Chapter 20

She liked it! The knowledge he'd chosen well warmed Ethan as he stared down at Naomi while she slept. The present he'd agonized over in the tiny shop-which he'd feared tripping in and creating a catastrophe-hung on a chain and swirled with the air currents. When Javier had told him to pick something up that would cheer her, he'd immediately thought about her collection. After hearing her story, he congratulated himself silently on making the right choice and fell in love even deeper.

Some people scoffed at the notion of love at first sight. In the case of shifters, some argued that the mating instinct should not be confused with the emotion. However, while the mating instinct initially drove him to seek her out, everything he'd discovered since enchanted him about her. Now, several days since their first disastrous meeting, he was truly and completely in love with the feisty hellion who hid an inner softness, which made the fact she'd faced danger all the harder to bear.