She put her hands on her hips. “Well, now how does that work, Mick, when you live here yourself? I can’t have you breathing down my neck as the owner.”
“I’m moving to Seattle. You’ll be my on-site manager. You can live here rent-free, plus I’ll set aside a maintenance account for repairs.”
She blinked a few times and then ran over and flung her arms around him. “Oh, Mick! I’ll be the best building manager in the history of building management!”
Mick laughed. “You sure? You’re not still…disappointed in me?”
“Oh, come on, Mick. You’re too old for me anyway. And you can’t rap worth a damn.”
>>>
The night before the three dreamslippers were to head to Seattle together, Mick found himself falling into a dream, and at first he could not figure out for the life of him whose it was. Only Cat, Pris, and Rose were in the building, and it didn’t seem to fit any of them.
He looked down at his hands, and they were a woman’s, and they bore a French manicure. But man that he was, that wasn’t enough to clue Mick in.
In heels, he stalked the streets of a ghetto he’d never seen before. He seemed to be looking for something, or someone. And there it was, a ramshackle house with peeling paint and a sagging front porch. That’s where his host in heels wanted to go.
Inside, a man had a belt tied around his arm and was feeding a needle into it. A woman was sitting on the couch in a daze. Mick-as-whoever-he-was walked past them to a room at the back of the house, more of a porch, really, too small to be a bedroom and not adequately insulated, as he could see the sunlight through cracks in the walls. Sitting on a mattress on the floor was the redheaded girl, whose name he now knew. Angie Ramirez.
Mick realized he must be walking in Serena’s dream.
Mick-as-Serena held out one hand to the girl on the mattress, and she took it. “It’s a long walk,” Serena said to the girl. “But you can make it. You have to.” The girl looked up into Mick’s eyes and nodded.
Serena took the girl out the back door and began walking with her down the street, and then the ghetto fell away, and they seemed to be in the scrub desert, and then that fell away, and they were on a beach. The dream had an endless quality to it, as if the walking took place over years and years.
Serena must have awakened at that point, as Mick was thrust out of the dream. He felt a deep longing in his chest, a longing to get there, to arrive somewhere.
He got up and walked over to the painting he had started when he blackened over the one about Cat’s dream. It had started out feeling like inspiration for him at first, as he realized he could use the black paint to obscure something bright and shining beneath it that wanted to come out, not Cat’s dream, but something really lovely and positive, something that everyone wanted, something that would be slipping out from under the black like it couldn’t be held back.
But he’d hit a stumbling block when he didn’t really know what that thing was.
Until now.
He realized it was home.
Read on for an exciting glimpse of the next book in the Dreamslippers Series…
Prologue
He held her hair in a tight nest at the back of her head, the tension making her scalp ache, like her desire. Pearls swayed in a loose arc beneath her chin. They reminded her of the Newton’s cradle on her desk at work, how she’d lift a metal ball to let it drop and hit the next one. The energy would travel through the three still balls in the center, forcing the one on the opposite end to rise upward. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
How many times a day she did that, she did not know. It was habit. It had been for years.
He released her hair. His fingers massaged her scalp. Her eyes rolled back with pleasure. Her saliva flowed.
“God, you’re beautiful like this,” he said. “I love it when you let go.”
She reset her gaze, and there he was, close in, staring into her eyes.
She touched his strong jaw, freshly shaven, letting herself feel thrilled by his masculinity. “I can only let go like that with you.”
The look he returned was one of surrender. She marveled at that. She was supposed to be the submissive one, and yet during their play, they both surrendered, to each other.
“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that,” he said.
Funny that he would say that, as she knew exactly how it made him feel. It was part of what drew her to him, his need to know their connection was real, that her responses to him were unique. And they were. He was the only dom she’d ever trusted like this, the only one who could unlock her body.
The only one she loved.
Following her craving, she moved his hands where she wanted them. “Please,” she said. “I need you to hurt me.”
