Catnapped, p.1
Catnapped, page 1
Catnapped
PEPPER MCGRAW
Contents
Description
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Thank you for reading
Excerpt
Other Books by Pepper
Anthologies & Collections
About the Author
Catnapped Copyright © 2021 Pepper McGraw
Digital Edition
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover Images and Inside Images from Dreamstime:
Panther © Tanais-tanais
Paw Prints and Heart © Zsuskaa
Woman in Green Dress with Red Suitcase © Anyata
Cat Stretching © Mykhailo Pokutnii
Gray Cat with Heart Hair Band © Zsuskaa
Pawprints © Fourleaflover
Cat Logo Set © Paul Diaconu
Edited by J.L. Troughton
PMG Publishing
Description
A matchmaking cat may be their only hope
for a happily ever after.
Maggie isn’t a fan of people. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that people aren’t a fan of Maggie. Therefore, when she inherits a house and enough money to retreat from the world, she happily embraces the opportunity, bringing only her cat along for company.
Jackson is the sheriff of his shifter town. He deals with people all day long and for the most part, enjoys his job. Until the crazy human who just moved to town reports a catnapping. He’s not exactly leaping at the opportunity to track down a missing pet. Then he discovers the crazy human is his mate.
Genghis Khat has a mission: find his human companion a mate. The only problem? Maggie’s mate is the sheriff and she’s not exactly a fan. It’s going to take a lot of work to make this match a pawsitively purrfect one.
One
BYGUL DESPERATELY NEEDED some time off from Pawsitively Purrfect Matches.
He was the cat companion of a goddess, after all, which made him practically a god himself. He deserved the time off, especially after working so hard on his latest matches.
He planned to make his report, then escape the PPM as soon as possible.
The sun was high overhead and he had grand plans for that bright patch of sunlight he’d seen just a few moments before.
He was almost to Freyja’s office door when he realized she wasn’t alone.
“I’ve never known a human in more desperate need of companionship.”
Bygul twitched his whiskers and laid his ears back in dismay. That was Bastet’s voice. He’d really rather not deal with her today.
“Agreed.” And that was Ceridwen. Even worse. “Who’s available to match her?”
Bygul backed away slowly. He’d come back later, catch Freyja when she was alone.
“Just Bygul,” Freyja said.
Bygul froze in mid-step. Well, that was rather rude! He wasn’t just anyone. He was her cat companion, for goddess’ sake!
“Not Bygul.” Ceridwen groaned. “He’ll make a total mess of things.”
Bygul growled low in his throat. He didn’t make a mess of anything! His matches were perfect in every way.
“He has the best success record of all our matchmakers and you know it, Ceri,” Freyja said.
Exactly! Thank you, Freyja. Bygul would have to remember to bring her a special gift next time he visited.
“Yes, but he’ll insist on making more than just the companion match.”
That’s it. Scratch Ceridwen off his Christmas list. No more decapitated birds for her!
“Actually,” Freyja said. “The likelihood of him succeeding in this particular case—”
“Practically zero,” Bastet said.
What? How insulting! Bygul was the best matchmaker they had on staff!
“Then why are we even having this conversation?” Ceridwen demanded. “We shouldn’t waste our resources if she’s not a good candidate.”
“Oh, she’s a perfect candidate for a companion,” Freyja said.
“But terrible for a mate,” Bastet said. “Which is excellent news for us. If Bygul fails to find her a mate—”
As if!
“He might finally give up his quest to mate-match all of his humans,” Freyja said.
“But if he succeeds,” Ceridwen wailed, “he’ll never stop!”
Ceridwen was so melodramatic. And wrong, of course. Nothing would convince him to stop matching his humans, not even failure, a word that had never been associated with any of Bygul’s matches—and never would be, if he had anything to say about it.
“Trust us,” Bastet said. “There’s no way he’ll succeed with this human.”
Now, that was just insulting. Bygul was a Norwegian forest cat, for goddess’ sake, and they never gave up!
Forget the nap.
Bygul took a moment to mourn that patch of sunlight he’d been looking forward to, then shook it off. In his lifetime, patches of sunlight would come and go, but the matches he made would last forever and this particular match definitely called for the number one matchmaker at PPM.
As far as Maggie Winters was concerned, life was nothing but a series of increasingly annoying events.
Nothing made sense.
Ever.
And people were the worst of all.
She simply didn’t get along with any of them, beginning with her parents and continuing with pretty much everyone she’d ever met in her thirty-six years on the planet.
