Keeping Her Pride (Ladies of the Pack Book 1)

by Lauren Esker

  "No wonder you were surprised that Olivia shifted for the first time at two months, if that's what's normal for you."

  "Yeah, it's—" She broke off as her throat choked up, and blinked fiercely, pushing back the sudden surge of tears.

  "Shit." Fletcher dropped an armful of T-shirts on the bed and sat down next to her. "I'm sorry. Bad memory?"

  "No," she whispered. "Good memory. It's just ..." She hesitated, unsure how to explain to a nonshifter. "I told you how the monitor stops me from shifting. I haven't become a lioness in a year. And without that, it's like a part of myself is locked away. So much of what we are, who we are, is tied up in our animals."

  Fletcher put an arm around her. She leaned into his shoulder. He started to speak and then paused; he seemed to be searching for words. "Does it hurt you?" he asked at last. "To be forced not to shift."

  "You mean physically? No, not really. It just feels like something's missing. I still have the instincts, deep down, but I can't do anything about them. And yeah, it's hard to deal with, but ..." She turned her head and kissed his cheek. "It's your daughter you're thinking about, isn't it?"

  "Not just my daughter," he protested. "I'm worried about you too."

  "I know. But to answer your question ... no, it doesn't hurt. It bothers me mainly because the choice was taken away from me. In our normal lives, we spend most of their time as humans and it doesn't bother us at all. Your daughter doesn't have to be a snake all the time to be comfortable."

  "That's good to know." He rubbed slow circles on her shoulder, a soothing, rhythmic motion. "For you and for Livvy. Chloe accused me of—no," he interrupted himself. "You were talking about yourself and I'm making it about me. Forget it."

  "No, you're not. I don't mind listening." She smiled faintly. "It gets my mind off my own problems. What did she accuse you of?" And I wish I had my lioness teeth. I'd love to set them on that snake's neck.

  "She keeps saying that Livvy should be with her because I don't know how to handle a shifter child. And the problem is, she's right." With a glance toward the bedroom door, he dropped his voice. "I'm terrified of her when she's a snake. And she can tell. Chloe thinks I'm making her ashamed of who she is, and I can't even argue with that, as much as I want to. I don't want my daughter to grow up thinking that Daddy thinks her shifting is bad."

  "Oh, Fletcher." She rested her head on his shoulder. "I don't know what to say, except that you're one of the most attentive and loving parents I've ever seen. Anyone who watches you and your daughter together can tell you adore her."

  "It's possible for parents to love their children and still mess them up."

  Don't I know that. She had no doubt that their parents had loved all of them, no doubt that Roger, who had been father and big brother rolled into one, had loved her too. And here she was with a tracking monitor on her ankle, half her siblings dead and the other half in prison.

  But Fletcher was no Roger. For one thing, if Roger had possessed a fraction of Fletcher's self-awareness and integrity, he would've asked himself the same questions Fletcher was asking, and things would never have gone off the rails like they did.

  "I think the fact that you're worrying about it means you're going to find a way," she said. "Snakes aren't really that dangerous, are they? From what I've read, they don't usually bite unless they're scared. Maybe you can find something online about safely handling venomous snakes."

  "Oh, trust me, I've looked up every website on safe snake ownership I can find." Fletcher's voice was dry. "The trouble is, nobody hands out venomous pet snakes, so most of the information I can find has to do with removing wild snakes from your house, and I'd never use most of those techniques on Olivia, even the supposedly snake-safe ones. Well, there's that and religious snake handling, but I'm not convinced God is going to protect me from snakebite."

  "What about gloves?" Debi suggested.

  "Gloves?"

  "Yes, like welding gloves or something. What if you wore gloves she couldn't bite through? Then you could hold her safely."

  "I ... huh. That's not a bad idea. I wouldn't want to wear gloves all the time, but I could invest in a few pairs of welding gloves and stash them in different rooms, like the snake traps."

  "Snake traps?" She was temporarily baffled, before remembering the otherwise inexplicable cardboard box with the T-shirt inside. "Oh, is that what the boxes are for?"

  "Necessity is the mother of invention," Fletcher said.

  "Daddy?"

