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

  “Get ‘er!” the hunter shouted.

  No fuckin’ way, Paprika thought with a smirk as she went flat on the ground, sliding across the leaves. She skidded directly between the two hounds who both turned to try and snatch her. Both of them snarled, then lunged, and then crashed directly into one another.

  The look of surprise on the hunter’s face was pretty great, but even though the dogs were in a heap, he was still armed, and was cocking his rifle. Rika knew better than to try and out run a bullet, so she just kept right on, charging straight at the guy with the dumb looking straw hat.

  He was quick though – real quick. In one smooth motion he clicked the barrel into place and cocked his shotgun. Rika was close, only about twenty feet away, but she was so, so fast.

  Like a blur shooting over the leaves, she blasted toward her would-be murderer, and wondered vaguely what he’d do with her if he killed her? Turn her into a hat? Pair of boots? Part of a cloak? Stuff her and sew a second head on beside the first to try and sell to some sucker tourist as a wild, whacky tchotchke?

  That thought made her giggle, but the intensity on the guy’s face as he trained the barrel on her was less amusing. Still, he wasn’t paying as much attention as he probably should have been.

  “Gotcha now, sucker!” he shouted.

  Oh yeah?

  Rika scrunched her tiny black and pink nose up into an expression that would win the hearts of any little kid at a pet store looking at bunnies. And then with all the deftness of a pro baseball player, she stuck out one leg, slid straight between the wide stance of the hunter, and through.

  With a hoot of surprise, the man pulled the trigger, shot a slug right into the forest floor, and got himself a face full of leaves as his gun’s kickback knocked him flat on his board-straight ass.

  Dashing back toward her outcropping as fast as her long, slender feet could carry her, Paprika was satisfied that the hunter wouldn’t try again. And if he did, she could just figure out some other whacky escape. It took about four minutes of skimming over the ground before she noticed that Henry had started buzzing and whirring again, which got her first blushing and then giggling.

  Up ahead, she saw that her little cave, an outcropping of rock and root that stretched out over the creek that ran through the forest and through the center of Cedar Falls about thirty miles downstream, gave her an instant feeling of well-being and safety.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes as she stretched out on the cool, time-worn wood and stone, and let her fur recede and her body return to human form. She wasn’t always a nudist, or hell, even immodest, really. She had a few hang-ups about this curve, or that one, or the way her boobs weren’t quite even, but out here in the woods where no one would ever find her?

  This is where she felt at home. This is where she fit in.

  She lay back, running her whirring friend up and down her bare body, and then between her legs. A soft groan escaped her lips, drowned out by the rush of water, as she pushed him inside and let yet another dentist fantasy carry her away.

  Only, he wasn’t just a dentist, not when she imagined him the way he really was. She got a hint of it when they kissed, when the hair on his cheeks grew thicker and harder, but the thing she knew would happen that she could hardly wait to experience was that the other part of him were sure to grow too.

  “Oh,” she whispered a moan, letting her little wand disappear between her folds with a slick, soft, warm sound. She pulled it back, then pushed again, a little deeper. “Oh yes,” she grabbed one breast with a cupped palm, pinching at her nipple until it was rock hard and standing up firm.

  Every time a breeze blew through, she took another breath, inhaling the scents of the forest and the rocks and the water trickling gently beneath. Paprika, bare and open and without a care in the world, was lost in the sounds and smells and tastes of the world, and the gentle, but urgent buzzing between her legs.

  “No need for that,” a familiar voice crooned.

  “Son of a shit!” Rika jumped so high she almost fell off her perch. “How the hell do you keep showing up like this?”

  “This is the first time I caught you naked,” Thor said. He had a smile – of course he did, that damn smile that slicked up Rika’s thighs and made her think things that no good girl ever thought. Admittedly, she wasn’t much of a good girl, but still, she was naked and playing with herself in the middle of the woods. And here he was.

