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Still, the title intrigued me.
Mail-Order Mating. One Click. Endless Chances.
Order a mate via email? Is that what it was promoting? I scoffed but then mentally retracted it. I’d gone about things in the traditional way, and look where it landed me. In a pride who saw me as a pathetic female with no life and no skills to get one.
What could it hurt?
There was a free account, thankfully. I became entranced in answering all the questions. All of them. They were thorough. My cheeks heated as I answered some. Sexual preferences. Relationship preferences. Animal Preferences. There were different sections, and not all of them were for mates. Some were looking for surrogates. Some for nannies. Some for plutonic relationships. Harems. Monogamy. There wasn’t a facet of mating off-limits.
The nanny/mate section intrigued me. I had eight brothers. Eight. I was the oldest and, naturally, became what my mother called the second mommy. I tended those boys like they were my own from the time I could.
My brothers had nearly killed Jason for what he did to me.
My father and the alpha had to order them to stand down. I may have been their second mama, but they were my protectors, even as toddlers.
I saw a few accounts. Some wanted a nanny and a mate.
My panther reared up inside me. Her distrust was fiercer than my own. The word mate was like a curse to her now, but my human side was lonely. I needed love and whether she denied it or not, my shifter side needed affection. Touch. Care, even if it wasn’t romantic. Most of the pride avoided me now. It wasn’t out of revulsion. They simply didn’t know how to approach me or had no idea what to say.
I didn’t blame them.
I barely looked myself in the mirror nowadays.
I got a text from the alpha, asking me to come in for some documents for Beth and Jason. He was warning me, which was appreciated. It also made my decision. There was no way I could get clean unless I first dragged myself from the muck.
Maybe this mating app was the way to get me out.
Then maybe, just maybe, I could finally move on.
Chapter Four
Justice
She didn’t have to love us.
I wanted to make that clear, but she did have to love Koby. Not that I thought she’d be able to resist him. Our cub was the cutest thing ever, and I knew once she met him, she’d fall for him just as hard as we had when he was born.
And he could do so many more things now than he’d been able to when he was born. Not that we hadn’t been crazy for him, but while that adorable bundle of sleeping/pooping/eating/repeat just seemed to get better every day. He tumbled into toddlerhood with enthusiasm, learning to eat just about everything and saying words first alone then in pairs then in simple sentences. His eyes lit up when he saw one of us, his little arms reaching out for a hug.
She’d love him. But we needed to make sure that whoever she was, he could love her, too. I went over the application again and made sure I’d filled in all the lines, finding it hard to be as clear as I’d like to be.
There were places to list all sorts of things, but nowhere I could fill in the essay it would take to explain how I felt. How I thought we both felt. The truth was we were lonely, but how could an app find us our mate? It would be remarkable if in trying to find someone to help us rear our cub, we also found the one intended for us…
More than remarkable, and I wouldn’t count on it.
Sitting on the sofa with my tablet, I wrote and rewrote what we were looking for. A mate. A nanny. A mate who liked children. A…a what? How could I be clear in writing what wasn’t clear in our minds? Or at least in mine.
While I mulled all the options listed there and which met our desires, a thudding from down the hallway told me that our toddler had once again done what baby pandas were not supposed to do until a whole lot closer to puberty.
He ambled into the room on all fours, black and white and cuter than just about anything on the face of the Earth. Headed for the front door.
“Oh no, Son. Shifting is one thing, but you are too little to take your panda self off in search of bamboo to snack on.” We actually grew it all along the fences because it wasn’t something we could find locally. There were in fact a few bamboos native to the Americas, and history reported it had once been widespread, but not any longer. At least not in our woods.
It did very well for us, though, and we grew several varieties careful not to let the non-natives spread off our property. While in the wild, ordinary pandas ate almost exclusively bamboo, although that had not always been the case. Long ago, they enjoyed all sorts of things, including meat. Currently, in zoos and sanctuaries, they ate other things like specially formulated biscuits and apples, even carrots.
Our little panda was a fan of tender bamboo shoots as well as an assortment of fruits and vegetables and just about any biscuit or cookie he could get his paws on. Not all that different from what he liked to eat in little boy form. And this little panda had just awoken from his nap, which meant he would need a snack and soon, or he’d get very cranky.
Not something I’d put in our application for a mate.Cranky toddler with big claws needs momwould not be attractive to almost anyone. Adorable toddler—which he was most of the time—was another matter altogether.
