Authors: Anya Nowlan
Roar for Her: A BBW Paranormal Weretiger Shape Shifter Romance (Sassy Shifter Brides Book 4)
R
OAR
F
OR
H
ER
S
ASSY
S
HIFTER
B
RIDES
B
OOK 4
BY
A
NYA
N
OWLAN
Copyright © 2015 Anya Nowlan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Roar For Her
Sassy Shifter Brides
Book 4
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of
Anya Nowlan
.
Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Think of the child… Think of the child… Don’t say a word,
Teresa kept repeating in her head as she sat rigid at her table, hands clamped in front of her.
“Where do YOU get off telling ME how to raise my kid!? If it weren’t for your silly understandings of how a boy should or shouldn’t behave then we wouldn’t be here in the first place! My Tommy would not hurt a fly unless it deserved it and you saying that he would, is just, well, it’s disgusting! That’s what you are! DISGUSTING! I’m going to tell the principal about how you treat my boy, and I swear, you will never work a day in this town!” the man screamed from across the table. His wife sat demurely next to him, her eyes downcast and her face white as a sheet. Teresa immediately felt sorry for the poor woman for having to put up with the fire-breathing wretch of a husband, but her sympathy only went so far at the time being. She was having far too much trouble trying to keep her composure.
“Mister Ridgely, please,” she started for the umpteenth time, only to get yelled down again.
“Don’t you please me! What do you have to say for yourself? I had to leave early from work for this nonsense, and my wife is supposed to be at home, preparing dinner. Instead we’re here, listening to your bullcrap about our son without you even having any proof. The nerve of you! No temp can speak to me like this, especially not some colored girl! You don’t even know my kid! How can you have any kind of opinion of him? Missis Johnson would have never allowed something like this to happen.” The man was fuming. Teresa could vividly imagine smoke rising from the top of his head. Her fingers were twisted together, and her jaw rigid from clenching her teeth together in an effort to not stand up and start screaming at the man the same way he was at her. Missis Johnson would have never let something like this happen? Pfft. Sure, the woman who had neglected to properly teach how to read to a class of elementary school students. Perhaps if Missis Johnson had cared a bit more, Teresa wouldn’t be sitting there, temping for her while the lauded teacher was home nursing a vodka headache for the third time this week.
Teresa took a deep breath and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Her irritation was bristling just under the surface, and she did her best to keep it from flaring up. Wouldn’t do any good to start a screaming match with a difficult parent. At least not for Tommy.
“Mister Ridgely. I do have proof. I stood ten feet away as Tommy grabbed a little girl and pushed her against a wall in the hallway, laughing and saying that girls like her aren’t good enough to go to the same school with him. If this behavior continues, the school will have no choice but to expel him. We don’t allow bullying, and this was more than just children playing. You know this, we’ve talked about it before.” Teresa caught Missis Ridgely’s eye and her heart just about broke. She could see the tears in the woman’s eyes – shame and disappointment in herself shining back at Teresa. Though Teresa hadn’t said it out loud, it was clear that the heartbroken mother understood what she meant. The little girl was one of the only black students in a mostly white school. Considering the way Tommy’s father addressed Teresa, she had no issues in guessing where the otherwise sweet boy got his prejudices.
“Furthermore, the principal is aware of this and has asked me to call you here to talk about this. She felt that phone conversations simply weren’t doing it anymore. I need to stress this. Tommy is a good boy. But he needs an example at home to know how to treat people who are different from him.” Her heart was beating wildly. She hated having these conversations, and it enraged her that Missis Johnson had let it go on for so long. Teresa had temped for her at least twice a week for the past few months, and she’d caught Tommy picking on the little girl repeatedly each time. When she’d suggested to the senior teacher that something should be done about it, she’d only received a scoffing remark and a suggestion to keep her nose out of it. After the little girl got a bruise on her cheek from colliding with the wall, Teresa couldn’t keep quiet anymore.
The look that came over Mister Ridgely’s face was pure disgust. He looked at Teresa like she was the lowest form of scum, taking in her slightly curly dark hair and her tanned skin. A lesser woman would have let her shoulders crumple under that deathly stare, but Teresa raised her head higher and gazed back at him firmly. He wasn’t the first person who’d questioned her worth as a person because of her skin color in the small Mississippi town, and he wasn’t going to be the last – as much as she hated to admit it.
