He was lone wolfing it, living with me in the territory of the Columbia Basin Pack, but not part of it. I wasn’t a werewolf, but I wasn’t a helpless human, either. I’d been raised in his father’s pack, and that was close to being family. So far he and Adam, the local pack’s Alpha—and my lover—hadn’t killed each other. I was moderately hopeful that would continue to be the case.
“Samuel?” I called as I rushed into the house. “Samuel?”
He didn’t answer, but I could smell him. The distinctive odor of werewolf was too strong to be just a leftover trace. I jogged down the narrow hall to his room and knocked softly at the closed door.
It was unlike him not to acknowledge me when I got home.
I worried about Samuel enough to make myself paranoid. He wasn’t quite right. Broken, but functional, I thought, with an underlying depression that seemed to be getting neither better nor worse as the months passed. His father suspected something was wrong, and I was pretty sure the reason Samuel was living with me and not in his own house in Montana was because he didn’t want his father to know for certain how badly broken Samuel really was.
Samuel opened his door, looking his usual self, tall and rangy: attractive, as most werewolves are, regardless of bone structure. Perfect health, permanent youth, and lots of muscle are a pretty surefire formula for good looks.
“You rang?” he said in an expressionless imitation of Lurch, dropping his voice further into the bass register than I’d ever heard him manage. We’d been watching a marathon ofThe Addams Family on TV last night. If he was being funny, he was all right. Even if he wasn’t quite meeting my eyes, as if he might be worried about what I’d see.
A purring Medea was stretched across one shoulder. My little Manx cat gave me a pleased look out of half-slitted eyes as he stroked her. As his hand moved along her back, she dug in her hind claws and arched her tailless butt into the air.
“Ouch,” he said, trying to pull her off, but she’d gotten her claws through his worn flannel shirt and was hooked onto him tighter than Velcro—and more painfully, too.
“Uhm,” I told him, trying not to laugh. “Adam and I are going out tonight. You’re on your own for dinner. I didn’t make it to the grocery store, so the pickings are meager.”
His back was to me as he leaned over his bed so if he managed to unstick the cat, she wouldn’t fall all the way to the floor.
“Fine,” he said. “Ouch, cat. Don’t you know I could eat you in a single bite? You wouldn’t even—ouch—even leave a tail sticking out.”
I left him to it and hurried over to my own room. My cell rang before I made it to the doorway.
“Mercy, he’s headed over, and I’ve got some news for you,” said Adam’s teenage daughter’s voice in my ear.
“Hey, Jesse. Where are we going tonight?”
Thinking of him, I could feel his anticipation and the smooth leather of the steering wheel under his hands—because Adam wasn’t just my lover; he was my mate.
In werewolf terms, that meant something slightly different for every mated pair. We were bound not just by love, but by magic. I’ve learned that some mated pairs can barely perceive the difference . . . and some virtually become the same person. Ugh. Thankfully, Adam and I fell somewhere in the middle. Mostly.
We’d overloaded the magic circuit between us when we’d first sealed our bond. Since then it had proved to be erratic and invasive, flickering in and out for a few hours, then gone again for days. Disconcerting. I expect I’d have gotten used to having the connection to Adam already if it were consistent, as Adam assured me it should have been. As it was, it tended to take me by surprise.
I felt the wheel vibrate under Adam’s hand as he started the car, then he was gone, and I was standing in my grubbies talking to his daughter on the phone.
“Bowling,” she said.
“Thanks, kid,” I told her. “I’ll bring back an ice-cream cone for you. Gotta shower.”
“You owe me five bucks, though ice cream wouldn’t hurt,” she told me with a mercenary firmness I could respect. “You’d better shower fast.”
Adam and I had a game, a just-for-fun thing. His wolf playing with me, I thought, because it had that feel: a simple game with no losers was wolf play, something they did with the ones they loved. It didn’t happen often in the pack as a whole, but among smaller groups, yes.
