Shifters on Fire: A BBW Shifter Romance Boxed Set (8 page)

Dora smiled broadly. “Nah,” she said without giving too much away. “I think we might just be pretty similar people, that’s all. It might sound weird, but hey, trust me. I know what you mean.”

Suddenly, Rex grabbed Dora, held her at arm’s length for a second, and then pulled her in for a massive hug that would have been more appropriate for a bear than a lion. It took a second for her to get her wits about her and realize what was going on, but when she did, she hugged him tight. “I’ll get busy, and you go get some rest, or some coffee, or some ice cream. I’ll get with you soon.”

He held her at arms’ length again, and gave her a smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t let you down.”

“It isn’t me you should worry about,” Dora said as he turned to leave. “Eve’s the mean one.”

He smiled again, and took his leave. This time when the door opened, it chimed one time, and then immediately stopped, even though it didn’t close all the way.

“If nothing else,” Dora said, “we got that taken care of.”

As soon as the big, beautiful lion, who she imagined would have a hell of a mane when he shifted, climbed into some kind of large-ish SUV and turned the ignition, Dora was on the phone again.

“Eve? You there? Oh what the hell, I know you are. Pick up, pick up, come on, pick up.”

A few seconds later, a very weary and bleary-sounding Eve announced her presence. “Hello?” she asked. “Dora? Why are you calling me so early?”

“Early? It’s half past noon. Is this how you work from home? Working hard or hardly working? Har-har-har.”

“I
am
an owl, you know. Showing up anywhere during daylight hours is one of the most obnoxious, headache-inducing things you can possibly imagine. Just the thought of the damn sun coming through the windows is enough to make my head throb. But anyway, what’s shaking?”

Dora was trying to figure out how to explain what she’d done without raising the ire of the Mistress of Mating, but she couldn’t come up with anything. “Well, look, a guy came in and told me he needed some help.”

“So you took his info and all that?”

“Well yeah, but when we got to the point about what kind of mate he was looking for, he didn’t really, uh...”

“He made a request and you took it?”

“Wait, how’d you know?”

Eve chuckled. “Oh you gigantic sap. You gigantic, enormous sap.”

“Wait, what?” Dora asked. “I’m missing something that’s obviously important. I know I am, but I don’t know what the hell I’m missing.”

“He called me first, hon,” Eve asked. “I have one of the lines for the office routed to my mobile phone. Some forwarding business or whatever you call it. Anyway, he called last night and I told him to come see me today. Or rather, go see you. Or whatever the case may be.”

“So you knew what was going on?”

“He told me the whole story and it melted even
my
icy heart,” Eve said. “Something about how he called for some stupid novelty t-shirts and she made him laugh. It reminded me a lot of someone else.”

“I can’t believe this, you broke the rules!” Dora said with a laugh. “Wait did you say it reminded you of someone?”

“I think you know who. And don’t make any owl jokes. But sometimes, the rules just get in the way.”

“Yeah,” Dora said, “I guess they do, huh?”

Chapter Three

Two days came and went.

An endlessly, brain-numbing amount of shirt orders, shirt pickups, and soccer coaches coming in for their team’s jerseys filed into, and out of, Dwyer’s SilkScreen Supply, with no word from the mystery man who ordered the dirty shirts.

It didn’t bother Sheena. Not at all, not one bit. At least that’s what she told herself. Really, she was going crazy a lot faster than she would ever admit.

In reality, it bothered her just as much as the fact that her job wasn’t to sell supplies to do silk screening, but to sell t-shirts and posters and trophies. That didn’t make a damn bit of sense when combined with the name. But not even fixating on how much she hated the name of the shop was enough to get Sheena’s mind off the guy with the growly voice and the good sense of humor that had entered her life and exited within the space of a single five-minute phone call.

Sitting there at the desk, waiting for her friend Lita to come back with coffee and hopefully—though she’d never admit to eating it—a doughnut or two, she felt even stupider than she had two days ago when she first felt like an idiot for falling for someone over the phone.

But he made a porno ad joke
, she thought, wistfully twirling a lock of her coppery, ringletted hair.

Immediately, she blew out an impatient puff of hair, and was glad that she’d already stopped twirling her damn hair by the time her friend walked in, leading with her ass as she pushed the door open. Sheena was
not
a hair twirler. She caught her hand as it was heading unconsciously back to the ringlet falling from her temple and would have slapped herself if it wouldn’t have made her look like a whack job.

“What’s eating you?” Lita said, flopping down on the stool where customers designing shirts usually sat. She followed her own flop with a dramatic
thump
of doughnut box on countertop. “I mean, besides the fact that you’re obviously in love with someone.”

