The Hawk and Her LumBEARjack: BBW Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance by Zoe Chant Page A

whatever she'd left in the car. "I, er, don't suppose there's some sort of outside chance you might have anything that'd fit me?"
    Hunter grinned at her. "Maybe from when I was eight years old."
    "Oh, knock it off. I'm not tiny . I'm only small compared to you."
    He sat up reluctantly and pushed back the blankets. "I've got an idea. If you don't mind wearing one of my shirts for the drive, we can go down to Bill and Lacey's place. They're my neighbors down the hill, and they're shifters too, so they'll understand the problem. Lacey's things would probably fit you."
    "What kind of shifters?" she asked.
    "Bill's a fox, and Lacey is a mallard duck." Hunter passed her one of his clean shirts.
    Felicity held up the shirt thoughtfully and then pulled it on. She felt like a child playing dress-up. The shirttails came almost to her knees. "Fox and waterfowl," she said as she rolled up the sleeves. "That is a meeting of opposites, all right." So people around here might be understanding of her relationship with Hunter. That was a definite plus. "Are there a lot of shifters in the area?"
    "There are quite a few," Hunter said. "It's a really mixed bunch. We don't have any big wolf packs or deer herds around here—none of those large, homogenous shifter populations. Mostly it's just people who drifted in for one reason or another and found there were already some shifters living here, so they stayed. We've got a few big cats, a couple of Lacey's deer cousins, a mink or two ..."
    "Other bears?" Felicity asked.
    "A few, sure. No birds of prey that I'm aware of, though, I'm afraid."
    "Well, you can't have everything," Felicity said, and she smiled. "I grew up in a small town with a bunch of hawk and falcon shifters, though. If I want to hang out with birds of prey, I can just go visit Mom and Dad for a while."
    ***
    Bill and Lacey were very welcoming, and Lacey's borrowed clothes fit Felicity like they'd been made for her, though the worn jeans and sweater weren't her usual sort of style. She also met the shifter couple's children—two fox cubs and two ducklings, running around their feet and playing while the grown-ups chatted. In human form, the kids had fluffy heads of hair like dandelion fuzz, two redheads and two blonds.
    This would be a nice place to live, Felicity thought. A good place to raise a family.
    As Hunter jolted on down the rutted road toward the town, Felicity rolled her window down. Hunter had already done likewise, hanging a tanned arm out the window. She remembered the woods in their winter-dead state after the ice storm, but in the last week, spring had broken out everywhere. She smelled flowers and fresh-turned soil and the indefinable green scent of the forest itself. Hunter pointed some birds out to her: a kingfisher perched in a tree, the darting flash of a blue jay, and a swirling vortex of swallows rising above a field, newly returned to this north country along with the insects they fed upon.
    The town, when they reached it, was small, quaint, and cute. Everyone knew Hunter, and wanted to stop and say hi to him, and meet the young lady with him. Hunter introduced her with a shy air that she found charming. It was like he couldn't believe she was really here, with him.
    After breakfast, he walked around the town with her. There wasn't a whole lot to see, but it was very pretty and scenic, especially with spring flowers bursting out all over. Her favorite part, she had to admit, was when they stopped on the bridge over the creek and Hunter took her in his arms and dipped her as he kissed her. This produced some cheering from the parking lot of the diner up the street.
    "Knock it off, you guys," Hunter shouted in their general direction.
    "Friends of yours, I take it?" Felicity asked. She was still breathless from the dip-and-kiss.
    "Some of the boys from the logging crew. Who are really being too nosy for their own good."
    "Hey, Hunter!" one of the other guys hailed him. They were all big, burly, outdoorsy guys,