Free Romance: Undercover Panther: BBW Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance (BBW, Paranormal, Werebear Romance) (Shapeshifter Romance Series by Ashley Hunter) by Ashley Hunter

 
     
     
    Prologue
     
    Angie was staring at the screen of her computer. It was a white sheet, not unlike the ones that write of the olden days used to face with actual pen and paper. It was the cursor in her case, but the enormity of the task was similar. She had barely written five hundred words since she sat down about two hours ago.
    It’s because of the damn clock.
    Her eyes darted again to the bottom right corner where the numerical digits announced the exact moment in space and time, always moving forward; before you had captured a moment, the next one was in line, ready to bring with it the uncertainty of lost happiness and moments that should have been grasped by but weren’t.
    Angie was so distracted by this clock because she had to be somewhere in just ten minutes and although her heart said no (a thousand times), it was the rationale winning the argument.
    Sighing loudly, Angie closed the lid of the computer without bothering to save whatever progress she had made and getting up.
    She picked up the red scarf that she had put on the sofa last night and it was in the exact same place. She draped the scarf around her neck, grabbed her purse and ventured out into the night.
    A night of thousand stars.
    The walk to the bar was a mere five minutes from where Angie lived but during these brief moments, she had thought about a hundred different things.
    She thought about all the time she spent in the bar listening to uncouth men fight over meaningless ball games, sometimes coming to blows over figures that were just numbers and did not even matter as soon as the game ended.
    She had to endure the gropes of drunken men who were too inebriated to see or think or speak or listen or take a punch consciously.
    She had to see desperate men drink the night away, looking at their watches even though they had nowhere to be and nobody was waiting for them. It depressed her, not only because she had to work in such conditions but because her own life had stalled.
    Angie was still 25, well educated and smart but she had always been self-conscious about her body. She belonged to a generation that had been brought up on TV with ads filled with lingerie models and Victoria’s Secret to set an unachievably high bar of body image for young people all around the world. It was easy to dismiss it being shallow, but the reality was hard to live with.
    She was “big-boned”, as per her grandmother; she had hips well for child bearing. Angie didn’t have the heart to tell her that it wasn’t the 1800s. Once she believed in Disney fairy tales and was of the opinion that there was someone out there for her. Some prince charming or other paper figure that could bring her happiness. Someone who would love her for who she was, rather than not look at her for who she wasn’t.              
    She was in front of the bar door, Thirsty Crow. She hated that name. It didn’t make any sense. It was apparently a reference to some old fable but the owner even got that wrong. What an idiot.
    Angie closed her eyes for a moment outside the door, as if praying for strength and when she had braced herself enough, she pushed the door (the sign said “Pull”) and entered the dimly lit room: the scene of her nightmares, the bane of her youth.
    Bob, the owner, a man with greying hair and growing belly, was standing behind the counter with a washcloth over his shoulder like all the bartenders in the damn movies.
    Bob was a perfect cliché: everyone told him stories about their lonely and measly existence and he absorbed, listened everything. Bob knew everyone and anyone who came into the Crow.
    He could recite the life history, the marriages, the children, the jobs, the healthcare plans, the type of car they drove, the TV shows they watched, the beer they drank, the steaks they ate, the kind of fish they liked, of every single one of his customer.
    Sometimes Angie suspected that Bob, in his leisure time, was a stalker or a night owl who would