Beneath the Skin: de La Vega Cats, Book 3 Read Online Free PDF

They can’t afford it.” Drew was the manager at the shop. Her parents ran the place. They didn’t have the kind of profits to bring her on full time.
    “You can find a job. You can do everything and better than everyone else, so what’s the real issue? Do you hate us?” He teased but she realized he might not have been entirely convinced that wasn’t the case.
    “I love you all. It wasn’t a difficult thing to come back here.” She paused, watching his posture loosen a little. “I’m thinking of going back to school to finish my degree.” She’d left UCLA to join the air force after several years of wandering. It had made her feel special, like she was doing something. Gave her the chance to use her love of flying those big, heavy supply runs.
    “Why not fly? You have a license. You’re an amazing pilot.”
    “I don’t know if I’ll ever recover my strength. I can’t pin my hopes on that. Anyway, an engineering degree is totally useful. I can pay for part of it with my GI Bill money.”
    “Sure. Except you don’t want an engineering degree or you’d have one already.”
    She frowned as she placed the cards. It was silly to not be practical.
    “What is it you want to do ? You have this time to figure it out, you know? Take this shitty thing life gave you and make it into a plus. If anyone can do it, you can.”
    “I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to rock climb.”
    “And so you say you can’t be a pilot now, though I don’t believe it. You can’t fly a giant cargo plane anymore. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fly other aircraft. You can fly anything. You’re one of those people who just does it all well. So do it and stop wallowing. I’ve never seen you wallow, it’s ugly on you.”
    She sniffed her annoyance but didn’t argue. In truth she did really need to figure out a direction and go with it.
    Being insightful, he got it and backed off a little. “So did you get, like, the jaguar medal of bravery for this bullet digging out? Is that why she came to visit? Add it to the chest full of stuff you’ve got already?”
    “It was her son I saved. They used silver on him. Shot him just feet away from where I was. She came by to thank me personally. Said she wanted us back. That they wanted to have us be involved in the jamboree again.”
    Drew’s brows rose. He was dating a girl from a family who was far more involved in jamboree events, so as a consequence, he went as well and found he enjoyed having that sense of community with the rest of the cats in their area. He’d been trying to talk their father into going, and it was currently a sore spot between them.
    “I appreciate the thank-you and all, but I didn’t do it for that. I did it because to do anything else would have been wrong.”
    “Of course you did. It’s who you are. Anyway, so which son was it? One of the good, single ones or one of the dick losers?”
    She laughed and socked his arm. “Gibson. Didn’t seem like much of a dick, or a loser. Though he was an alpha through and through, so dick is there in his DNA anyway.”
    He grinned. “The Bringer. Stacy’s brother Dario is one of Gibson’s guys. Thinks pretty highly of him. What are you going to do? About the visit and what she said?”
    “I’ll talk to Mom about it later today.”
    “How’s physical therapy going?”
    She harnessed her snarl of annoyance. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
    “And you don’t like being asked every day, but I don’t like that you pretend getting attacked was nothing big. You were victimized, Mia, and I don’t think you should feel any shame for being affected by it. You don’t have to be perfect all the time.”
    “Oh look, a customer.” She moved past her brother, ignoring his comments, and headed to the couple who’d just come in. She didn’t want to talk about it. She was sick of thinking about it.
    Was it too much to just want to get back to normal?
    She took in the couple who’d entered the shop. Cats. Interesting,