“Good Samaritan Mercy,” Mary Jo muttered. “Shouldn’t we all be grateful for her charity?” She glanced around and realized she was the center of attention and flushed. “What? It’s true.”

Still on the phone, Adam looked at Mary Jo and held her—and everyone else in the room—silent with his gaze. He finished his business with the travel agent, then hung up the phone.

“That’s enough,” he said very softly, and Mary Jo flinched. He is quiet when he is really mad—right before people start dying. “This is not up for debate. It is time for everyone to go. Christy is not pack, was never pack. She was never my mate, only my wife. That means she is not pack business, and not your business.”

“Christy is my friend,” said Auriele hotly. “She needs help. That makes it my business.”

“Does it?” Adam asked her, clearly out of patience. “If it is your business, why did Christy call me, not you?”

She opened her mouth, and Darryl put a hand on her shoulder and led her out of the room. “Best leave well enough alone,” I heard him say before they left the house.

The wolves—including Mary Jo—slid out of the room without waiting for Adam to say anything more. We stood in the kitchen, Adam, Jesse, and I, waiting until the sounds of cars starting and driving away left us in silence. All the uniting benefit of this Sunday breakfast was gone like the last of the waffles.

“Jesse,” I said. “Your mother is welcome here.”

“You know what she’s like,” Jesse said passionately. “She’ll spoil everything. She can get people, can get Dad, to do things they had no intention of doing.”

“Not your problem,” I told her, while Adam’s face tightened because he agreed with Jesse.

“She can get me to do things, too.” Jesse’s face was desperate. “I don’t want you hurt.”

Adam’s hand came down on my shoulder.

“You are responsible for your own actions,” I told her. Told both of them. “Not hers. She’s not a werewolf, not Alpha. She can’t make you do anything unless you let her.”

I glanced up at the clock, though I knew what time it was. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I need to change clothes and head to church, or I’m going to be late.” I strode out of the kitchen, then gathered myself together and turned at the doorway. “Something tells me that I’ve got a lot of praying for patience and charity in my future.” I flashed them a grin I didn’t much feel, then left.

Church didn’t help a lot. I was still unsettled by the events of the morning when my back hit the mat on the floor of the garage. The impact forced the air from my lungs in an inelegant sound and drove my worries away. I snarled at my attacker—who snarled back with interest.

The snarl didn’t make Adam’s too-handsome features less handsome, but it would probably have scared anyone else. Me? I think I have some kind of subliminal death wish because Adam’s anger makes me go weak in the knees, and not in a terrified sort of way.

“What are you trying to do? Kill mosquitoes?” Adam was too mad to be aware of my reaction to his anger. “I’m a werewolf. I’m trying to kill you—and you smack me open-handed on my butt?”

Even with me on the ground, he stayed in sanchin dachi, a neutral-ready position that allowed him easy rotation for either strike or block. It also made him look pigeon-toed. Not a good look, even for Adam, but his thin t-shirt, wet with sweat, did its best to improve the picture.

“It’s a cute butt,” I said.

He rolled his eyes, released the stance, and took a step nearer to me.

“As for my hand on your cute butt,” I continued, letting my shoulders relax against the mat, “I was cleverly trying to distract you.”

He frowned at me. “Distract me from what? Your awesome, sneaky attack that left you lying on the floor?”

I twisted, catching him in front of the ankle with one foot as I put my whole weight behind the shin I slammed into the back of his knee. He started to lose his balance, and I rolled up with an elbow strike that hit the big muscle that ran up the back of his upper leg with charley-horse-causing force. As he went all the way down to hands and knees, I swung the wrench I’d snagged on my original fall and touched him on the back of the head with it.

“Exactly,” I said, pleased that I’d been able to lie well enough with my body language that I’d taken him unawares. He’d been fighting a lot longer than I, and he was bigger and stronger. I was very seldom able to best him while we were sparring.

