Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance) Read online

  She stared at him in disbelief for a second. I can’t possibly tell him I’d been thinking the same thing about going to Jamesburg. I mean, how nutbar whacko would I have to be to drag a guy I barely met to live with my ex-convict sister in a town that’s full of... well, she’s got some pretty wild stories.

  Her chewing on the insides of her bottom lip got his attention. “Yeah? You’re thinking about it, I can tell.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me, Thor,” Rika whispered. “You don’t even know what my last name is.”

  “Lewis.”

  “Well,” she smiled a tiny grin, despite her misgivings and general displeasure. “I mean you wouldn’t if it weren’t for having read my medical files.”

  “You’ve got an answer for everything,” he said sternly, fingers gripping her wrists. “For everything except for your heart. You can’t tell me why you kissed me in the first place, and you can’t tell me why you’re not pulling away from me right now. Can you?”

  His intensity made the little fire in her belly flare hotter and brighter. Tingles crept down her stomach, tightening the muscles between her legs. It was the same thing she felt before...

  With his hands still locked on her wrists, Paprika felt a wave of heat pass over her chest. Her nipples puckered sweetly against the soft, thin fabric of the old bra she was wearing. With a shake of her head, she stood up on her tip toes and did the exact same thing that got her into this mess in the first damn place.

  But she wasn’t the one doing the kissing for long.

  With a rumbling groan that started in his chest and vibrated against hers, Thor forced her head back with his. His lips pushed hers open, his tongue swirled behind her bottom lip, exploring every line, sliding along her square, flat teeth. He groaned as he tasted her, sighed as he drank her in. And then just as she thought he was about to pull away, he went in harder, deeper, hungrier, swirling his tongue against hers.

  She felt herself carried backward, her feet lifted off the ground. Then a second later, she felt the rough-hewn bricks of the old fireplace that she’d sat around every Christmas since she was a conscious bunny, drinking cocoa and listening to her grandpa tell weird stories about what it was like in The Old Days.

  What would he think? She wondered pointlessly as a rough hand slid under her dress shirt, separating it from the tight-fitting waist of her slacks and letting her skin taste first air, and then the sweet pleasure of Thor’s fingertips curling along her spine.

  He finally let her go, so he could take a breath.

  Every inch of Rika’s being was screaming at her to pull away, to separate and refuse him. Every neuron in her addled, confused brain was saying no, but her heart was opening itself to this mysterious, gruff, too-big-to-be-reasonable bear.

  And Rika? She wasn’t ever very good at saying no to her heart.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Thor said, brushing a curl out of Rika’s face. “I have no idea. As soon as I left the commune for college I told myself it was reason and planning all the way for this bear. None of the impulsive, love first and ask questions later stuff my parents were into.”

  “But here we are,” Rika said. “My mom drinks white wine mixed with Gatorade and calls it a sports drink.”

  “Yeah,” he smiled, “and mine live in a colony made of organic farms and half-buried school buses. I can’t stop thinking about you, I can’t stop even though I should.”

  She stared into those huge, walnut-brown eyes for a second longer than she should have. There was a second – a brief, fleeting second – when Paprika started to pull away again as reason won out. But then she stared into his eyes, looked at those slightly-pouty, full, red lips, and just kissed him again.

  “What in the hell’s wrong with me?” she asked out loud, though it was just an internal thought that got away and slipped out her mouth.

  “Nothing,” Thor whispered, enveloping her once again with his delicious kiss, his hot breath sliding down her neck, and those fingertips that just kept fluttering on the place she’d gotten a tattoo she vaguely regretted. “You are... you’re you. That’s exactly what I want.”

  As their lips parted with a soft, delicious suck, Thor was smiling. His dimpled left cheek, his high cheekbones, his absolutely perfect five o’clock shadow, it was all too much.

  “This is stupid,” she said, but she couldn’t help smiling as she did.

