Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance) (2 page)

“Thinking something naughty?” Rosalie chided her daughter. “You always turn red when you do.”

Laughing it off and waving a dismissive hand, Paprika had to do something to stop thinking the things she thought. Then again, whenever she had a sex dream about him, she half-shifted, her buck teeth sprouted out and broke her retainer. So maybe the universe
was
trying to tell her something. Her mom certainly had. Ever since the poor guy first moved to town, and second, let it slip to her that he was a bear, she wouldn’t let him alone.

He kept his distance though. Not like a cold personality, just that he was cautious. Paprika always figured he’d been hurt, or maybe he was just a loner. But those big, soulful, brown eyes and those lips that bowed just so...
ugh
, she thought.
I’ve got a bad case of the horny today
.

“I’m gonna go shower,” Rika announced, standing up quick enough for the blood to rush from her head and leave her feeling slightly woozy.

“Cold one?”

“Beer? No thanks, Mom, we’ve established that I don’t drink before, what, eight in the morning?”

A quick
whack
on the back of her head made both she and her mom laugh. “Cold
shower
. You know, to treat whatever condition you have that’s making you blush from head to toe?”

One of the many downsides of a hippie mom is that even though the open talk is a great thing and all when you’re growing up and don’t understand how your body works, having to joke about masturbating with her? That’s about eight steps over the far side of the line.
Rika just laughed, shaking her head.

“Yeah, you got me there,” she said. “You absolutely got me there.”

“Okay well after you’re done, meet me in the chicken house.” She wouldn’t ever call it a coop or a cage, because the chickens she kept were happy, not enslaved. “We have a supremely large amount of chicks to sex and tag.”

Paprika nodded, backing away slowly, like she was worried if she made any sounds, her mom would say something else mortifying. Turned out, being quiet didn’t prevent that.

“Oh,” she said, looking up from the newspaper’s farmer report. “I put that wand of yours in your top left drawer, right under the sink.”

If she was blushing before, Rika just about spontaneously combusted. “
Mom!
” she chuffed. “You’re not supposed to touch my vibrator! What the hell?”

Pursing her lips and shrugging carelessly, Rosalie sipped at a fresh cup of coffee. “Everyone does it,” she said. “I don’t know what the big deal with all the sex shaming is about.”

“It’s,” Paprika briefly tried to figure out words to use. “It’s like going through someone’s underwear when they told you not to wash them, and then not only washing them but also like arranging them in order of thong size and sexy factor.”

Her mom furrowed her brow, trying to figure out the analogy. “I’m not...”

“Never mind!” Paprika said. “I’ll just, yeah; I’ll just wash my own underwear.”

The analogy had flopped so hard that it confused the person who used it into changing the subject. Luckily, the subject went
away from
the sex toy that her mom moved, instead of toward the topic.  That was a relief at least. But then, Rika dawdled a moment too long. “Go on, honey, go rub one out and when you get done releasing all that pent up tension, we can clean the chickens.”

“MOM!” Paprika yelled, going from bright red to purple, and fled the room before any more mental damage could be done.

Rosalie didn’t start laughing, out loud anyway, until the door to the basement slammed shut.

That was, with a few variations on a theme, more or less how life worked in Cedar Falls. It was frequently awkward, often ridiculous and frequently, a little to the left of normal. But then again, for Paprika, it was home. The only one she’d ever known.

No jobs, crazy mom, sister in some whacked out town eighteen hours away by a car that she didn’t – and wouldn’t – own for the foreseeable future, massive crush on a dentist bear she wasn’t entirely sure would know her name if it wasn’t for said crazy mom badgering him constantly, and a pair of buckteeth that wouldn’t ever go away when they popped out.

But
, Rika thought, opening her top left drawer and shaking her head as she closed her fingers around the toy she’d named “Henry” for some reason she’d never figured out,
it’s home
.

She turned on the shower, and one of the good things about living in a place so far away from civilization that she had to borrow a car and drive an
hour
to get to Target, took place. The massive, absurd, and likely out-of-code hot water heater chugged to life and almost instantly, the room filled with enveloping, relaxing, beautiful steam. With Henry in hand, Rika eyed the shower for a minute and then switched the water flow back to the tub.