Adam rolled over, rubbing his thigh to relieve the cramp I’d given him. He saw the wrench and narrowed his eyes at me—and then grinned and relaxed on the wrestling mat that covered half the garage floor. “I’ve always had the hots for the mean and sneaky women.”

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Sneaky I knew, but I didn’t know you liked mean. Okay, then. No more chocolate chip cookies for you. I’ll feed them to the rest of the pack instead.”

He sat up without using his hands, not showing off, but because he was just that strong. He wasn’t vain enough to realize how it made the muscles in his belly stand out under the meager cover of his shirt, and I wasn’t going to tell him.

Not that I had to. His mouth kicked up at the corners, and his chocolate eyes darkened a little as his nostrils flared, taking in the change that desire had made in my scent. He stripped off the shirt and wiped his face on it before tossing it to the side.

“I only like a little bit mean,” Adam confided in a low-husky voice that made my heartbeat pick up. “Withholding cookies is world-class mean.”

We’d been sparring every day since I’d had a fight with a nasty vampire named Frost. Adam decided that since I was going to keep getting into trouble, the only thing he could do was try to ensure I could get myself out of it, too. I was still doing karate with my sensei three times a week, and I could feel the difference all the extra practice was making in my fighting ability. Sparring with Adam meant that I could pay attention to fighting without worrying about hurting someone (werewolves are tough). It meant that I could ignore the need to hide what I was behind human-slow movement. Today, it also meant that I could forget that phone call this morning for a little while.

I leaned forward, putting my forehead against his sweat-slicked shoulder. He smelled good: the mint and musk of werewolf, clean sweat, and the blend of scents that was Adam. “No. If I were world-class mean, I’d have told Christy to go find someone else to save her.”

His arm came around me. “I don’t love her. I never loved her the way I love you. She needed someone to take care of her, and I like taking care of people. That’s all we had.”

He thought he meant it, but I knew better. I’d seen them together when times had been good. I’d seen the damage that herleaving had done to a man who took care of the people who belonged to him and didn’t let go of them easily. But I wasn’t going to argue with him.

“I’m not worried about her coming between us,” I told him truthfully. “I’m worried about her hurting you and Jesse. Hurting the pack. But that’s better than letting her face whatever it is on her own.”

He bent down and put his cheek against the top of my head. “You lied,” he said. “You aren’t mean at all.”

“Shh. It’s a secret.”

He lay back on the mat and pulled me down with him. “I think you need to bribe me to keep your secret,” he told me thoughtfully.

“I have a feeling I’m going to be baking a lot of cookies in the near future,” I said ruefully. “I could go back on what I said and let you eat one or two.”

He hmmed, then shook his head slowly, rolling me a little, so I was on top of him instead of beside him. “That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? People wouldn’t think you were mean if you fed me cookies.”

Jesse was out with friends, and none of the werewolves had ventured back after Adam sent them away.

I sat up, feeling the rise of his breath underneath me, feeling the hard muscles of his abdomen. I wiggled back a little, and he sucked in his breath.

“I don’t know if I have anything else to bribe you with,” I said seriously.

He growled at me, a real growl. Then he said, “See? World-class mean.”

Making love with Adam was sometimes slow, the intensity building until I swore if I felt one thing more, I would burst into sparks and never feel anything again. At those times, I’d come back to myself limp and a little lost, in the best of all ways. Love means leaving yourself vulnerable, knowing that there is someone to catch you when you fall. But when I was already feeling vulnerable, I couldn’t have let go like that.

Adam chose to keep it lighter this time, as if he knew how breakable I felt. He was passionate and playful, and I gave as good as I got. I wasn’t the only one worried about what Christy’s presence would do to us; I wasn’t the only one who needed reassurance.

I cried out when his teeth nipped my shoulder, as the hint of pain traveled electrically down my spine, sending me into a cl**ax that left me wrecked in body and whole in spirit. He waited until I was finished before starting again. I watched his face, watching him hold on to his control—and I put paid to that. I nibbled the side of his neck, then wrapped my legs around him, digging into his lower back a little with my heels. He lost himself in me, and it was enough for me to cl**ax again.

