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

middle of the woods and listen longingly to every animal call, every roar and howl and cracking stick, wondering if maybe the wolf howling in the distance, or the bear who broke that stick was the one for me.
    Then again, waiting for fate is about the dumbest thing I can imagine. I’d waited years for Liam to stop being an asshole, and the only thing that got me was a mortgage I could barely pay and a dog that I loved more than I loved my husband.
    God, he’d made me hate myself. Not in an overtly cruel kind of way, he just... I’d dress up for him, put on a little maid outfit, or try some cute panties, and he wouldn’t look at me. He’d just sail past on his way to the TV, or out to the Tavern with a handful of his friends.
    I got the dog to love me, and he had his friends. But underneath it all? I didn’t have much of anything except a hole in my heart that he used to fill. People told me all the time that I needed to figure out my own path, my own happiness. I’d listen to them and agree, because I really did understand that the only real happiness comes from in your own heart, but holy shit if it wasn’t hard to believe.
    A dragonfly landed on my nose. He rubbed his little mouth parts together, and when I puffed a breath at him, he hovered in front of my eyes for a second, gave me a really good staring-at, and then went on his way. Whenever something like that happens in Jamesburg, I get to wondering if it’s actually a dragonfly or if it’s someone I know in disguise.
    Anyway, the years came and went, Liam got nastier and less receptive, and then finally I just shut down. I felt like I was dying, alone, in a hole in the ground without anyone to bother helping me up.
    One day he didn’t come home. He had a band that he played with on the weekends, and I was used to him staying out late and drinking, but we had a rule that no matter how late he stayed out, he had to come home before the sun came up. I didn’t care if he was too drunk to stand up, he could call a cab or have a friend drop him off. Well, this one day he just didn’t show up.
    I let myself have a few seconds of reprieve from reliving my own nightmarish twenties with another look around the forest. In the distance, maybe a half mile down the river, a huge, strikingly beautiful bear emerged from the woods. He stared straight at me with the knowing, intelligent eyes that told me he wasn’t wild.
    Well, he might have been wild, but what I mean is that sometimes he was also human. My lynx eyes let me make out the vaguest hint of tattoos encircling his pale, cool, brown eyes. At first, I just stared back. The bear and I, we seemed to have some kind of common ground, some kind of understanding.
    Either that, or I was going completely ape-shit from being alone too much. I chuckled softly, since really, what else could I do?
    The longer I let my gaze rest on the huge shifter hanging out in the river, and the longer he stared back, the more I started to feel other things. Tightness in the pit of my stomach preceded a wash of goosebumps that made my entire back prickle. Gentleness behind those half-wild eyes that I couldn’t explain warmed me from the top of my head down to my painted toenails that I dug in the sand.
    Are you the one for me? I wondered. After all this time, to find my mate in the river? Talk about too good to be true.
    I laughed softly under my breath again. It beat the alternative – crying about being a whack-job.
    Slowly, the beautiful creature walked to the side of the river, slapped at something, and made his way to the riverbank opposite mine. The sun glittered off the water the way it only can in the middle of a late spring afternoon, when it looks like a sidewalk made of light stretching into infinity.
    He shook his head, flinging droplets of water in every direction. I wished he’d talk to me, roar, something. I wished he’d come over and nuzzle me, then let himself turn into a man and run his hands up and down my back.
    I