Fascination: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance (Shifters Forever After Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

Cadence, and Carina had been split up. No relative volunteered to take all three girls, so they’d gone to different relatives’ homes, not reuniting until they’d grown.
    Laken had gone to one set of grandparents, Carina to the other set.
    Cadence was left with her father’s younger brother, who had found her to be an adorable decoy while he plied and plowed his way through rich widows and bored housewives. After a few years, Cade wasn’t the cute little decoy anymore.
    It was time for Uncle Ramon to include her in a completely different enterprise. She had a new place in her uncle’s plans.
    Accessory.
    She learned the ins and outs of lock picking, alarm disengagement, scaling buildings, and safe cracking. It didn’t hurt that she, like her uncle, was a black panther shifter. Scaling buildings was easy to manage when a single leap could take her to the second-story balcony. It also didn’t hurt that she could jump building to building, so even if she was pursued, it was a matter of a leap humans couldn’t handle that could put her out of reach of the cops.
    And then one day, Uncle Ramon vanished. Poof. Gone. Sixteen-year-old Cade was left to fend for herself. And fend for herself she did.
    She didn’t put the knowledge her uncle had given her to use. He’d stashed plenty of money, artifacts, and jewelry in a storage unit. She knew his contacts and had no problem fencing items to live. So she finished high school, forging his signature when a guardian’s signature was required.
    She kept contact with her sisters, but they’d been raised in other areas and had “normal” family lives, so she didn’t let them know her situation. They’d email and call, and she’d pretend everything was as it should be.
    Then came college. She had no clue what she wanted to do until she spent a summer working as a camp counselor at the Y. Teaching. That was what she wanted.
    A few years later, she was doing just that: teaching kindergarten in one of the more underserved, financially deprived areas in the city.
    She thought she loved the job until she saw little Ignacio and his daily bruises. She looked into it, tried to find his home. He was classified as homeless, with no address in the system. A temporary situation, the school told her, a situation that would be rectified when the boy and his mother were reunited with his father. But still she worried, and she wanted to follow him, to use her panther scenting to track him at night, but…
    Time wasn’t on her side.
    One day, Ignacio quit coming to school.
    Two days later, she found out he was being buried that Saturday. She went to the funeral. His mother’s silent tears didn’t move Cade any more than his mother had been moved to protect Ignacio when he needed her. The boy’s stepfather was standing by her side, his face stoic. Cade didn’t need anyone to tell her he was the cause of Ignacio’s death.
    The father appeared at the funeral too. A long distance truck driver, he’d been out of town. Word had it he was trying to find a way to gain custody of his son, and the reasons he didn’t were plentiful and understandable: his job, no one at home to watch the child, no stable home environment…
    The reasons weren’t as heartbreaking as the final result.
    When the father appeared at the gravesite, he lunged for the stepfather, screaming accusations of abuse. The stepfather’s friends stepped up, and the father was unconscious and being kicked repeatedly before anyone could react.
    Cade left the cemetery that afternoon with two goals. The first was immediate. She took care of that matter within a few days, after Ignacio’s father had left town on his next long-distance haul. She wanted him long gone, with a solid alibi.
    The stepfather’s disappearance remained a mystery.
    The second goal was taking longer, much longer, but the special home she wanted to fund, Ignacio’s Place, was to be more than a dream soon. She was so close to meeting the goal, she could taste