Grin and Bear It (Ursa Shifters Book 3), page 44
I saw the shrug, the smug smile and stormed into the shower, slapping my hands down on his shoulders.
“You did what?” His smile faltered then, as I glared at him with all of the intensity I could muster. “You insufferable, bloody, bastard of…”
“Oh shit…” he whispered.
“An amazing man.” I pressed my lips to his, feeling the sweet, sweet rush that came from kissing my mate, and realising I wasn’t late at all.
“Mm…” He groaned into my lips. “I like this. Now, you could show me just how appreciative you are. Up against the tiles—”
“No.” Cole appeared in the bathroom looking harried. “Absolutely no high fiving the vagina until later, tonight, maybe, after I’ve had a nervous fucking breakdown. What if no one turns up to the school?”
“What?” My eyebrows shot up. “I thought enrolments—”
“Enrolments are awesome,” Lin ground out, shooting Cole a look. “The school passed the building inspection and has got department certification. Everything’s good to go. We just need to get our star teacher there.”
Lin was right. We were all prepared to start the new school year. The building was created in record time, people from the bear shifter community all pulling together to ensure a state of the art facility was built. We’d even been inundated with requests for enrolment from non-shifter families, from those hearing good things about the school.
And me.
I’d been touched to find some of my old students and their guardians in the front office before term started, requesting to enrol and one of them was Trevor.
“What are you doing here, Trevor?” I asked, coming around the front desk to see him. “Hey, Rosie.”
Rosie was his mum and she smiled to see me.
“That Greenbank has gone to shit since you left,” she told me, “and Trevor…” She swallowed hard, then looked around. “The boys in my family, some of them shift into dingoes at the full moon. We’re not sure if Trevor will, but… We wanted a place where he’d be accepted if he does.”
“Really?”
Trevor shrugged, flushing at the attention.
“My uncles do, and so have most of my cousins, so I guess I will.”
“And I hear you’ve got a good sports program running here as well. You got some ex National Basketball League players on staff?” Rosie said.
We’d pulled some strings, talking to some of the shifter community’s connections and found some guys who had coaching ability, but no position to go to, then offered them a healthy salary.
“So we have,” I said with a nod. But after Rosie had completed the necessary forms, I saw May, one of the girls from my old class and even Felicity. Apparently May’s mum transformed into a dragon every Chinese New Year, so they were looking for a school that was shifter friendly, but Felicity? She and the other bookish girls in her friendship group wanted to enrol too. They didn’t really care about sports or the shifter element, being just bog standard girls like me. Instead she just stared into my eyes and smiled.
“School’s not the same without you, Miss,” she said and I forced myself to smile back. “I’m in Year 11 this year and I need to start working on preparing for Year 12. I think you’re the best person to help me do that.”
“Felicity…” I said with a sigh.
“No one else cares like you do,” she said, “so?”
Would I admit her to this school? Would I teach her? The answer was yes, always yes, of course, so I chatted with her parents, and made clear the situation in as polite a terms as possible. Felicity and her friends would be in class with bear shifters, potentially dingo shifters and even a dragon shifter perhaps, and were they OK with that.
They were.
And so it was with a feeling of anticipation that I walked into school that day, my sleuth at my back, the twins walking off to go and greet their friends as soon as they were on school grounds.
“Coming through!” I looked up once I was in my classroom, early for once, due to Lin’s sneakiness. “Doom piles incoming!”
She, Dale and several of my guys walked in with their arms laden with familiar looking wicker trunks.
Colleen had been the one to retrieve all of my resources from my classroom. June wouldn’t let me back on school property and to be blunt, I didn’t want to go there. As much as possible, I tried to forget Greenbank, even if it hurt to do so. The fact it did, was why I worked at it so hard, trying to move on. But she’d piled everything into trunks for me, the lot of them setting them up neatly on the bench at the back of my room, so that everything was neatly squirrelled away, but also there for me to sort through when I was ready. I smiled when I saw it, then laughed, tears forming in my eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, blinking hard, but only just managing to hold back the tears. “I mean—”
“Shut up, idiot,” Coll said, pulling me into a hug. “No thanks needed, you know that. We’re here for you, El, in whichever way you want. Any parents get feisty? I’ll kick their arses. Any kids get out of line?”
I’d deal with it, I promised myself, but it was then that the bell went.
“Shit, assembly,” I said, remembered the structure I’d worked out with the new principal we’d hired.
“Hopefully it will be a little less dramatic than the last one you attended,” Nash said with a boyish grin.
“It’ll be perfect,” I assured him. “I just know it.”
What’s next?
I have plenty more bears covers, so if you want to see more, let me know!
Acknowledgments
The amazing Steph Tashkoff did the edit of this book, squeezing a whole damn book in over Christmas!
She’s an incredible new editor who’s meticulous in her research and wrangling on the text.
Interested in booking her? Contact her via Facebook Messenger.
https://www.facebook.com/steph.tashkoff
Cover was created by the team at Design by Definition.
Special thanks to the alpha team for your help with this one!
Sam Hall, Grin and Bear It (Ursa Shifters Book 3)
