On the Growl: A Shifter Romance Anthology

by Lynn Red

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking.”

  “Doing too much of that will get you in trouble,” Petunia said, and then mumbled something about how it can keep you out of trouble, too.

  With a heavy sigh, Paprika rolled over onto her stomach, and let her eyes fix on the TV she had muted across the room. An old episode of Family Feud was about halfway over. Richard Dawson had started kissing women in that vaguely creepy but not quite harassment way that he always did. “Oh God,” Rika said. “What if I upset him?”

  “Do you know men?” Petunia shot back. “You said you grabbed him and kissed him, right? Did he squirm, trying to get away? Did he get all nervous and shake like Uncle Jake does every time you take away his quote-unquote coffee cup?”

  “Well,” she paused for a second. “No, he sorta went at it with me.”

  “Good so we’ve established that he’s a normal male with a libido. And also since he’s a bear,” Petunia trailed off for a second. “Oh honey, oh honey do you know what you did?”

  “You’re not about to have another break are you?”

  Petunia snorted defiantly. “My therapist says it was brought on by a mixture of stress and whackadoo brain chemistry. Yes that’s the term she used. But no I’m not. It’s just... he’s a bear. You know what they say about bears, right?”

  “Why do I feel like I’m about to be gifted another dick joke?”

  “Because usually you would be. But no, remember – bears, they mate for life. Dating and playing around and all that, they’ll do some but they’re pretty serious about their love lives. If he got all hot and heavy with you, he might’ve decided the next fifty some-odd years of your life for you already.”

  Oh that would be bad. Right? I mean, I hardly know the guy. He knows my molars and my incisors really well, but I don’t even know his phone number.

  Paprika swallowed, hard. “He did get a real kinda, I dunno, intense voice? And he got all growly and told me that when he saw something he wanted he went after it until he got it.”

  Petunia gave her a long, I-told-you-so sound. It was a sort of whine that started in her nose and went high and then low. It wasn’t a particularly rare sound, either, even though in most cases, Petunia was never right. This time, though? “God, don’t you love it when they get all growly? Makes my lady parts feel all weird. I mean, aside from the referring to you as a non-living ‘it’ but you can’t win ‘em all.”

  “I did kinda feel something,” Rika admitted, evading her sister’s lady parts entirely.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you did. A bear? I’m sure you felt a whole lot of something.” Petunia snickered at her own joke. “Sorry, I had to get it out or it would have festered in my belly for a month and gotten way raunchier.”

  “That sounds horrifying.”

  “Yeah, well, you know me. Say, you also know that I’ve got an open bedroom, right? Why don’t you come visit some weekend? This place is… different from Cedar Falls, that’s for sure.”

  “And you’re an expert at subject changing. Listen, I gotta run,” she said, noticing the time. “Interview in thirty minutes.”

  Petunia sighed again and said goodbye. “Oh wait,” she said just as Paprika was about to hang up. “You know we need a dentist, right? The old witch doctor finally admitted that neither he, nor either of the weird zombie bear things he runs around with have steady enough hands for root canals.”

  “Witch doctor?” Paprika asked, the shock evident in her voice.

  “It’s, yeah well, like I said, Jamesburg is a different sort of place.”

  “Huh. Well yeah I’ll tell Thor to move there, no problem.” She hit the button on the phone, and didn’t realize for at least three beats of her heart, what she’d just said.

  Opening her eyes halfway, she pinched the bridge of her nose. “I am definitely an idiot.”

  The interview came and went – it wasn’t a big thing, just a series of boring questions about how customer centric she was. Paprika found that kind of funny, because the old man who owned the Stop N Shop where she had applied to clerk was just about the gruffest, rudest guy she’d ever come across. Whenever she went in there for a drink or five or six candy bars, he just sorta watched her, old, unlit cigar between his stained lips.

  He never said much of anything except. “Anything else?” and “Any gas today?”

  In fact, the interview was the first time she found out his name was Norman. Norman Cruise, proprietor, was the way he’d introduced himself. He was nicer during the interview than he was during midnight candy runs, but Rika got the distinct feeling that working the graveyard at a gas station was probably not where she wanted to end up.