My mate wouldn’t tell me where he was taking us—leaving it for me to discover his plans by whatever means necessary. It was a sign of his respect that he expected me to be successful.
Tonight, I’d bribed his daughter to call me with whatever she knew, even if it was just what he was wearing when he walked out the door. Then I’d be appropriately dressed—though I’d act astonished that we matched so well when I hadn’t a clue where he was taking me.
Play for flirting, but also play designed to distract both of us from the reason we were dating instead of living together as mates. His pack didn’t like it that his mate was a coyote shifter. Even more than their natural brethren, wolves don’t share territory well with other predators. But they’d had a long time to get used to it, and were mostly resigned—until Adam brought me into the pack. It shouldn’t have been possible. I’ve never heard of a nonwerewolf mate becoming pack.
I set out clothes to wear and hopped into the shower. The showerhead was set low, so it wasn’t hard to keep my braids out of the full force of the water as I scrubbed my hands with pumice soap and a nailbrush. I’d already cleaned up, but every little bit helped. A lot of the dirt was ingrained, and my hands would never look fashion-model tended.
When I emerged from the bathroom in a towel, I could hear voices in the living room. Samuel and Adam were deliberately keeping it soft enough that I couldn’t hear the words, but it didn’t sound like there was any tension. They liked each other just fine, but Adam was Alpha and Samuel a lone wolf who outpowered him. Sometimes they had trouble being in the same room together, but evidently not tonight.
I started to reach for the jeans I’d laid out on my bed.
Bowling.
I hesitated. I just couldn’t see it in my head. Not the bowling part—I was sure that Adam enjoyed bowling. Throwing a weighty ball at a bunch of helpless pins and watching the resultant mayhem is just the kind of thing that werewolves love.
What I couldn’t see was Adam telling Jesse he was taking me bowling. Not when he was trying to keep it from me. The last time all she’d been able to do was tell me what he was wearing when he left the house.
Maybe I was just being paranoid. I opened my closet and looked at the meager pickings hanging there. I had more dresses than I’d had a year ago. Three more.
Jesse would have noticed if he’d dressed up.
I glanced at the bed where my new jeans and a dark blue T-shirt summoned me with their comfort. Bribes can go both ways—and Jesse would find it amusing to play double agent.
So I pulled out a pale gray dress, classy enough that I could wear it to all but the most formal of occasions and not so dressy that it would look out of place at a restaurant or theater. If we really went bowling, I could bowl in the dress. I slipped into the dress and quickly unbraided my hair and brushed it out.
“Mercy, aren’t you ready yet?” asked Samuel, a touch of amusement in his voice. “Didn’t you say you had a hot date?”
I opened the door and saw I hadn’t gotten it quite right. Adam was wearing a tux.
Adam is shorter than Samuel, with the build of a wrestler and the face of . . . I don’t know. It is Adam’s face, and it is beautiful enough to distract people from the air of power that he conveys. His hair is dark, and he keeps it short. He told me once that it is so the military personnel that he has to deal with in the course of his security business feel comfortable with him. But these last few months, as I’ve gotten to know him better, I think it is because his face embarrasses him. The short hair removes any hint of vanity, and says, “Here I am. Let’s get down to business.”
I would love
him if he had three eyes and two teeth, but sometimes his beauty just hits me. I blinked once, took a deep breath, and brushed off the need to proclaim himmine so I could pull my mind back to interactive mode.
“Ah,” I said, snapping my fingers, “I knew I’d forgotten something.” I ran back to my closet and snagged a sparkly silver wrap that dressed the gray up appropriately.
I came back out to see Samuel giving Adam a five-dollar bill.
“I told you she’d figure it out,” Adam said smugly.
“Good,” I told him. “You can pay Jesse with that. She told me we were going bowling. I need to find a better spy.”
He grinned, and I had to work to keep my face annoyed. Oddly enough, given his face, it wasn’t the beauty of Adam-with-a-smile that delighted me when he grinned—though he really was spectacular. It was the knowledge that I’d made him smile. Adam was not given to . . . playfulness, except with me.
