“Absolutely.” Janice leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms. “We’ll all be meeting tomorrow, and you can join in after you get off work.”
“Work?” I blinked up at her.
She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. “Yes. After you catch up on your day job. Of all of us, you’re supposed to stay most connected to humans. You need to do that.”
Even the thought of work made me yawn involuntarily.
Kade laughed and I was reminded briefly of how, even in the darkest moments, there are flashes of joy.
“Go home,” Janice said. “You can’t do anything more until tomorrow, at the earliest. Rest. I’ll be in touch.”
IN SOME WAYS, IT FELT like a cop-out—but I let Janice and Kade convince me to go home. We stopped by the NICU long enough to see the two new babies. They were snuggled in their incubators, eyes closed, tiny hands and feet curled in.
“Do you have names for them yet?” Kade asked quietly.
I shook my head. “Not yet. I almost want to wait until we find their sibling—God, I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.”
“No one does,” Kade said quietly. “That’s not as easy in serpent-born lamias as in the human-born ones. We didn’t have time to find out before the wolves took it.”
Tears pricked the corners of my eyes and Kade wrapped his arms around me, whispering words of comfort. “It’ll be okay. We’ll find the baby.”
I nodded. “And then I’ll name them all.”
As Kade drove us home, I threaded my fingers through his, thankful he understood me so well.
We walked in the door and I shut it behind us, wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him down to me. The heat of his lips slanting across mine sent chills racing down my spine, and my shiver seemed to move through me and into Kade.
Kade pulled away long enough to brush strands of hair from my face and stare into my eyes. “This okay tonight?” he asked softly.
“Yes,” I murmured, standing up on my tiptoes to wrap my arms around his neck and pull him back down into another kiss. “I need this.”
Sliding his palm down my back and settling it in the small indentation just above the top of the scrubs I’d borrowed to wear home, he pulled me closer to him, molding my body to his until I couldn’t tell where I ended and Kade began.
The realization that he wanted this comfort every bit as much as I did lit me from within, and I met his heat with a fire of my own, pressing hard against him and pushing his lips open with my tongue, deepening our kiss.
With a groan, Kade skimmed his mouth down the side of my neck, dropping tiny kisses along the way until he reached the hollow just below my collarbone. When he licked that spot, I whimpered. Then he was pulling off my shirt and casting it aside, and then tugging my bra with one hand. He drew me tight against him with the other hand against my back and sucked my breast into his mouth, running his tongue over my pebbled nipple.
Streaks of heat sparked from my nipple straight down to pool in my abdomen, where it seemed to throb in time to my heart, every beat a pulse of sheer desire.
“Please,” I whispered, not even sure why I said it—but the single word seemed to act as a spur for Kade, who pushed off my pants and swept me up with both hands under my ass and lifted me from the floor, moving his mouth back to mine for another deep, tongue-tangling kiss.
Instinctively, I wrapped my legs around his waist, crossing them at the ankle behind him, and tightened my arms around his neck.
I could feel him hard against me, our underwear between us an irritant. With tiny, inarticulate noises, I wiggled a little, as if I could dislodge the fabric between us by motion alone.
I gasped when, having donned a condom, Kade pulled my panties out of the way. Then I moaned as he guided the tip of his cock to my slick entrance, wiggling as he barely pushed up and then slid back out without fully settling me onto him.
“Hang on,” he whispered, then thrust upwards at the same moment he loosened his grip enough to let me drop down onto him.
The sudden sensations as I stretched to take him in completely made my eyelids flutter closed and all I could do was repeat “yes,” over and over, even as I tightened and loosened my thighs to meet him, thrust for thrust, as he pumped into me.
Fucking as soon as we walked in the door wasn’t exactly what I had planned.
Then he was inside me again, and there was no more room for thought. I pulsed around him, pulling him into the deepest, hottest part of me.
Kade shifted his hands to grip my ass tightly, pulling me closer as he drove into me. I whimpered, and he moved his hands again, this time making sure he could still hold me with one hand while he slid the other between us.
For just an instant, I wished I’d had the foresight to take off my underwear before he picked me up. But I discovered quickly enough that he could fit his hand down the front of them.
Lightly, he dragged his knuckles downward through my curls until he brushed them against my clit. My sharp inhale and the tightening of my pussy around his cock made him swell even more, and he began to circle my clit with his thumb as he moved inside me.
My own rhythmic motions grew faster. Throwing my head back made it more difficult for Kade to hold me in place, but I don’t think he would’ve stopped for anything.
When I leaned my forehead against his and stared into his eyes, my breath hard and fast and mingling with his own, it was all I could do to keep from coming right then.
Yes. This man.
Now.
Always.
I closed my eyes, my breath ragged and my movements wild as I ground my clit against his hand and pulled myself down onto him until he was as deep as he had ever been before—deeper—and I could feel from the way he grew harder and harder the pressure building, ready to explode into me, and still he tried to move even closer to me, further into me, as if he could reach the very core of me.
