“No scented pads for you. Wings, no scent. A large pack.”
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The packs landed in the cart. “What else? Let’s see.” He read, “A medium-size pack. Got it. No panty liners. No underwear for you on off days. What’s next? Hound food. We’ll buy him pussy food. He chewed my boot, then hid under the bed like a pussy. Did you know that?”
“I’ll talk to him about the shoes.”
“How?”
“I have a way with animals.”
Jamie cupped my cheek, stroked it with his thumb, and I leaned into his palm. “Yeah, you do,” he said.
An announcement broke the spell, and we moved again.
“Whatcha staring at?” Jamie shouted. “Fuck off to the next aisle. Hurry up, baby, people are looking at you, and I’m gonna have you roast somebody.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re looking at you.”
“Why?”
“This city is yours. You’re grunting and stomping in the girly aisle. It makes people nervous.”
“You know what? I’m gonna put you in the cart,” he declared.
“The shopping cart?”
“Mm-hm.”
“It’s better if we don’t draw any more attention.”
“We’re not. I’m gonna put you in the cart and push you to the deli, where we’re gonna grab sandwiches and eat them at home.”
“And what should we eat tomorrow?”
“I’ll get someone to do this for us and deliver it to the door. Wouldn’t you like that better?”
I laughed when he plopped me down to sit inside the cart. He propelled us forward, cutting corners left and right with my hair flying all over my face. I gripped the sides of the cart and laughed.
Mid-run, Jamie said, “Baby, we gonna spin. Remember how we spin? Hang on.”
“No, we don’t have to do that.”
“Hang on.”
“Aaaaahhh!”
Jamie laughed and, a spin later, stopped at the deli. “Can I help you?” the woman asked.
Jamie read the entire menu for me.
Life dealt me a wild card, I thought. Jamie was my wild card.
Afterword
Hello! I want to take ten seconds and thank you for reading Blind Beast Mate. And extend my thanks to my beta reader AJ who’s read my books since 2014 (before I published) and my super awesome editor Linda and her team who clean up my words. I own all the typos found.
If you enjoyed Jamie and Rey’s story, please leave a word or two as a review on your favorite book site.
On the next page, sneak a peak at Wild Beast Mate. Dewlyn is fire, and Vice is oh so yummy.
Wild Beast Mate
***uncorrected proof pending release
Dewlyn
You’d think by this day and age, the beasts who took over the earth after the Great Nuclear War would bring us humans out-of-the-world advanced technology. Like they could come up with some sort of a universal key set for burglars, a shape-changing key that molded to every lock you jabbed it into so that I wouldn’t have to swipe hairpins from random women as I swooped from the sky. Just sayin’.
At midnight, inside the dark office space of a recently built high-rise in the city once called Louisville, I dreamed of a universal key set as I picked a tiny little lock with hairpins I’d gotten from Rey, my sister-in-law, before I ran away from Vice, my beast mate. Before I ran away from him the second time. The first time, after Vice had proclaimed me his mate and not just a pair he’d bought because of my red hair, petite body, and pixie face, I’d knocked him out in his sleep and run. I’d just wanted him to leave me alone. But he hadn’t.
The second time, he caught me when I tried to rescue Rey from drowning. Then he got smart and put me in a cage at night while he slept. But one morning, while Vice showered, my sister-in-law—bless her good heart—gave me her hairpins. I picked the cage’s lock, freeing myself, then took to the skies with her unused horrific pink bike. For a few days, I huddled inside the shelter I’d set up for me and other runaway pairs. Until we ran out of food, and, again, I needed to get out there and get some.
Luckily, my friend Patty, our house sister, got news from her boyfriend just as I set out to raid fridges and pantries in the Beast City. He’d heard of New City, a city on the rise, and located a storage place where the construction workers got their food supplies. That much food? So worth checking out, and so I traveled to New City.
At first, I scouted New City for a temporary home, and once I found one, I scouted the construction company’s building. Now I readied to rob the construction manager’s office of the key to the storage place. However temporary my stay might be, I welcomed the relocation into New City. Vice flew over the Beast City, relentless in his pursuit to bring me in and lock me up inside his house. So my mission out here in the middle of Nowhere, Kentucky, afforded me an opportunity to get away from his big hands.