“I don’t have to listen to any more of this nonsense from
you
.” The way he said it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Ella, come on, we’re going,” the man said, standing up abruptly and grabbing his wife by the hand. He almost dragged her out of the classroom, the frail woman trailing behind him. Teresa caught her glance before she was pulled out the door, and the woman mouthed a ‘thank you’ before disappearing into the corridor.
I guess no one stands up to him,
Teresa thought sourly, her shoulders falling now that she was alone. She buried her face in her hands, exhaustion wafting over her. Oh, how she hated moments like these. She loved children, that’s why she became a teacher in the first place, but kids who lived in a hateful, prejudiced environment never got the chance to grow up into the wonderful human beings they could have been. It broke her heart. It was even harder seeing families suffer under the reign of a tyrant like Mister Ridgely. His wife seemed like a lovely woman who would never allow her child to pick on others because of their skin color or the way they looked, or anything else for that matter. Teresa had always wanted children, but seeing how even the best of mothers sometimes had to struggle to raise their kids right, she kept pushing her desire for a family further and further into the future.
You’re going to have your vacation soon, Teresa. Think about that. Don’t get upset, this just comes with the job,
she reminded herself.
Just when she felt more down and out than ever before, her phone buzzed softly on the table. She raised her brown eyes to look at the screen, and a happy flutter wafted through her. The screen showed a new message on SassyDate, and she knew
exactly
who it would be from! At least there was something good in the dreary, horrible day.
***
“It was that bad, huh?” Julie asked, making a sympathetic face as Teresa walked into her office, varying two cups of cocoa and balancing her phone on one of the rims. Teresa nodded mutely, focusing on getting the drinks to the table without spilling them all over herself. She set one in front of Julie and then sank into a seat across from the wide vice-principal’s table with her own. The first sip sent some much needed warmth and comfort coursing through her, giving her a moment to settle before telling Julie about everything.
“It was, yes. He was just as receptive to the idea that his child had done something wrong as if I’d called him the world’s first and foremost terrorist. I felt so bad for his wife. I don’t really know what to do. Johnson won’t do anything about it, in fact, I think she might be encouraging it. And we got the principal to allow me to call them in, but you know that will be the end of it. Johnson has tenure
and
they’re friends. It’s hopeless.” Teresa had to resist the urge to gnaw on her lower lip. It seemed so obvious what needed to be done. The class needed a better teacher, one who was there for the kids every day, not just when she had the time, and the kids needed to be shown how to treat one another. All things a temp wouldn’t be allowed to do.
Julie nodded quietly, looking as resigned as Teresa. They both hated when the system bound their wrists, not allowing them to do anything for the kids who needed guidance.
“Well, we just have to keep trying. One of these days, those old hags will be too brittle to cause any trouble, and we can make some changes around here.” It sounded like wishful thinking to Teresa, but she nodded nonetheless. She’d become fast friends with Julie, the blue-eyed and smiley vice-principal of the Ridgeton Elementary School that she had been sent to temp at for this quarter. Soon, though, her time at the school would be up, and after a short vacation, she would have to start looking for another place, unless she was offered a permanent position. By the way she’d been ‘stirring up trouble’ as the principal put it, Teresa didn’t harbor much hope for any renewed contract. It was going to suck having to leave Ridgeton. Or, to be more specific, it was going to suck to have to leave Julie to fight the wolves on her own.
Teresa thumbed her phone wistfully, trying to will it to buzz again.
“What are you smiling about?” Julie asked teasingly, sipping on her cocoa. Teresa looked up, blushing, and let the phone fall on her lap.
“Oh, nothing.”
“Is it that guy again?”
“Maybe,” Teresa admitted, the blush becoming scarlet now. God, just the thought of him made her light up like a candle.
“So, are you going to take him up on the offer? It sounds like a lot of fun!”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really know him, do I?” Teresa started, falling into her favorite topic of late – Slate, and whether or not she would go help him photograph the Idaho mountain ranges during her vacation. She’d seen his profile on SassyDate, a dating app for shifters and humans, and at the bottom of his description he’d written that he was looking for a woman whose idea of a good time would be flying high over the gorgeous mountains of Idaho, photographing them and enjoying the scenery while getting to know each other over a couple of weeks. He wasn’t looking for anything untoward, just companionship hopefully from someone passionate about wildlife and nature photography to help him get a better understanding of the area. It sounded exactly like something she would love to do, her second passion aside from teaching being photography. And he was hot as sin, so that certainly helped, even if he said everything would be completely proper. But wouldn’t it be complete madness to go off into the wild with a man she barely knew, even if they had been talking over the app for months now, and she felt like she’d told him almost everything there was to know about her?