  “Yeah, it absolutely is. I’ve never wanted anything more.”

  With a disbelieving shake of her head, Rika smiled back. “As stupid as it is, this might be perfect.”

  “Give me a couple days to get things ready. Call you tonight?”

  She shook her head. “My mom isn’t gonna take this easy. Maybe it’d be best if you just showed up one night and away we went?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said, taking a step back. “I’ve found that if you just kinda let the universe do its thing, stuff works out.”

  Paprika nodded as she stared. “You have to listen, though.”

  She hardly noticed with Thor took her hand. His lips warmed the back, shooting a hot tickle up her neck. “Yeah,” he said, “we just have to listen.”

  -5-

  “A day long orgasm? That sounds... well, like it might be sorta painful.”

  -Petunia

  “Yeah, you’re a class one idiot all right.”

  “Thanks Tuna, real encouraging.” Paprika, even a day later, was in the afterglow from Thor. “He didn’t even do me and I still feel like I’ve had a day long orgasm,” she said wistfully. Her sister groaned and then made a gagging sound.

  “Where is he moving?” Petunia asked, after she cleared her throat a few times, making it clear that she didn’t want to hear any more about her sister’s physical sensations. “And by that I mean where are you moving?”

  As soon as the question was out, Rika froze in place. She wrinkled her forehead, the way she did when she was trying to remember something. “I’m sure he said.”

  Petunia started clicking her teeth together impatiently. “So you’re moving somewhere with a guy you hardly know. One of your meetings happened because he was invited into the house by our mother while she was drunk and—”

  “She wasn’t drunk. At least, I don’t think she was. The bottle was full. Full-ish.”

  “So are you going to answer me?”

  Before she could formulate words to articulate that she was sure the guy said where they were going but she just couldn’t remember, not right then, Jane Fonda’s Thirty Minute Abs started honking out its greasy, slightly dirty saxophone soundtrack. Rika’s mother let out a long, slow hoot to begin the fun, right along with Jane, and then the thumping started.

  “I can’t handle this.”

  Petunia sniffed. “Handle what? A stable life and a guy who apparently makes you come by staring at you for eight seconds and kissing you? Jesus, I had a zombie bear chase me halfway across town once, not even a stiff nipple.”

  “A zombie... bear?”

  “Long story. Anyway, point is you need to figure out what the hell’s going on in your brain, Rika. I still think you should just move to Jamesburg. I’ve got a lodger coming next week, you could probably hook up with him, have one of your day-long climaxes. Say, does Mom still give you tips for the best ways to use your vibrator?”

  She knew how to hit all the right buttons, so to speak. This was stupid. Really, really stupid. Paprika was, once again, getting swept along on a wave she never meant to ride. She was going along with an impulse and pretending it was something deeper. And hell, she didn’t know where they were supposed to move.

  The red-headed rabbit let out a long, tired sigh. “I need to run, I think.”

  “Hop?”

  “Shut up,” she said, laughing at her sister’s terrible joke. “I gotta figure out what I’m doing, not just about this, but about everything.”

  Petunia sniffed, apparently disinterested in the conversation and taken somewhere else with a thought. “Wel
l, let me know,” she said.

  The phone clicked dead, and a feeling very similar to dread spread through Rika’s chest. Constricting, tugging, and tight, she tried to breathe, but felt herself balling up from the inside out. This was not at all the time for one of these.

  Her chest was tight, her shoulder ached. If she didn’t know better, she’d think she was about to have a coronary. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on perspective, she was familiar enough with this scenario to stick her hand in the late 80s-style nightstand beside her bed and fish out the bottle of Xanax, conveniently cut into half pills. Tiny rabbits don’t need much in the way of suppression.

  She popped two halves.

  This wasn’t going to be an easy one.

  She lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the thud-thud-thud of her mother’s feet, and tried to close her eyes. The medicine didn’t reduce her symptoms really, it just moved her mind to a place where she could try to reason through the panic. She always got this way when she was about to make a big decision. Hell, even small, pretty dumb ones often got her all cranked up.

