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.