  And here she wasn’t making a single move to get away, not even a totally reasonable backing away motion, or getting up to possibly run. She was just lying there, entranced by the grin that, had she been wearing panties, would have got them real wet.

  He took a step nearer. That’s when she finally looked away from his eyes to notice that, just like she imagined, the good doctor was indeed big everywhere. “It’d look weird if it was smaller,” he offered. “Bear and all.”

  “No more jokes,” Paprika said, sitting up on her outcropping and setting Henry down beside herself.

  “No,” Thor said, his voice a husky, lusty whisper. “I’m going to help you with that.”

  “You’re... what?”

  The huge bear crawled up onto Rika’s safe haven with more agility than she figured he had, and kissed the top of her left foot, then the side of her calf, right where her leg started to bulge a little.

  A hot flush crept up from where his lips fluttered, and Paprika let her head fall backward on her shoulders as she drew a breath. “This is real?” she asked. “This is crazy.”

  “Yes to both.”

  A finger slid up one side of her sex and down the other, circling slowly, tickling her softest skin to life. She grabbed the finger and tried to push it between her folds, but Thor wasn’t having any of that. Not just yet.

  He tisked his tongue against the back of his teeth and pulled his hand away, trailing soft, curling tickles down to Paprika’s knee. Pushing her leg in the air, a butterfly kiss on the back of her knee shot a hot surge to where his finger had just been. She closed her eyes, letting the pleasure wash from head to toe.

  A gentle buzzing sound was the next thing she heard. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “That’s so good.”

  “Hush,” Thor urged. “Lie back. Let me drive.”

  As her vibrator circled one nipple, and her bear flicked his tongue over the other, letting him drive was the only thing she could do. She had enough strength to grab a handful of wavy, dark brown hair. She clenched her fist, and made him breathe a little harder. His hot, sweet breath sliding around her breast sent another chilling wave down her body.

  A warm, almost hot palm cupped her sex, and Paprika spread her legs, hoping he’d take the hint. He pulsed two fingers against her, pressing hard on the tendons between her thighs. The sensation was something between a massage and masturbating, which... was probably the point.

  A pleasured giggle escaped Paprika’s parted lips. A twinge of tightness gripped her stomach.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please let me taste.” Her words were halting and broken up by gasps, deep breaths, and even a lip biting or two. “Let me...”

  Standing up and then kneeling beside her head, Thor slid the first of two thick, long, rough fingers inside her waiting sex. Rika opened her eyes wide, and then closed them as she purred her pleasure. Reaching out with groping fingers, she closed a fist on Thor. She rubbed him slowly, softly, feeling him lengthen and thicken in her hand. As she ran her tongue around his tip, he pushed deeper, curling two fingers then deep inside.

  “Ung, God yes,” she whispered. “If I didn’t think you’d kill me I’d ask for another one.”

  Thor snorted a laugh, and answered by rotating his fingers inside her, smiling as she rolled her eyes back in her head, tugged on his cock, and tried to reach him with her flailing tongue. He moved closer and let her take him in.

  The slow dance quickened for a moment before both of them realized the tempo was too much, and they slowed again. “How did you know I was here?” Rika a
sked, as the thought occurred to her for some reason when she slid her lips back.

  “Followed you,” was his answer.

  Before she could say anything else, those big, beautiful fingers went so deep she felt him in her deepest parts, and his palm flattened against her clit. He ground at her, smiling as she lost control. Involuntarily, Rika seemed to smile and gasp in alternating time. His fingers pumped harder and deeper, in time with her heart.

  The fist on Thor’s cock moved faster, faster, in time with his breathing, and just when she felt him surge and swell, Paprika’s sex clenched down hard on his fingers. She closed her lips around him, flicked her tongue, and at exactly the same time, both of them gave in.

  The world went swirling, white and black up and down. His taste warmed her all the way down, his fingers ground out pleasure she’d never imagined before. Every inch of Rika’s body was all prickles and goosebumps. When he finally pulled away, his fingers left an aching void that she longed to have filled. “Don’t ever stop doing that,” she whispered, with her eyes still closed. “Okay?”

