by Lynn Red
On the Growl
A Shifter Romance Anthology
By Celia Kyle, Lynn Red, Jessica Sims, Flora Dare & Marina Maddix
Copyright© 2014 by Rising Books
Waking Up Were Copyright© 2014 by Celia Kyle
Bear Your Teeth Copyright© 2014 by Lynn Red
Tiger by the Tail Copyright© 2014 by Jessica Sims
Bears Repeating Copyright© 2014 by Flora Dare
To Screech Their Own Copyright© 2014 by Marina Maddix
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Bear Your Teeth
By Lynn Red
To Screech Their Own
By Marina Maddix
Tiger by the Tail
By Jessica Sims
Bears Repeating
By Flora Dare
Waking Up Were
By Celia Kyle
Bear Your Teeth
By Lynn Red
Paprika Lewis is in love with her dentist. That’s a normal thing, right?
Problem is she’s a super-cautious, red-haired rabbit-shifter with a pair of buckteeth she can’t manage to hide, and the dentist? He’s pretty much the nicest, hottest guy she’s ever met... and spends part of his time turning into a bear.
Yeah.
Between her whacked out sister, an overprotective mom, and a life she’s barely able to keep in check, Rika would generally rather just look at guys and think about how good it’d be to curl up next to one, to wrap her legs around... Ahem, she’d rather fantasize than deal with a relationship.
But when one thing leads to another, and her bear crush takes a job in the same weird town in the mountains where her sister is doing community service, will Paprika throw caution to the wind, and give in to her admittedly over-eager drive to hunt him down and rub all over him?
BEAR YOUR TEETH is a standalone novella in the Jamesburg Shifters series – each is a standalone story with a unique hero and heroine, and a HEA that’ll leave you smiling and maybe a little misty eyed – but you can read them in any order you like!
Chapter 1
“Actually, mom, the boundary for a normal relationship is on THAT side of you commenting on my vibrator.”
-Paprika Lewis
The shock of waking up – being jolted to your senses, when you were just so peacefully asleep, or in Paprika Lewis’s case, in the middle of a slightly kinky sex dream about your dentist – is never easy to take. That sudden rush of consciousness flooding your mind, the immediate dissipation of the pleasant nothingness, or the really pleasant sweatiness, respite ended, early morning sun streaming through the windows.
Sometimes it’s welcome. A nightmare ended, a bout of sleep paralysis left behind, a dream so vivid you could swear the aliens were right there vanished into the vague recesses of memory.
Other times, that jolt is provided by the sound of someone’s feet banging along in a horrible rhythm to the dulcet tones of a mid-80s vintage Jane Fonda aerobics tape. Yeah, tape.
Paprika swung herself out of bed, feet dangling a few inches from her carefully maintained hardwood floor. She blinked, rubbed her eyes with two balled up fists, and opened them. The pile of laundry she’d built up over the past week was staring her right in the face.
Rika decided to close her eyes again. “Not today,” she said under her breath. “Just can’t look at that today.” There was a lisp whenever she pronounced an ‘s’ sound. “For the love of…” she trailed off, lisping her ‘f’ and lifting her hand to her mouth.
With a heavy sigh, she felt her extended incisors, and then popped off the retainer she’d been wearing to keep them from coming out. But every time she shifted, those big bunny buckteeth came right back, and usually bent her retainer. Running her tongue along the places on her gums that the metal rubbed raw, she sighed again and sank back into her pillows. The longer she was awake, the smaller and smaller the chance of her falling back asleep grew, and with it, the chance of her spending another few moments underneath her favorite dentist dwindled as well.
When the next phase of the workout – jumping jacks and toe touches, done in time to The Power of Love started up, Rika just gave up. The third sigh carried her out of bed and to her feet. She pulled her toes into a ball, loving the cool, smooth feeling of the pine. She bent over, more of a ‘throwing herself over at the waist’ than anything else, and grabbed her ankles, twisting back and forth until her back popped.
The fourth sigh she heaved was of relief. “Maybe today will be good?” she asked the universe as she shuffled to her closet and selected a suit – okay, the suit – and threw it on her bed. She loved this thing. Picking this smart, dark gray suit was the best thing she’d ever managed from a Goodwill. It fit in all the right places – little bit skinny around the arms, smallish around the legs, and bigger around the hips. Hell, even the jacket was roomier around the middle and smaller on the top, without even having to be tailored.
“Best eight bucks I ever spent.”
Her mood generally lifted, before she knew it, she was singing along with the Huey Lewis song pumping into her ears from the floor above. Why her mom insisted on using the room directly above hers for an exercise room was a constant point of contention, but what the hell, Rosalie Lewis invited her to come back home when she lost her last job, so it was hard to complain. Much.
The last part of her ritual – trying to tame the violent, almost defiant mop of orange she called hair – was also her favorite. She ran a series of brushes through the curls, silently smiling each time one of the coils resisted her efforts to tame them and bounced back into place. It wasn’t quite Shirley Temple caliber, but it was pretty damn close.