  The small voice piped up from the doorway. Olivia was peeking in shyly.

  "C'mere, Liv." Fletcher held out the arm that wasn't around Debi, and the girl scampered over and nestled into his other side, peeking around her father at Debi. "What's up, little girl?"

  Olivia mumbled something and stuck her thumb in her mouth. Debi decoded it as something along the lines of "I'm hungry."

  "Well, you're in luck. We're going to have your favorite, noodles with cheese. Grandpa Tom's recipe." This produced a shy grin. "You like that?"

  "Noodles," Olivia mumbled around her thumb. Debi smiled at her. She turned her face into Fletcher's chest with a giggle.

  Fletcher gave Debi a rueful smile. "I hope macaroni and cheese is okay with you. It's not the box kind, though she likes that too, but I'm not going to feed Kraft to a guest. This is grade A mac'n'cheese, oven baked with a bread crumb topping. If you'd rather have something with meat, I have pork chops in the freezer—"

  "Macaroni and cheese sounds wonderful." She grinned back. "I do eat things other than meat, for the record."

  "Great. There'll be a salad for the adults, and quite possibly a glass of wine or two."

  "What kind of wine pairs with mac'n'cheese?" Debi asked impishly.

  "According to my sommelier, you need a chardonnay, perhaps a nice riesling. The apple notes complement the aged cheddar in the macaroni."

  "Fletcher, you are amazingly full of—" Becoming aware of the bright eyes watching her from Fletcher's chest, and the sharp little ears that went with them, she changed her teasing insult to "—macaroni yourself."

  Fletcher laughed. He stood up, bringing along the child who clung like a limpet to his chest. "Why don't you put your things away while I go begin the first step in our gourmet repast, namely the ceremonial boiling of the macaroni. Come on, monkeybrains."

  "Daddy, I'm a snaaaake," trailed behind them as Fletcher took Olivia into the living room.

  "Not a monkey?"

  "No!"

  Debi smiled to herself and opened her suitcase.

  From the living room: "How about a sea cucumber? Not that either?"

  "No!"

  ***

  Debi woke beside Fletcher, curled skin to skin. The evening had been incredibly pleasant, even though they hadn't really done anything. They'd just had dinner together and then watched kids' movies on TV for a little while (Olivia in Fletcher's lap, Debi curled up in a chair with a cup of tea) until it was time for Olivia to go to bed and the adults to go do ... grownup things. She smiled lazily, thinking about it.

  Something had awakened her, so she lay still, enjoying the warmth of his sleeping body, while she tried to suss it out. Cloud-filtered morning light colored the room in shades of pastel and gray.

  A dry rustling noise came from somewhere in the vicinity of the closet and Debi thought, Oh.

  She sat up. At least she wasn't completely naked; aware that she and Fletcher weren't the only people in the condo, she'd put on a satin nightie after last night's hushed but still quite enjoyable activities. She checked the floor carefully before putting her bare feet down on the carpet, though the tiny rustles from the closet let her know that she was probably in no danger of stepping on any small snakes.

  Fletcher slept on, oblivious.

  The closet door was slightly open, as was their bedroom door: just enough of a crack to admit a curious little snake. Debi crouched in front of the closet. "Olivia," she whispered. The rustles subsided into a guilty hush. "You're not in trouble. Come on
out."

  After a long pause, a small brown body slithered out of her open suitcase, where it appeared to have been frolicking in her toiletries. There was a faint hint of vanilla perfume. Debi put her hand down on the floor, not without a few qualms, but if she was going to show Fletcher that his daughter wouldn't hurt him, she had to be willing to put her money where her mouth was, so to speak.

  Olivia paused, flicking out her tongue, before she slithered into Debi's palm. Her small body was cool and dry. Debi cupped her two hands together to make sure not to drop her and stood up carefully.

  "Here," she whispered, placing Olivia very gently on top of the dresser. "I just need to put on something warmer, okay?" Although it was summer, the condo was cool. Outside the window, rain pattered softly.