I came with a cry, shudders wracking my body as I clung to him, tightening around Kade in waves that seemed to match the sound of his heart. And then he was pouring himself into me, every pulse of his own orgasm a hot reminder of how much he loved me.
Chapter 32
WHEN I COULD THINK again—beyond simply “Yes” and “don’t stop”—I realized Kade’s legs were trembling. I wasn’t surprised. The way he had swelled and heated inside me just before his orgasm had triggered something inside me—either a second orgasm, or a continuation of my first, I wasn’t sure.
In any case, that white-hot passion had wiped out everything else from my consciousness, leaving me draped helplessly, almost bonelessly, around Kade. Apparently, he had managed to keep us upright. If I had been in charge of the standing, I wasn’t sure I would have done as well.
The thought made me giggle against the crook of his neck, and I dropped a kiss against the hollow there as Kade asked, “What?” His voice was more than a little breathless.
“You can put me down now, I think.”
At that, he laughed, too. “I’m not sure I can. But I’ll try.”
I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING to my alarm, a reminder that the human world still held part of my allegiance, no matter how exhausted I was.
I groaned and buried my head under the pillow. “I don’t want to go talk to damaged human children today.”
“You could probably call in—I let Gloria know yesterday that one of the mothers we’re sponsoring went into labor yesterday, so you might be a little late.”
“I’m not sure that would help at all,” I said, my voice still muffled. “She doesn’t approve of the humanized version of our plan.”
Kade snickered. “That’s because the humanized version is insane. People don’t date for a couple of months and then suddenly agree to become house-parents to a bunch of children fathered by a serial rapist.”
I let out another exaggerated moan. “You’re supposed to be encouraging me to go to work.”
He dropped a kiss on my uncovered shoulder. “As long as we’re infant-f
ree for the morning, I have a better idea.”
With a laugh, I tossed the pillow across the room.
When I got to work a few hours later, I was still smiling.
That lasted through about ten minutes of the morning meeting.
Not that the meeting itself was all that unusual. We went over continuing case files, discussed the new cases we had coming in, and prepped for the court cases the CAP-C would be dealing with over the next week.
But even as I fell into the groove of the meeting’s give and take, I could feel my boss, Gloria, watching me more closely than usual.
I wasn’t surprised at the end of the meeting when she said, “Can I talk to you in my office for a minute?”
She shut the door behind us and took a seat behind her desk, gesturing for me to sit across from her.
This does not bode well.
“Lindi, I’m very concerned about you.” If I hadn’t already known, her use of my name to open the meeting-after-the-meeting would have clued me in to what she was doing.
“Don’t use your counselor voice on me,” I said. “I know all the same techniques you do. You’re not going to head-shrink me over these kids.” I didn’t even have to say which ones—we both knew we were discussing the children Kade and I were not-quite-adopting.
But Gloria didn’t know—couldn’t know—the background behind our connection to them.
Gloria leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, gazing at me analytically through narrowed eyes. She chewed on her bottom lip as she considered what she might say next.
Finally, she shook her head.
“The problem is that I think you might need to talk to someone over whatever it is that’s going on between you and Kade that makes you want to take in these children.” She tapped her fingers on her desk. “You’re acting irrationally and not at all like yourself.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong. What I couldn’t say to her, though, was that in many ways, I was acting more like myself than she had ever seen me be—I’d always worked so hard to maintain a human exterior, to keep my façade as Lindi Parker, counselor, that I had completely buried the part of me that was serpentine, that was lamia.
And now I was discovering that perhaps I didn’t know how to integrate my snake self with my human self, after all. That all I had ever really known how to do was compartmentalize them.
And now that they were bleeding into one another, my emotions were out of control.
I was reeling with it.
My eyes filled up with tears and I blinked furiously to try to push them back.
“If you two are really going to take Serena home, then you might want to consider taking part of your available new parent leave,” Gloria suggested.
She doesn’t know the half of it.
“You can have up to six weeks,” she continued. “Everyone here knows how hard it is to be a new parent. So even if there is nothing else going on, it’s normal to feel out of control, to feel like you’re having a hard time keeping your normal life together.”
This time I didn’t snap at her for using her counseling voice on me.
She was right. I needed time away from everything, time to simply bond with the infant—infants, I reminded myself—I was bringing into my life.
But leaving the CAP-C would mean walking away from the one thing that kept my human life focused.
“Thanks, Gloria. I really mean it. And I do understand what you’re saying. This weekend was rough—rougher than usual—but I really want to see this case to the end. It’s important to me. I’ll get it together, I promise.”
“Okay.” Gloria nodded, but she didn’t look like she bought it. “In the meantime, will you please talk to someone?”
I shrugged. “Who? Who can I talk to right now that won’t have some other professional connection to me, some conflict of interest?”
“There are some people in Dallas,” Gloria suggested. “I could get their names to you, you can see if you like anyone.” Her voice trailed off as I shook my head.
