Mail Order Tiger Bride Wars: A Scorchingly Hot BBW Shifter Romance Read Free

suitable. I mean . . . there’s one who lives in Papua New Guinea.”
    “Who happens to be the descendent of a very famous shifter cannibal. You don’t have the right to be choosy, son! Our species is dying out. We have to arrest this . . . soon. You think those Chinese zookeepers wait for pandas to naturally procreate?”
    All Cole could think about pandas right now was that they eat shoots and leaves. And there was something about punctuation. Eats, shoots, and leaves?
    “No.”
    “Good. Do you think those werewolves wait to be mated? No. They hold large clan Gatherings and choose their mates during raves. That’s why there are so many of them. And vampires too.”
    “Vampires don’t mate, Dad.”
    “There’re still plenty of them. Plenty!” his father thundered. “You know what happens when you don’t find a wife, son?”
    Another Big Bang ? The planet will cease to exist?
    Cole rolled his eyes.
    “You’ll cut me off,” he said.
    “What’s that again?”
    Cole cleared his throat. It didn’t help that he was standing there in his tent, stark naked. “You’ll cut me off.”
    And I can no longer fund my dig.
    “I’m going to have to give you an ultimatum, son. It’s for your own good.”
    Yeah, and you’ve been telling me that since you made me eat raw rabbits with their fur when I was five and told me it was for my own good.
    “You need a little push in the right direction. I’m tired of waiting. Your mother is tired of waiting. Your grandmother and grandfather are tired of waiting.”
    Cole sighed. Maybe you should have more children then, Dad, since I’m such a disappointment. But yadda, yadda, I know Mom can’t have any more children because she got salpingitis right after my birth, and so you’re stuck with me.
    “If you don’t find a legitimate bride by the midsummer Solstice, I’m going to cut you off for real. See how far you get with your mummies then.”
    “I’m not excavating mummies, Dad . I’m in the Congo basin, not Egypt. I told you, I’m – ”
    The phone clicked off.
    Cole stared at it.
    This was real.
    His dig. He was soooo close to finding the ruins, he was sure. Already, the top layers yielded evidence of a lavish shifter civilization. Possibly a secret one, dating back many centuries when shifters were hunted and persecuted. And so they were forced to hide in seclusion. What better hideout for half-animals than an actual African jungle, right?
    He stared at the golden urn he had found five feet under the topsoil. It sat on his desk – a reminder of all the possible history that lay beneath his feet. The urn wore carvings – a man with a lion’s hind legs and tail. A woman with a bird’s beak and wings for arms and a totally female midriff and legs.
    If he was right, this would be the shifter discovery of the century. It would be the oldest shifter civilization ever unearthed – dating back to the time of the Romans. He did not have any carbon dating equipment here, and he was waiting for the next courier batch to send the urn back to the University of Pennsylvania, where he hailed from.
    Nobody believed in his hypotheses. Nobody believed in his dig. The university wouldn’t fund it, and so he had to dig into his father ’s considerable money.
    And now the rug was about to be pulled from under his feet.
    But wait.
    He hadn’t been exactly inactive in this initiative. One month ago, he had emailed the Shifter Tribune classifieds and put up an ad. Of course, he had promptly forgotten about it as soon as he found the urn. But now the ad came back to him again, like a light bulb moment.
    Damn.
    He scurried for his laptop. He had one of those satellite Internet devices as well, using his phone for a modem. Which cost a fortune – all part of his father’s generous money. He checked his emails on his private account – which he hardly ever used. But he had to create one just for this purpose.
    A total of ten new emails appeared in his Inbox.
    Ten!
    Wait. Most of it