“Everything,” I said.
She gave her tennis shoes a rueful glance, but turned on the shower and stepped into the big stall, shoes, clothes, and all.
“I’ll go get clean clothes,” I told her.
Adam met me at the hall doorway. He jerked his chin toward the bathroom, where anyone could clearly hear that someone was showering. “Scent,” he said.
“Her clothes were very dirty,” I told him a little smugly. “Even her shoes.”
“Sh—” He bit it off before he could complete the word. Adam was a little older than he looked. He’d been raised in the fifties, when a man didn’t swear in front of women. “Shoot,” he said, the word obviously not giving him the satisfaction to be gotten out of cruder terms.
“Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach,” I agreed. He looked blank, so I repeated it with proper emphasis. “ChEEZ-zes crusty. Got Al-musty. Got DAMp on the StoneofapeaCH. My foster father used to say those around me all the time. He was an old-fashioned sort of wolf, too. He especially liked the Stoneofapeach. ‘Stoneofapeach, Mercedes. You don’t have the sense God gave little apples.’”
Adam closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the door frame.
“Gonna be expensive if you break another wall,” I offered helpfully.
He opened his eyes and looked at me.
I threw up my hands. “Fine. You want to support the Carpenters’ Union, that’s your business. Now move, I told Jesse I’d be back with clothes.”
He stepped back with exaggerated courtesy. But when I walked past him, he swatted my rump. Hard enough to sting.
“You need to be more careful,” he growled. “Keep interfering in my business and you might get hurt.”
I said sweetly as I continued to Jesse’s room, “The last man who swatted me like that is rotting in his grave.”
“I have no doubt of it.” His voice was more satisfied than contrite.
I turned to face him, yellow eyes and all.
“I’m thinking of picking up a parts car for the Syncro. I have plenty of room in the field.”
Someone listening in might have thought my last comment was off topic, but Adam knew better. I’d been punishing him with my Rabbit parts car for several years. Clearly visible from his bedroom window, it now sat on three tires and had various pieces missing. The graffiti was Jesse’s suggestion.
If Adam hadn’t been as uptight, it wouldn’t have worked—but he was one of those “everything in its place and a place for everything” kind of people. It bothered him—a lot.
Adam grinned briefly in appreciation, then his face sobered. “Tell me you, at least, had the brains to catch their scent.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why would I do that? Then instead of harassing Jesse, you’d be tormenting me.”
One of them had been a stranger to me, but the other…there was something about his scent that was ringing a bell, but I’d wait until I was out of here before I tried to work it out.
He gave a bark of fierce laughter.
“Liar,” he said.
He took two quick steps forward, wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, and held me for his kiss. I hadn’t expected it—not while he was still so close to changing. I’m sure that’s why I didn’t pull out of his hold.
The first touch of his lips was soft, tentative, asking where his hands had demanded. The man was diabolical. I could have resisted force, but the question of his kiss was an entirely different matter.
I leaned into him because he asked with the light touch and the gentle withdrawal of his lips that begged me to follow where he led. The heat of his body, welcome in the overcooled house, rewarded me as I leaned closer to him, as did the hard planes of his body, so I was drawn to press even tighter against him.
He danced like that, too. Leading instead of pulling. It had to have been deliberate, something he worked at, because he was as dominant as they came—Alphas are. But Adam was more than just dominant: he was smart, too. And he didn’t play fair.
Which is how he ended up against the wall with me plastered all over him when someone…Darryl, quietly cleared his throat.
I jerked free and hopped back to the middle of the hallway. “I’ll just get Jesse’s clothes now,” I told the carpet on the floor and then took my red face into Jesse’s room and shut the door. I didn’t mind getting caught kissing, but that had been a lot more carnal than a kiss.
Sometimes good hearing isn’t a blessing.
“Sorry,” Darryl said, though his voice carried more amusement than apology.
“I bet,” growled Adam. “Damn it. This has got to stop.”
Darryl gave a full-throated laugh that lasted quite a while. I’d never heard him laugh like that. Darryl was pretty uptight usually.
“Sorry,” he said again, sounding more apologetic this time. “Looked to me like you’d rather it not stop.”
“Yeah.” Adam sounded suddenly tired. “I should have gone after her a long time ago. But after Christy got through with me, I wasn’t sure I wanted another woman ever. And Mercy is more gun-shy than I ever was.” Christy was his ex-wife.
“Then Samuel came to compete for the prize,” Darryl said.
“I am not a prize,” I muttered.
I knew they both heard me, but all he said was, “Samuel has always been the competition. I prefer him here, so at least I’m competing with a flesh-and-blood man, and not a memory.”
“If you’re going to talk about me behind my back,” I told Adam, “at least do it where I can’t hear you.”
They must have followed my request because I didn’t hear any more of their conversation. The shower was still going, so I sat down in the middle of Jesse’s room—pulled a bottle of nail polish out from under one hip—and then took the opportunity to pull myself together. Adam was right; this had gone on too long.
Samuel had been behaving himself like an angel, for the most part—and Adam had been likewise. But it seemed to me that Adam had been more restless than usual and his temper more uncertain.