  Of course, she wasn’t really sure where she did want to end up, except that she couldn’t get that big damn bear out of her head. Nor could she forget what she said to Petunia. How casually she’d said it. I hope she knows it was a joke. Oh wait, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. And that’s going to take some explaining.

  With her purse in one hand, a folio folder with a resume in the other – turns out? Gas stations? Don’t really care about your resume – and a six pack of beer and one half-gallon of milk in a sack over her shoulder, she shambled to the door. She felt guilty just buying the beer at two in the afternoon, so she grabbed the milk, too, to make it look like she was just out shopping. It probably didn’t fool anyone, but hey, it made her feel a little better.

  “Son of a bitch,” she groaned, when she turned the door handle that connected her basement directly to the outside world. She’d dead bolted it, then promptly forgot and left through the front door. The thought crossed her mind that maybe she was getting a little batty in her old age.

  Steeling herself for probable contact with the alien life form known as her mother, Paprika started really wishing that the bag with the beer in it wasn’t clear. Her mom, she thought, would probably want to mix it with Gatorade powder.

  Shuddering at the thought, she tried every way she could think of to open the thumb-latch door, but just couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve putting all of her carefully picked up belongings down, and that was just out of the question.

  Unfortunately, just as she was about to execute her carefully planned balancing act, the door swung open, both screwing up Paprika’s plan, and also removing the thing she was using to balance on, which sent her into one hell of a spill. Feet over head, bottles over milk, she tumbled through the threshold, over her very surprised looking mother’s outstretched hands, and straight into…

  Holy shit.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked the giant standing in front of her, who had managed to catch her, and two bottles of Pale Ale. “I was just—“

  “I want you to listen to me before you say anything at all. Like, actually listen.”

  Those eyes, she thought. Those lips, that hair, those hands. She could hardly keep from staring. “Why are you in my house?”

  “Right, yeah that’s what I’m about to tell you. After Monday, I started thinking,” Thor looked away from Rika just long enough to nod as Rosalie departed the front door, sports bottle full of wine in hand, equipped with leg warmers and a Jimmy Connors-style headband. “I’ve never done anything like that, never even really wanted to. Something just overwhelmed me and then I think maybe I went about three steps too fast, and then about ten steps too slow.”

  He grabbed her arms, but she hardly noticed until the heat from his massive palms burned through the crisply ironed fabric of Paprika’s favorite – and only – dress shirt. “I’m the one who kissed you,” she said. “I was worried I pissed you off or something, I—“

  Thor shot her a smile that made her knees weak and her legs feel a little like jellyfish tentacles. The dimple on his left cheek gave Paprika something to look at, which was a pretty obvious aversion tactic, but at least she wasn’t staring straight at the floor. There’s always an upside to everything.

  The upside to this? Holy shit was that a good looking dimple. And a high,
strong jaw, and a... before she knew it, Paprika might have been panting slightly, though she was very careful not to do any drooling since – ten steps too far? Drooling was about fourteen.

  “Uh,” Thor started, cocking his head slightly to the side. “Did you just go into a coma?”

  “What? Huh? No one hit me in the head,” Paprika shot back, a little more defensively than she meant.

  “Right, you just kind of trailed off and started to stare at the side of my face.”

  Rika took a deep breath, and then heard the door behind her creak as Rosalie finally got bored of listening in and decided to go have her sports drink. Nothing goes better with an hour’s worth of Jane Fonda and who-knows-how-much relationship meddling like chugging a bottle of wine flavored Gatorade.

  “Look,” Rika finally said. “I don’t know what happened to me, but—“

  “This,” Thor said, sliding one hand into Paprika’s mop of red hair, and the other around her waist. When he pulled her against his body, she felt the muscles in his chest, the rising and falling of his lungs with every breath. She felt his heartbeat, felt his breath caress her cheek, her neck, and then just as a flush of anticipation crept along her sides and, knowing her luck, peeped up out of her shirt, he did it again.

