Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance) Read Online Free Page A

say.
    He furrowed his brow again, a deep frown line crinkling his forehead. “Weirdest thing. I’m not sure. There was a job posting, and all it said was something vague about mountains, and then gave a number to call if you were interested.
    “That’s not normal. Wait, was this in one of our papers?” Shifters, weres, whatever they’re called, have “for them” papers that usually contain old news stories about this bear or that tiger making the draft in the NFL, or a seal getting elected to the US Senate. But they also had job postings that, if you looked at them with the slightest squint, seemed like creepy sex ads you’d find in a vintage 1976 corner paper in Vegas.
    He shook his head. “Well, mine.”
    She quirked an eyebrow. It had worked. Apparently. Thank God .
    “Dental journal. You know, job ads for dentists.”
    Slowly, Rika started to nod. “Well, if you want, I can ask my sister if the place she went needs a dentist, Dr. Melton.”
    “Is it friendly?”
    “Apparently. I mean, they tolerate Petunia.”
    For a moment, Thor’s mouth hung open. But then he clapped it shut. “I can’t ask you to do that. In fact, I can’t believe I’ve done most any of the things I’ve done today. And anyway this is all a pipe dream. I can’t move without a place to work, there are a scarce few places I’d even feel safe, let alone comfortable.”
    “I hear that,” Rika scoffed, standing up and desperately needing to either get out of there or kiss him again because her heart was just about to erupt if one of the two didn’t happen.
    “Next time I see you, do me a favor?”
    He’s going to tell me not to come back. He’s going to want to get the hell away from crazy rabbit-lady for fear of a lawsuit, he’s—
    His hands on her shoulders, his lips against hers, Thor Melton took a deep breath through his nose, inhaling Paprika’s scent. As his tongue explored her lips, and then moved inside, he ran his hands through her hair, grabbing big handfuls and letting the curls slide between his fingers.
    He released her, and she sank back, mouth open. The heart that had been threatening to explode seconds before suddenly ached worse than ever – but this time because she’d tasted what she wanted worse than anything, and then it was gone.
    “Next time I see you, call me Thor. And promise me there will be a next time.”
    “Y-yeah,” Rika said. “And call me Rika. And uh, hell yeah there’s gonna be a next time.”
    When she finally made her way out of the office, the world felt different, like how after the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s holiday trifecta, the world just feels slightly off? That’s the sense she got.
    But this? Definitely, definitely the good kind of off.

-3-
“The size difference never really occurred to me. Well it did, but only once, and you know what they say tiny hands make look bigger, right? That can’t possibly hurt my self-confidence.”
-Thor Melton, DDS
    ––––––––
    “A bby?” Thor Melton called down the hall to his assistant – or at least that’s what she was right then. The patients were drying up. Hell, the whole town was drying up, so when there weren’t any teeth to clean, she answered the phones.
    Of course, there wasn’t much of that to be done either.
    She stuck her head in the door, a tendril of mousy brown falling across one of her tortoiseshell patterned plastic-framed glasses. “’Sup, T?”
    Formality wasn’t something Thor Melton took very seriously. It actually made him nervous when people called him doctor, mister, whatever. He’d grown up too fast for his own liking, but barely fast enough to keep ahead of the cubs his mom and dad kept having without the money to support, or the bills that kept piling up.
    Hippie parents might be awesome in all kinds of ways – open talks about the dangers of government intervention and public school, for one, and naming him Thor for goodness sake for another – but when it came to fiscal