Shifters with Secrets (An MMF Bisexual Threesome)(4)

“Oh,” she said, looking back down at the sink. She shut her water off and reached for the paper towels.

“Another time,” he said, quickly. He didn’t want her to think he wasn’t interested.

He was very interested, though things might also be a little... complicated.

“Thanks for all your help,” Sofia said, holding open the bathroom door for both of them go walk through. “See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow,” Thomas confirmed, and then watched Sofia walk up the stairs, her hips swinging from side to side as she went.

It was a captivating sight.





***





As the sun went down, he was in his pickup truck, gunning it through the narrow, winding mountain roads. The radio here was starting to come in and out, so he reached out and turned it off, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

He was headed for Glenn’s house, because he had a pretty good idea of who was behind the library break-in.

Glenn was the Sierra pack’s beta, and he considered himself its consigliere too, after seeing the Godfather movies too many times. He was best friends with Kane, the pack’s alpha, and the two had outdated ideas about what being a bear shifter meant.

To them, it meant no outside involvement, no being friends or — God forbid — lovers with humans. For Glenn and Kane and most of the men of their generation, the outside, human world was a thing to be hated, and they kept themselves apart from it as much as possible.

The problem was, it wasn’t really possible any more.

As far as Thomas was concerned, their policy of keeping to themselves was actively bad for the pack. He’d gone away to college and moved back to Placerville, but only about half of the kids he’d grown up with had done that — the rest left for life in the big city, preferring bright lights and excitement over the small town where they’d grown up, and Thomas couldn’t blame them.

Last week, he’d made the mistake of mentioning Sofia’s research to a buddy of his, Glenn’s son, and now it had mostly been stolen amidst a pile of broken glass.

If Glenn and Kane disapproved of humans and shifters interacting, they were solidly against humans learning the shifters’ secret. The problem was that Glenn and Kane also weren’t very smart. Sofia didn’t think that shifters were real.

No human thought that. After all, it was completely insane to believe that there were people who could turn into bears, after all.

Sofia was just studying legends, and she thought that shifters were about as real as the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. She didn’t even consider that they might be real. It was the stories she was interested in, but Glenn and Kane didn’t understand that at all. They thought that if they could take the books she needed, they could keep her from figuring out the truth.

She wasn’t anywhere near the truth, Thomas knew. Sofia had no idea that there was a truth to know, and Glenn and Kane were making it worse, not better.

Finally, as the sky turned red and then purple between the trees, Thomas turned into Glenn’s long gravel driveway, gunning his truck’s engine up the steep incline. He parked in front of the big, log cabin-style house, got out, and rang the doorbell.


A tall, plump woman came to the door, wearing a sweater and an apron. She frowned when she saw Thomas.

“Everything all right?” she asked without preamble.

Thomas gave her the same easy smile that he’d given Francis earlier that day, even though it was hard, the adrenaline beginning to pump through his veins.

“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Long,” he said. “Is Glenn home? I wanted to talk to him about something.”

She turned and began walking for the kitchen again, gesturing after Thomas to follow her in. It wasn’t unusual for people to just drop by their house — Glenn and his buddies were notorious luddites who didn’t even like telephones, let alone cell phones or the internet.

“He’s not home yet,” she said, returning to stir a big pot of something with one hand as she sprinkled salt into it with the other. “The boys are out on a hunting trip for more venison, so I’m not really sure where they are or when they’ll be back.”

That meant he was in bear form, of course, somewhere out with Kane, probably.

“What did you need?” she asked, still stirring.

Thomas licked his lips and thought that he should tread lightly. It wasn’t looked upon kindly in shifter society to charge into someone’s home and tell someone’s wife that they’d been up to no good.

“There was a break-in at the library,” he said, slowly. “They found bear tracks outside.”

That part wasn’t true, but it didn’t really hurt.

“The cops don’t know what’s going on, but I think it might have been some of the younger guys,” Thomas went on. “I was hoping Glenn could help me figure out what happened.”

Mrs. Long clucked and shook her head. “You know how the cubs can be,” she said, her tone firmly disapproving. “I’ll be sure to tell Glenn that you came by. He doesn’t like these sorts of incidents any more than you do.”

She took a quick taste of the chili, thought for a moment, and reached for the chili powder. “Think if someone got caught and panicked,” she said. “Then we’d all be outed in a moment.”