Thin Skinned
A Lindi Parker Shifter Shield Prequel
Margo Bond Collins
Thin Skinned © 2019 Margo Bond Collins
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Thin Skinned: A Lindi Parker Weresnake Prequel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Thin Skinned
Sometimes, being a snake shifter just isn’t scary enough.
Lindi Parker wants to spend her life helping people—it’s why she became a counselor in the first place.
The one thing she absolutely does not want to do is let anyone know that she’s actually a snake shifter.
Occasionally, those two goals come into conflict. She just didn’t expect it to happen the first week at her new job.
But here she is, a python-shaped stowaway in a car engine, hurtling toward a showdown with a group of drug dealers planning to spirit a child out of the country.
This might require a little creativity.
And a little more poison behind her fangs.
When she accepts a new job, Lindi takes on more than she anticipated in this prequel to the bestselling Shifter Shield urban fantasy novel Under Her Skin!
Chapter 1
I think I have an ethics problem.
I realized half a second after the thought passed through my mind that it probably was not the most pressing issue I had to deal with.
I was, after all, curled into the engine of a car racing along at seventy miles per hour.
More significantly, I was in my snake shifter form. The one I tried never to let anyone but my family see. The one I avoided taking in public. The car was almost certainly headed from north central Texas straight down to Mexico, and unless I figured out a way to kidnap a child from its parents and sneak away, I was probably going with it. Assuming I didn’t get caught first—and possibly also killed for being a snake in the engine.
A week before, I’d never had problems like this. Of course, a week before I was still a grad student finishing up my training as a licensed counselor.
Now I was a contract counselor for Sams & Sams & Associates, a law firm that did a lot of work on behalf of children.
I was also a python in a car engine—oddly enough, also on behalf of a child.
I’d started my new job—as a counselor, not a python—four days ago. That was the day before I met Paige Beaumont and her parents.
On paper, my new employers were a typical firm specializing in family law. In reality, almost half their cases involved acting as the amicus or ad litem attorney for a child—a lawyer appointed to see to the best interests of the child in a court case. Usually a custody case.
When she’d hired me, Yolanda Sams had warned me that the law firm she and her husband Keith owned was behind and would put me to work immediately. Keith had reiterated the comment. And they hadn’t been lying when they told me they would throw me in to sink or learn to swim from the first day.
“Come on, Lindi,” Yolanda had said. “I’ll show you to our file room. If ever you don’t have anything assigned to you, you can come in and read up on our current and pending cases.”
I never had a chance to do that—I got handed a case on day two. That first case dealt with Baby Paige. That’s what her family called her—I assumed she was named after someone else who was the adult version of the Paige in that family.
I did some quick brushing up on the case before they came in on my first full day in the office, sitting down at the desk in my tiny side office and flipping through the manila file folders that Yvette Barnes, the attorney acting on behalf of Baby Paige, had passed to me that morning after a quick staff meeting.
My firm’s job was to figure out what was in the child’s best interest. My job was to make sure the child was cared for. And that meant I had to interview everyone involved.
Basically, the case came down to the fact that Baby Paige’s aunt, Courtney, wanted to take custody of her, in no small part because Baby Paige’s parents had recently been arrested for distribution of cocaine and methamphetamines.
Drug dealers. Fabulous. Still, that didn’t preclude their right to raise their child. I knew that much. And I was trying to keep an open mind, though I kind of wanted to declare in the aunt’s favor right up front.
But that wasn’t my job. I needed to assess the entire situation. I read through the attorney’s notes on the aunt’s comments. Her argument was that unless Paige’s parents got clean, they were in no shape to maintain custody, and that their recent arrests proved that.
“I’m stable, and my sister and her husband are not,” Courtney Mingus said almost as soon as she sat down in the comfortable, upholstered chair across from me. She wore jeans and a t-shirt, neither fancy, but both clean, and her dark brown hair was pulled away from her pale face in a low ponytail. Her file said she was mid-twenties, my age, but I would have put her about five years older.
“They’re both drug addicts,” she continued, “and I suspect they’re drug runners, too.” She glanced off to