That was troubling news because Adam had a hot temper, worse even than most werewolves. Otherwise, Samuel had told me, the Marrok would have used Adam more heavily as one of the spokesmen for the werewolves. He had the looks and the speaking abilities for it. Adam had attracted some attention from the press anyway because he was doing some consulting and negotiating in Washington, D.C. His control was very, very good, but when he lost it, he went berserk and the Marrok wouldn’t risk it.
I was pretty sure that Adam would have exploded over Jesse’s bruises anyway—but maybe he’d have regained his control better if he hadn’t already been on edge.
Jesse’s door opened and Honey came in, shutting the door behind her. Honey was one of those people who can make me feel grubby, even when I’m wearing a perfectly presentable T-shirt. She could have been a recruitment poster model for the trophy wife. She intimidated me in an entirely different way than the werewolves usually did, and it had taken me a long time to get over it.
She stepped gingerly over the usual teenager mess that Jesse had scattered on her floor—Jesse’s room looked even worse than mine usually did, which made it pretty bad.
“You’ve got to do something, Mercedes,” she told me softly. As long as the rest of the pack was downstairs, they wouldn’t hear us. “The whole pack is restless and short-tempered—and Adam almost lost it today. Pick someone, Adam or Samuel, it doesn’t matter. But you have to do it soon.” She hesitated. “When Adam declared you his mate—”
For my safety, he said, and he was probably right. Timber wolves will kill a coyote in their territory—and werewolves are every bit as territorial as their smaller brethren.
“He didn’t ask me,” I interrupted her, with heat. “I wasn’t there and I didn’t find out about it until it was done. It wasn’t my fault.”
She shook her mane of honey-colored hair and crouched down beside me. If she could have seen the floor, I think she’d have been sitting l
ike I was, because she was technically lower in the pack (thanks to Adam declaring me his mate), but she was too fastidious to sit on a pile of dirty clothes.
“I’m not saying it is anyone’s fault,” she said. “Fault doesn’t change what is. We can all feel it, the weakness in the pack. It is allowed for you to refuse him absolutely, and then things will return to normal. Or accept him, and things will change another way, a better way. But until then…” She shrugged.
It was easy, even for someone like me who was around them all the time, to forget that there was more to the magic of the werewolves than their change. I think it’s because the change was so spectacular—and the rest of the magic is the pack’s business and affects no one else. I didn’t consider myself pack—and until Adam had made his claim, no one else had either.
My foster father told me once that he was always aware on some level of all the other pack members. They knew when one of their own was in distress; they knew when one died. When my foster father committed suicide, it took a while for them to find the body, but they’d all known when to go looking. I’d seen Adam call his pack to him with more than the sound of his voice and had seen them heal him of silver damage that should have killed him.
I hadn’t realized that there might be more to Adam declaring me his mate than the simple act until I’d been able to help Warren control his wolf when he was too hurt to do it himself. I’d been grateful, but I hadn’t looked at it any closer.
I was getting a headache; dread sometimes does that to me. “Tell me that again and be clear, please.”
“When he declared you his mate, he offered you an invitation to join us. He opened a place for you that you have not filled. That opening is a weakness. Adam mostly keeps it from us, but he only does it by absorbing all of the effects himself. His wolf knows there is a weakness, a place where harm might come to us, and it leaves him on alert, on edge, all the time. We can feel that, and respond to it.” She gave me a tight smile. “That’s why I was so unpleasant to you when he sent me to play bodyguard against the vampires. I thought you were playing games and leaving us to pay the price.”
No. No game playing. Just a lot of panicking. Whomever I chose in the end, Adam or Samuel, I’d lose the other one—and that was more than I could bear.
“All of us depend upon our Alpha to help us live among the humans,” Honey said. “Some of Adam’s wolves have human women as mates. It is his willpower that allows us to control ourselves, particularly as the moon nears her zenith.”
I put my aching head on my knees. “What was he thinking? Damn it.”
She patted me on the shoulder, an awkward touch that managed to convey both comfort and sympathy. “I don’t think he was thinking of anything except to place his claim on you before another wolf killed or claimed you.”
I gave her a look of disbelief. “What is going on? Is everyone losing their minds? I haven’t had so much as a date for ten years and now there’s Adam and Samuel and—” I’d have bitten off my tongue before I continued and mentioned Stefan. I hadn’t seen the vampire since he and the Wizard had killed two innocents to take the blame for killing Andre so Marsilia didn’t kill me. It was just as well as he wasn’t my favorite person.
“I know why Samuel wants me,” I told her.
“He thinks that the two of you could have children—and you can’t forgive him for wanting you for practical reasons.” There was something in Honey’s voice that told me that she liked Samuel—and maybe it hadn’t been just my perceived “game playing” with Adam and her pack that she’d resented. But the expression on her face told me more. She understood Samuel’s point from experience; she wanted children, too.
I don’t know why I started talking to Honey. I didn’t know her that well—and had spent most of that time disliking her. Maybe it was because there was no one else I knew who was in a position to understand.
