Page 77 of Purrfectly Kissed

“I thought you mentioned something about seeing a show tonight. Is it here?”

Please don’t be here.

If he was taking her somewhere else, she could beg off and hire a cab to take her home. There was no way she was sitting through anything else with this man. Not now. Not ever.

“Ah, I see, babe, you want some entertainment first, I get it,” he snickered loudly, and she blanched.

Whatever he thought was going to happen wasn’t. She needed to disabuse him of the notion, and fast.

“Alright, alright. Lemme finish this, babe. Then we’ll go up to the room I got for us,” he said.

Before she could make sense of the ludicrous statement, he slurped another fried shrimp, don’t ask how. Then he grabbed her arm and yanked her from the seat before she could even react.

Elissa tugged on his hold, but the man was immovable. Tossing a five-dollar bill on the table, Little Gianni snatched a toothpick from the hostess stand before dragging her outside.

Great, he was a cheap tipper, too.

All she wanted was to go home. Figuring the best way to do that would probably be to get him to the car, she let him lead the way.

Once inside, she would ask him to drive back to Hoboken so she could wring Gretchen’s neck. Fuming, she pulled her arm out of his hand and walked behind him.

The rain was really pouring, and the cheap bastard had refused valet. Elissa ducked her head so she wouldn’t get so wet. Of course, the jacket she’d brought was light and had no hood.

Gianni had an umbrella, but he didn’t offer to hold it for her, and honestly, she did not relish the idea of getting any closer to him than necessary.

Seriously, not happening.

Now all she had to do was break the news. She had no intention of watching a show or returning to the hotel with him.

What could go wrong?

Excerpt from Wolf Shield: Guardians of Chaos

What a day! Fergie McAndrews headed towards the pick-up truck she’d borrowed from her roommate for work that morning.

Of course, the thirty-thousand dollar certified used luxury car she’d splurged on earlier in the year was in the shop. Again.

Just another in a long line of bad decisions. After leaving a perfectly good job for a startup company, she was laid off three weeks ago and had to borrow money from her parents to pay rent. Wasn’t that humiliating?

“This is the last time, Ferg,” her step-monster had said after she’d Venmo’d the money to her.

God forbid the mechanic call and tell her the car was ready. She wouldn’t be able to pick it up for another week. That was when she got her first paycheck from her newest gig at L-Corp. Not a startup, but an older company with new offices in Bayonne, which was only a half-hour commute.

But to commute, you needed a car. Fergie had no choice but to borrow the old pick-up from her best friend and roommate, Jessenia Banks. It wasn’t like she needed the truck. She worked from home these days. Besides, Fergie promised to fill it up and have it washed.

She huffed out a breath. It’d been a really long day. A crappy one too. Fergie wanted to love her new job. Really, she did. But so far, it was the pits. If Fergie wanted to be a librarian, she would’ve been one.

Research was her jam. Well, when it was interesting. She had a knack for sniffing out information and compiling easy-to-read spreadsheets and timelines. It wasn’t the hard work that annoyed her. Her complaint was the content. The actual stuff her new boss had her looking up. It was beyond boring.

Why an enormous conglomerate like L-Corp needed old land surveys, cross-referenced with newspaper reports on accidents, crimes, etcetera. She had no idea. She’d been at it for weeks now. So far, she’d researched six locations given via GPS coordinates across Hudson County. Her new boss wanted everything, every little insignificant piece of information she could dig up.

That was the easy part. It was the hassle of the actual job that really made her want to give up. Every day she had to drive to Bayonne to pick up her work laptop she’d dropped off the night before with all of that day’s findings. Every single night they wiped her computer clean.

Like she was going to run away with the secrets of what happened on 2ndand Washington sixty-years ago. Can you say paranoid? Ugh.

Fergie had always looked forward to working for a huge global company. It was supposed to be her ticket out of the Garden State. Traveling the globe, seeing new things, visiting far-off places was always a secret dream of hers. Well, that, and having her own walk-in closet full of gorgeous designer shoes.

Best secret dream evah!In her opinion, anyway. What woman didn’t love shoes? Fergie hummed as she daydreamed about rows and rows of Blahnik’s, Jimmy Choo’s, Garavani’s, Ferragamo’s, and her personal favorites, Louboutin’s on every shelf!

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