“Hey, Mercy,” Samuel said, as Adam opened the front door.
I turned to him, and he gave me a kiss on the forehead.
“You be happy.” The odd phrase caught my attention, but there was nothing odd in the rest of what he said. “I’ve got the red-eye shift. Most likely I won’t see you when you get back.” He looked up at Adam, meeting his eyes in a male-to-male challenge that had Adam’s eyes narrowing. “Take care of her.” Then he pushed us out and closed the door before Adam could take offense at the order.
After a long moment, Adam laughed and shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said, knowing the other wolf would hear him through the door. “Mercy takes care of herself; I just get to clean up the mess afterward.” If I hadn’t been watching his face, I wouldn’t have seen the twist on his lips as he spoke. As if he didn’t like what he was saying very much.
I felt suddenly self-conscious. I like who I am—but there are plenty of men who wouldn’t. I am a mechanic. Adam’s first wife had been all soft curves, and I am mostly muscle. Not very feminine, my mother liked to complain. And then there were those idiosyncrasies that were the aftermath of rape.
Adam held out his hand to me, and I put mine in his. He had gotten very good at inviting my touch. At not touching me first.
I looked at our clasped hands as we went down the porch stairs. I’d thought that I was getting better, that the involuntary flinching, the fear, was leaving. It occurred to me that maybe he was just getting better at working around my fears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, as we stopped beside his truck.
It was so new there was still a sticker on the rear-seat window. He’d replaced his SUV after one of his wolves had dented the fender defending me—followed by a separate incident when an ice elf (honking huge fae) who was chasing me dropped the front half of a building on it.
“Mercy—” He frowned at me. “You don’t owe me for the damned truck.”
His hand was still holding mine, and I had a moment to realize that our fickle mate bond had given him an insight into what I was thinking, before a vision dropped me to my knees.
* * *
IT WAS DARK, AND ADAM WAS AT HIS COMPUTER IN HIS home office. His eyes burned, his hands ached, and his back was stiff from so many hours of work.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. No wife to protect from the world. It had been a long time since he’d loved her—it is dangerous to love someone who doesn’t love you in return. He’d been a soldier too long to put himself deliberately in danger without a good reason. She loved his status, his money, and his power. She’d have loved it better if it had belonged to someone who did as she told him.
He didn’t love her, but he’d loved taking care of her. Loved buying her little presents, loved the idea of her.
Losing her had been bad; losing his daughter was much, much worse. Jesse trailed noise and cheer everywhere she went—and her absence was . . . difficult. His wolf was restless. A creature of the moment, his wolf. There was no way to comfort it with the knowledge that he’d have Jesse back for the summer. Not that he derived much comfort from that either. So he tried to lose himself in work.
Someone knocked on the back door.
He pushed back the chair and had to pause. The wolf was angry that someone had breached his sanctuary. Not even his pack had been brave enough these past few days to approach him in his home.
By the time he stalked into the kitchen, he had it mostly under control. He jerked open the back door and expected to see one of his wolves. But it was Mercy.
She didn’t look cheerful—but then, she seldom did when she had to come over and talk to him. She was tough and independent and not at all happy to have him interfere in any way with that independence. It had been a long time since someone had bossed him around the way she did—and he liked it. More than a wolf who’d been Alpha for twenty years ought to like it.
She smelled of burnt car oil, jasmine from the shampoo she’d been using that month, and chocolate. Or maybe that last was the cookies on the plate she handed him.
“Here,” she said stiffly. And he realized it was shyness that pinched in the corner of her mouth. “Chocolate usually helps me regain my balance when life kicks me in the teeth.”
She didn’t wait for him to say anything, just turned around and walked back to her house.
He took the cookies back to the office with him. After a few minutes, he ate one. Chocolate, thick and dark, spread across his tongue, its bitterness alleviated by a sinful amount of brown sugar and vanilla. He’d forgotten to eat and hadn’t realized it.
