My Raptor: An Erotic Shapeshifting Paranormal Romance by Cara B. Connor

Chapter 1
    Today was a regular old day, just like any other. Carol West walked home from work along the same old trail that she had walked every day for the past few years. Her long brown hair bounced about as she walked along the bumpy pathway. It was a shortcut to her apartment building that several people used when walking back from town. It was fairly well lit and safe which is exactly why she used it since she was fairly shy and not outgoing in any way.
    Carol liked living on the edge of town since in many ways it allowed her a lot of privacy. She only had a few neighbors on her floor and her apartment building was only half full of residents, but overall her apartment allowed her all the solitude that she so desperately craved. But she often got lonely too. Sometimes getting exactly what you wanted wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
    At 36, she was still very pretty though she did not consider herself that way at all. Actually, she considered herself a little plump. But the truth is, most men would have just considered her voluptuous, with nice curves in all the right places and would have loved the chance to be with her. But she was always too hard on herself – she’d been that way her whole life.
    Her clothes were outdated and she wore no makeup, but her beauty was natural and her features well proportioned. And you hardly ever saw her without a book in her hand or within hands reach. But it was Friday, a beautiful late summer Friday, and she was walking along the trail on her way home after work. Turns out, an entire free weekend loomed ahead of her. The weekends she was off were always the worst because she had so little to do outside of work.
    Normally, Carol spent all her days inside the confines of the city library. She had been there for the last few years since she graduated from college and she couldn’t see herself being anywhere else. Nor did she want to be. During her days back in college, those friends who knew her best, knew there was but one place you could always look for Carol and find her, besides class or her dorm room.
    Once on the school premises, her second port of call, besides the lecture hall, or her dorm room was the library. Carol was a voracious reader. She read things in her discipline and basically everything else she could get her hands on. Her friends always complained to her about the amount of time she spent reading and not hanging out with them. But with her love of books and reading, she didn’t mind spending the entire day in the library.
    Her first love had always been books and always would be. Often times, though, she couldn’t help but feel a little lonely now that she was out on her own, because in this world of books there was little time for anyone else – not even pets. And over the years she had long since lost touch with old friends since she so seldom went out.
    Overall, she did not have, and did miss, the liveliness of human company since she had never really had it in the first place. It seemed in many ways to her, there was just herself and the whole wide world of adventure waiting between the pages of the next novel sitting on her night stand.
    Even when she was attending college she pretty much kept to herself, much to the harassment of her peers. She rarely ventured further than her classrooms or her dorm. She even scheduled phone calls with her parents, both academics themselves, always being precise and formal, just like she was with other people. But now that she was done with school and out in the real world, she did see her friend’s point. Unfortunately, books could not provide absolutely everything that she needed.
    Carol thought she was happy, though. She had acquired the dream job she had always wanted as a librarian and she could surround herself with her passion. The woodsy smells of the books, the feel of the fine paper pages between her fingers and the act of discovering the next story, it was all so familiar to her. And she loved them