Shocked, I turned around, so I could see his face instead of just the reflection. “No one knows about the shoes. Bran doesn’t know.” I hadn’t thought that Bran knew about the shoes.
“I don’t know if Bran does,” Adam said. “Samuel said that he and Charles cooperated to keep Bran guessing because he was really enraged about the shoes.”
Charles had covered for me? I’d known that Samuel had seen me and not said anything–but I hadn’t known about Charles. Truth was that in my heart of hearts I’d been a lot more scared of Bran’s son Charles than I’d ever been scared of Bran. I just never believed that Bran would really hurt me. Charles … Charles would do whatever he had to. I was still more scared of Charles than Bran, but not asscared because Adam had my back.
“The shoes were not the brightest idea I’ve ever had,” I admitted. “But I was provoked.”
I met Adam’s eyes, and we stared at each other for a minute, then I started to snicker. He laughed and pulled me into his body. I relaxed–and it felt like the first time I’d relaxed since Christy came to stay with us.
“The shoes didn’t really have anything to do with Bran,” I told him.
“Leah is his mate,” he said. “Of course it had something to do with Bran. Especially when he couldn’t figure out who was stealing her shoes.”
I laughed again, tried to stop, while I said, “Only one shoe.”
“One of each pair. At a time. Forty‑three shoes gone over a five‑week period. Sometimes two or three shoes in the same day. Not a scent trace to be found. Just like a wizard had conjured them away.”
I blinked away tears and tried to stop laughing. It wasn’t that funny–it was the release of the tension that had been building up for days. “I actually can’t remember what it was Leah did, specifically. But I’m sure it was something worse than making me Enemy Number One because I let her tablecloth get stained.”
“Samuel said Leah put out a bounty on the shoes and the thief.”
That sent me off again.
“Her face,” I managed. “If only I had a photograph of her face.” Though I had a pretty good memory of it. “I thought she was just going to spontaneously combust right there in front of us–barefoot.”
“When Samuel told me about it, he asked me to find out how you managed it without leaving your scent behind. He said that when he asked you, you told him that you were keeping your secret in case you had to do the same to him someday.”
“Fishing pole and a big hook,” I told Adam because I’d do better than shoes if I had to get back at him for something. “The hardest part was shutting the closet without going into the room.” I thought about it. “Okay, the closet door and getting out of the house forty‑odd times without getting caught. Thank goodness I spent a lot of legitimate time over at that house, so I didn’t have to try to cover up my scent except to keep it out of Bran’s bedroom.”
“What did you do with the shoes? Samuel said Bran searched your foster parents’ house for them.”
I snickered again. “Searched every day, sometimes twice a day–every time a shoe disappeared. Bryan got mad about it eventually, but Evelyn thought it was funny. I dumped the shoes in a glacial lake that was about three miles from our house. In between trips, because I couldn’t quite manage to make it there unseen every day, I hid them in the bed of Charles’s truck.”
“I thought you were afraid of Charles.”
I nodded. “So was everyone else, though. And he only drove that truck when he absolutely had to.”
“You said you tossed all of them in the lake. I thought one of those shoes returned a few years later? Where did you hide it?” His eyes were happy.
“In the lake with the rest.” I shivered in reflex. “It took me four hours of diving in that lake to find a shoe–and that was a glacier‑fed lake. Most of the shoes had rotted into mush, but there was a steel stiletto with this wiry mesh stuff that looked pretty good. By that time, Bran had quit looking, so I didn’t have to be so careful.”
Bryan and Evelyn had both been dead then, too, and I’d been living alone in their house that no longer really felt like my own. Not even their ghosts had lingered with me. I didn’t tell Adam that, he was too perceptive, and I was too prone to self‑pity with Christy living on the other side of my bedroom wall.
I cleared my throat. “I had to work on that stupid shoe for months before it didn’t look like it had spent two years in water. But her face at the sight of it sitting on top of the Christmas tree was so worth it.”
“She’d hurt you,” Adam said, his voice soft and certain.
“She couldn’t hurt me,” I corrected briskly if not truthfully. To earn the Christmas‑tree topper, she’d made a disparaging remark about my foster father, Bryan, after he’d killed himself. “She made me mad.”
“She hurt you.”
I shrugged. “I was pretty sure she’d clean my clock after that one. I mean, even without evidence, who else could it have been?”
“She couldn’t.” Adam’s face was satisfied. “Samuel told me that when she tried to bring her case to Bran, Charles swore, in front of most of the pack, that you were with him all day working on cars during the only time the switch between the star and the shoe could have been made. No one could hear the lie, so she had to leave it or challenge Charles first.”
“He lied?” I said, shocked. Thought about it, and said in a hushed voice, “He lied, and no one could tell?”
“It’s Charles,” Adam explained as if that was enough–and it was. “You handled Bran, and you handled Leah. So don’t tell me you couldn’t put a stop to Christy’s taunts and teach her to behave herself until she goes home.”
I didn’t think it would be as easy as he made it seem. But he was right that I was backing away from a confrontation.
“If she goes before there is a knock‑down, drag‑out fight between the pro‑me and the pro‑Christy factions, it’ll be better for the pack.” My voice was small.
“And less collateral damage,” he said, kissing my nose, “Jesse has to deal with concerning her mother. She doesn’t need more drama. Auriele, Mary Jo–they don’t really know who she is. And that’s not a bad thing.”
“She’s not a horrible person,” I protested.
He smiled, briefly. “No. She makes people feel good for defending her, for doing things for her. Makes them feel like heroes–she made me feel that way once, too. Nothing wrong with that.” He kissed me. “But I like my women less helpless.”
I went limp against him, and said, dramatically, “I’m helpless against your kisses.”
He laughed like a villain in a cartoon. “Aha. So that’s how it’s done. Well, there’s no help for you, then.”
“No,” I said in a faint voice, putting an arm over my forehead as I arched back over his arm in the classic pose of the helpless ingénue. “I guess you’ll just have your wicked way with me again.”
“Cool,” said my husband, a wicked growl in his voice. “Don’t worry. You’ll enjoy every minute of it.”
I finished the wasserboxer engine I was rebuilding with great satisfaction. As if to make up for the chaos in my own life, the engine was going together as sweet as molasses and twice as easy. Like a gambler on a winning streak, I was worried that I’d ruin it in the last moves. But it buttoned up duck soup, as if I were putting it together in the factory instead of thirty years later.
I had an urgent brake job left (brought in about fifteen minutes before). However, I’d decided last night, after Adam was sleeping beside me and looking more relaxed than he’d been in days, that I was finished leaving the battlefield to Christy–that was giving her too much advantage.
I’d have the brakes done by lunch tomorrow, and that would have to be soon enough. I patted the wasserboxer for being such a good patient and stripped out of my overalls in the oversized bathroom/laundry room. I got a can of soda from the fridge, and, clad in civilian clothes, I ventured into the main office.
“Closing time.”
“Sounds good,” Tad said, looking up from the books, where he was finishing recording an appointment. Gabriel had been trying to get me to set up the appointment schedule on computer, but Tad didn’t seem to mind the paper route. “You look tired, Mercy. Go home. Get something to eat. You look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”