But it wasn’t the chocolate or the food that made him feel better. It was Mercy’s kindness to someone she viewed as her enemy. And right at that moment, he realized something. She would never love him for what he could do for her.
He ate another cookie before getting up to make himself dinner.
* * *
ADAM SHUT DOWN THE BOND BETWEEN US UNTIL IT was nothing more than a gossamer thread.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured against my ear. “So sorry. F—” He swallowed the obscenity before it left his lips. He pulled me closer, and I realized we were both sitting in the gravel driveway, huddled next to the truck. And the gravel was really cold on my bare skin.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Do you know what you showed me?” I asked. My voice was hoarse.
“I thought it was a flashback,” he answered. He’d seen me have them before.
“Not one of mine,” I told him. “One of yours.”
He stilled. “Was it bad?”
He’d been in Vietnam; he’d been a werewolf since before I was born—he’d probably seen a lot of bad stuff.
“It seemed like a private moment that I had no business seeing,” I told him truthfully. “But it wasn’t bad.”
I’d seen him the moment that I’d become something more than an assignment from the Marrok.
I remembered feeling stupid standing on his back porch with a plate of cookies for a man whose life had just gone down in the flames of a nasty divorce. He hadn’t said anything when he answered the door—so I’d assumed that he’d thought it stupid, too. I’d gone back home as fast as I could without running.
I had had no idea that it had helped. Nor that he saw me as tough and capable. Funny, I’d always thought I looked weak to the werewolves.
So what if I still flinched if he forgot and put a hand on my shoulder? Time would fix that. I was already a lot better: daily flashbacks to the rape were a thing of the past. We’d work through it. Adam was willing to make allowances for me.
And our bond did its rubber-band thing, which it did sometimes, and snapped back into place, giving him access to my thoughts as if my head were clear as glass.
“Whatever you need,” he said, his body suddenly still as the evening air. “Whatever I can do.”
I relaxed my shoulders, burying my nose against his collarbone, and after a second, the relaxation was genuine. “I love you,” I told him. “And we need to talk about me paying you for that truck.”
“I
’m not—”
I cut off his words. I meant to put a finger against his lips or something tender like that. But I’d jerked my head up in reaction to his apology and slammed my forehead into his chin. Shutting him up much more effectively than I’d meant to as he bit his tongue.
He laughed as he bled down his shirt, and I babbled apologies. He let his head fall back against the truck door with a thump.
“Leave off, Mercy. It’ll close up quick enough on its own.”
I backed up until I was sitting beside him—half-laughing myself, because although it probably hurt quite a bit, he was right that his injury would heal in a few minutes. It was minor, and he was a werewolf.
“You’ll quit trying to pay for the SUV,” he told me.
“The SUV was my fault,” I informed him.
“You didn’t throw a wall on it,” he said. “I might have let you pay for the dent—”
“Don’t even try to lie to me,” I huffed indignantly, and he laughed again.
“Fine. I wouldn’t have. But it’s a moot point anyway, because after the wall fell on it, fixing the dent was out of the question. And the ice elf’s lack of control was completely the vampire’s fault—”
I could have kept arguing with him—I usually like arguing with Adam. But there were things I liked better.
I leaned forward and kissed him.
He tasted of blood and Adam—and he didn’t seem to have any trouble following the switch from mild bickering to passion. After a while—I don’t know how long—Adam looked down at his bloodstained shirt and started laughing again. “I suppose we might as well go bowling after all,” he said, pulling me to my feet.
Chapter 2
WE STOPPED AT A STEAK HOUSE FOR DINNER FIRST.
He’d left the bloodstained coat and formal shirt in the car and snagged a dark blue T-shirt from a bag of miscellaneous clothes in the backseat. He’d asked me if he looked odd wearing a T-shirt with tuxedo pants. He couldn’t see the way the shirt clung to the muscles of his shoulders and back. I reassured him, truthfully—and with a straight face—that no one would care.
Silver Borne mt-5 Page 2
