by Zoe Chant
Wedding Bear. (Enforcer Bears #3). A curvy librarian in desperate need of a date + a bear shifter in search of a home + the past that's pursuing him = one sweet and steamy small-town romance!
Fighter Bear. (Enforcer Bears #4). A curvy veterinary technician longing for a family + a lonely bear shifter with a wounded heart + a family farm in jeopardy = one exciting rural romance!
Firefighter Dragon. (Fire & Rescue Shifters # 1). A curvy archaeologist with the find of a lifetime + a firefighter dragon shifter battling his instincts + a priceless artifact coveted by a ruthless rival = one blazing hot romance!
Firefighter Pegasus. (Fire & Rescue Shifters # 2). A curvy pilot wary of flighty men + a firefighter pegasus shifter determined to win her heart + a high speed air race with even higher stakes = one explosive romance!
Firefighter Griffin. (Fire & Rescue Shifters # 3). A curvy single mom burned by love + a unique half-eagle, half-lion shifter firefighter with a wounded soul + the little boy who brings them together = one heart-warming romance!
Firefighter Sea Dragon. (Fire & Rescue Shifters # 4). A lonely woman who feels like a fish out of water + a firefighter sea dragon baffled by human ways + a forbidden love that will shake the whole sea = one magical romance!
The Master Shark’s Mate. (Fire & Rescue Shifters # 5). He's the most feared shifter in the sea. She's a middle-aged grandma from Arizona. He may have finally met his match...
Firefighter Unicorn. (Fire & Rescue Shifters # 6). His touch can heal anything — except her. Her touch can kill anyone — except him. He’s her salvation. She’s his doom.
And many more!
Zoe on Audio
Kodiak Moment – Audiobook - A workaholic wildlife photographer + a loner bear shifter + Alaskan wilderness = one warming and sensual story.
Hero Bear - Audiobook - A wounded Marine who lost his bear + a BBW physical therapist with a secret + a small town full of gossips = a hot and healing romance!
If you love Zoe Chant, you’ll also love these books!
Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents # 1), by Lauren Esker. A bear-shifter ex-mercenary and a curvy lynx shifter searching for her best friend's killer are handcuffed together and hunted in the wilderness. Can they learn to rely on each other before their pasts, and their pursuers, catch up with them? A full-length novel.
Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents # 2), by Lauren Esker. Avery is a lone werewolf with no pack; Nicole is a social worker trying to put her life back together. When he comes to her door with a box of orphan werewolf puppies and danger in pursuit, can two lonely people find the family they've been missing? A full-length novel.
Dragon’s Luck (Shifter Agents # 3) by Lauren Esker. Gecko shifter and infiltration expert Jen Cho teams up with sexy dragon-shifter gambler "Lucky" Lucado to win a high-stakes poker game. Now they're trapped on a cruise ship full of mobsters, mysterious enemy agents, and evil dragons! A full-length novel.
Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents # 4) by Lauren Esker. In her search for the truth about shifters, tell-all blogger Peri Moreland has been clashing with tiger shifter and SCB agent Noah Easton for years. Now she and Noah are on the run with an unstoppable assassin after them and a custom-made plague threatening the entire shifter world! A full-length novel.
Laura’s Wolf (Werewolf Marines # 1), by Lia Silver. Werewolf Marine Roy Farrell, scarred in body and mind, thinks he has no future. Curvy con artist Laura Kaplan, running from danger and her own guilt, is desperate to escape her past. Together, they have all that they need to heal. A full-length novel.
Prisoner (Werewolf Marines # 2), by Lia Silver. Werewolf Marine DJ Torres is a born rebel. Genetically engineered assassin Echo was created to be a weapon. When DJ is captured by the agency that made Echo, the two misfits find that they fit together perfectly. A full-length novel.
Partner (Werewolf Marines # 3), by Lia Silver. DJ and Echo’s relationship grows stronger under fire… until they are confronted by a terrible choice. A full-length novel.
