Page 1 of Remington’s Mate

Chapter 1

It was a Sunday evening, and Jaeda Monroe was sitting in a tiny apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, drinking a homemade blackberry martini and practicing being human.

She had her dating app open on her laptop, and she was crossing off last week’s dates from her list of potential boyfriends.

She really needed a new list. And a new dating strategy. And probably another martini.

She was obviously doing this wrong. All her dates looked great on paper—smart, reasonably attractive, good jobs, interesting hobbies, no hideous grammar mistakes in their profiles.

But in real life, not so much.

Coffee Date #1 had spent an hour telling her all about himself, and not wanting to know a damn thing about her.

Coffee Date #2 had made not-so-subtle references to Jaeda’s generous curves and strongly suggested she start working out.

She had informed him that she took after her mother in abilities as well as looks, which meant that despite the size of her thighs she could lay his ass on the ground in under thirty seconds in a fight. Or, alternatively, take him out with a hunting rifle at 1,000 yards.

He’d left fairly quickly after that.

One reason she had to practice being human. She still had the tendency to think like a wolf shifter.

Saturday Dinner Date had seemed really promising—an accountant who rode a motorcycle and played in a rock band on the side. So, stable with a touch of creativity and bad-boy—excellent combination.

But the longer they talked, the more he was attentive and charming and self-deprecating, the more she felt like she was moving slowly away from him and he was getting smaller and smaller, like she was looking at him through the wrong end of a telescope.

Something was missing. Something was always missing, and Jaeda was starting to get the feeling the problem wasn’t them.

There was something wrong with her—something beyond being not-quite-human and not-quite-shifter.

You just haven’t found the right guy yet, she told herself. You’ve read all the magazines. Being human doesn’t make it easier to meet the right person. It makes it harder, because there’s no fated mate out there. You have to figure it out for yourself.

And she would. If hard work and problem-solving skills could provide happiness, Jaeda Monroe was going to be the happiest human in the whole fucking world.

She just had to keep focusing on her goals. Make a plan, list the steps she had to take, and work the list.

She flipped pages in the thick loose-leaf binder in front of her. She’d had it since high school, which was the reason the cover was unfortunately bedazzled beyond decency.

The first page was a worn, creased piece of blue-lined notebook paper, with the goal list she’d made the day she decided that she was going to leave the Silverlake wolf pack and be a kickass human girl instead of a wimpy non-shifting shifter girl.

In her curlicue high-school handwriting, the list read:

Get the hell out of Idaho

Go to college with people who never, ever sniff your butt

Date human boys who will not try to bite you and claim you and get you pregnant because you’re a fucking alpha’s daughter

In fact, date people who think ‘alpha’ is some kind of perverted sexual thing and want nothing to do with it

Live in a city, where there are more people than cows, in a neighborhood where there is more than one bar and more than two restaurants and some of them even have ethnic food. Where people (gasp!) deliver food to your door

Be a kickass executive bitch with a corner office looking out over the abovementioned city, and lots of minions to do my bidding

Marry a human man and have human babies in a place where no one thinks that’s weird or feels sorry for you because of it

Goal #1—check. She’d left Silverlake territory for college and went back only when she missed her parents and her best friends too much.

Everybody had to leave home sometime, right?