I checked my watch. “Maybe ten or twelve minutes?”
“I’m a little surprised she’s not crying yet. That’s hungry work.” With a sure touch, he shifted her from one arm to his shoulder and balanced her there with one hand as he used the other to dig through the small black diaper bag Dr. Jimson had sent with me.
He pulled out a bottle of baby formula, already prepackaged, and a separate nipple from another section of the bag.
“Put these together for me?” He held out the items. I took them, a little bemusedly, and began figuring out how they all fit together.
When I had the bottle ready, I handed it to him. He had spent the intervening few minutes talking to Serena, his voice sweet and quiet.
“Is this what ‘supportive whatever’ looks like?” I asked as I handed him the bottle. He slipped it into Serena’s mouth, and once she was suckling happily, he grinned up at me.
“This is exactly what supportive whatever looks like.”
I dropped onto the bed next to him, sitting as heavily and suddenly as if my knees had actually given out. In actuality, they only felt like they had. “I think I might love you more right now than I ever have before,” I said, leaning my head over to rest it on his shoulder.
“Now,” he said, “tell me what you were so angry about when I came in.”
So I did. Everything, from my dad inviting Shane the grad student to come hang out, apparently in the actual hopes that he would see Serena changing, to the moment when I had shoved past Shane and out of the herpetarium entirely.
By the time I finished talking, I was furious all over again. “And it’s like he has completely betrayed everything he ever knew about me. We spent my entire childhood keeping what I was a secret—and from what I’ve learned about the shifter world, that might have been what kept me alive. If people had known—if shifters had known—that I was a survivor of whatever extermination program y’all had put in place, I probably would’ve been assassinated. I do not want for these children to face something that terrible.”
“And absolute secrecy is the only model you have for dealing with a dangerous situation like this?”
I glared at him. “Don’t try to use counselor-speak on me. I know what you’re doing.”
Kade moved Serena to his other arm, and I forced myself not to melt at the sight of him handling her so competently, so calmly.
“I did go to medical school, you know,” he said. “We had a pretty substantial psychiatric series. I did a rotation in psych.”
Shaking my head, I reached out and took Serena from him, holding her up onto my shoulder and patting her back. “No. It’s not the only possibility. But yes, it is my childhood model for dealing with a potentially dangerous situation that involves children who are also shifters.”
“Have you considered possibly giving your father’s idea a try?” Kade’s gaze was a little too direct, a little too innocent.
“You’re in on this, aren’t you?” I asked.
He stretched out on his side on the bed, cupping his head in the hand on his propped-up elbow so that his biceps bulged.
“Don’t try to distract me by posing like some pinup boy,” I said, trying hard not to laugh.
Kade snorted and began trying other poses for me. “What about this one? Is this distracting enough?”
“Scoot over, you smartass.” I slid Serena onto the bed between us and stretched out beside Kade. I put my head down along my arm and looked up at him. “Do you really think it’s a good idea?”
His mouth twisted a little as he considered. “I’m just not sure it’s a bad idea. It may be an impossible idea, at this point. Now that he’s seen a shift, he may run screaming in the other direction.”
“About that...”
“What did you leave out?” Kade’s voice was flat.
“When I told him that no one would believe him? I might have shifted my eyes and teeth a little.”
Kade shook his head, but he didn’t actually seem bothered by it.
“As long as he didn’t get pictures, no one will ever believe him. And with the things they can do with photo manipulation, no one would believe him anyway.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. I didn’t want to admit how much my instant, furious reaction had been worrying me.
“Okay,” I said. “If that little incident didn’t send him screaming into the wilderness, I will consider the possibility that someone like Shane Wills the grad student might be helpful as we attempt to raise up to eight snake shifter babies.”
“There’s no we in this. I’m merely the supportive whatever, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sure you are.” I reached my hand over to run it along the side of his face. “So what are you doing out here, anyway? Not that I’m not glad to see you, but I thought you were on duty all weekend at the hospital.”
“One of the other ER doctors had a request in to see if anyone could switch out for a different weekend next month—I thought I’d take him up on it and come see how you girls are doing.”
Yeah, right. Supportive whatever, my ass.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said aloud. “But you may have come out here for nothing. Dr. Jimson wanted me to bring Serena back in if she shifted. I should probably go do that now.”
“Why don’t you let me drive the two of you back into town?” Kade asked.
“But my car is out here.”
He shrugged. “Maybe we could come out again tonight and shift.” He looked at me with raised eyebrows. All too often, our shifting time spent together ended up with us back in our human forms having wild, passionate sex in the dirt.
“I think that sounds like an absolutely perfect idea,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He gathered up all the baby gear, and as