Mated to the Meerkat, by Lia Silver. Jasmine Jones, a curvy tabloid reporter, meets her match in notorious paparazzi and secret meerkat Chance Marcotte. A romantic comedy novelette.
If you like Zoe Chant, try …
Metal Wolf
Hi! I wrote this book as Zoe Chant, but I also write as Lauren Esker. If you enjoyed Bull in a Tea Shop, you might also enjoy my sci-fi romance series, Warriors of Galatea. The series begins with Metal Wolf and continues in Metal Dragon. Both are standalone romances with an HEA.
Metal Wolf
A farm girl who dreams of the stars.
A wounded soldier who was born there …
Sarah Metzger gave up her dream of becoming an astrophysicist to care for her widowed father after a farming accident. The only stars she'll ever know are the ones she sees through her telescope from her bedroom window.
Until an injured soldier from outer space crashes into her life ... literally.
Injured and on the run, on a planet called Earth ...
Wolf shifter Rei was enslaved as a child and forced to fight for the galactic empire who conquered his people. When his stolen spaceship plunged into Earth's atmosphere, he never dreamed he might find sanctuary, home, and love.
On Sarah's world, in Sarah's arms, he can finally began to heal. Perhaps there is a future for him other than fighting.
But the empire that stole him as a child has tracked him across the universe to find his hiding place.
A lush, beautiful world, with no idea that aliens exist ... and no defenses against them.
A world called Earth ...
On Amazon and KU!
Keep reading for a preview …
S ARAH METZGER HUMMED quietly to herself as she went through her familiar farm chore routine. Wisconsin autumn was always glorious, and this had turned out to be a particularly nice one. The colors were starting to pass their peak, but the October air was crisp and clean and sharp as the edge of a knife, carrying a faint, acrid hint of woodsmoke.
The sun was setting behind the outbuildings as she dumped the last bucket of feed into the milk cow's trough. Not a cloud marred the deep blue sky, where the first stars were beginning to emerge. It would be a chilly night, so she shut the horse in the barn and made sure the chickens were all in their house. But with that clear sky and the moon not yet risen, tonight would be perfect for stargazing.
"Hey, Dad?" Sarah called, pulling off her muddy boots in the farmhouse kitchen. "I'm going out to the lake tonight, all right?"
She came into the living room to find that it had been annexed by another of her dad's projects. Wide, flat pieces of metal and a variety of electrical and engine parts were spread out on newspapers that had been put down to protect the old hardwood floor, and Gary Metzger was sitting in the middle of it with a wrench in one hand and what looked like a heap of printed-out instructions from the Internet, stained with black fingerprints.
"If I was any other little girl's daddy," her father remarked gruffly without looking up from his project, "I'd think you were gonna head out there to Lover's Leap and hook up with some town kid."
Sarah couldn't help laughing. "I'm twenty-six, Dad. Hardly a kid. If I wanted to hook up with someone, not that I do, I wouldn't have to go out to Lover's Leap; we could get a motel—"
Her father made a protesting sound and a show of blocking his ears. Sarah laughed again.
"Wouldn't mind, you know," he added gruffly, wiping his hands on his grease-stained sweatpants. "You ought to do something for yourself for a change."
"I'm not hooking up with anyone, Dad."
"I know. It's you, so I reckon you're goin' out there to look at the stars."
"That's right. It's the Orionids tonight. I'm hoping to see some meteors." She stepped carefully over what appeared to be a crankshaft. "Are you still working on turning the old gristmill into a hydroelectric plant for the farm?"
"That's right. Finally got the alternator pulled from that ol' truck out back of the barn, and the water wheel i
s just about put back together." He scratched his ear, then looked ruefully at the parts on the floor. "Okay, not quite. But I got the bearings I needed, so she'll get there. Eventually."
"Well, have fun. I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. And looking forward even more to putting an end to those stupid power outages whenever we get a snowstorm." She kissed him on top of his balding head. "Don't wait up."
