Page 4 of Bears Behaving Badly
She turned and handed off the box to Oz Adway. “It’s not cupcakes.”
“No! My Monday is ruined!”
“It’s Tuesday, Oz.”
“Eclairs! Well. Three-point-five eclairs. This box was full when you bought it, wasn’t it?”
She snickered, which was answer enough, apparently, as Oz wasted no time fleeing back to the bowels of Accounting from whence he was spawned.
That’s one problem solved.Annette sighed and stared at her desk, briefly entertained the idea of turning all her paperwork into origami swans, then turned to Nadia, her facilitator-slash-colleague-slash-bane. “So. Dev Devoss and Caro Daniels?”
Nadia, who stood a foot shorter and dressed like she was the only one in the room worth looking at (which might be true), peered up at her. “How did it go?”
“What?”
“Your date with David Auberon.”
Annette stared. “Why does everyone think I went out with David Auberon?”
“We don’t. But speaking only for myself, I feel if I pretend it’s happening, eventually you’ll succumb.”
Annette rolled her eyes. “How romantic.”
“Oh, darling. Who said anything about romance?”
“One, it creeps me out when you call me ‘darling.’ Two, it also creeps me out when you decide to create an alternate reality in which you have arbitrarily decided that David Auberon and I are going out. Three, talk about work now.”
Nadia shrugged elegantly, which Annette hadn’t thought possible. The woman could probably clean the wax from her ears with verve and elegance. “As you like.”
“Dev Devoss and Caro Daniels,” Annette prompted.
“Dev got punched for shoplifting again.”
“Pinched, Nadia. Not punched. Your grip on American slang is greasy at best.”
“Don’t slang-shame me.” Nadia ruffled her hair, then settled. “Now about Dev—”
“Death by nagging—pretty sure that’s his immediate future. Apparently, I yell at him in my sleep.”
“It’s better than strangling him. And Caro Daniels is downstairs in holding.”
“My new lamb.” From force of long habit, this was more murmured than spoken aloud. The adults Annette worked with didn’t take it personally, but if it got back to any of her kids, the ones with a high prey drive might see it as an invitation to fight. “Did she sleep?”
“Yes. Almost immediately. And it seems to me that she’s been living ralph, too.”
“Living ‘rough.’ Wejustwent over this.”
“My point is that I believe she ran away.”
“That would have been my guess, too. Hardly unusual.” Troubled teens often bolted; that had been true for generations. But she’d noticed werewolf cubs were especially prone to it. And while she hated generalizing and stereotypes more than she hated those big puffy orange circus peanuts, more than one teenage Shifter had rebelled against the pack hierarchy, even if only for a few days. It was as if they needed to make a run for a solitary life before settling in.
She couldn’t relate. At all.
“Ah. There you are.” She’d rummaged through the sea of papers and come up with two files: Caro’s slim one, likely just the arrest report, and Dev’s vastly thicker one, which necessitated a three-inch binder. And tabs! Annette glanced through Caro’s arrest report: she’d been read her rights, made no statement, did not ask for a phone call. Endured an exam, weight and height—she glanced up at Nadia. “Malnourished, underweight, small build.”
“Indeed. It’s rather astonishing that she came out the winner.”
“That’s one word for it. And she hasn’t said anything?”
