I knocked on the door one last time, then glanced at my watch again. If I skirted the speed limit, I’d have ten minutes before the wolf was at my door.
MY ROOMMATE’S CAR WAS IN THE DRIVEWAY, LOOKING right at home next to the ’78 single-wide trailer where I lived. Very expensive cars, like true works of art, shape the environment to suit themselves. Just by virtue of being there, his car made my home upper-class—no matter what the house itself looked like.
Samuel had the same gift of never being out of place, always fitting in, while at the same time he conveyed the sense that here was someone special, someone important. People liked him instinctively, and trusted him. It served him well as a doctor, but I was inclined to think it served him a little too well as a man. He was too used to getting his way. When charm didn’t cut it, he used a tactical brain that would have done credit to Rommel.
Thus, his presence as my roommate.
It had taken me a while to figure out the real reason he’d moved in with me: Samuel needed a pack. Werewolves don’t do well on their own, especially not old wolves, and Samuel was a very old wolf. Old and dominant. In any pack except his father’s, he would be Alpha. His father was Bran, the Marrok, the most überwerewolf of them all.
Samuel was a doctor, and that was more than enough responsibility for him. He didn’t want to be Alpha; he didn’t want to stay in his father’s pack.
He was lone wolfing it, living with me in the territory of the Columbia Basin Pack, but not part of it. I wasn’t a werewolf, but I wasn’t a helpless human, either. I’d been raised in his father’s pack, and that was close to being family. So far he and Adam, the local pack’s Alpha—and my lover—hadn’t killed each other. I was moderately hopeful that would continue to be the case.
“Samuel?” I called as I rushed into the house. “Samuel?”
He didn’t answer, but I could smell him. The distinctive odor of werewolf was too strong to be just a leftover trace. I jogged down the narrow hall to his room and knocked softly at the closed door.
It was unlike him not to acknowledge me when I got home.
I worried about Samuel enough to make myself paranoid. He wasn’t quite right. Broken, but functional, I thought, with an underlying depression that seemed to be getting neither better nor worse as the months passed. His father suspected something was wrong, and I was pretty sure the reason Samuel was living with me and not in his own house in Montana was because he didn’t want his father to know for certain how badly broken Samuel really was.
Samuel opened his door, looking his usual self, tall and rangy: attractive, as most werewolves are, regardless of bone structure. Perfect health, permanent youth, and lots of muscle are a pretty surefire formula for good looks.
“You rang?” he said in an expressionless imitation of Lurch, dropping his voice further into the bass register than I’d ever heard him manage. We’d been watching a marathon ofThe Addams Family on TV last night. If he was being funny, he was all right. Even if he wasn’t quite meeting my eyes, as if he might be worried about what I’d see.
A purring Medea was stretched across one shoulder. My little Manx cat gave me a pleased look out of half-slitted eyes as he stroked her. As his hand moved along her back, she dug in her hind claws and arched her tailless butt into the air.
“Ouch,” he said, trying to pull her off, but she’d gotten her claws through his worn flannel shirt and was hooked onto him tighter than Velcro—and more painfully, too.
“Uhm,” I told him, trying not to laugh. “Adam and I are going out tonight. You’re on your own for dinner. I didn’t make it to the grocery store, so the pickings are meager.”
His back was to me as he leaned over his bed so if he managed to unstick the cat, she wouldn’t fall all the way to the floor.
“Fine,” he said. “Ouch, cat. Don’t you know I could eat you in a single bite? You wouldn’t even—ouch—even leave a tail sticking out.”
I left him to it and hurried over to my own room. My cell rang before I made it to the doorway.
“Mercy, he’s headed over, and I’ve got some news for you,” said Adam’s teenage daughter’s voice in my ear.
“Hey, Jesse. Where are we going tonight?”
Thinking of him, I could feel his anticipation and the smooth leather of the steering wheel under his hands—because Adam wasn’t just my lover; he was my mate.
In werewolf terms, that meant something slightly different for every mated pair. We were bound not just by love, but by magic. I’ve learned that some mated pairs can barely perceive the difference . . . and some virtually become the same person. Ugh. Thankfully, Adam and I fell somewhere in the middle. Mostly.
We’d overloaded the magic circuit between us when we’d first sealed our bond. Since then it had proved to be erratic and invasive, flickering in and out for a few hours, then gone again for days. Disconcerting. I expect I’d have gotten used to having the connection to Adam already if it were consistent, as Adam assured me it should have been. As it was, it tended to take me by surprise.
I felt the wheel vibrate under Adam’s hand as he started the car, then he was gone, and I was standing in my grubbies talking to his daughter on the phone.
“Bowling,” she said.
“Thanks, kid,” I told her. “I’ll bring back an ice-cream cone for you. Gotta shower.”
“You owe me five bucks, though ice cream wouldn’t hurt,” she told me with a mercenary firmness I could respect. “You’d better shower fast.”
Adam and I had a game, a just-for-fun thing. His wolf playing with me, I thought, because it had that feeclass="underline" a simple game with no losers was wolf play, something they did with the ones they loved. It didn’t happen often in the pack as a whole, but among smaller groups, yes.
My mate wouldn’t tell me where he was taking us—leaving it for me to discover his plans by whatever means necessary. It was a sign of his respect that he expected me to be successful.
Tonight, I’d bribed his daughter to call me with whatever she knew, even if it was just what he was wearing when he walked out the door. Then I’d be appropriately dressed—though I’d act astonished that we matched so well when I hadn’t a clue where he was taking me.
Play for flirting, but also play designed to distract both of us from the reason we were dating instead of living together as mates. His pack didn’t like it that his mate was a coyote shifter. Even more than their natural brethren, wolves don’t share territory well with other predators. But they’d had a long time to get used to it, and were mostly resigned—until Adam brought me into the pack. It shouldn’t have been possible. I’ve never heard of a nonwerewolf mate becoming pack.
I set out clothes to wear and hopped into the shower. The showerhead was set low, so it wasn’t hard to keep my braids out of the full force of the water as I scrubbed my hands with pumice soap and a nailbrush. I’d already cleaned up, but every little bit helped. A lot of the dirt was ingrained, and my hands would never look fashion-model tended.
When I emerged from the bathroom in a towel, I could hear voices in the living room. Samuel and Adam were deliberately keeping it soft enough that I couldn’t hear the words, but it didn’t sound like there was any tension. They liked each other just fine, but Adam was Alpha and Samuel a lone wolf who outpowered him. Sometimes they had trouble being in the same room together, but evidently not tonight.
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.