Her father shifted his weight, wincing as it tweaked his damaged hips, and set the printouts aside. "You shouldn't be havin' to look at the stars through a telescope from the lake. I know you were always wild to be one of those astro-whatevers—"
"Astrophysicist," Sarah said with a smile, turning back at the bottom of the stairs. The old pain was dull enough now that she could talk about it, even laugh about it, without hurting. That was the thing about childhood dreams. You imagined all kinds of wild things about your future, and then you grew up and learned to have smaller dreams, simpler dreams, the kind that were easy to achieve.
"You deserve the stars, Sarah," her father said quietly. "You shouldn't put it all on hold to take care of me and the farm."
"I'm taking classes, aren't I?" Sarah said with a lightness she didn't quite feel. Part-time, true—at the rate she was going, it would take her twenty years to get a degree—but a couple of days a week were all she could manage while still living at home, with the long drive to the university in Eau Claire. "Now I'd better get going or I'll miss the show."
She hurried up the stairs, as much to get away from the conversation as to avoid missing a few minutes of meteor-watching.
It doesn't matter. I probably wouldn't have been much of an astrophysicist anyway. I'll eventually marry some local boy just like my mom did, and settle down to raise sheep and take care of the family farm. I'll still have the stars in the evening. That'll be all right.
Small dreams, she reminded herself as she packed the telescope into its carrying case. Small, easy dreams, the kind of dreams that couldn't be upset by your mom getting a terminal cancer diagnosis when you were fifteen or your dad having a bad farm accident a couple of years later.
Just because she had once dreamed of the stars didn't mean she couldn't learn to enjoy a life on the farm. She had once imagined the universe, but now its boundaries had narrowed to the borders of a rural Wisconsin county, and that was okay too. Or so she told herself. The stars were still up there, old familiar friends keeping her company in the autumn dusk.
She trotted down the stairs with her arms piled high with her skywatching gear. She had her telescope and tripod, DSLR camera for taking night shots, night sky field guide, camp chair ... what else was she going to want? A good jacket, she thought, shrugging into the heavy sheepskin-lined one that always hung on a hook by the kitchen door. And a sandwich and thermos of coffee would probably be a good idea, too.
Her father, busy with his project, didn't seem to notice her leave. She loaded her kit into the passenger seat of the farm truck and pulled out of the driveway onto their little rural road.
The road to the lake skirted the edge of Sidonie, Wisconsin, pop. 1092. A truck laden with laughing teens roared around her, spraying gravel from its rear tires. Going to one of those bonfire parties along the lake that her dad was worried about, she thought with a smile. She'd been to a few of them as a teen, but she liked the peace and solitude of stargazing better.
She turned off the lake road onto a rutted dirt access road that took her down to the beach. This late in the fall, the lake was nearly deserted. The summer houses had been boarded up for the season, the boats pulled out of the water. Far down the beach she saw a small flicker of light and heard tinny strains of music from what was probably the end-of-season bonfire that the kids had been going to. It looked like it was the only one.
Good. Better star watching for her.
She set up her camp chair and her telescope. She had a bigger and better telescope at home, but the portable one with the carrying case was good for traveling because she didn't mind if she bumped it when she was throwing it into the truck or hauling it through the woods. She'd had it since she was a kid. Through the old plastic eyepiece, she had gotten her first glimpse of Saturn's rings. She'd watched comets and meteors, and experienced a rare view of an aurora borealis straying far enough south to light up the northern sky in shades of red and green.
"We've come a long way together, haven't we, old gal?" she murmured, patting the telescope as she looked up at the sky. Just as she looked up, a meteor flickered briefly, and Sarah smiled. That was a good sign of a nice display tonight.
The Orionids weren't the most spectacular meteor shower on the calendar, but they were the last one before the weather got cold. So far, the October night wasn't too bad. She'd been able to see her breath as she packed the truck, but the sheepskin jacket was keeping her warm. She tucked her hands into her pockets, curling one of them around the thermos of coffee she'd poked in there. It was, as she'd hoped, a good night for stargazing, clear and dark. There was some light pollution from the town off to the west, but it wasn't too bad with no cloud cover to trap and reflect it.