As soon as she had stripped down and dumped an appropriate amount of chemical-laden bubble bath into the water, which really irritated her mom, Rika’s ancient cell phone started buzzing in the other room. It was one of the ones she had to flip open and
press actual buttons
to use. She trotted into the other room, and almost had a coronary when she saw “DR MELTON DENT” on the screen. It was too small to display the entire word dentist.

She furrowed her brow and answered. “Hello?”

Expecting his secretary, when that leathery, gruff voice slid through her crackly phone speaker, she just about melted. There aren’t a lot of people who list ‘going to the dentist’ as one of their favorite pastimes but then again, most people didn’t see this guy.

“Hello?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly husky. “Oh sorry, I already said that.”

Dr. Melton chuckled.  “That’s all right,” he said. “Listen, Paprika, there are some, er, scheduling conflicts today.” In the background, she heard a whistle, like the whistle of a train? “I’m afraid I’ll have to reschedule your consultation.”

She picked at one of her incisors. “It’s pretty bad,” she said. “They popped back out.”

He chuckled again.
Damn it why does he have to laugh hot?
She imagined those dark brown eyes, his slightly shaggy hair, and the way his left cheek dimpled when he smiled. More than once, she’d thought about some bedside service to go with his bedside manner, but she forced herself not to think about that.
Down to business, Paprika, stop getting all breathy
.

“Oh, hm,” another train whistle sounded behind him.

“Are you traveling somewhere?” she asked.

“Me? No, I’m... what do you mean?”

“Nothing, I can just hear trains. Must be my phone being ten years old and shitty.”

Suddenly the trains stopped. Paprika quirked an eyebrow. “No clue,” Dr. Melton said, obviously ignoring something. “So would you be able to come by earlier instead of later? And how about we just skip the consult. We both know why you’re coming in. And anyway, I can’t wait to see you. You’re like digging through a trashcan and finding a box of sealed Twinkies and a triple meat cheeseburger wrapped in foil. And, uh, the garbage can is—”

“Huh?” Rika asked. “Was that an attempted compliment?”

He laughed, easily and carelessly, despite having just tried to compliment Paprika by comparing her to a lucky dumpster dive. “Oh, you know, bear thing,” he said, then chuckled a little more. “One man’s trash is one bear’s—“

“Yeah, yeah,” she said with a little more eagerness than she meant. “I won’t take offense at being called a Twinkie, but the line is drawn at trash.”

He sounded a little flustered when he apologized, and even
that
was cute. The two of them chuckled, both a little uneasy. There was something between them – there had always been something between them, from the very first visit she had. She smiled and said goodbye, and that was that. Rika let out a long sigh.

“It’s one of those days,” she told her little friend. “You know what I mean.”

If it could have answered, the pink rod with the ball bearings and several points of what the package called “intimate stimulation” would have nodded.
Oh God yeah I know what you mean
, it would have said.
Just remember to change the batteries outside the tub this time.

As she settled in, closed her eyes, and began to imagine how it would feel to have Thor’s arms around her, to curl his long, brown curls around her fingers, to have his hands rake through her hair. The buzzing started, and she was already halfway to her toes curling up and goosebumps replacing that blush.

That time, when the tiny furs on the back of her neck started sprouting, and her teeth got a little longer? That time, Paprika didn’t mind one bit.

––––––––

“P
aprika Lewis?”

The words rang out like a church bell ripping through what would otherwise be a perfectly normal, sane, restful Sunday morning. It’s a pretty sound – even a pleasant one – but they always seem to hit at exactly the wrong times.

Like now, Rika had just started reading a really juicy scandal article from a six-year-old copy of
The Cedar Falls Examiner
that she found stashed in Dr. Melton’s magazine rack. How it got there, she’d never been able to guess, since the office had only existed for three years. The article in question was an in-depth expose about some rock act that came through town. Turns out, they lined the pockets of the town councilman in charge of vetting permits. He let them play
past midnight!

