Hosed (Happy Cat #1)(17)

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Tucker87: Isn’t Emma June the sweetest? kiss emoji eggplant emoji kiss emoji





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Emma_June_Jennings: Tucker, stop! UGH! Seriously. I’m going to block you from the page if you don’t stop embarrassing me.





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LetItBurn1234: The fire department should have let that hell hole burn. The longer we tolerate a sex toy factory in the middle of our town, the faster we become a place decent people won’t want to call home. That factory gives more jobs to people outside Happy Cat than inside, and attendance at the fish fries and bingo nights is down forty percent. People don’t want to be here anymore. How much more money and credibility do we have to lose before the citizens of Happy Cat wake up and smell the rancid lube drying on the face of this once respectable town?





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Ruthie_May_Is_Me: I resent this comment. Sunshine is a gift to our community, and brought much-needed economic improvement to a town that’s been shrinking since I was a girl. Maybe attendance is down at bingo because it’s the same night as the darts tournament at the Wild Hog.





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Emma_June_Jennings: And who puts LUBE on their FACE? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Not to mention gross. And the fire department is in the business of saving lives, spooge for brains. There could have been people still inside the factory for all they knew.





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LetItBurn1234: There’s nothing worth saving in that place, the ‘employees’ included, and everyone knows it.





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Ruthie_May_Is_Me: Oh my Goodness! How awful. Who is this? Gerald is this one of your profiles?





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BakeryBoyHC: No, it’s not mine. I was trying to stay out of the comments and let everybody else weigh in. But this isn’t right. Step back, LetItBurn. I don’t like that place any more than you do, but those are good people who work there. Innocent people…even if they do make an indecent number of sex toys.





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LetItBurn1234: If those people know what’s good for them, they’ll start looking for another job. Sooner or later, there’s going to be an incident the first responders of Happy Cat aren’t prepared to handle and that place is going down. Be a shame if any ‘good people’ were caught in the crossfire.





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BakeryBoyHC: All right, that’s enough. This is getting ugly and there’s no call for that. We can solve this the democratic way, with a special referendum election to vote on whether or not the factory should be allowed to stay. In the meantime, let’s all keep our head on our shoulders and not go off half-cocked.





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Tucker87: Heh…you said half-cocked.





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Emma_June_Jennings: heavy sigh Oh, Tucker…





Eight





Ryan





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I get off my forty-eight-hour shift at the fire station at three a.m. Saturday morning and head home to crash for a few hours. Despite the exhaustion making my bones feel hollow—we assisted on three traffic accidents and a fairly serious grease fire during my shift, in addition to fetching George from an industrial garbage bin outside the dollar store, where he was spotted devouring the day old eggs the night manager had thrown out an hour before—I can’t sleep.

I’m too keyed up. Too ready for nine o’clock to roll around.

Too excited to see Cassie again, to give her a town tour she’s never going to forget, to see her eyes light up when I introduce her to all the good stuff she’s been missing in Happy Cat, and to find out if she’s going to look at me with that “I want to lick you up and down” gleam in her eye she had Wednesday evening.

If she does, I intend to let her lick me up, down, and any other direction she would care to lick me. And I am fully prepared to return the favor. I want a taste of Cassie’s plush mouth the way I want George to start cleaning up his own popcorn mess when he’s done watching old episodes of The Cat Whisperer on Animal Planet on the couch.

I’m not sure if he’s intrigued by the cat whisperer’s soothing voice or trying to pick up a few tricks for achieving world domination over the feral cats in our neighborhood, but nothing holds his attention and keeps him out of trouble better. So when he crawls into bed with me a little after four, I turn on the little TV on my bureau and pull up an episode on Hulu.

In just a few minutes, The Cat Whisperer has worked his magic on me too, and I’m out like a light.

The next time I open my eyes, it’s to the droning of my alarm notifying me that it’s eight thirty. I stumble into the shower before I’m fully awake, still drowsy, but determined to get pretty for Cassie. I dry off, run some gel through my hair, and dress in khaki cargo shorts and a tee shirt I dug out of my drawer just for her. I bustle about the kitchen, packing snacks and lunch and putting several bottles of homemade lemonade on ice in my mini cooler, along with a couple of surprises. I load everything into the saddlebags on my bike and push Big Blue over to Cassie’s place.