“If you want to find out what happened to your brother, you will tell us where you are.” Her mother’s voice was firm and unyielding.
Fury boiled up inside Lainey, and for a brief moment, resignation. She needed to know where her brother was. She’d have to tell them where she was. Then they’d come out here and find a way to drag her back to Philly. Goodbye to freedom, she thought.
How could her parents be so heartless? How could they sound so calm when Donny was hurt?
And then a terrible suspicion swept over her. If something had happened to her, yes, they certainly would sound this calm. But to Donavan? No way. They’d be frantic, hysterical. He was, had always been, the favored child. Handsome, athletic, not fat…her parents had indulged his every whim. If they were shopping and he glanced at a toy, they rushed to buy it for him. They skipped Lainey’s plays and piano recitals because they were always too busy with work, but they went to every soccer game, every basketball game, of Donny’s.
If anything, Lainey felt they held a good portion of the blame for Donny going off the rails when he was in his teens. He knew that he never had to face consequences for anything. Every time he got in trouble, their parents rushed to blame everybody else and assure Donny that he could do no wrong.
“Hello?” her mother snapped. “Do you care about your brother at all?”
“Donny isn’t injured, is he?” Lainey asked. “You actually used that against me to trick me into calling you back. How could you? Just when I thought you couldn’t stoop any lower…”
Both her parents yelled into the phone at the same time.
“Everything that we did, we did for you!” her father shouted.
“Are you calling me a liar? How could you speak to your mother that way?” her mother yelled.
“I cannot believe you did this. I’m going to hang up, and call Donovan right now. If I can’t reach him, I’ll call his wife, or his work. I will let them know that my parents told me that he was seriously injured, and I just wanted to find out if it was true or not.”
“Don’t you dare.” Her mother’s voice rose in hysteria. “Don’t you dare tell anyone we said that.”
“Goodbye. I’m changing my phone number.” Furious, she hung up the phone.
She’d give Donny her new number. Donavan was as exasperated with their parents as she was. He didn’t like their social climbing, their obsession with appearances, or the way they treated his sweet but socially un-impressive wife and belittled her career as a nurse.
Lainey began pacing angrily on the grass. How did her parents always do this to her? Was she really such a selfish person, to want to marry for love, and only for love?
She should have smelled a rat from the beginning. Of course someone like Miles wouldn’t be interested in someone like her. Her stomach turned over at the memory of the phone conversation she’d overheard.
Doubt began to creep in, wrapping dark tendrils around her heart and squeezing hard. Were her parents right? Was Miles the best she could ever hope for? Should she call them back and— Shouts of terror rang through the air, jerking her out of her gloomy reverie. Childish shouts of terror.
She ran towards the sound, and broke into a small clearing where a child had climbed onto the end of a very skinny branch on a massive oak tree. The branch was fifty feet off the ground, bending under the child’s weight and about to snap.
A group of wolf-shifter children were gathered around the base of the tree, shrieking in panic, screaming “Felix! Get down!”
Chapter Four
Lainey looked up at the tree and made a split second assessment. If there was one area of life where a bobcat shifter had mad skills, it was tree climbing. Shifting would destroy her clothes, of course, but it couldn’t be helped.
Within an instant, faster than she’d ever shifted before, she was in bobcat form, racing towards the tree. Her claws shot out, and with a mighty leap, she sank them into the bark and then shot straight up the trunk, branches whacking her in the face, adrenaline jolting through her.
She ran along a sturdy branch that was below the one the little wolf-shifter cub was clinging to, and leaped up, catching his shirt in her jaws just as the branch gave way underneath him with a crack.
Her leap carried her down to another branch, where she landed with a thud, clinging to him for dear life, claws sinking into the wood. Then she leaped from branch to branch until they’d safely reached the ground, where she deposited him in the grass.
Her clothing lay in shreds on the ground. She grabbed up her skirt in her jaws and ran behind a bush, where she shifted back into human form.
“Don’t come back here, I’m not decent!” she called out to the kids, who ignored her, racing around the bush.