She finally realized it wasn’t going to be a winning battle, especially not in the humid wave of awful that descended on Cedar Falls that week, and just clipped it back into something resembling order. Her last order of business was to grab her handbag, her planner, and get the hell out of—
“Really?” she asked, looking down at the faux-leather bound day planner. “The interview is tomorrow?” She rolled her eyes at herself, and yanked the barrettes out of her mane, unleashing the great red torrent.
Upstairs, her mom let out a loud hoot of self-congratulations, and shut off her tape. The blender came next, and then the sound of frying… something. Bacon? Eggs? Paprika could only hope, could only dream. More likely it was some kind of weird kale concoction, or something involving acai berries. She decided to brave the possibility of hippie breakfast, and headed upstairs.
“Mom?” she asked as she rounded the top of the narrow staircase that had once almost killed her, and several times acted as the portal into a world of nightmares that her sister harassed her about from the beginning of her memories. It was kinda cool to have always lived in the same house, but on the other hand, with that house being in Cedar Falls, it was kinda not cool at the same time. “Are you… drinking?”
Rosalie Lewis, almost sixty and the foxiest rabbit shifter pretty much anywhere, was constantly moving, constantly doing. She had a string of dates this week, seemed like one every night. Every morning she was up at dawn, aerobics at six thirty, then break
fast and tending the animals and the garden and then she did some other thing that involved being kind to the earth.
She smiled warmly, sweat running down the sides of her face. Two tendrils of slick, soft, brown hair were plastered to the sides of her face. Her pale, ghostly-blue eyes, the lucky result of getting the good part of the albino gene pair, twinkled as she poured what appeared to be the better part of a bottle of Moscato, into a sports bottle. “Yep!”
“Is this some kind of new thing you’re doing? Just giving alcoholism a try to see what all the rage is about?”
“Nope!”
She added two scoops of lemon-lime Gatorade powder to the wine, closed the vacuum lid with a snap, and started shaking like she was playing a sleigh bell. “It’s good for you! Doctor says a glass a day.”
“Uh,” Paprika smiled, “yeah I think that’s red wine, and I’m pretty sure that a glass and a bottle are different sizes.”
“This is one glass isn’t it?” Rosalie uncapped the ridiculous concoction and took a long pull before sighing happily and offering Paprika a pull. “Boy that’ll get you going all right!”
“No thanks,” the younger Lewis said, patting her mom on the back of the hand. “I’m sure it will absolutely get you going though. No doubt in my mind.”
Rosalie shrugged and took another pull. For a moment, Paprika wondered how it was possible, but then she remembered that her mom’s metabolism was fast for a rabbit shifter and realized she’d probably never even feel the buzz. “You got anything going on today aside from the dentist appointment?”
“I, uh,” Rika said before pausing. “Interview today.” She lied, hoping to avoid rutting around in the garden or picking up chicken eggs for most of the morning. “Wait, did you just say dentist appointment?”
Her mom nodded very excitedly. “I got you an appointment with that gorgeous hunk of a bear you pine over so frequently.”
“Ugh, God, mom,” Rika groaned, her cheeks flushing crimson. “Why do you say things like that?”
“Because they’re true. And also your interview is tomorrow. I checked your planner while you were asleep. And also, I’ve got a laundry list of stuff that needs doing around the farm before you get to go get your teeth cleaned for the third time in six months. You need a man, Rika.”
And if you won’t go after one yourself, I’ll do it for you. After what happened to your sister, I don’t think I could handle another Lewis girl getting in trouble! She could finish the phrase in her own head. When she thought it, the voice was nagging, irritating and more than a little grating. In reality though, her mom never sounded anything but absolutely sweet.
Even when she knew better.
“Wow okay, that’s… privacy? Kind of a thing?”
“Oh nonsense,” her mom said, quaffing the rest of her science-lab-yellow beverage. “We’re family, and anyway, after what happened with—“
“My sister, I know, I know,” Rika said, shrugging her shoulders and then rolling her neck to relieve a crick that only sprang up when her mom started to talk about finding her a mate. “But I’m not her, and I’m not going to go nuts and tear up a bunch of fields and get community service. I live here mom, we can’t even shift in public here without everyone going nuts.”
It was true, sort of. Over the years, most of the shifters left Cedar Falls and the rest preferred to keep to themselves. There were a handful of shifters – the Lewis family, some minks, a couple of actual peacocks, and a family of bulldogs who had a pet bulldog. Talk about a sense of identity. Oh and then there was of course, the dentist.
God what a bear he was. Paprika shivered just a little when her thoughts turned to Thor Melton, DDS. Seriously, Thor. His parents must’ve had a pretty good feeling about how he’d turn out. As it happened, the name totally fit his tall frame, thick shoulders, and husky voice. And a dentist? A bear with earning potential as big as his—
“Thinking something naughty?” Rosalie chided her daughter. “You always turn red when you do.”
Laughing it off and waving a dismissive hand, Paprika had to do something to stop thinking the things she thought. Then again, whenever she had a sex dream about him, she half-shifted, her buck teeth sprouted out and broke her retainer. So maybe the universe was trying to tell her something. Her mom certainly had. Ever since the poor guy first moved to town, and second, let it slip to her that he was a bear, she wouldn’t let him alone.
