Taming the Heart (Creatures of the Night Book 2) by Tisha Wilson Page B

and white flannel. “I dress like your American miner,” he replied slightly perturbed. He had made some effort to fit in here.
    “Okay. You are not in Pittsburgh don’t ya know. Yer in Wisconsin.”
    He had heard some of the locals using the accent, but he preferred to use the accent heard in most American movies. It was easier to speak American English with a bit of a Western twang, because of his heavy Norwegian accent, than it was to pick up some of these specific dialects in the North.
    “But I see some of the men here. They wear the heavy boots and the flannels.”
    “With jeans and t-shirts, and steal toes are all right, but that jacket won’t pass muster up in this neck a the woods I’ll tell you. You stand out like an orange flag in a fresh snow.”
    He nodded in understanding. He had thought that the fact that he was a stranger had drawn a lot of attention. In this day and age, however, people were not as alert to strangers in their midst as they had once been, especially the way so many towns thrived on tourism anymore.
    “What would be more suitable?” he asked.
    She eyed him critically and he was shocked by how quickly she’d gone from near heart break back to perky again. Well if not perky, at least slightly annoying, slightly cute, curious woman.
    “Okay. What you wanna buy are some good thermals to go under yer clothes cause when it gets ta snowin up here it will blow yer socks off. Then some nice fur lined boots. Then ya need some good jeans, you could keep the flannels but throw in some good undershirts that say neat things like ‘I love summer’ or ‘Kiss me I’m cute’. Then add a heavy wool coat, some mitts and warmers and you would fit in here like a firecracker on the forth of July.”
    “I love… summer?” he asked incredulously.
    “Yeah. It’s supposed to be sarcastic. Especially if you wear it in the middle of a blizzard.”
    Her deep blue eyes were bright and shinning when she talked to him now. If she could use her legs he had no doubt she would be sitting up on the couch with her legs beneath her ready to pounce in excitement. As it was she was leaning in to him on one small arm and smiling at him. It was a practice in patience not to pull her forward and kiss that soft little mouth.
    “Kiss me… I’m cute?”
    “That would be more ironic if you have a rounded beer belly like a lot a the guys I know. My dad could have worn that shirt every day of the week and gotten ten laughs per day. He was skinny everywhere but his gut,” she said and patted his gut as if to demonstrate. The touch of her small hand to his abdomen made his muscles tighten.
    She let her hand linger over his abs for a moment and he felt like his breaths were shorter. One part of him wanted to move away from her, a completely separate part of him wanted her to stroke to her hearts content. As if she became aware of his thoughts she pulled away as if burned by fire. She laughed and sat back again.
    “You would have liked my dad. He likes the history channel too,” she went on, a bit more animated now than before.
    “The history channel?”
    “Yeah. I saw you had it on when I turned on the television, but he probably didn’t watch it for the same reasons you do, I mean you’re a part of history. He just liked hearing about the life stories of people that lived long ago. He said he hoped someone read about him one day and found him as interesting as those people on the history channel. I told him it wasn’t likely because we only ever owned a copy shop. He said that his copy shop could be the beginning of a chain of copy shops and he would be forever immortalized. The name of our copy shop was The Copy Shop. I mean how original is that? Not at all I tell you. Of course-”
    She stopped talking when he put a hand on her bare arm. He was as shocked by the contact as she was. It was his turn to pull away quickly.
    “You don’t have to be nervous.”
    She shook her head and made a motion as if to say he