Free Bear Hearted: BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance by Ava Hunt

all the space, three-quarters of it was empty.
    “Son of a bitch.” She planned all of this. He went into the bathroom and all of her stuff was gone from there too.
    He let out a frustrated groan and decided he needed a distraction. He looked into the mirror, seeing a frazzled man looking back at him and figured out what to do.
    He grabbed his laptop and fell against the over-sized pillows on his couch. The leather stuck to his skin as the temperature rose in the room, the air conditioner battling with the heat from outside. The scent of the outdoors calmed him. He’d be fine.
    He opened a search engine and his hands hovered over the keyboard. What was he going to write?
    He tried “man changing into bear” and came up with strange videos and fictional stories. He watched a few videos which were bogus and a waste of time. He scrolled through pages of information until he understood that he was using the wrong search terms. The word “shifter” had come up more times than not.
    After a few clicks he avoided the romance novels with chiseled men on the covers. Instead he clicked through to article-type websites. He found a lot of information on wolf shifters but apparently the idea carried over to other animals as well.
    The origins of werewolves and the like were based in fantasy and magic. Nothing magical had happened to him that he knew of. He felt silly reading about shifters and diverted his research to bears in general.
    As he read, the connection to everything he’d been feeling made sense. His senses were heightened, even when he was in his normal human body. He felt a kinship to the animal and wanted to know more and more about them. He read until his vision was blurry.
    He checked his phone and was surprised to see it was late in the afternoon. But what surprised him more was the five messages and ten missed calls from Estrella. He knew she’d called that morning. He had clicked the vibration setting on when he left Alexa, not wanting to speak with anyone for a while.
    Opening the voicemail, he listened to the last message which came in an hour ago.
    “Toby, please call me back as soon as you get this.” The Doc’s voice was chopped between quick breaths as if she’d been running.
    He looked at his phone, wondering why the Doc was so interested in speaking with him. Was there something about his heart that caused her alarm?
    He pressed her number and she picked up on the first ring. “Toby?”
    “Yeah, Doc. Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine. I want to know if you’re okay.”
    Well I turned into a bear last night, Doc. Apparently I’m a shifter of some sort . Yeah, right. She’d probably refer him to a different type of doctor if he admitted that. “I’m fit as a fiddle. Are you sure you’re okay? You sounded frantic on that last message.”
    She sighed on the other end of the line. “I’ve been busy today. I hope you don’t mind—” then she rattled off a series of questions; was he eating, was he tired, etcetera.
    Toby formed each response carefully, only giving straight answers. He feared he’d give up warning flags of something awry if he spoke too much. Though when her questions were leading, he was the one to become frantic and a little suspicious.
    “Have you noticed any changes in your body?” she asked.
    “Not that I know of. What would you be referring to?”
    “You mentioned previously about you not being able to see your scar. Sometimes medications have side effects. I’d like to keep track of those in your file.”
    He searched for anything he could give her. Growing fur and changing into an animal definitely would not qualify.
    “You can trust me, Toby,” she said. “I only want what’s best for you.”
    What was best for him was to keep this strange new part of him a secret from everyone. “I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.”
    “That’s good,” she said and he heard her smile over the line. “I apologize for alarming you. When I don’t hear back