Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page A

red-haired bear perched on her shoulders. She’s Dean’s girlfriend – another coyote – and my second helper. “We got it all worked out, right, Millie?”
    “Yup!” she said, before blowing a raspberry. “I’m not scared of the woods no more!”
    “What’d you do?” I asked Malia.
    She shrugged. “I just told her that I met Dean in the woods, and so magic happens out there.”
    “Magic!” Millie shrieked. “I hope I see a unicorn!”
    “Around here?” I asked her, poking her in the stomach until she giggled. “You just never know. Okay! Everyone, quiet down! The van just pulled up and I’m ready to get going! The sooner we get there, the sooner we can swim and play! Does that sound fun?”
    An eruption of sheer joy burst out of every tiny mouth in the room.
    As far as us adults went, our expressions ranged between excitement, terror, and cautious optimism.
    “Everybody out!” I shouted. “Make sure you have your stuff! You don’t want to have to ride home in the same clothes you rode out in, you’d smell...”
    “Like Mister Dean!” Leena squealed, finishing my standard joke before the whole room burst out again.
    And this? This is my life. It might be crazy, it might be wild, but it’s what I love.
    There’s just one tiny thing missing – a piece of my heart that I think... honestly? I’ll never have again.
    *
    S etting up the tents went from a simple procedure to taking up a pretty good chunk of the morning. Leena and Millie kept rolling theirs over, the panda cubs somehow kept putting the tent poles on the inside instead of the outside. The raccoon twins managed to get theirs up so fast that they got bored, took it apart, and then couldn’t manage to get it back together again.
    Things get weird when you’re trying to keep the peace with a bunch of different species, and also get something done at the same time. Keeping them all happy and semi-productive at The Cubby Hole isn’t much of an issue because there’s always stuff to do, and we’re always watching. But out here? When Dean, Malia, and I had our own tents to put up?
    We wondered if there were going to be any problems with getting set up when we were driving out here. Dean even had the nerve to say he thought we’d be done with setup less than an hour after showing up at the campground and we could get right into the water.
    So, did a bunch of cubs and three semi-competent adults have problems getting a bunch of two-person tents set up?
    Does a bear shit in the woods?
    But once we were done, a feeling of incredible peace came over me. I was able to take a few minutes and sit on the bank of the fairly big, but fairly pokey, Jamesburg River and wiggle my toes in the rocky sand that made up the riverbed.
    Dean and Malia were playing with Leena, Millie and the raccoon babies in the water, the three pandas were taking a nap and everything was just kinda... well, it felt right . I let my thoughts drift some, and stared out at the dense greenery that surrounded us on all sides. Pulling a deep breath into my nose, the scent of grass, of earth, and just the slightest hint of decaying leaves all mixed with pine and oak and jasmine.
    The breath I let out was slow and trickling, just like the river I was rooting around in with my toes.
    I watched them wiggle for a second. Each of them was painted a different color, like I always do. There wasn’t any reason I started, no profound meaning to the hues I chose, but it just felt like my little rebellion that no one cared about except me. I didn’t need to get all huffy or tell anyone off when they made me mad because I could just paint my toes, instead.
    I used to like dying my hair all kinds of crazy colors, but something about going from twenty-nine to thirty and opening a business removed that particular outlet from my coping-with-stress playbook.
    Did I miss having someone? Yeah, almost all the time. It was still weird, after the years alone, to go home to an empty house out in the