  He snorted another laugh, but didn’t speak. Admittedly, there wasn’t a whole lot to say. Thor drew himself up, his knees sliding behind Rika’s, and draped an arm over her side, tickling her navel with his fingertips.

  His touch was like a dream, fleeting and soft, fading with each passing moment until his hand lay still against her belly, warming Paprika all the way through.

  She opened one of her eyes, peeking to make sure she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. The huge bear was staring back, his expression hard and steel. He looked so determined, so unlike his normal joking, light-hearted self, that she wondered if something was wrong. But, not wanting to know the answer, she just stayed quiet, although she remembered to open her other eye a second later.

  Depth perception: a good thing.

  “You ever jump off a high dive when you were a kid?” he asked, breaking the comfortable silence.

  “Like at a swimming pool? Or metaphorically?”

  “I’m going for a metaphor eventually, but let’s do literal, first.”

  She smiled. “You are overeducated, aren’t you? Okay well, uh... yeah I have. Not many times, but a few.”

  “Okay, how about a cliff? Like cliff diving. Ever done that?”

  She shook her head, making a red coil fall down across her face, which he pushed back behind her ear without ever taking his gaze away from peering into her soul. “Nuh-uh. Never even been to a place where you can cliff dive.”

  “Would you?”

  “Jump off a cliff into an ocean? I guess, I mean, I do all kinds of stupid shit on a pretty regular basis.”

  His eyes were focused on hers, but there was something far off in Thor’s expression. “My mom told me when I left for college that I wasn’t welcome back on the commune.” He paused, Rika sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, chewing at it to fidget. “She said I betrayed the family, said I was going to kill my dad, that he’d never forgive me, all this stuff.”

  “What a bitch,” Rika said, entranced by his words. “Who would tell their kid that?”

  “Someone who is afraid of the world,” he answered. “Someone who hasn’t known anything but what they know for so long that everything else seems alien. Someone who doesn’t want to deal with a world they can’t control.”

  She let a half-hearted grunt of accession, and started rubbing a lock of bear hair between her thumb and forefinger. “But your own mom?”

  “Well, me and twelve other cubs. That’s kind of important. I wasn’t all that special to them, except that I helped with the babies and I helped with the farm and all that.”

  “You make it sound like you were some kind of farm hand, more than a kid.”

  “In a way, I was.” Those dark brown eyes seemed to go all stormy. The intensity of Thor’s expression got Rika all excited again, enough that she had to chide herself to stop, at least until the story was over. She contented herself with squeezing one of his shoulders. At least that gesture could be taken as a show of solidarity. Grabbing his junk, not so much.

  “It isn’t that they didn’t love me,” he continued. “It’s just that life is different out there.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The commune?”

  Paprika nodded.

  “Oh, uh, near the Colorado-New Mexico border. I helped winter prep, I helped farm and ranch, and everything else, but in the end, I just couldn’t stay.”

  “It sounds kinda,” Rika chewed her lip again, searching for the right word. “Idyllic? I mean, it seems like a thing people to do run away, you know? Like what people say about Alaska, how the only way anyone moves there is if they’re running away from something in a place where life is normal.”

  He thought long and hard, a furrow creasing his brow. “In a way, I guess. Although my parents weren’t criminals or anything, they just—“

  “All this time,” she interrupted, “I thought you meant your parents were like my mom. Too excited about Whole Foods, real into protesting against Monsanto and complaining about GMOs and, apparently, drinking entire bottles of white wine mixed with sports drink powder. I had no idea.”

  The squeezing of his shoulder had turned from flimsy cover for touching him to genuine concern. “I can’t even imagine that sort of thing is legal.”

  Thor smiled, briefly. “I mean, it’s New Mexico. Plenty of things there are legal simply by virtue of the police having no way in hell of doing any actual policing.”

  “Makes sense. So they just kicked you out?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t hear from any of them for the eight years I was in school and the three I’ve been in The Falls. Not a single fuckin’ word.”