Sheena tried her best to appear nonplussed. That meant that she opened the box, found the one with the most chocolate frosting on it—this time that happened to be a cream filled long john—and stuck it straight in her mouth. She shrugged as she took a big bite, and then shrugged some more as she chewed. By the time the stingingly-sweet filling got swallowed, she’d stopped shrugging, which was a good thing, because her neck was starting to hurt.

“I’m in love with someone?” she asked. “No I’m not.”

“Right,” Lita said. “Remember that one time you fell in love with the guy who came in here and borrowed the copy of
Ulysses
you were reading? You remember how that went?”

Sheena snorted hard, and had to cough a little to keep her lungs Bavarian cream free. “The one who thought it was about the Civil War general?” she asked. “I still give him some credit. I mean, he
did
want to read a book about the Civil War general. Not everyone’s willing to do that. At least he didn’t think it was a Batman comic.”

“You mean like that one?” Lita lifted her foot off the ground and used her bare toes to point—obnoxious foxes with their super balance—before she grabbed her own doughnut. “Maybe don’t throw sticks if you live in a glass terrarium.”

“I’m not a lizard,” Sheena said. “Even if it feels like it sometimes.” She took a deep breath and let it out in a long, trailing sigh. As she did, she felt the tension in her shoulders relaxing until she was slumped over forward, with her forehead almost touching the countertop. “Still hasn’t called.”

“Who hasn’t?” Lita asked. “Oh god damn girl, you did
not
make some guy you wanted to talk to call your stupid callback service, did you?” She stared at her friend for a second, and when Sheena didn’t take any bites or take any sips, she knew the awful truth. “Why?”

Sheena frowned and shrugged again. This time it was a shrug of resignation rather than pretense. “It just... I don’t know, I felt like an idiot for jumping on some guy over the phone. I figured he needed to do at least a little work before I jumped his lion bones.”

“Lion?” Lita asked. “How do you know?”

“His voice,” Sheena replied. “It’s kind of a thing with us. We can just tell.”

“Right,” Lita said as a smirk spread across her face. Her cheeks almost lit up with a red flush. “You got it bad, girl,” she said.

“No I don’t,” Sheena said, irritated. “I don’t got anything. I might have something bad, but I certainly don’t, uh, got anything.”

Lita laughed out loud. “So now you’re doing your grammar critique. How many times do we have to go around and around before you just admit that I always know what I’m talking about?”

“Fourteen,” Sheena looked at the floor and took another bite of long john as she grumbled the answer. “You’re gonna have to repeat it fourteen times before I listen, and maybe not even then.”

Lita laughed and sighed heavily. “Look, you’re obviously hard up for some serious cuddle time, so why not just call the guy and get it over with? Are you really going to sit there and stew over waiting for him to call? This is 2016, honey, all that
Rules
shit needs to take a hike. You want a guy, you go get him.”

“I dunno,” Sheena said, “it’s not like I’m
that
desperate. We
do
go out sometimes. And we
do
pick up guys sometimes.”

Lita chuckled. “Yeah, hey, remember last time you took a guy home, h ad a great time, and ended up falling in love with him?”

“Well...”

“Okay, that was a little too specific. How about the last time you took a guy home and had great—no, how about even decent—sex?”

“Okay, okay,” Sheena said, stuffing the last bite of doughnut into her mouth and washing it down with latte. “I get it, I—”

“Let’s take it one step further. When’s the last time you even
met
a guy who wasn’t a massive douche or a—”

“I said okay!”

“I was going to say ‘a zebra’ but hey, if I got the point across, then all right, I guess I can can it.”

“I don’t even know how—” Sheena was just about to make another excuse for her cowardice, although this one made perfect sense because she really
didn’t
have any idea how to get in touch with the growly voiced lion. The door to Dwyer’s opened with a clang, and before the “someone’s here” chime started to play, Sheena’s heart dropped straight to the floor. She opened her eyes so wide they looked like saucers with tiny violet circles in the middle.

“Did you just stroke?” Lita asked. She stuck out a hand and closed Sheena’s mouth, which had fallen open in a comical gape. “Get a grip on yourself, it’s just a customer.”

If this was just a customer, then Sheena didn’t need to worry about finding a guy ever again in her life. Somehow, the print shop’s clientele had gone from soccer moms and local bands to six foot three guys who wore suits with no tie, and
didn’t look like a jerk
.

The fabric of his very obviously tailored suit clung to the width of his shoulders, and tapered with down to a v at his waist. His legs were thick, proportionate to his torso and his arms. The charcoal gray trousers were a perfect fit too. “Yeah, I bet he’d be a perfect fit in—” Sheena clapped her hand over her mouth when she realized she was talking.

Lita, for her part, tried her damndest to keep from laughing, but when her friend had just made an out-loud declaration about the suitability for a guy who just wandered into the print shop for her ladyparts, it was
kinda
tough. Instead, she decided to play wingman as skillfully as anyone since Goose did for Maverick. It was one step below busting out
You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling
, but it was good enough to keep Sheena from either throwing up, actually stroking out, or possibly leaping straight onto the guy and straddling his waist.