He kept his distance though. Not like a cold personality, just that he was cautious. Paprika always figured he’d been hurt, or maybe he was just a loner. But those big, soulful, brown eyes and those lips that bowed just so… ugh, she thought. I’ve got a bad case of the horny today.
“I’m gonna go shower,” Rika announced, standing up quick enough for the blood to rush from her head and leave her feeling slightly woozy.
“Cold one?”
“Beer? No thanks, Mom, we’ve established that I don’t drink before, what, eight in the morning?”
A quick whack on the back of her head made both she and her mom laugh. “Cold shower. You know, to treat whatever condition you have that’s making you blush from head to toe?”
One of the many downsides of a hippie mom is that even though the open talk is a great thing and all when you’re growing up and don’t understand how your body works, having to joke about masturbating with her? That’s about eight steps over the far side of the line. Rika just laughed, shaking her head.
“Yeah, you got me there,” she said. “You absolutely got me there.”
“Okay well after you’re done, meet me in the chicken house.” She wouldn’t ever call it a coop or a cage, because the chickens she kept were happy, not enslaved. “We have a supremely large amount of chicks to sex and tag.”
Paprika nodded, backing away slowly, like she was worried if she made any sounds, her mom would say something else mortifying. Turned out, being quiet didn’t prevent that.
“Oh,” she said, looking up from the newspaper’s farmer report. “I put that wand of yours in your top left drawer, right under the sink.”
If she was blushing before, Rika just about spontaneously combusted. “Mom!” she chuffed. “You’re not supposed to touch my vibrator! What the hell?”
Pursing her lips and shrugging carelessly, Rosalie sipped at a fresh cup of coffee. “Everyone does it,” she said. “I don’t know what the big deal with all the sex shaming is about.”
“It’s,” Paprika briefly tried to figure out words to use. “It’s like going through someone’s underwear when they told you not to wash them, and then not only washing them but also like arranging them in order of thong size and sexy factor.”
Her mom furrowed her brow, trying to figure out the analogy. “I’m not...”
“Never mind!” Paprika said. “I’ll just, yeah; I’ll just wash my own underwear.”
The analogy had flopped so hard that it confused the person who used it into changing the subject. Luckily, the subject went away from the sex toy that her mom moved, instead of toward the topic. That was a relief at least. But then, Rika dawdled a moment too long. “Go on, honey, go rub one out and when you get done releasing all that pent up tension, we can clean the chickens.”
“MOM!” Paprika yelled, going from bright red to purple, and fled the room before any more mental damage could be done.
Rosalie didn’t start laughing, out loud anyway, until the door to the basement slammed shut.
That was, with a few variations on a theme, more or less how life worked in Cedar Falls. It was frequently awkward, often ridiculous and frequently, a little to the left of normal. But then again, for Paprika, it was home. The only one she’d ever known.
No jobs, crazy mom, sister in some whacked out town eighteen hours away by a car that she didn’t – and wouldn’t – own for the foreseeable future, massive crush on a dentist bear she wasn’t entirely sure would know her name if it wasn’t for said crazy mom badgering him constantly, and a pair of buckteeth that wouldn’t ever go away when
they popped out.
But, Rika thought, opening her top left drawer and shaking her head as she closed her fingers around the toy she’d named “Henry” for some reason she’d never figured out, it’s home.
She turned on the shower, and one of the good things about living in a place so far away from civilization that she had to borrow a car and drive an hour to get to Target, took place. The massive, absurd, and likely out-of-code hot water heater chugged to life and almost instantly, the room filled with enveloping, relaxing, beautiful steam. With Henry in hand, Rika eyed the shower for a minute and then switched the water flow back to the tub.
As soon as she had stripped down and dumped an appropriate amount of chemical-laden bubble bath into the water, which really irritated her mom, Rika’s ancient cell phone started buzzing in the other room. It was one of the ones she had to flip open and press actual buttons to use. She trotted into the other room, and almost had a coronary when she saw “DR MELTON DENT” on the screen. It was too small to display the entire word dentist.
She furrowed her brow and answered. “Hello?”
Expecting his secretary, when that leathery, gruff voice slid through her crackly phone speaker, she just about melted. There aren’t a lot of people who list ‘going to the dentist’ as one of their favorite pastimes but then again, most people didn’t see this guy.
“Hello?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly husky. “Oh sorry, I already said that.”
Dr. Melton chuckled. “That’s all right,” he said. “Listen, Paprika, there are some, er, scheduling conflicts today.” In the background, she heard a whistle, like the whistle of a train? “I’m afraid I’ll have to reschedule your consultation.”
She picked at one of her incisors. “It’s pretty bad,” she said. “They popped back out.”
He chuckled again. Damn it why does he have to laugh hot? She imagined those dark brown eyes, his slightly shaggy hair, and the way his left cheek dimpled when he smiled. More than once, she’d thought about some bedside service to go with his bedside manner, but she forced herself not to think about that. Down to business, Paprika, stop getting all breathy.
