6. Doreen
DOREEN
Doreen hadn’t shifted involuntarily since she was a kid, but it turned out that falling unexpectedly and fully clothed into an ice-cold beaver pond in the autumn would do that to you.
Unfortunately she was now a badger sinking into a beaver pond while tangled up in her clothes, shoes, and the straps of her canvas shopping tote.
One thing badgers were quite good at, however, was thrashing their way out of unwanted situations.
Things! Confining us! Remove them! SHRED~!
For once Doreen’s temper and urge to shred things when upset worked to her advantage. She flailed wildly, ripping into what the human part of her realized with sinking regret was a fairly expensive fall sweater. As she kicked her way toward the surface—badgers were also good swimmers—she bounced off something unexpected and yielding, which she assumed was some other item of her clothing and lashed out. Her claws failed to connect, and then her sleek badger head popped up and she treaded water for a moment, looking around and getting her bearings.
She had fallen off the upper dam into the pond below it. The water wheel was thumping away near her. It had one of her shoes caught in it, going around and around. As Doreen stared at that, something else surfaced near her and kept rising. She turned and found herself eye to eye with her silken lacy pink panties.
They were balanced on the head of a confused-looking beaver.
Doreen and the beaver stared at each other for a minute. Then Doreen hissed at the beaver fiercely, baring her teeth and expressing a combination of Give me that back! and I am wet and cold and it’s your fault!
Rather than answering, the beaver gave a splash and turned into a naked guy treading water with long, tanned limbs right next to her.
Doreen’s panties were still on top of his sleek, wet head.
It was definitely Wick.
Doreen made a very unbadger-like noise.
“Sorry,” Wick said, treading water gracefully and without apparent effort. The cold didn’t seem to bother him at all. “Really, I’m very sorry, Miss Badger, I didn’t mean to knock you into the water.”
Well, he knew she was a shifter, obviously. Doreen’s badger was almost losing its mind inside her, and when a badger wanted to make its opinions known, it was hard to stuff it back down—as Doreen had been dealing with all her life. At times like this, she really only had two choices: give in to her badger, which currently wanted to snuffle all over Wick’s face for some reason (scars be damned; she barely noticed them), or give her human side the upper hand and hope she could make it work.
She decided to go with that second one, because letting her badger wrap itself around Wick was just not on, even though her human self kind of agreed with the urge. But she figured she had some better chance of stopping it in her human form. Also, as a human, she could talk. So she shifted back.
Simultaneously she discovered, or rather rediscovered, two things.
First of all, the water was extremely cold.
Second, she’d lost all her clothes when she fell in, so she was treading water naked.
“Ack!” she yelped, trying to cover herself up. This only caused her to start to sink.
She would have been fine—at worst she’d just have shifted badger-shaped again—but before the water could close over her head, there was a swift flurry of movement and she found herself resting against a warm chest, being gently guided so that she was floating on her back in the water.
Her naked back. And Doreen had a very buoyant front.
“Just relax,” Wick said, his voice vibrating through his chest and consequently through her entire body. He had an amazing voice, deep and slow and calm, which relaxed her down to her core and simultaneously made her want to fling him down on a bed and madly ravish him. “I’ll get you to shore. You don’t have to do anything.”
“I can swim,” Doreen said breathlessly, dying a thousand deaths as she was towed gently backwards in a rescue hold, accompanied by her own little island chain. Her nipples had decided to make things worse by pointing vividly upward due to a combination of cold and arousal.
“I assume you can,” Wick said, and surprised her further by adding, “Most shifters can when they’re shifted. But sometimes it’s hard to transfer those skills over to your human shape, and cold water can be deceptive. You can swim if you want, of course, but this might be safer.”
“Okay,” Doreen agreed readily, not prepared to put up too much of a fight while she got to lie on his chest and get manhandled ashore. The whole experience of being manhandled in a good way (as opposed to man-fondled or man-pinched) was one she decided she could get used to.
Unfortunately honesty overcame her.
“You have my panties on your head,” Doreen said. “Unless they’ve fallen off.”
There was a brief silence interrupted only by small splashing noises as Wick continued to swim. Then he said in a slightly choked voice, “That’s what that is? I thought it was pond weeds.”
“There are weeds in this pond?” Doreen kicked a nervous foot as something soft brushed it underwater.
“Among other things,” Wick said, sounding a little more confident.
Doreen did not consider this a good thing to sound confident about. “ What other things? Bugs? Leeches?” She became aware, to her embarrassment, that she was sounding like everything she generally tried not to be: a stereotypical girl. “I mean, there are probably bugs,” she went on, gazing up at the blue sky and trying (and failing) not to be quite so conscious of his chest against her. “They’re fine. Bugs. I would probably eat them as a badger.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Maybe she should just stop talking forever.
They bumped into something which turned out to be the shore. As Doreen reached behind her and felt grass and a muddy bank, Wick eeled away from her so smoothly that she wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t shifted for a moment. Then she glimpsed his bare shoulder and the side of his face in the water.
A hand broke the surface and he removed her underwear from his head, where it had clung for the entire swim, and held it out.
“Here,” was all he said, and then he flipped his entire body around, shifting in the process so gracefully and effortlessly that it took her breath away. She caught a glimpse of a sleek brown-furred body and a flash of a tail, and then he vanished underwater.
“No!” Doreen exclaimed, sitting up with the panties clutched in her hand. “Don’t go!”