  Can’t get a job, can’t move out, can’t do much of anything, she thought, in the self-defeating way a person uses to talk themselves out of doing something exciting. Whatever I do is gonna end up a mess, just like this idiot thing about moving wherever I’m moving with a guy I don’t know. Yeah, sure, he’s hot and nice and... yeah whatever Petunia said about my climaxing all the time, but...

  “Oh God,” she whispered. “I can’t do this.”

  Her chest tightened up again, her lungs squeezing out the air, gripping like a big boa constrictor, tighter with every breath. “I can’t do this. I just can’t.”

  With a fairly high level of effort, she pushed up off the bed and moved across her room to the small bank of high-up basement windows, opening one of them slowly. The sudden rush of cool-ish early fall wind struck her, blowing the red curls back out of her face as the breeze filled her normally warm little basement. Before she knew it, Paprika had stripped off her old He-Man tee, her loose, old jeans, and one of the only set of panties she had that didn’t feature some kind of superhero.

  “Hey,” she’d said once to a boyfriend who made fun of her for having Batman plastered across her ass. “Ain’t no shame in the Underoo game.”

  She dumped him the next day, figuring he probably wasn’t worth the effort. Especially since most of his leisure time was spent trying to find ways to either insult or cheat on her. Though, of course, she didn’t figure that out until a couple weeks afterward.

  The chilly metal of her window frame brushed Paprika’s bare nipples, sending a wash of goosebumps down her stomach. As she straddled the pane and slid out, the metal chilled her deep between the legs, the same place she felt get all tingly and warm when she thought about Thor, or kissed him, or—

  With a giggle, she crept back inside and grabbed Henry out of the drawer she moved him in hopes that her mother wouldn’t find her trusty vibrator again. One more reason to get the hell out, no matter where I go, she thought, blushing furiously. She grabbed a fanny pack – which is embarrassing to wear on vacation, but when you’re a buck-naked bunny shifter, it’s pretty hard to carry much of anything. With a click, her pack, and her friend, were in place. She cinched it down tight to keep it from flopping all over the place, and climbed back out the windows.

  She lingered just a little with the cold metal between her legs, supporting her weight and chilling her through and through. The cold always thrilled her, the bracing chill of a coming winter storm was something Paprika always looked forward to, rather than dreaded. But today, she had other plans.

  As soon as her feet hit the ground, she was running, and then seconds later when her soft, thick, coppery-red fur was full and luxurious, blanketing her in a grown-on full-length fur that didn’t require the death of any innocent woodland creatures, her run turned into more of a stride.

  Her legs, already long and slender, folded up on themselves, her ears extended, and for a second, every sound in the forest converged on her. Shifting was always like this, no matter how many times she did it. The rush of sounds, the enveloping cocoon of smells and tastes that she couldn’t sense while in human form, flooded her lagomorph brain.

  As she hopped and skipped, deeper and deeper into the woods, she went too low over a jutting root, which sent Henry into a vibrating fit. The pulsing, rotating, whirring engine warmed her belly but she wasn’t ready to stop, not just yet. She wanted to get to the place she always longed to visit when she had one of her attacks.

  But then again, that pulsing would feel really good right about then.

  She shook her head, clearing out the first wave of horn-dog desire, and continued on her way.

  The woods, for their part, were still and calm. That wasn’t so strange, not for early October, and she appreciated the solitude, the quiet. Still though, something wasn’t quite right, she thought as she bounced over another branch and then crouched low to slide underneath a bunch of mushrooms growing out the trunk of a massive pine. When her belly scraped the ground that time, Henry flicked off, which was, being honest, vaguely disappointing.

  Her legs were starting to burn, her ears starting to twitch. She loved how it felt to run like this – free and liberated from everything in the world – she loved how her muscles filled with blood and surged with power. She loved the peace and the...

