Free Grayslake: Lion to Get Her (Alpha Lion Shifter Romance) (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 8) by Lynn Red Page B

sagging her shoulders. “You really do think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
    “We’re all crazy, baby,” Elaine responded. “But no, my point is that something’s eating you alive and it has been for a long, long time. I’ve never seen you in a slump this bad and before you respond with some kind of pithy answer to what I’m saying, it doesn’t have anything to do with sex.”
    “Gee, thanks,” Laney said, frowning. “I guess I should take that as a compliment, but I’m not sure exactly how I’m supposed to do that. Mind explaining what it is that you mean?”
    “I mean you’re brilliant and,” she paused for a second to scratch. “Listen, compliments aren’t exactly my strong suit, but no matter how I act most of the time, you’re my best friend and I am here for you. Anyway, you’re brilliant and you’re beautiful and you have no reason to feel shitty all the time, but it seems like any more that’s exactly what’s going on.”
    For a long moment, Laney just sat there, alternating between listening and thinking. Maybe it’s true , she thought, biting down on her bottom lip. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I’m just some kind of emotional loose cannon with no sense of self control or sense of being reasonable. “Oh God,” Laney said, as the realization hit her square in the stomach like a locomotive plowing straight into Superman’s brain and bouncing off. “I’m lonely, aren’t I?”
    Instead of replying verbally, Elaine just twitched one of her eyebrows into a shape resembling a triangle. She had this way of making Laney work her way to conclusions that Laney would never reach on her own, but at the same time, getting Laney to think that she was the one who came up with the thought in the first place.
    She’d learned a long, long time ago that the best way to get a stubborn-as-fuck lioness to come around to your perspective was by convincing them that they had the perspective all along . It was a good thing that Elaine grew up the youngest sister, and the brothers just above her in the pecking order were twins who turned thirteen when she was ten. Turns out, those lessons applied in all sorts of situations. Not just controlling hormonal, half-wild teenaged boys, but they could also apply very well to getting hormonal, half-wild lioness thirtysomethings to come around to reason and come down from the ledges that they got themselves all wound up on from time to time.
    And somewhere deep in her brain, Laney appreciated it. She couldn’t count how many times Elaine had gotten her to take a few breaths and tune down the blood pressure when nothing else possibly could.
    “Thanks, Wendy,” Laney said.
    Elaine shrugged and gave her a brief smile. The other thing she’d learned over the years of being friends with Laney was not to gloat when she was right. It isn’t like Laney went crazy or anything, she was just sort of prickly about certain things, and that was the biggest.
    “No, seriously, I know you’re doing that thing where you don’t want to get me wound up, but I really appreciate what you said. And I appreciate you listening to me. We aren’t the warmest and cuddliest friends, but I’d be a mess without you.”
    “I know,” Elaine said with another grin. “But now you have to deal with them ,” she hissed, drawing back like Dracula seeing a cross as the Kiddie Time crowd filed in and started looking around.
    “Miss Langston!” she immediately recognized the voice as the high-pitched, adorably-lisped girl who first warned her about the presence of the man who had complicated every single second of her life since his discovery. It seemed like a damn eternity, even though it had only been three days since they met.
    “Miss Langston!” the little girl repeated, this time punctuating her call with a tug on Laney’s shirt. “How’s your boyfriend? Did he ever get what it was he was moaning and carrying on about?”
    “I, uh,” Laney turned bright red, an