  Only this time, he really did it.

  She’d never felt a kiss like this, so powerful, so sweet and heavy and perfect, that her entire body seemed to open up and take this huge bear of a man inside. She ached for him, wished for his hands to get a little grabbier, for those perfect lips to get a little lower.

  When he let her go to take a breath, she latched on, hands shooting to the sides of his stubbly-cheeked face. The rasp of his whispers under her fingertips when she curled them sent a snake of pleasure creeping down her belly, an electric surge of the deepest ache she’d ever felt.

  “Here?” he asked, grinning. “I mean, yeah, your mom may have given me some of her Gatorade which, let me tell you, is not what I expected, but—“

  It was Rika’s turn. “Shut up,” she whispered, stepping up on her tip toes, and pressing her lips to Thor’s. She sucked his bottom lip between hers, tasting the mixture of orange and Moscato on his lips. Somehow, when she tasted it like that, it was a lot better than it sounds.

  And there we go, she thought, smiling as he let his tongue explore her lips. Every line, every crack or tiny split, Thor breathed her in, drawing long, deep breaths through his nose. As he did, his hands moved around to the front of Rika’s body. He pushed her shirt up, brushing her soft stomach with the back of a rough, huge hand.

  “Here?” he asked again.

  “My mom wants me to marry you,” Rika whispered. “Also, she’s a hippie rabbit shifter. She could walk in with you on all fours behind me and not bat an eye. Although she might give you some pointers.”

  A look crossed Thor’s face that seemed a lot further from revulsion than Rika thought he’d give her. “You too?”

  “Me too, what?” she asked, nuzzling his neck and kissing a place that made him groan a little when she did. She even got a few goosebumps to pop up, which felt like she must be doing something right. One last suck on his neck, one last long inhalation of the scent of this man’s body and the vague remnants of CK1 he’d probably used eight hours ago.

  “Paprika, my parents named me Thor. Do you think they were Vikings or something?” He smiled, and she couldn’t help but snort a laugh.

  “So that’s what happened to you. I’m named after a spice, you’re named after a hammer throwing comic book character.”

  He nodded, a heavy look of fake sadness marking the big man’s face. “On the bright side, you weren’t named Coriander, and I wasn’t named Spider-Man.’

  That time, she laughed so hard, she started making the noise that Petunia always described as “somewhere between a horse and a pig, burping.” At first she tried to cover it, but just like he’d done with her teeth, Thor moved her hand.

  “Anybody who wants you to be anyone but who you are, they don’t deserve you.”

  “I’m pretty sure anyone who says stuff like that is just trying to get in my pants,” she shot back, but playfully.

  She went in for another nuzzle, after which she planned another kiss and then maybe unbuttoning his pants and basically throwing herself at him until he relented, but he held her still for a second. “I wish I was,” he said. “I mean – no, wait,” he stumbled around, getting more flustered as he tried to correct himself. “Sorry, I used to stutter pretty bad, I still do sometimes when I get a little too excited.”

  Rika’s lips trembled as she smiled. “There’s nothing to be nervous about. Well, I mean except for planning how you’re going to get away from me which, after that kiss? That ain’t gonna be easy.”

  He smiled, but he didn’t. There was something wrong, she just knew it before he said a word. “What is it?” she asked, dread boiling up. “You’re about to say something I don’t want to hear, aren’t you?”

  He held her still, his fingers squeezing gently on Paprika’s shoulders in a rhythm that somehow closely matched her thudding heart. How had something that started so carefree and so comically impulsive, ended up so dramatic – and how did it happen so fast? What even did happen? She wasn’t sure, really, but the look on his face spelled out Paprika’s anxiety with one perfect dimpled cheek and one arched eyebrow.

  “I came here to say goodbye,” was all he said. His tone was flat and soft.

  “Why,” she started, but cut herself off. “I mean, why? Why are you even here? You’re my dentist, what the hell are you doing in my house?”

