“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.
It was Friday night, and business was brisk. Happily, the service was fast.
After the waitress took our orders, Adam said, a little too casually, “So what did you see in your vision?”
“Nothing embarrassing,” I told him. “Just one time when I brought cookies over to you.”
His eyes brightened. “I see,” he said, and his shoulders relaxed a bit, even if his cheeks reddened. “I was thinking about that.”
“We okay?” I asked him. “I’m sorry I intruded.”
He shook his head. “No apologies necessary. You’re welcome to whatever you pick up.”
“So,” I said casually, “your first time was under the bleachers, huh?”
He jerked his head up.
“Gotcha. Warren told me.”
He smiled. “Cold and wet and miserable.”
The waitress plunked our food down in front of us and hurried on her way. Adam fed me bites of his rare filet mignon, and I fed him some of my salmon. Food was good, company better, and if I had been a cat, I’d have purred.
“You look happy.” He took a sip of his coffee and stretched out a leg so his foot was against mine.
“You make me happy,” I told him.
“You could be happy all the time,” he said, eating the last bite of baked potato, “and move in with me.”
To wake up next to him every morning . . . but . . . “Nope. I’ve caused you enough trouble,” I told him. “The pack and I need to come to . . . détente before I’m moving in. Your home is the den, the heart of the pack. They need a place where they feel safe.”
“They can adjust.”
“They’re adjusting as fast as they can,” I told him. “First there was Warren—did you hear that after you let him in, several other packs have allowed gay wolves to join, too? And now there’s me. A coyote in a werewolf pack—you have to admit that’s quite a lot of change for one pack to take.”
“Next thing you know,” he said, “women will have the vote or a black man will become president.” He looked serious, but there was humor in his voice.
“See?” I pointed my fork at him. “They’re all stuck in the eighteen hundreds, and you’re expecting them to change. Samuel likes to say that most werewolves have all the change they can deal with the first time they become wolf. Other kinds of change are tough to force on them.”
“Peter and Warren are the only ones who’ve been around since the eighteen hundreds,” Adam told me. “Most of them are younger than I am.”
The waitress came and blinked a little as Adam ordered three desserts—werewolves take a lot of food to keep themselves fueled up. I shook my head when she looked my way.
When she left, I took up the conversation from where I’d left off. “It won’t hurt us to wait a few months until things settle down.”
If he hadn’t basically agreed with me, I’d have been sleeping in his house already instead of making do with dates. He understood as well as I did that pulling me into his pack had caused a lot of resentment. Maybe if it had been a healthy, well-adjusted pack beforehand, things wouldn’t have gotten so tense.
A few years ago, some of his pack had started harassing me—a coyote living next door. Werewolves, like their natural brethren, are territorial, and they don’t share their hunting ground easily with other predators. So to put a stop to it, Adam declared me his mate. I hadn’t known at the time why the harassment abruptly stopped—and Adam hadn’t been in a hurry to tell me. But pack magic demanded that the declaration be answered, and Adam bore the cost when it wasn’t. It left him weaker, crabbier, and less able to help his pack stay calm, cool, and collected. By bringing me in as a member of his pack at virtually the same time our mating bond connected, Adam hadn’t given his people a chance to get their feet underneath them before throwing them back onto uncertain ground.
“One more month,” he said finally. “And then they—and Samuel, too—will just have to get used to it.” His eyes, the color of bitter dark chocolate, were serious as he leaned forward. “And you will marry me.”
I smiled, showing my teeth. “Don’t you mean, ‘Will you marry me?’ ”
I meant it to be funny, but his eyes brightened until little gold flecks were swimming in the darkness. “You had your chance to run, coyote. It’s too late now.” He smiled. “Your mother is happy that she’ll be able to use some of the stuff from your sister’s wedding that wasn’t.”