Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance) by Lynn Red

again, really feeling like it was time to backhand her older sister. “I’ll have to think about the princess thing.”
    “No!” Glenn shouted, dramatically, like he was Romeo and just learned of Juliet’s passing via a third party, because instead of being with her, he’d decided to go watch the Venice team play London in a medieval soccer match and get drunk. “No! You mustn’t take my heart!”
    He started spinning in slow, obviously very skilled pirouettes. “My queen, my queen, she’s gone from my life.”
    “I’m not gonna get a restaurant recommendation out of you, am I?” Paprika asked.
    Petunia was howling . “Ask him about the dust!”
    With a deep breath, and a heavy sigh, Paprika relented. “Okay what’s this about fairy dust?”
    As soon as she asked, her strange courter froze in place like he’d just had a bucket of liquid nitrogen dumped on him. “You can’t see me!” he hissed. “You don’t know I’m here!”
    “I’m sorry if I offended you, I—“
    Interrupting Paprika’s apology, and accompanied by Petunia’s one rabbit laugh track, Peter Pan spun on his toe, and flung two fistfuls of glitter right into Paprika’s face. He made a poof sound with his mouth, and ran off, shouting that he was invisible and going back to the fairy kingdom.
    “I’m covered in glitter,” Rika said flatly. “He threw glitter at me.”
    “What? No he didn’t, sis,” Petunia insisted. “That’s fairy dust! And now you’re invisible!”
    “I really, really, really need that beer right now.”
    Petunia was screaming, howling, blustering with laughter so hard she was turning purple. Good thing it didn’t take much effort to say “go straight” and “turn left.”

-8-
“There’s very little worse than meeting a hedgehog shifting professor and not seeing him get upset.”
-Paprika
    ––––––––
    I t took three beers to get through the interview-like introductions. Rika met the mayor, alpha, whatever; she met the bat – who was definitely a really hot vampire girl; she met the hedgehog, the tiny fox who was apparently mated to the huge bear cop she’d seen earlier. It took another half a beer to get through meeting the corgi parents, which was about the funniest thing in the world, and just as adorable as her sister had said.
    The weirdest thing though, well aside from all that, was how everyone kept asking about what sort of sunscreen she was wearing.
    When the tide stemmed for a moment, she finally had a second to talk to her sister privately.
    “Why do they all keep asking me about being out in the day?”
    Petunia shrugged. An absolutely enormous bear, dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a cowboy hat wandered over to their booth, accompanied by a gangly man with all sorts of junk tied in his hair, who was flanked with two odd looking, half-green bears, who were alternating between holding hands and exchanging slobbery kisses.
    The big guy stuck his hand out. “I’m West,” he said. “I dragged your sister in after she ruined my garden.”
    Petunia seemed oddly at peace with this. “He did me a favor,” she said out the side of her mouth.
    “Hi, uh, I’m Paprika, I’m just coming to town to—“
    “Atlas!” the jangly looking man shouted. “Atlas! No!”
    But it was too late. The giant, whose breath smelled like a mixture of body spray, bubble bath and... candles? Had plucked Paprika off her stool, and was hugging her like a kid with a favorite stuffed hippo. “Hel...lo!” Atlas bellowed. “New... friend!”
    He was gross, and he was sorta grimy, but his enthusiasm was enough to outweigh Paprika’s horror. She started giggling and smiling as he mauled her with hugs and open-mouthed, watery baby kisses. The slightly smaller one finally grabbed his hair and yanked. “No!” she shouted. “Atlas, bad! Bad Atlas!”
    Looking dejected, the zombie put her down, but resumed smiling a second later when what Paprika guessed must have been the constructed girlfriend