Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 77812 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77812 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
“I think I like the human deputy.”
Me too.
“He calls everyone fucking aliens when he gets pissed off, so I’m kind of excited to see what he says when he finally meets you.”
That was going to be amazing.
I loved everything about the crazy town…and it just kept getting better.
“If you’ve been given gifts by our local welcoming committee, please be alarmed because we don’t have one. We have locals who make ridiculously bad decisions.” The deputy paused, shaking his head like he was frustrated by all of us. “If you ate or drank anything that they gave you, please see me before you leave or before you do anything stupid.”
Yep, still fabulous.
“I’m turning the meeting over to Boyd as our local representative and Pierce here to represent the visiting councils.” That was the part of his speech which got reactions from around the room. No one cared about being drugged, but someone else getting to be in charge was ridiculous.
The deputy wasn’t having any of it, though, and stopped it immediately. “Enough.”
“Most of you didn’t realize you’d been drugged by old ladies and the rest of you were waiting for someone else to take charge so you could blame them when shit hit the fan.” No one had a good comeback for that, so they went quiet fast. “Congratulations. Someone took charge.”
Pierce.
Which didn’t surprise me at all.
He was a wonderful pain in the ass who didn’t like most people, human or other, and yet still hated for anyone else to be in charge of the irritating people.
“I can’t decide if I should be there in person to help the situation or just enjoy the drama for the moment like one of the TV shows you showed me.”
Yeah, this was kind of like a daytime soap opera.
Attempted murder and everything.
Yeah, best town ever.
****
“Oh…” Don’t call him Daddy. Don’t call him Daddy. Someone might be able to hear us. “Do you think we can go in and look?”
Daddy Manny frowned, doing his head cock thing like he’d seen the other men do. “Is that not the point?”
Looking at the small strip of shops on the less interesting side of town, he focused back on me. “Shopping is a universal concept. They want you to buy their goods.”
But their goods were costumes.
“I don’t care if people think I’m odd. I know you won’t think I’m odd. But the owners are kind of weird about the other…you know…the people like us.” Probably shouldn’t say dragons or mages. “I can promise not to talk about sex toys but I can’t promise not to get excited.”
Or stay big.
Daddy squeezed my hand. “Is that your concern?”
“Part of it.” So I hadn’t been lying. “But I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
“My Wren.” Daddy Manny leaned over and kissed my head. “Your youthful headspace is adorable. That can’t possibly make anyone uncomfortable.”
Still looking slightly confused, Daddy frowned again. “We are keeping our clothes on. We are not doing inappropriate public displays of affection. We will not mention diner topics. We will make everyone comfortable.”
Daddy’s frown that time was clearly because of a sentence issue but he didn’t worry over it for long. “If they are that easily offended, they should not be selling clothing clearly designed for youthful adults.”
Part of me wanted to open the bond wide again and either give him the word he was looking for or ask if he wanted me to help, but we’d been practicing keeping it toned down as much as possible around regular humans. When it was wide, we had a tendency to just use the mate bond to talk and that didn’t look human-normal at all.
Even Daddy Manny had realized that.
No.
Toman.
Even Toman had realized that.
Ugh.
I was definitely going to call him Daddy.
“Shopping for fun stuff makes me little.” I couldn’t help it. “Shopping for costumes would definitely make me little.”
Daddy shrugged. “I don’t see the problem with that. It is a store that sells costumes and toys.”
Technically he was right but I didn’t want to upset him.
Or make him upset with me.
Or make him upset with one of the store owners.
They were all a little suspicious of anyone from the other side of town…it meant they were smart…but it also meant they were hard to get along with. Somehow even though they were only a few miles apart they seemed to live in completely different worlds.
Maybe it was because of the way the roads kept disappearing? I’d heard those stories and I could understand how it would make someone mostly human or humanish kind of crazy.
“Can…can we turn the bond up just a tiny bit so I’ll know as soon as you get frustrated?” Normally I didn’t mind even Pierce going nuts on someone but Daddy was different. He was special.
And not from this planet, so I wanted him to have good experiences.