“I don’t blame Samuel for realizing that a shapeshifter who changed into a coyote and was not bound by the moon might be a good mate,” I told her, speaking very quietly. “But he let me love him without telling me exactly why he was so interested. If the Marrok hadn’t interfered, I’d probably have been his mate when I was sixteen.”
“Sixteen?” she said.
I nodded.
“Peter is a lot older than me,” she said, speaking of her husband. “That was hard. But I wasn’t sixteen and…” She paused, thinking. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t recall ever hearing how old Samuel is, but he’s older than Charles, and Charles dates back to Lewis and Clark.”
The outrage that filtered into her voice, still pitched not to carry to the other werewolves, was like a balm. It gave me the courage to tell her a bit more.
“I am happy with who I am,” I told her. “The incident with Samuel let me break with the pack and join the human world. I’m independent and good at my job. It’s not glamorous, but I like fixing things.”
“And still,” she said, voicing the thing I hadn’t said.
I nodded. “Exactly. And still…what if I’d taken him up on his offer? I tell myself that I’d be a lesser person, but Samuel isn’t the kind of man to iron all the personality out of his wife. Half the trouble I got into when I was a teen he got me into—and got me out of the other half.”
“So you’d be a doctor’s wife, and free to do as you please—because Samuel’s not the control freak that most of the dominant males are.”
There it was. Oh, not Samuel. She, like most people, saw what he wanted them to see. Gentle, laid-back Samuel. Hah.
But, I’d always wondered why Honey had married her husband, who was so far down in the pack power structure when she was as dominant as all but the top two or three wolves. Since she took her rank from her husband, she was a lot lower than she’d been before she’d taken Peter as her mate. There weren’t actually all that many submissive wolves out there. The kind of determination it takes to survive the Change isn’t usually found in a person who isn’t at least a little dominant.
“Samuel is as much a control freak as any of them. He just hides it better,” I said. “The reality of it is that he’d have wrapped me in cotton wool and protected me from the world. I’d never have grown or become the person I am.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Like what, a mechanic? You work for less than minimum wage. I saw Gabriel do the paychecks—he clears more than you do.”
I’d been wrong. She’d never understand.
“Like owning my own business,” I told her, though I knew it was futile to expect her to comprehend what I meant. I’d turned down everything that she’d wanted out of life—status, both in the werewolf world and the human one, and money. “Like being able to take something that doesn’t work and fix it. Like being able to hold my own with Adam today instead of falling on my knees and looking at the ground. Like deciding what I’m going to do every day—including going after that demon-riding vampire who almost killed Warren. I’m not all that, especially not compared to the werewolves, but you have to admit that I was uniquely suited to taking him out. The werewolves couldn’t. The vampires and fae wouldn’t. What would have happened if I hadn’t been able to kill him? Samuel would never let his wife risk her life to do something like that.”
I realized something then. As scary as it had been (and I had the nightmares and the scars to prove it), as stupidly dangerous as it still was—and possibly deadly—I was proud of killing those two vampires. No one else would have been able to do it. Just me.
Samuel would never let me do something like that.
I could never have Samuel without giving up something I cherished about myself. It was the first time I’d let myself look at that because then I’d have to admit that Samuel could never be for me.
The question was, would Adam be any better? And if I took Adam, Samuel would leave. Part of me still loved Samuel, and I was not ready to give him up.
I was so screwed.
“You think that Adam would have let you go after that thing if you were
his mate?” asked Honey in disbelief.
Maybe.
“I didn’t mean to walk in on anything,” said Jesse in a small voice.
I realized that I hadn’t been hearing the water from the shower for a while. I hadn’t heard her approach either.
She’d wrapped a towel around herself, but she was still quick at closing the door behind her. She gave Honey a wary look, but then dismissed her.
“I overheard that last part,” she told me. “Dad told me to stay out of his affairs. But I thought you ought to know that he told me not too long ago that if you don’t fall out of a plane now and then, you never learn to fly.”
“He gave me bodyguards,” I told her dryly. Honey had been one of them.
She rolled her eyes at me. “He’s not stupid. But if there is something you have to do, he’ll be at your back.” I gave her an incredulous look and she rolled her eyes again. “Okay, okay, he’ll lead the way. But he won’t make you stay behind. He doesn’t waste his resources that way.”
When Jesse had been missing, and Adam too hurt to do anything about it, he’d all but recruited me to find her, knowing that the people who had her had almost killed him. For some reason that recollection let me breathe deeply again.
Knowing that I could not have Samuel hurt. I think giving up Adam might just break me—which didn’t mean that I might not have to anyway.
I hopped to my feet.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I told her and then changed the subject. “How are you feeling?”
She smiled and held out a rock-steady hand. “I’m fine. You were right; a hot shower really helped. I’ll have some bruises, but I’m all right. Gabriel helped, too. He’s right. I did defend myself, better than they expected. I know to watch for them now and…” Her smile widened just short of splitting her lip again. “Dad’s given me bodyguards.” She said it in the same exasperated tones I used.
chapter 7
Sometimes it seems like the distance between Adam’s house and mine changes. Just an hour or so earlier, it had taken me only a moment to get from my door to his. It took me a long time to walk back home and I mourned all the way.