Fighting for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 3) Read Free Page B

the channel again, this time to a man in a suit waving his hands over a weather map of the west coast.
    You shouldn’t go because you have to be up and at school in the morning , she reminded herself. You can’t teach a bunch of kindergarteners on five hours of sleep.
    And, sooner or later, you know that one of the parent volunteers is going to notice that something is up, and they’ll talk to the principal, and they’ll talk to the school board, and before you know it I’ll be on the local news, just like poor Nicky.
    She took another bite, the soup in the bowl getting low.
    Well, not dead. But some terrible picture of me will be up there and a blond lady in a bad suit will go on and on about a local Kindergarten teacher caught in a gambling bust .
    The bowl was empty now, and Grey settled back into the couch, drawing her feet up under her.
    You’re staying here, she told herself again and again. Remote in hand, she went through the channels again, landing on the local news.
    The same woman was talking to the camera, but behind her, Grey could just barely see Detective Sorenson and the other police officer take the black plastic off of Nicky, revealing his strange, dead face.
    In seconds, Grey grabbed her wallet and was headed out the door.

    This time she drove. It was only a few blocks, and it felt silly, but the night before she’d walked, and look where that had gotten her.
    Just an hour , she told herself as she walked up to the liquor store on First Street. Or fifty bucks. An hour or fifty bucks, and then you’re going home and going to bed .
    As she walked through the store, the clerk looked up from the movie he was watching on his phone, gave her a quick once-over, and then nodded.
    Grey went to the door in the back, covered in a giant poster of the St. Pauli girl, holding a beer in front of each comically-sized boob. Just like she did every time she came here, Grey wondered how she got them to be so perky . Some kind of push-up bra, sure, but something extra? A corset? Boning? Just genetics? Grey considered her own rack pretty good, but it wasn’t beer advertisement good.
    It’s probably photoshop , she thought, as she took the grimy doorknob in her hand and walked through.
    It took her eyes a minute to adjust, just like usual. The door led to wooden stairs, and she stood at the top for a moment, trying to see in the dark, before descending them carefully, one hand on the railing.  
    At the bottom was an absolutely massive man, bald with a beard, and he stood from his chair when she approached.
    “Hi, Tobias,” she said. She handed him her bag, which he put into a cubby behind him, and then raised her arms from her sides.
    “Back again?” he rumbled, carefully patting her down.
    “Yeah,” she said, half dejected and half excited.
    “Be careful,” he said. “It’s a regular wolves’ den in here.”
    His remark caught her off-guard. Grey had grown up in Reno, Nevada, not Cascadia, and she had trouble telling who was a shifter and who wasn’t. She was pretty sure that Tobias, who was massive and at least six and a half feet tall, was a grizzly shifter. Along the same lines, she had a strong suspicion that most of the men and women at the poker game were wolves, but she didn’t really know how to tell for certain.
    A certain snarl in their voices? That lupine look? It was impossible, sometimes.
    “Thanks,” she said to Tobias, a little uncertainly.
    The poker room wasn’t fancy. It was an old, barely-finished basement, and it smelled like stale beer, old whiskey, and cigarettes smoked twenty years before.
    There was a single table in the middle of the room with three people around it, whiskey in tumblers on the table, cards in front of them. Just seeing it sent a spike of anticipation through Grey’s body, the thrill of gambling making her giddy already.
    Around the periphery of the room were boxes of liquor, piled high, along with old beer signs, posters advertising vodka, and other