TAKING ON FOUR SHIFTERS (Steamy Werebear Shifter BBW FMMMM Menage Romance) by Willow Wilde Page A

saw. The skinnier girls were always putting out, eager for the attention. But I was stronger than that. I had standards. Morals.
     
    And those morals had gotten me here. To come home, ready to put the final touches on a gift I had planned for weeks…only to find that this time, my man hadn’t bothered with the breaking up part, but chose to let me find out the hard and devastating way.
     
    CREAK.
     
    I froze for a split second, then bolted down the last couple of stairs. I had skipped the faulty stair on my way up, but while I was lost in thought it had completely slipped my mind. As I heard a thump from upstairs and a door fly open, I thought quickly and sidestepped to snatch his keys off of the newspaper. I could hear murmuring from upstairs, and it sounded like a slight argument. They forgot how thin the walls were to this house.
     
    “Honey?” I heard from upstairs. “Honey, are you down there?”
     
    I couldn’t manage even a squeak without bawling, so I darted back to the front door, grabbed my own keys off of the front door, and slammed it shut behind me. I already had my main key in my quivering fingers and locked it behind myself, just in case they went back to their sex and someone wandered in to steal something, then hopped back into my car. I heard thumping down the stairs as I started the ignition, glanced over my shoulder to check for oncoming vehicles, and whipped out of the driveway as I hit the power button to roll down my driver’s side window.
     
    Tammy flew out the door, dressed in a haphazard array of mixed clothing. One of his long-sleeved sweaters covered her chest while she had a pair of her high-cut shorts on beneath it — for a moment, it looked like it was just the sweater altogether. Her arms were flailing, and she was trying to wave me down.
     
    “Wait! Mandy! STOP! ” I could see that she was crying as she darted out to the driveway, but I whipped the car around the other way, tossing his keyring out the window. Just before I peeled off and left the traitors to the rest of their afternoon, I watched with some smug satisfaction as it slipped down the run-off drain, disappearing beneath the street.
     
    *              *              *              *
     
    I seemed to subconsciously know where I was going long before I consciously did. While I tried to calm myself down and begin to think rationally, I would snap out of it to find myself driving towards the interstate, or passing up familiar exits several towns over from home. Wiping my tears free, I wondered what was going to happen now, and what I would do to clear things up with the guests. Plane tickets had already been bought. Both families were counting down the days until the big day. The date had been saved for months.
     
    But I knew it would be best to figure these things out later. For now…I wasn’t so sure about now. Yet, I felt like it was going to work itself out, somehow. I just didn’t know what I was going to tell them.
     
    It was only when I saw the exit for Checker’s Grove that I realized where I was going. The small, quaint forest town was known in these parts for being a hotbed for shifter activity. They had originally been in the woods, protecting the simple townsfolk from threats within — once or twice a backwoods gang had tried to move in, and occasionally there was a kidnapping or a murder, although justice always seemed to be dealt in the end. A place like that always seemed to attract some weird stuff, but nobody seemed to grasp the reality of the situation until the shifters came out in the open, a few years back. All over the world, they had been living right under our noses, but as technology had advanced and their forests had been whittled away, they had felt the need to come out from the woodworks, so to speak.
     
    And as it turned out, one of the areas where shifters had propagated was the quiet, little town of Checker’s Grove, less than an hour from