>>>
He knew to smack her where she was fleshiest, and to do it until her skin turned pink, but no more. He knew she enjoyed the feeling of the silk ties against her wrists. He knew when she parted her lips just so, her tongue wet, to slip his thumb into her mouth.
He would know the sound of her sigh across a crowded room.
But he did not know her name. She was only “Dandelion” to him, the nickname at once soft and tough. At work, or even randomly at home when he should have been watching himself more carefully, he would smile, thinking of her as pretty like the dandelion’s flower, but with roots he couldn’t rip out of himself if he tried.
Only once, in the beginning, did she have to use their safe word. The name of a bird: robin. “It makes me think of flying away,” she explained. Her eyes were coy, but he heard the sadness in her words.
He didn’t want her to have to escape. He wanted her free, to choose him. He wanted them both to be free.
But they were each in their own cage.
>>>Falling for the Dreamslippers? Learn more about the series at http://www.catintheflock.com/dreamslippers-series.html.<<<
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all who reviewed and recommended the first book in this series, Cat in the Flock. Without you, I wouldn’t have had the gumption to write a sequel. These days it takes a village to publish a successful book, and you are my treasured neighbors.
And a special shout-out to my BETA readers for their honesty and insights: Ana Sprague, Anna Dobritt, Anne Harrington, Beth Poole, Chris Roman, Chris Toepker, Chrysanne Taull, Elisa Mader, Jennifer Vandenberg, Lanae Rivers-Woods, Linda Cox, Mario Russo, Marnie Roberts, Merlin G. MacReynold, Peter Wiederspan, Rebeqa Rivers, and Renee Corwin-Rey.
Most of all, thank you to the readers who’ve fallen in love with Cat and Granny Grace. It’s my pleasure to bring you their stories.
Namaste.
About the Author
Lisa Brunette is the no. 1 Amazon bestselling author of the Dreamslippers mystery series. Book One, Cat in the Flock, is an indieBRAG honoree title that has been praised by Kirkus Reviews, Midwest Book Review, Readers Lane, and others. The second book, Framed and Burning, is a finalist for the Nancy Pearl Book Award and a nominee for the RONE Award that has received critical praise from BestThrillers.com, Puddletown Reviews, On My Kindle, and many more. Book Three will be released in fall 2016.
Brunette is a career writer/editor whose work has appeared in major daily newspapers and magazines, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Woman, and Poets & Writers. She’s interviewed a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a sex expert, homeless women, and the designer of the Batmobile, among others.
She has story design and writing credits in hundreds of bestselling video games, including the Mystery Case Files, Mystery Trackers, and Dark Tales series for Big Fish and AAA games for Nintendo and Microsoft platforms.
Brunette holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from University of Miami, where she was a Michener Fellow. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in Bellingham Review, The Comstock Review, Icarus International, and other journals, and her poetry is available in a book-length collection, Broom of Anger.
&
nbsp; She’s also received a major grant from the Tacoma Arts Commission and won the William Stafford Award and the Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Project Award.
Brunette is a member of Mystery Writers of America and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association.
>>>Read her weekly blog posts at www.catintheflock.com.<<<
>>>Join her mailing list at http://forms.feedblitz.com/192 and receive a free book!<<<
Book Club Discussion Questions
1.When did you figure out the arsonist’s identity? What tipped you off?
2.Who is your favorite dreamslipper, and why?
3.Which non-dreamslipping character is your favorite, and why?
4.Which parts of the book made you feel the most? Describe.
5.How do the descriptions of Miami fit with your own impressions of the place, either from experience or from media?
6.What did reading this book teach you?
7.What was most surprising about the story? Least surprising?
8.Quote a favorite line or passage to share with your group.
9.Which character’s art would you most want to hang on your own walls?
10. What sort of jail sentence should each of the guilty characters serve? What do you think is fair?
Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) Page 30