As you know,
Rika’s sister Petunia once said,
the only good reason to be out after midnight is because you’re getting into some real trouble. Like, the fun kind.
That nugget of wisdom came the morning after Paprika wired her entire life savings to her sister to bail her out of jail. Petunia gave her a list of charges, but she was almost sure half of them weren’t real, and the other half were dialed down. Either way, she’d learned how damn hard it was to get a wire transfer at midnight.

Turns out, she tried to burn down a carrot farm or something out of some displaced anti-maternal rage, and had also tried to kidnap a bear shifter. The details were a little hazy, and in her defense, Tuna – that’s what Rika always called her as a little girl, and it stuck – had been going through some pretty serious shit back then.
Back then
being about six months in the past.

“Ms. Lewis?”

Abby, Dr. Melton’s hygienist – yeah the only one – who sometimes moonlighted as his assistant when whoever the newest hire was invariably failed to show, appeared at the door. Or, Paprika thought, from the way she was pursing her lips, she’d probably been standing there a while. And she couldn’t even use the “oh I thought you were calling someone else” line, because the whole damn place was bereft of life.

“Sorry,” she said bashfully, going with the honest route. “Reading some article about a corrupt politician.”

Abby snorted a laugh. “Ain’t they all? Say, do you have any idea how that paper got here? I’ve always wondered.”

Rika shrugged and smiled as they went back to room three on the left.

After she was all polished up, Abby rose from her chair, excused herself and exited stage left.

Without a newspaper to gawk at, the passage of time between her exit and
his
entrance seemed to stretch into infinity. She just stared, her brain zoned completely into the back of the short, industrial-looking green garbage can outside the window. It was framed on either side by honeysuckle she could smell through the glass, but the blank green space gave her thoughts a screen on which to appear.

She’d always done that when she had things on the brain. Just stare and stare and stare until something made sense. Or, as the case often was, until she realized that she probably needed to sleep more. She just didn’t know what to do – it wasn’t like life was
bad
or anything, but living at home at almost thirty, not finding any damn job at all, much less one that would use the sociology degree she’d gotten six years before? It’s enough to beat a girl down pretty hard.

And then there was the constant contact with her mother, who she dearly loved, but come on –
vibrator moving?
She was worried about her sister, too. Petunia had never been the most rock-solid stable bun in the bunch, and even though it seemed like she was happier out in whatever that town was – Jamestown? Jeffsburg? Something like that – Rika still wanted to make sure her big sister was okay.

And
then
there was all the mate business. She wanted one – obviously, judging from how much use Henry had gotten lately – but it was a complicated thing. If she shacked up with a human, that’d be okay even if the kids only had a half shot at shifting.

“Jesus, Rika,” she said, laughing softly. “Haven’t even found the mate yet and you’re already thinking about kids.”

“Getting ahead of yourself is about as dangerous a thing as you can do,” Dr. Melton said, his entrance marked by the smell of boot leather, the faint aroma of a manly, impossible-to-hide-from-rabbit-senses musk, and a touch of very reasonably applied CK1.

“Sorry,” he said, sitting down on his rolling stool. “Bear ears, they pick things up. Anyway, kids are fun. You don’t have any, if I recall?”

Paprika shook her head, subconsciously trying to cool her blushing before it crept out of her shirt. This close to Thor though it was almost impossible, especially with the
oh my God please throw me against this wall or bend me over this table full of teeth models and do me right here
pheromones he was throwing off. So instead, she just smiled, trying very hard not to show him her buckteeth.

He nodded. “Right, so what brings you in? Not that I mind since... well obviously business is pretty slow.”

“Teeth,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what I normally do take care of. What’s up with yours?”

“They popped out again, won’t go back. “

“Ah hah. Well, let’s take a look. Shifter problems,” he said absently, as he slid the paper mask over his nose. “Well, good thing you have someone to see about this stuff. Although I’d kinda love to hear a human’s reaction to ‘jeez doc, I turned into a rabbit, my teeth popped out and broke my retainer, and now I can’t get them to go back’.”