  Something in the distance cracked a stick. And then another.

  Rika froze. Even if the residents of Cedar Falls weren’t going to hunt down and murder a shifter girl no matter how much they distrusted her kind, they were absolutely not above blasting a rabbit. And a weird colored one like her?

  She turned back toward home, her worst fears confirmed. A pair of hounds, still on leash, had picked up her scent and were starting to tug at their master. That’s how she knew they weren’t shifters – they let themselves be leashed up. That’d never do for someone who didn’t want it.

  There wasn’t much sound coming from the hunter which was bad – it meant that he knew what he was doing. Of course, the two bloodhounds could have told Paprika he was no amateur. He had the gun crooked over his forearm, probably loaded but he was too seasoned to wander around with it in firing position.

  Good for him, bad for her.

  She dug down just into the first layer of leaves. The humus and smell of decay would hide her from those super-sensitive noses, but not for long. She’d have to make a break for it sooner than later if she wanted a reasonable chance of getting out of it alive.

  Of course there was the other option of just turning back into Paprika and presenting herself to this guy. That brought its own set of potential problems though. And anyway, she was starting to like this adventurous new side of herself she’d found. One of the hounds straightened. The trail of scent he found had turned hot.

  “You see somethin’, Elmer?” the hunter asked his dog.

  Well yeah, dumbass, Rika thought. I smell a rabbit, but she’s kinda weird, kinda like she’s got something made out of silicone around her neck.

  Huffing a laugh, Paprika waited until both dogs had circled back around the other side of the hunter. Both of the dogs were probably good trackers, but it wasn’t anything to do with their personalities. Both animals looked slightly dopey, slightly confused. No way they’d catch her.

  That’s the thing about shifters. They might be animals, they might take new shapes, but they didn’t behave like their shape shifting targets. A normal rabbit would have just panicked and ran, and gotten shot in the ass for his trouble.

  Rika though? She had a plan.

  The two dogs were beginning to snuffle and get excited. One of them hopped up on his back legs and then crashed back to earth with a very excited look on his face. Just a little closer, she thought. Let ‘em off those leashes.

  This was nuts, she knew. Even more nuts than moving wherever the hell she was going with Thor, or than just up and moving to Jamesburg. Worst case
with either of those, she ended up having to come back home. Wouldn’t have been the first time. With this guy thought? Worst case she ended up with a slug in her head, or her ass, or wherever he managed to hit.

  Then again, going on adventures was fun, she’d decided in her long meditation and her short, punchy conversations with her sister. She’d never learn what her limits were if she never pushed them.

  Closer, she urged. Come on you ugly shits, just a little closer.

  The splotchy-coated dog on the left grew more and more excited until finally the cover-all-wearing hunter got the idea. “You got somethin’ boy? Go! Go get it! Catch me a fox!”

  A fox? Yeah these shit-for-brains could probably catch a fox. But me? Not a damn chance.

  As the two dogs bounded toward her, jowls, skin, and ears flopping all over the place, Paprika watched in silent astonishment at the sheer volume of saliva coming out of the two beasts. The splotchy one had so heavy a tendril that it stayed together when he ran until it whipped back over his head and across an eye.

  Just a little closer.

  She could smell that distinctive musk that only hound dogs get. Well, hound dogs and a couple of guys she’d dated who she was fairly certain weren’t hounds.

  They slowed, preferring to use stealth. This was always a really funny thing for an animal which was actually stealthy to watch, because even though humans can’t hear the plodding feet, every single other thing in the world can hear it clear as day.

  Just a little...

  Paprika could almost taste the mealy, kibble breath on her cheek. With a determined blast of speed she shot out of her little dugout cubby in one direction, and when she was sure the hounds were both on her tail, she jumped from the forest floor to a pine tree, then shoved herself backward off of it, charging headlong into the two gaping, slavering, derpy-looking maws.