Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance)

Also By Lynn Red

Dedication

Bear Your Teeth

A Jamesburg Shifters novella | by | Lynn Red | Connect with me online at my Facebook page: facebook.com/lynn.red.946 | Click here to sign up for my mailing list to get the latest news and exclusive excerpts, contests, and cover reveals! Or navigate to: http://eepurl.com/G1q2X

-1- | “Actually, mom, the boundary for a normal relationship is on THAT side of you commenting on my vibrator.” | -Paprika Lewis

-2- | “You didn’t even have to give me the giggle gas to make me do that. I must be going nuts, huh?” | -Rika

-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

-4- | “Every now and then, I get a really good idea. And almost always it turns out to be not quite as good as I thought it was initially.” | -Paprika

-5- | “A day long orgasm? That sounds... well, like it might be sorta painful.” | -Petunia

-6- | “I’d like to see THAT on a Bear Grylls show.” | -Paprika

-7- | “We really should look into more therapy. Not for you, I mean, for me.” | -Paprika

-8- | “There’s very little worse than meeting a hedgehog shifting professor and not seeing him get upset.” | -Paprika

-9- | “Thinking about it, logistically, I don’t know how this is gonna work but... you know what? I don’t care.” | -Paprika

Thank you so much for checking out this latest Jamesburg story! | Connect with me online at my Facebook page: facebook.com/lynn.red.946 | Click here to sign up for my mailing list to get the latest news and exclusive excerpts, contests, and cover reveals! Or navigate to: http://eepurl.com/G1q2X | And keep turning those pages for some very special excerpts!

Excerpts | Lion in Wait

Bearly Hanging On

To Catch a Wolf

Bearing It All

Further Reading: Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

Also By Lynn Red

About the Author

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Alpha Werebear Romance

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T
he 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 breakfast 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—