Just then, that was good enough.

“Doughnut?” Lita asked. “They’re still kinda hot.”

“He’s kinda hot,” Sheena murmured through her fingers before closing her eyes and shaking her head. “Why can’t I shut up?”

Lita gave her a sharp jab with her toe to shush her.

“Oh, uh, sure,” the guy said. “I was just thinking about how I forgot to eat this morning. Something’s... someone’s... been on my mind.”

Lita arched an eyebrow and Sheena let out a quailing yawping sort of noise.

It was
him
. Even if his voice had been a little garbled by the bad connection, she’d recognized that round, warm, but somehow slightly gravelly voice anywhere. Somehow, she kept form saying anything else, but it took so much personal discipline that it gave her a stomach ache.

Mystery man opened the box, looked around, and decided on the second most chocolate-overdose one of the bunch. Sheena watched him lift the long john. She couldn’t peel her eyes off him as he brought it to his lips, then between his straight, white teeth, and bit down.

“Shit!” he squawked, as a load of cream shot out of the doughnut’s ass end. Half of it squirted onto the countertop behind which Sheena sat, and the other half somehow roped around and splatted on the upper thigh area of mystery man’s beautiful trousers. He started laughing as he wiped, and then licked the cream off his finger before reaching for a napkin and dabbing at the resultant wet spot.

“That always happens after you get stuff dry-cleaned, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t worry! I’ve got water!” Sheena was compelled by some force outside herself, much larger than herself, to help him. She stood up like a bolt of lightning had shot through the top of her head, and darted to the back. Wetting a napkin, she came back to the front, leapt across the counter and immediately applied the damp paper to the guy’s crotch.

Lita had just about endured enough. She let out a peal of laughter simultaneously joyous and horrified. Mystery man lifted both his hands like he was surrendering to the police, but as soon as he realized she was cleaning his pants and not attacking him, he breathed a sigh of relief and let his hands fall on her shoulders. “Thanks,” he said, reclining his head back on his shoulders. “I really needed that. Honestly this is the best suit I have, so getting that stuff on them was kind of the worst thing that could happen.”

Jets of warmth coursed through Sheena’s body, radiating out from his fingertips. The sensation crept down her back, curled around her legs and gave her a jolt of excitement where it
really
counted. Somehow, she hadn’t yet noticed what she was doing, or more importantly, how it looked.

“There,” she said, looking up at him as he looked down at her. “All better, we got it just in time—”

“Sheena?” it was Dwyer calling from the back. A moment later, he emerged from the office and let out an audible gasp. “Sheena! You can’t... what’s... oh no!”

From his vantage point, all he could see was the top of his best employees head bobbing back and forth behind the desk, and a very tall man who even Dwyer had to admit was rather attractive, apparently holding her shoulders down. His head was tilted back and his eyes were closed and this was all just too much.

Thump
. Dwyer hit the deck.

Sheena jumped to her feet, looked down at where she’d been, and then over at Lita who was red-going-on-purple with laughter that had apparently robbed her brain of oxygen. Mystery man’s relief vanished immediately from his face. “Is he okay?” he asked, trotting around the counter to find the round-faced proprietor completely unconscious.

“It looked like I was giving him a blowjob,” Sheena stated, flatly. Her voice was so dry and instructive that it would have been at home coming out of an exceedingly boring history professor. “It did, didn’t it?”

Lita couldn’t even gather herself enough to respond. She was snorting, choking, and making some kind of sound that was a lot like a seal honking. “You were...” she broke off to laugh. “And then he put his... and oh my God!” she snorted again, this time so harshly that it seemed like she might implode. And from how purple she had turned, maybe suffocation was a present danger.

“But then when he opened the door and... oh my God!” She slid off the counter where she’d been seated, and proceeded to double over, clutching at her stomach and holding her side at the same time. “He fell over! You made your boss pass out!”

Her snorting turned back to honking, and then reverted to snorting again.

“Hey, uh, can you get me another of those wet napkins?” Mystery man was asking from the floor. “He’s all right, I think the shock of the faux-job just gave him a little bit of a panic. Or maybe a thrill. He’s doesn’t look like he’s in the best shape, so a thrill might’ve made him hit the deck. No, that was rude, it was definitely the shock.”

“He talks to himself too, in like full conversations,” Sheena said softly to Lita, who had just managed to get herself somewhat back together.

“Yeah, now he just needs to narrate what’s happening around him out loud, and—”

“He’s fine,” Mystery Man said. “Yeah, just need to get some water on his face, he’ll come right around, I think.” He patted Dwyer’s puffy cheeks. “He’ll be just fine. Can I get that water?”