  She stared, blankly, vaguely aware she was shaking her head.

  “Anyway, I heard from my dad last night.”

  A tear slid down the bear’s face, but he didn’t change his expression one bit. Rika had a feeling what was coming, but she chose for once not to jump to any conclusions, or fill in someone else’s words in her own head before they said them for themselves. Sounds like a small thing, but for her, that was practically landing on Mars. She swiped the tear off his cheek, her thumb tip rasping over stubble. He kissed her wrist when it came into range of those perfect, red lips.

  “She died three days ago. The same day I decided to move, and conned you into going with me. I didn’t find out until last night, but... yeah.”

  “Holy shit,” Rika whispered. This didn’t seem like an ‘I’m sorry’ moment, judging by the steel in Thor’s face. She drew him closer anyway, cradling his huge head against her naked chest. Wetness from his tears ran down and soaked into the roots underneath. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “You can continue to not say you’re sorry,” he said with a hint of a smile. “And you can continue to just stay here and let me stare at you. I don’t know why, I don’t know what happened, but the universe sent you to me, and I think this pretty much proves I’m not insane.”

  “Well you did stalk me into the woods.”

  She worried for a second that joking wasn’t the right thing to do, but when he cracked another smile, she relaxed. “I feel like I’m in the middle of an ocean and just happened to find a skipper,” Thor said.

  “You... what?”

  Clearing his throat, Thor scrunched up his eyebrows. “You know, a skipper, like on a boat? So I found a boat, but instead of having to steer it myself – which I don’t know how to do – I found you, and you already know, and so,” he trailed off.

  “I know that look,” she said. “And I know the rambling.” Without another word, she pulled him against her chest again, and just let him sob.

  His huge body shook, he gripped her closer and tighter, like he was using her for an anchor. She had no idea why he would, but the things he said had made sense, in a backward, kind of upside down way. And it wasn’t like she didn’t feel the same sorts of things for him.

  He cleared his throat again and apologized.
She shushed him with a kiss.

  “My dad was sick my whole life. He died three months before I turned eighteen, and all anyone ever told me was how sorry they were.”

  Thor fell silent, looking relieved to have someone else talking instead.

  “‘I’m sorry he was so sick,’ they’d say, or shit like how they were sorry for how badly I was hurting. You know what the truth was? I’ve never told anyone this, but,” she took a deep breath. A tear of her own rolled down her cheek. Why the hell was she so open with this guy? Had just those few encounters turned her into an open book? Maybe it was his being so raw that got her to realize there was more to this than just some passing thing.

  “Truth is, I didn’t even know my dad. He wasn’t ever really a person to me. He was just always sick. I know that makes me sound like an asshole, I know it, but hear me out.”

  “No it doesn’t,” he cut in. “I’m a doctor, remember? I know there’s that thing about dentists and doctors being different, but trust me, I’ve seen some shit.”

  Paprika swallowed hard. “He was just there. He was conscious, but he was always looped on pain killers, and in the brief moments of lucidity he had where we were alone, it was like he didn’t even really know what to make of me. I loved him, you know? I loved him because through all of it, he was a good guy and took care of me the best he could, but I didn’t even fucking know him.”

  Thor was nodding, brushing the tears away from Rika’s eyes.

  “I couldn’t tell you what his favorite movie was, I don’t know if he liked football. Anyway, that was a really long way of saying that I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry until I saw my mom laughing like two weeks later.”

  “My dad was laughing too,” Thor said. “It wasn’t... I mean not like big, loud guffaws, but I could tell that something had switched in his brain.”

  “Was she sick? Like long term?”

  He shook his head, and then sniffed. And then he started nodding. “I guess, I don’t know, really. They weren’t really clear on the whole medical sciences thing. He said she’d been coughing for a while but nothing worked. I didn’t bother asking if he took her to a doctor because, well, yeah, no reason to rub salt in an open wound.