Melted By The Lion: A Paranormal Lion Shifter Romance by Amira Rain Read Free Book Online

did. I didn’t care if Trevor found Veronica genuinely amusing or not. I didn’t care what he thought about her at all. I didn’t even care if they hit it off so well that they flung off their clothes and started trying to make a baby right there in her hospital room. And, in fact, all the better for me if they did. I knew I’d have to stay at Trevor’s residence for a little while, until I could find somewhere else to live, but I was pretty sure that that’s what I’d eventually do. And when I did, maybe Trevor would be more inclined to just give up and let me go my own way if Veronica was already pregnant. She could fill his mansion with “business arrangement” babies, the sooner the better.
    I watched jugball on TV until noon, when Betty, a smiling nurse with gray hair streaked with bright silvery white, came in with my lunch tray.
    After she’d introduced herself, she set the tray on my lap, took the lid off a covered plate, revealing a vegetable salad with grilled chicken on top, and then frowned at me. “Now, is it okay that the kitchen put whole cherry tomatoes in yours?”
    Confused, I set the TV remote aside, looking at her. “Well, sure. It’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
    “Oh, well, because the young woman across the way and just down the hall a little just had a terrible fit that hers hadn’t been cut into fourths. She told me to take the tray back and tell the kitchen staff that they should all be fired for such an error. I thought that maybe having cherry tomatoes cut into fourths was how they were served back in the time that you young women remember, before you were frozen.”
    I made a noise between a sigh and a laugh, though feeling bad that Betty had had to deal with Veronica’s little fit. “No, cherry tomatoes were still served on salads whole even hundreds of years ago, from what I can remember. But I’m just guessing Veronica was still throwing fits about them not being cut into fourths even then.”
    Shaking her head, Betty pulled up a chair over to my bedside. “I sure wish Commander Beaumont would come back. She was a perfect angel when he was here.”
    I snorted. “I’m sure she was. An angel very interested in his muscles, from what it sounded like.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Oh, nothing. Just something I don’t even care about anyway.”
    After sweetly insisting on unwrapping my silverware from my napkin, and then opening my milk and juice cartons, Betty asked if I’d like to eat alone, or if I’d like some company.
    When I said I’d love some company, she took a seat in the folding chair she’d pulled over, smiling. “I was hoping you’d say that. I love getting to know new people.”
    Wherever Betty lived, I began wondering if she had room for a guest.
    Over the next couple of hours, I learned that she didn’t. We talked about many different things, including how things had changed, and hadn’t, since the time I’d lived before the nuclear disaster, and before I’d been frozen. In past decades, technology had pretty much reached pre-disaster levels, so most people now owned TVs and cell phones, just like I remembered. Some people even owned personal computers.
    However, Betty said, the thing that had used to be called the internet wasn’t what it once had been, how I remembered it. “You see, even after all these years, there’s still not enough people on earth to give it all the content that it once had, I’m told. And here in Beaumont City, we don’t have a lot of computers anyway. We have some here in the hospital, but they’re not quite the household item that they are in DC these days.”
    After some more discussion about computers, we switched gears to geography, and Betty told me exactly where we were in Louisiana.
    “We’re just west of a place that used to be called New Orleans back in your time, though sadly, that city was completely leveled by the disaster. It’s all wild swampland now. Beaumont City is a lot less marshy, though things do