He dropped a kiss on my uncovered shoulder. “As long as we’re infant-free 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,