And when we lay na**d on the mats, the smell of sex and sweat in the air, his hand wrapped tightly around mine: I felt the problem of Christy shrink down to a manageable level.

As long as Adam loved me, I was sure I could deal with the worst Christy could throw at us. I pushed aside the nagging thought that the euphoria of Adam’s lovemaking sometimes left me with delusions of invulnerability.

Late that night, long after we’d gone to bed, someone knocked on the front door.

Adam’s arm was heavy across the back of my thigh. Somehow, I’d rolled until I was curled up mostly sideways in the bed. Medea, the cat, lay behind my head, answering my question about why I was in such an odd position. She had a way of shoving me off my pillow while we slept, so she could have the high ground.

Someone knocked again, a polite knock-knock.

I groaned and pushed Medea off my pillow, so I could pull it over my head. Adam stayed relaxed and loose as I wiggled. So did the cat. She didn’t protest, didn’t get up and stalk off. Just kept sleeping where I’d put her.

Knock. Knock.

I stiffened, half lifted myself off the bed, and looked at Adam. Looked at the cat. I shook Adam’s shoulder to no effect: something was keeping him asleep. Since it had taken the cat, too, I assumed it was magic.

I am immune to some magic, and maybe that’s why it wasn’t affecting me, but that persistent knock—

Knock. Knock.

—that was the one, made me think that perhaps my exclusion had been deliberate. Someone wanted to talk to me alone. Or do something to me when I didn’t have Adam to back me up.

I rolled off the bed and grabbed my Sig Sauer out of the drawer in the nightstand, dropped the magazine with silver bullets, and replaced it with copper-jacketed hollow points. No werewolf I knew had the magic to keep an Alpha of Adam’s caliber sleeping this deeply. That meant fae or witchcraft, and both of them could be killed by a regular bullet. I was pretty sure. Witches I was certain of—as long as it wasn’t Elizaveta—but the fae were tricky.

The hollow points would do more damage than silver bullets to any of them, anyway. Silver was too hard to be good ammunition. And armed was better than unarmed when facing an unknown enemy.

I looked in on Jesse on my way to the front door. She was sleeping on her back, her arms wrapped over her head, snoring lightly. Safe enough, for now.

Knock. Knock.

The gun gave me the courage to ghost down the stairs. It was heavy. Like the daily fighting sessions with Adam, carrying the gun had become part of my routine. I wasn’t human, not quite, but I was very nearly as helpless. It hadn’t mattered much until I took Adam as my mate. In some ways, being part of the pack had made me a lot safer—but it had also made me the weakest link in the pack. The gun helped equalize the difference between me and the werewolves.

It was dark outside, and the narrow glass panel next to the door was opaque anyway. I had no way to tell who was there.

Knock.

“Who are you?” I asked, raising my voice without yelling.

The knocking ceased.

“We do not give our names lightly,” said a man’s pleasant voice. That he didn’t raise his voice told me that he knew enough about me to understand that I could hear better than a regular human. His answer told me what he was, if not who.

The fae were careful with their names, changing the ones they used regularly and concealing the older ones, so that they could not be used against them. Fae magic works best when it knows who it is working upon. However, giving an enemy your name could also be a show of strength—See how little I am worried about you? I will give you my name, and even with that, you cannot hurt me.

Thanks to my friend and former employer Zee—iron-kissed, self-proclaimed gremlin, and mechanic extraordinaire—I knew a lot of the fae around the Tri-Cities, but the one at my doorstep was no one whose voice I recognized. Fae were good with glamour: they could change their faces, their voices, even their sizes and shapes. But all the fae were supposed to be on their reservations after having all but declared war upon the US.

“I don’t open my door to people whose names I do not know,” I told the stranger outside my door.

“Recently, I have been Alistair Beauclaire,” he told me.