  Debi slipped into a flowing bright-red robe she'd brought—her favorite, and in her opinion, the sexiest one she owned—and turned back at a stifled giggle. There was now a naked little girl sitting on top of the dresser, grinning at her. As soon as Debi looked at her, Olivia clapped her hands over her eyes, as if she couldn't be seen if she wasn't looking at anyone.

  "Your dad's right, you are a monkey."

  "No!" Olivia said.

  Fletcher stirred in his sleep, and Debi put her finger to her lips.

  "Shhh, Daddy's sleeping. Come on, let's go find some breakfast. And maybe some clothes for you."

  She wasn't sure if Olivia would allow herself to be picked up, but when Debi put an arm around her, Olivia put her arms around Debi's neck and allowed herself to be gathered off the top of the dresser.

  Debi carried her into the living room. There was a child gate across the open door of Olivia's bedroom, covered with a layer of window screen to block the snake-sized gaps in the lattice. Apparently this didn't have the stopping power that Fletcher had hoped.

  "Do you get out of your room a lot?" Debi asked.

  Olivia nodded and giggled.

  "Aren't you cold?"

  "Mmmmm ... yes," Olivia declared.

  "Where are your clothes?"

  Olivia pointed at her room.

  Well, that made sense. Debi found a little pile of child's sleepwear discarded just inside the child gate. "Where are the rest of your clothes?"

  "I don't want clothes," Olivia said.

  "But you're cold. You need clothes to keep you warm."

  While Olivia mulled over this grownup logic, Debi located the stash of neatly folded child-sized clothing in a small dresser painted white with bright flowers stenciled on it. "What do you want to wear?"

  "Nothing."

  Children on TV were never like this. She tried to think back to when her younger brother Derek was this young, but they were too close in age; their elder siblings had wrangled them both.

  But children were just small people. They had reasons for doing things. She thought she understood Olivia's reasons; clothing was constricting for a shifter, especially when you needed to shift. Less so for a snake than for a lion cub, but maybe Olivia found it unpleasant to have her clothing collapse on her and have to tunnel out of it.

  "How about a compromise?"

  "What's that?" Olivia asked.

  "It means you don't have to put on all your clothes, you just have to put on one thing, and I'll pick something that's easy to get in and out of in case you want to shift."

  After some thought, Olivia nodded. This particular compromise turned out to be harder than it sounded, but after Olivia had rejected several options, they settled on a dress. Debi helped her get into it, channeling her old skills at dressing her collection of dolls. "Okay, let's go find breakfast now. Yeah?"

  "Yeah," Olivia chirped.

  And that was how Fletcher found them, sitting at the kitchen island with bowls of cereal. Olivia was picking her Cheerios out of her milk and eating them with wet hands. Fletcher, in a bathrobe, stopped and stared at them with an expression that was the visual equivalent of Awwwwww.

  "We're having breakfast," Debi told him. "Olivia, no—don't do that—" She'd hoped Fletcher would come out to find that she had successfully accomplished all mothering tasks, not to puddles of milk on the counter and a daughter who had accidentally dunked her hair in it.

  "It's okay," Fletcher told her. He kissed her on the back of the neck and Olivia on top of the head. "For future reference, it usually works better to give her dry cereal in a bowl and the milk separately in a glass. She's still getting the hang of spoons."

  "I tried." Debi fought to keep the petulance out of her voice and didn't quite succeed.

  "What? No, you did great! She's dressed and she's eating and she's not shaped like a snake, which puts you ahead of nearly every babysitter she's ever had."

  "Oh." Her chest warmed.

  Fletcher yawned and got out a bowl. "I was going to make W-A-F-F-L-E-S—" Olivia looked up at the rapid-fire spelling before turning her attention back to her fistful of Cheerios. "—but since you've both eaten, maybe we'll do it tomorrow. Or even for lunch. That sounds like a good rainy-day lunch to me." He looked out the rain-streaked window at the gray gloom over the city. "When the weather's nice, we go to the park on weekends, but I think today is a staying-inside kind of day. Sorry we're so boring."

  "You aren't boring at all," Debi said, a little bit shyly. "I don't mind staying inside. When I was a kid ..." She forced herself to stop. No one cares about your trivial childhood anecdotes, Debi. The voice in her head was very much like Roger's.