“I don’t have the time right now. But I promise, if I don’t manage to get my act together in the next couple of days or so, after I’ve had a little more sleep, then I promise I’ll go see someone.”
“Promise?” Gloria pressed.
“Pinky swear,” I said.
“Okay, then.” She picked up a file on her desk and started flipping through it, a clear dismissal. As I left, though, she called out after me. “But, Lindi? Feel free to leave a little early today if you need to. It looks like your schedule is open after three.”
My eyes filled up with tears again—I was lucky to have a boss as considerate as Gloria.
“I will,” I said, not looking back as I brushed the mostly unshed tears from my eyes and made my way back down to my own office.
Chapter 33
JANICE STOPPED BY THE office that afternoon right after lunch and dropped off a clean cell phone for me. Apparently, Tomás and his crew had taken care of our immediate technical concerns. I wasn’t entirely certain what we had done to deserve the jaguar’s loyalty, but I was more glad than I could say that we had it now.
Especially since it allowed Janice to let me know that a group of us were meeting at her house whenever I got off work.
That didn’t happen as early as Gloria suggested—it never does. There’s always more paperwork to be done in any counseling environment. But I did pull up in front of Janice’s house a little after four.
I was stunned when I walked in to find Frank and several of his wolves in attendance.
My eyes started to shift to their serpent form as anger surged through me.
“Keep control,” Janice murmured to me as she walked past, placing one calming hand on my back.
“What are they doing here?” I whispered to Kelly as I joined a small group of people I knew.
“No idea,” Kelly replied. “I think they’re planning to make some kind of statement in a minute.”
The shapeshifters’ Councils were an odd mix of formal and informal, bylaws and practices that had grown out of a combination of human governance and animal pack law.
Add to that the fact that every area in the country big enough to have its own Council also included a large enough number of shifters to mean that the composition of each Council was different, and it was possible to see how the shifters had ended up with a patchwork of barely agreed-upon guidelines.
Frank and his wolves knew this as well as anyone, and I was willing to bet they were counting on it.
Really, when it came right down to it, the Councils were determined by their members. If Frank and his wolves could convince enough of our people that I didn’t belong, then they could arrange to have me kicked out.
Lucky for me, that was never going to happen while Janice was around.
“Okay, everyone,” Janice called out. “The wolves from our own Council’s pack have asked to speak and, in turn, to be given the opportunity to introduce a guest speaker.” Her eyes had turned brown—she was almost as irritated with Frank and his crew as I was. But she was a better politician than I was and managed to keep that irritation under wraps.
One of the local packs’ alphas stepped to the front of the room—for a weekday afternoon, Janice’s living room, usually more than big enough for any Council business, was full to bursting. If Frank followed through with his threat and actually called a National Council meeting, we would be forced to move to one of the outdoor venues.
It would be better that way, really, if only in order to keep humans from snooping around in too much of our business.
As I watched the jostling at the front of the room while the wolves prepared whatever they had to say, I realized how quickly I had adapted to thinking of “us” and “our pack.”
It hadn’t been that much time since I’d assumed I was the only shifter in the world.
I was still the only adult lamia I knew of, but there were plenty of other shifters.
The local werewolf Alpha opened
by blustering about some arcane point of pack law as it translated to the Council and I wasted several minutes trying to follow it. I hadn’t noticed when Kade entered the room, but his scent wafted over me before I saw him.
Just the smell of him brought a smile to my face—clean and spicy and always drawing me toward him.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” He looked oddly worried as he came to stand next to me.
“I don’t want to miss what the wolves have to say.”
“I’ll make sure we get back in time for anything important—come to the kitchen with me for a couple minutes?”
“Okay.” I followed him, curious about what might possibly be more important than whatever the werewolves were cooking up now.
We got to the kitchen, Kade paced back and forth several times, chewing on his bottom lip—always a sign that he was dealing with something worrisome.
“You’re making me nervous,” I said with a half laugh. “I’m a little bit concerned it might be something serious.”
Taking a deep breath with the air of someone about to impart particularly horrific news, Kade met my eyes directly and said in a rush, “My parents and four of my brothers are going to come to town next week.”
“I thought you had a good relationship with your parents and siblings,” I said, confused.
“I do. We have a great relationship.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“You remember how, just a couple of days ago, Jeremiah was entirely terrified to introduce Shadow to his matriarch?”
“Of course,” I said.
“And remember how it turned out to be no big deal at all when he finally did — they were all so caught up in the other issues that it was like it was no problem at all?”
Oh, hell...
“Is your family coming here to meet me?”
“Not exactly.”
“That means exactly, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” He grimaced. “They’re worried about me.”
“What do you mean, worried about you?”
Kade’s gaze flickered from one point in the room to another. If I hadn’t known him better, I would’ve said he was acting shifty. And not in a “my boyfriend’s a sexy shapeshifter” kind of way, either.
The Skin She's In Page 19