They were just incomprehensible.
Take the woman who’d asked Maggie’s opinion at the retail outlet she used to work for. Used to being the key words in that sentence.
The woman had asked, point blank, whether the dress made her ass look bigger.
Maggie was simply telling the truth when she said, “Oh, yes, it’s quite prominent in that dress, actually.”
She had more to say, of course, but the woman didn’t appear to be listening as Maggie went on to explain that the dress did a beautiful job of accentuating all of the woman’s assets, backside included.
Unfortunately, the woman had thrown a fit in middle of the department store and had demanded Maggie’s manager fire her on the spot.
Maggie’s protests that she was just answering the woman’s question and that it was a compliment in any case went completely unheard.
Maggie really didn’t understand why the woman was so upset. Why would she even ask such a question if she didn’t want to know the answer?
Even more perplexing was the concept that having a large ass was somehow undesirable. Everyone was built the way they were built and Maggie just didn’t understand people’s obsession with hiding what made them unique.
It was entirely too confusing.
So that was approximately job number seven hundred fifty-three that Maggie had lost since she began working at age thirteen.
It was the same story over and over again.
Either people didn’t appreciate Maggie’s honesty or they were assholes.
Or both.
And Maggie frankly didn’t put up with assholes.
Like the man who copped a feel when she was serving him a burger and fries.
Or the boss who insisted on calling her sweet cheeks and slapping her ass.
She’d dumped an entire pitcher of iced tea over the head of the first one (job number four hundred ninety-one) and the second, she’d laid out with a single punch (job number one hundred eighty-six).
Overall, Maggie was fine with her rather vagabond, work lifestyle. She usually had no less than three jobs at any one time because she always knew at least one would be ending imminently. Most of her jobs never even lasted a month and that was fine.
Maggie liked variety.
So far, she’d worked almost every job you could possibly imagine. She’d even worked for a city morgue once upon a time. That had been the perfect job as the only people she ever interacted with, given she worked the nightshift, were dead.
Unfortunately, she discovered she really fucking hated the dead.
They were creepy and disturbing and she kept imagining the zombie apocalypse starting right there in the morgue where she was working. She’d be the first zombie victim and she really wasn’t okay with that, especially since she was pretty certain the recently dead would be too hungry to leave any bit of her behind.
This, of course, wasn’t what she liked to imagine her role to be in the zombie apocalypse.
At best, Maggie hoped to be a survivor fighting the zombie horde.
At worst, she expected to become a zombie herself.
But entirely consumed by zombies?
No way.
Maggie Winters had no intention of ever becoming the first zombie dinner.
Or would that be breakfast?
Well, it didn’t really matter.
The point was Maggie wasn’t cut out for working with dead people.
So that was job number three hundred forty-eight, one of the very few she’d quit on her own.
Most jobs Maggie simply endured, at least until she was fired, but keeper of the dead wasn’t one of them.
Maggie often wondered, though, if she’d perhaps been too hasty in walking away from that particular job.
After all, the dead weren’t anywhere near as annoying as all the living people she’d encountered in her many, varied jobs since.
And so far, as far as she knew, the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened yet, which meant she could have stayed and avoided people and not been eaten by zombies, but she hadn’t known that at the time, now had she?
Nor had she realized that most jobs she would be qualified for, as someone blessed with only average intelligence, a GED and a work history that resembled a ping pong ball, would require some form of human interaction, even if only with co-workers and a supervisor.
So there she was, working dead-end, stupid jobs or getting fired from dead-end, stupid jobs when something extraordinary happened.
She received a phone call from a lawyer who informed her she’d inherited a small house and some money from a great-aunt she’d never even met.
After much back and forth, as she tried to explain he had to have found the wrong Maggie Winters because no, she did not have an aunt named Becky, although, yes, she was the daughter of Joseph and Sarah, but as far as she knew, her mother had no living relatives at all.
Nevertheless, it appeared Becky did exist and Maggie was her only living heir.
After a rather long conversation that utterly taxed Maggie’s patience and communication skills (she had very few, after all), she ended the phone call with a visceral understanding of what people meant when they referred to life-changing events.
Maggie’s heretofore unknown aunt was apparently quite well-off or perhaps she simply hoarded her money. Either way, Maggie’s life was changed forever.
She couldn’t say whether the house or the money was more important. Truthfully, one without the other, wouldn’t have provided the freedom they did together.
The money was great, but not so great that Maggie could have purchased a house and had money left over to live on. And while the house was wonderful, without the money, Maggie would have had to continue to work to pay for groceries and utilities.