  The look on his face was utter confusion, though to be fair, she did raise some good points. “You came here after I kissed you like an idiot, and then panicked and ran, to tell me you were moving? I thought you wanted to come and ask me out for coffee or something like a normal person!”

  To say he was taken aback is like saying the Mississippi is just a creek.

  He stuck his hands up in the air, deflecting the incoming torrents of cannonball-shaped accusations.

  She had her mouth open, about to lay in again, when he put a hand over her mouth. Paprika screamed something that’s probably better to have been muffled anyway. It took at least thirty seconds of squalling, pissed-off, furious rabbit rage until she finally relaxed.

  “You promise not to yell anymore if I take my hand off?”

  Rika nodded. Her eyes told a different story, but she was nodding. He pulled his hand away and before the hand was off her mouth, she started in and he squelched her again.

  “You promised,” he said with one of those damn smiles that could probably still get him in her pants. “Okay, well, maybe not promised but you nodded and it seemed pretty serious.”

  She rolled her eyes back in her head so hard they could have forced her head backward with the impact of optic nerves slamming against her skull. “Okay,” she said, although it was so muffled it sounded like “bohay,” two or three times.

  “You promise this time?”

  She nodded again, and then rolled her eyes again. “Promise?”

  “Mmm-hm, fine,” she said. Which came out as “morf ham.” He laughed as he pulled it away, cautiously waiting to see if she kept her word that time. She pursed her lips. She opened them and he moved his hand back.

  “Just testing you.” A smile crossed her lips despite the pretty intense anger she had coursing through her veins. “So you gonna tell me what the hell you’re doing here, breaking my heart? Or do I have to ask?”

  “Well you just did.”

  The glare Rika shot him spoke a thousand, really nasty, words.

  “I just need to get on with my life. I found a place that needs a dentist, that sounds pretty shifter-friendly, and honestly a little strange, but that’s okay. I’m tired of hiding who I am, you know?” He grabbed her shoulders and stared deep into her eyes.

  No matter how bad she wanted his touch, his kiss, and no matter how much she hated doing it, she shrugged away from hi
m, and when he went to grab her again, batted his hand away. “I don’t know why I even care,” she said, staring at the floor, and very obviously not believing herself. “It was just one kiss, one taste of you, I don’t need this shit. I need to find a job and get out of this house.”

  Thor’s eyes lit up in a disgustingly attractive way that made Paprika’s stomach turn a little somersault, to her infinite disappointment. He reached for her again, but this time grabbed a wrist as she tried to knock his hand away. He curled his fingertips tantalizingly against the skin of her inner wrist. The gesture warmed her skin, and got her insides all twisted up. “Come with me,” he whispered. His voice was eager, but soft and powerful, like old leather studded with brass rivets. “Come on, let’s do something completely fucking crazy. Let’s just go and never look back.”

  She stared at him in disbelief for a second. I can’t possibly tell him I’d been thinking the same thing about going to Jamesburg. I mean, how nutbar whacko would I have to be to drag a guy I barely met to live with my ex-convict sister in a town that’s full of… well, she’s got some pretty wild stories.

  Her chewing on the insides of her bottom lip got his attention. “Yeah? You’re thinking about it, I can tell.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me, Thor,” Rika whispered. “You don’t even know what my last name is.”

  “Lewis.”

  “Well,” she smiled a tiny grin, despite her misgivings and general displeasure. “I mean you wouldn’t if it weren’t for having read my medical files.”

  “You’ve got an answer for everything,” he said sternly, fingers gripping her wrists. “For everything except for your heart. You can’t tell me why you kissed me in the first place, and you can’t tell me why you’re not pulling away from me right now. Can you?”

  His intensity made the little fire in her belly flare hotter and brighter. Tingles crept down her stomach, tightening the muscles between her legs. It was the same thing she felt before…

  With his hands still locked on her wrists, Paprika felt a wave of heat pass over her chest. Her nipples puckered sweetly against the soft, thin fabric of the old bra she was wearing. With a shake of her head, she stood up on her tip toes and did the exact same thing that got her into this mess in the first damn place.