Another shooting star appeared and vanished in the dark sky over the lake, arcing between the stars, there and gone. Two so far, and she'd hardly been here ten minutes—
Wait—what was that?
This was a bright reddish light in a part of the sky where she knew there shouldn't be a star, not one like that. It was in the wrong place for Mars or Venus too. A satellite, maybe? Sarah reached for her telescope.
Several times in her night-sky watching excursions, she'd had the rare treat of seeing a meteor explode. Twice it was a bright flash, too high to see any details. Other times she'd gotten to see them pop like fireworks as they plunged into the Earth's atmosphere.
And there was always some small part of her that hoped to see a UFO. Not that she believed in UFOs, not in the alien spaceship sense. But if you spent a lot of time staring up at the night sky, sooner or later you might see something a little out of the ordinary, something you couldn't quite identify. That was the actual meaning of UFO, anyway: unidentified flying object. There was a lot of interesting stuff up there—space junk, military aircraft, satellites, experimental rockets, weather balloons.
Maybe this was her first UFO.
The telescope didn't make it any easier to identify; it just made it brighter. It was a vivid red flaring to yellow-white at its center, the color of an object heating up on contact with atmosphere. Through the telescope, she could make out a little of the comet-trail of hot air and debris that it would be leaving behind, but only a truncated hint of it. An object like this should be leaving an incredibly long trail, like in footage she'd seen of space shuttle reentry.
If the tail looked so short she couldn't even see it with the telescope's aid, that meant it was headed almost directly for Wisconsin.
Sarah straightened up from the telescope. The object was so bright now that no one looking up at the night sky, even in a cursory glance, could possibly miss it. As she stared up at it, the air shivered around her with a sudden, low rumble.
Sonic boom, she thought. It was going faster than the speed of sound when it hit the atmosphere. Probably still is. Just like the space shuttle.
It seemed shocking that an object this large could have slipped into Earth's atmosphere undetected. NASA tracked everything of significant size that might risk a collision with Earth, and Sarah followed several sites and message boards devoted to near-Earth objects. She would definitely have heard of anything large expected in Earth's neighborhood tonight. However, she also knew from following those message boards that new objects were discovered all the time. There was always a chance—not a large chance anymore, but still a chance—that an object large enough to cause the extinction of all life on Earth could slip through the network of official space observatories and amateur astronomers guarding the night skies to plow into the planet undetected. Space was unspeakably huge, after all.
Maybe this was that extin
ction-causing object.
Yet she wasn't scared. Wonder filled her instead. This was why she'd wanted to be an astrophysicist in the first place. If this was going to be the giant asteroid that wiped out humankind, she was getting to see it. She was getting to watch it land.
Possibly right on top of her. It was shockingly bright now, lighting up the trees around her, bright enough to cast shadows. Far down the beach, the music cut out, and she heard distant, startled voices.
All Sarah could do was stare. She could hardly even blink, even though it was so bright it made her eyes water. She didn't want to miss a second of this. Especially if these were her last moments on Earth.
If this is how I die, what a way to go.
She could hear it now, or rather, feel it, the way she'd been able to feel the sonic boom a few moments earlier. The air around her seemed to tremble.
And then it was upon her. Heat washed over her, and Sarah belatedly realized she'd have a better chance of surviving this if she got down on the ground. All she had time to do was throw her arms over her head before the object hit the water with a tremendous CRACK!
The shockwave hit her an instant later, knocking her down. As she sat up dazedly, covered with sand, she was just in time to see a wave racing inland, topped with foam, high enough to blot out the dark line of trees on the opposite shore.
Her telescope! She made a desperate lunge for it, just as the wave caught her and she was suddenly underwater. The wave rolled her like a pinball into the woods. She tumbled into the brush with a painful crash, disoriented and terrified. Somehow she maintained the presence of mind to throw her arms around a tree trunk, stopping her from being battered to death among the trees. Water was all around her; she couldn't tell up from down. And then the wave receded, leaving her shivering and coughing at the edge of the woods.