  But Fletcher had his full attention on her. "Go on. What'd you do when we were a kid?"

  "We'd make cookies and decorate them." She admitted it like a dirty secret. Memory rose up to engulf her: the floury disaster of the kitchen counters, the warm sweet smell of baking, the giggly teasing as she and Derek squished tubes of icing onto their cookies and tried to compete to make the most colorful cookie or the most ridiculous-looking one. Their hands had been as colorful as the cookies by the end.

  "That sounds like a lot of fun."

  "It was." Debi smiled wistfully. "My big sister Mara ran the show. She had all different kinds of sprinkles, and she'd mix up colored icing, then bring out the big box of cookie cutters. My brother Derek always wanted the lion one, but I loved the one that was shaped like a fish, for some reason. We never bothered waiting until the cookies were cool to decorate them, so the icing dribbled off and it was always a mess."

  "A very tasty mess, I'm sure."

  "Yeah, except the time we decided to flavor the icing with every bottle of flavoring in the kitchen so every cookie would be a surprise. Like the weird-flavored jelly beans in Harry Potter." She made a face. "Even Derek couldn't eat some of those cookies."

  Fletcher gave a soft laugh. "I can imagine. Hey, I didn't hear the magic word, snakelet." Olivia's small hand was creeping toward his bowl of Cheerios. Having been caught, she jerked it back with a giggle.

  "I hope you don't mind me rambling—" Debi began.

  "Not at all. I love hearing about your family. You know, I always used to envy the other kids who had big families and a lot of family traditions like that. I mean," he added quickly, "I know you lost your parents when you were young. I'm sure your life was tough in different ways than mine. It's just that my parents were usually too busy working to do anything like that, and after Dad got hurt, I took over doing most of the household chores. I remember how I'd imagine having a big family, everybody sitting around the table at Thanksgiving with a roast turkey in the middle of the table, instead of microwaved turkey breast and watching TV with Dad."

  "Fletcher—" she began.

  "No, don't indulge me; I know I'm being ridiculous about this. Sorry for the gloom trip. My childhood wasn't bad. My dad doted on me, I know that he did. He would've given me the world and it just about killed him—maybe did actually kill him, in the end—that he couldn't." He leaned over and kissed Olivia on top of her curls, making her giggle. "I get that now. There's nothing I wouldn't do for this little sprout here."

  I get it too. She thought of Fletcher growing up i
n a family that struggled to make ends meet, forced to take on adult responsibilities too soon. No wonder he wanted his daughter to have everything he hadn't.

  "You know what?" Fletcher went on. "I know we have baking supplies around here, flour and whatnot. How about a quick trip to the store to pick up sprinkles? You can show me which ones to get."

  "I ..." She couldn't find the words. "Fletcher, I wasn't suggesting anything. I was just reminiscing. We don't have to."

  "No, it sounds like fun. I enjoy cooking, but I'm usually too busy, and Olivia and I almost never cook anything together. She's getting old enough now that she might be able to help a lot." He nuzzled the top of her head. "What do you say, mini-me? Do you want Debi to show us how her family used to make cookies?"

  "Cookies!" was the gleeful response.

  "I—I wasn't ever in charge, though. Mara did all the work. I don't even know the recipe she used." She didn't know what made her balk, only that it felt as if she'd put her foot down on solid ground and instead found a very long step with darkness shrouding whatever lay at the bottom.

  "Could you call her and get the recipe?" Her expression must said more than words, because Fletcher winced. "Shi—uh, crud. Sorry. Didn't mean to put my foot in it. Hey, look, I bet there are tons of sugar cookie recipes online. We could use one of those."

  "I'm not going to be any good at doing this by myself," Debi protested.

  "But you won't be by yourself. We'll be doing it with you."

  And that was how she ended up at the grocery store on a rainy Saturday, watching Fletcher put one of everything in the cake decorating aisle into his basket while a raincoat-bundled Olivia dangled off his leg.

  "Fletcher, no, I didn't mean for you to spend a fortune on this!"

  "So? I've got the money. At least for now." His lips thinned briefly before he smiled. "And I figure, if we're going to do this, let's do it right."

  "But do we really need every color of spray icing they sell?"