With both house and money, however, Maggie now had the means to retreat from civilization forever.
She would never have to deal with people again!
She’d never have to see that look on their faces when they realized she was serious when she gave them a truth they didn’t want to hear.
She’d never have to deal with an asshole boss or an entitled customer or all the tiny misunderstandings that happened day after day when people got all worked up over things Maggie didn’t even realize were problems.
Like voting. Why was everyone so worked up about someone getting voted off an island? Maggie didn’t even know such a thing was possible. Could anyone be voted off? This island didn’t seem a very good place to live if that were the case.
And royal marriages. Why in the world would anyone care about someone else’s marriage? Her parents’ had been a disaster and Maggie didn’t even care about it, so why would she worry about the state of a stranger’s marriage?
None of it made any sense.
And in a world where nothing made sense, the unexpected gift of being able to retreat from it all was like a dream come true.
So Maggie quit her three jobs. She’d possibly already been fired from one of them, but since she wasn’t quite sure about that, she went ahead and quit that one as well.
Her boss looked surprised, so perhaps she really had been fired. Why wouldn’t he have just said that though? Maggie couldn’t understand why some people never said exactly what they meant.
“I don’t think this is the right job for you,” wasn’t the same as “you’re fired,” now was it?
She never quite knew how to interpret that statement, so would always show up for the next shift to see what happened.
Sometimes they came right out and said, “You’re fired. Go away.”
Sometimes, however, they didn’t say anything at all and she got to keep the job. For a while anyway. Until something else happened.
But this unpredictability was why she never really knew.
If “I don’t think this is the right job for you” was a synonym for “you’re fired,” then she shouldn’t have been able to continue working at any of those jobs, right?
Only that’s not what happened approximately thirty-six percent of the time.
Usually (sixty-four percent of the time to be exact) it did mean you were fired, but all those other times, it meant you could keep working if you just showed up.
So that being the case, Maggie always showed up and sometimes she got to keep working.
It was really quite perplexing and yet another reason to be absolutely thrilled to no longer have to work with people.
Maggie actually took quite a bit of pleasure in quitting her jobs.
She didn’t even given them notice.
She figured after all the years she’d spent dealing with being fired from job after job with no notice whatsoever, the world owed her the opportunity to do the same back.
So when she quit her final job, the one she was probably fired from already, but maybe not, she delighted in informing her boss, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re fired.”
She then walked out, leaving him sputtering in her wake, which was really quite awesome.
A couple hours later, her Honda Civic was packed full of clothes and other essentials and she was ready to hit the road.
Her apartment was on a month-to-month lease so she simply handed her key to the landlord and said, “You can keep the deposit. Use it to get rid of everything I left behind.”
“Wait. What?”
She left the landlord sputtering behind her as well, which was also quite delightful. After all, he was just another human being who never said exactly what he meant.
When she first moved in, he’d offered to let her earn her keep in other ways, but everything she suggested, he turned down. She offered to do maintenance, yard work, change lightbulbs, paint the hallways, vacuum the stairs, but he never took her up on any of those offers, and when she demanded to know what he wanted her to do instead, he hemmed and hawed and said to just pay him his rent and get out of his face.
Okay, so maybe he did say what he meant there at the end, but still. She’d wasted so much time trying to think of ways to earn her keep and he never did take her up on any of it. Not even when she offered to run errands for him. Rude.
In any case, that was all behind her now.
No more landlords.
No more bosses.
No more customers.
No more people!
Two
THE FIRST THING Bygul had to do was find the right cat.
According to the PPM’s mission statement, this was not a task to be taken lightly. Every cat was unique, after all, and deserved the very best of human companions.
Which was what made this particular matchmaking more challenging than usual. Typically, they started with a cat and then went in search of the perfect human match.
This time, however, a human had come to the attention of PPM and now the task was to find the right cat.
At first, Bygul thought a full-grown cat would be best. One who was big enough for hugging and cuddling. An affectionate cat who wouldn’t mind the constant handling.
Then Bygul discovered the human was moving, and more importantly, where the human was moving to.
Suddenly, he was on a time crunch.
He had to find the cat and get it bonded with the human before she reached her destination. Otherwise, he might not succeed in recruiting a cat to bond with her at all.
Of course, there were some cats who would be thrilled at the challenge of living in shifter territory, but they were all a bit crazy, even feral, and possibly not the best match for a woman as lonely as Maggie Winters seemed to be.
