Lion In Wait (A Paranormal Alpha Lion Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page A

expensive, you idiot! Where am I gonna get another damn lion? I just can’t have him in a trailer with a cage that’s open all the goddamn time! As attached to that stupid cat as you are, surely you can see how that might concern some folks?”
    “It didn’t have to be this way,” Cass said, her words hitching in her swollen throat. If she thought she could have killed every one of them, Cass would have done it without a second thought. How dare they invade her place, take her friend? How dare they?
    “If you hurt him,” she said between gritted teeth, “I’ll—”
    “Sit there and watch, whine a little bit, maybe? Then what? You gonna hurt me? You gonna sneak in at night and kill me? Fuckin’ idiot girl. Come on you buncha rubes, get the cat, let’s get going.”
    Cass stared at the bulbous roll on the back of Lyle’s head as he ordered the men around, and the group finally managed to heft Lex’s huge body up and out of the trailer. When they were gone, and she was alone with Lyle once again, he turned to her, jabbing one of his sausage-like fingers in her face.
    “We both know the deal. You know how much you owe me. Eight—”
    “Seven,” she cut him off. “Seven thousand, thirty-eight dollars. Don’t think for a second that I don’t remember every single cent.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” he said dismissively. “You’re mine until I’m paid off. You do what I say, when I say it. Where would you be without me, kid? Huh? Jailhouse in... where was it? Some shithole in Ohio?”
    “Nebraska. You remember that, don’t act like you don’t.” Cass clenched her teeth so tight her jaw ached. She knew it was true though. “You found me when I was at my weakest, Lyle,” she hissed. “You pretended like you cared, but you were just waiting until I was strong enough to stand on my own again. Then, as soon as I could, you waved that notepad in front of me like a hospital bill. Every noodle I ate, every Tylenol you gave me, every—”
    “Bottle of hooch you nursed?” The smile that crossed Lyle’s face was crooked, red, bleeding, and so smug it belonged on an underwear model. “We all have our debts, Cass,” he said, drawing near her, and grabbing a handful of dark brown curls. “And they all gotta get paid.”
    He drew a deep breath, inhaling her scent into his lungs. He closed his eyes, shuddering dramatically as he exhaled. “One way or another, they all gotta get paid.”

-3-
“There’s the line over there. He crossed it so far we’re in the next county over.”
-Cass
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    S he didn’t have any tears left. Not a single one, not for Lex, not for herself, not for anyone. The three days of travel between Turnbow and the next nothing town they were playing, Cass spent sitting her trailer, bumping over the road, and staring.
    Staring, thinking, and trying to come up with a plan.
    I got nothing. No way to get out, no way to get revenge, no way to do anything except sit here and do exactly what he says .
    Hopelessness sank in somewhere between Oklahoma City and Dallas. It turned to resentment and anger somewhere around Houston, and by the time the winding route stopped in Beeville – some tiny town an hour and a half north of Corpus Christi – it had all circled fully back to numbness.
    The night before, their second on the road, she tried to sneak around the loosely circled camp to find wherever they took Lex, but had to keep slinking back in the shadows to avoid detection. Most of the other animals were kept in horrifically small trailers designed to keep them from “getting too wild” as Lyle put it so beautifully, and those box cars were usually situated at the center of wherever they camped.
    It was easier, that way, for whoever was on animal slopping duty to clean.
    She hadn’t heard any noises, or picked up on anyone talking about the lion at the group meals, which was the only time Cass ever appeared in public. And even then, she’d avoid them if they happened near