Free Running with Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 1) by Roxie Noir

they’d put your face on a diversity pamphlet in two shakes of a tail and brag about having one of the few lupine professors of Classics in the United States.”
    She studied Elliott’s face for a minute.
    “One thing at a time,” Elliott said. “Let’s see if the students eat me alive first.”
    “I think you’ll be right as rain,” she said. “But good luck out there.”
    It’s gonna be a day , Elliott thought.

    After his morning, nothing else seemed so bad. Even though he was teaching four classes, a pretty heavy load, he only had two of them on Tuesday. He had no idea why Tuesday was the first day of class, but figured that he wasn’t in a position to ask a lot of questions.
    His first class, a survey on translating late-period Roman historians, was a small seminar. Out of ten students, there were three lions, a bear, and six humans. As the students laughed, talked, and argued about the relative merits of each writer and translation, Elliott quietly marveled at how well they all got along. When he’d been in school, the lions had kept to themselves in their own cliques, even in the lion fraternity. The same with the bears, though there were less of them. There had only been a couple of other wolves on campus at all, and Elliott had barely hung out with them, preferring to be a loner with a few human friends, mostly from the rugby team.
    They had probably figured it out, but he’d never told them, and then they’d drifted apart after college.
    Maybe things are changing , he thought. Triad marriage has been legal for, what, a year now?
    “Any questions?” he asked the class when he finished going over the syllabus.
    A girl raised her hand. Human, long blond hair.
    “How frequent are the pop quizzes going to be?” she asked.
    Elliott grinned.
    “If I told you, they wouldn’t be pop quizzes, would they?” he said.
    She made a face. It had probably worked with countless boys, but it did nothing for Elliott.
    Welcome to college, he thought.
    “All right,” he said. “We’re starting with Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita , so please have the lines in the syllabus translated and ready by Thursday. See you then.”
    The students got up and filed out, leaving Elliott an extra ten minutes to get across campus to his next classroom, where he’d be teaching Introduction to Latin Language. It was something he hadn’t taught in years, but Dr. Nigel had told him that all the Classics professors took turns teaching it, and it just happened to be his turn.
    Elliott was pleased to have the job at all, and didn’t argue with the man.
    He got to the other classroom a few minutes early and draped his sport coat over the back of a chair, then wrote PROFESSOR WHITING - INTRO TO LATIN on the board. Nothing worse than students in the wrong place, he thought, as he wandered over to gaze out of the room’s high windows.
    A few minutes later, the students started trickling in. Elliott tried not to note which ones were shifters, but it was second nature to him by now. Mostly humans, some lions, a few bears.
    No wolves. There were never wolves.
    Quit worrying about it , he thought. There were two more minutes until class, and he walked up to the head of the room, getting the syllabi out of his briefcase.
    The bell on the quad tolled at exactly 2 pm, and he picked up his chalk and opened his mouth.
    One more student came in as the bell was tolling. She was an older student and had at least fifteen years’ seniority on the other students, easily. She had light brown hair that was just barely starting to go gray at her temples, and wore a blue plaid shirt over a pair of well-broken in jeans with heavy boots on her feet.
    When she entered, she stopped short for a second, then continued on to the back row. She sat and took her class materials out, never once taking her eyes from Elliott’s face.
    Elliott’s heart nearly sang when he saw her.
    Another wolf! He thought. Finally.
    He smiled at the class, welcomed them, and went over