Adam got out first because he wasn’t stiff from sitting after a fight. I heard him laugh as I slid gingerly out of the vehicle—but I didn’t see why he was laughing until I shut the SUV’s door.
Some joker had left a pumpkin pie on the porch step. It was store-bought, one of those in a clear plastic keeper. In orange Sharpie they’d scrawled For Mercy, with apologies, from Her Little Pumpkin.
I picked it up and took it inside. There were three small pumpkins sitting on the stairway. One of them had a three-by-five index card with Score is 1–0. Want to try again? A second had a big spider drawn on it with marker. The third was covered with itty-bitty spiders.
I could have sniffed them to figure out who it was—even if they’d used gloves, they had transported the loot in a car. But that would have been cheating.
I walked past the stairway and into the kitchen. I set the pie on the table next to Medea, who was not supposed to be on the table. She rolled over on her back without any sign of guilt, and I rubbed her belly.
“You are a weird cat,” I told her, as her stump tail swatted back and forth with pleasure as if she were a dog.
Adam came up behind me and put the stairway pumpkins on the table next to the cat and the pie. He wrapped his arms around me and said, “What can I do to help?”
I turned around and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, finding his lips by feel because I kept my eyes closed. As his mouth caressed mine—and then changed into something fiercer—I felt the tension that had invaded my body ever since I saw the encyclopedias in the bathroom ease into a different kind of tension.
Passion didn’t make my stomach hurt, didn’t make me want to curl up under the blankets like a child afraid of the dark. Passion—at least passion with Adam—made me feel brave.
“That,” I said. “Yes. That’s good. Nudge.”
“Upstairs.” His voice was gravelly and sent a zing up my spine because my body knew what happened to it when Adam sounded like that.
I nodded and he picked me up—I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t wince at the feel of his arm across the cut on my back and the flexing of stiff muscles. I was pretty sure that I’d pulled something in my lower back, because it spasmed when I twisted.
Adam was observant by nature and training, so it didn’t surprise me when he took me to our bathroom instead of our bed. He undressed me carefully. When my shirt tried to stick to the cut, he held a wet washcloth over it until it pulled free.
“Mary Jo looked at it,” I told him. “She said it was my choice for stitches, but her opinion was the stitches would bother me more than the wound.”
“She’s a werewolf,” Adam said, looking closely at my back. “Stitches are always unnecessary for her, and she’d already be healed from something like this. She cleaned it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Did she bring her little first-aid kit just for me?” I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me. But anything the werewolves couldn’t heal from in minutes would be too much for that little kit.
“Yes,” Adam said, and I snorted at his “of course” tone.
He stripped me down to my skin. He paused here and there to check other cuts and bruises. But I knew there wasn’t much. His fingertips touched the muscle in my side that had given me fits when he picked me up in the kitchen.
“Bruised,” he said.
“The wall.” The impact had been on my back. Good. Bruises healed faster than pulled muscles—or at least they quit bothering me sooner.
He wet another clean washcloth and delicately cleaned my face, my hands and arms, making me remember that I was splattered with blood.
“Most of the blood is Wulfe’s,” I said. And told him about how I’d tried to free Wulfe from the hold of the Soul Taker—and how he had used that freedom—in more detail than I’d given the pack.
“He cut himself open to save me,” I said. Possibly that wasn’t the only reason, but I didn’t want Adam to know quite how much the Soul Taker wanted me or what it thought that would mean. Not because I wanted to keep anything from Adam but because I needed to make love with him. And if I got started on the whole woo-woo mess of my visit to the seethe, I wasn’t going to want to make love for a while.
“He could have killed me anytime he chose,” I told Adam’s shoulder—because he was holding me again by that time and because if my face was buried in his shoulder, there was no possibility of my catching his eyes.
“There are people I would less like to make an unwilling slave of than Wulfe,” Adam commented. “But they are fewer in number than the fingers of my right hand.”
“How come you have all your clothes on and I’m naked?” I complained, because I was done talking about Wulfe and the Soul Taker right now.
He laughed, a small private sound. “Because you plastered yourself against me before I could get them off.”
I backed up and sat on the cold marble of the vanity countertop because my feet hurt and because it put some distance between us. I could watch him strip without being tempted to touch—which might slow us up.
Watching Adam undress was one of my favorite things.
“What?” he asked, stepping out of his jeans.
I remembered to shut my eyes before I accidentally looked into his. “What do you mean, what?” I asked.
“You were grinning.”
I felt it happen again. “I am just surprised that some enterprising women haven’t put a hit out on me in sheer envy,” I told him. “And they don’t even know that the outside package isn’t a tithe on the man underneath.”
There was a pause, and I felt my smile soften, but it wouldn’t go away. I hurt all over. I was an exhausted mess. As soon as I let myself think again, I was going to be a scared, exhausted mess. And it didn’t matter. Adam made me happy.
“You can look at me, you know,” he said, nearer than I’d expected. “You don’t need the Soul Taker to show you my soul—you’ve already been there, done that.”
My mate had a generous and open heart. Beside him I was a hopeless coward. It would not matter to me if he’d seen my soul bared once, I still would not want him to do it again. I would be too afraid of what he’d see.
I swallowed. “I have my heart set on jumping your bones,” I told him. “That other is distracting.”
He gave an Adam grunt, and I heard the soft footfalls that told me he had gone into the bedroom. I opened my eyes and gingerly got off the vanity. My skin wanted to stick so I had to peel myself off. Standing on my feet had been getting more uncomfortable, but sitting on the vanity had been the wrong choice. Hopping down wasn’t pleasant.
Adam missed all of this—as I intended him to. When he came into the bathroom, I was standing on the tile and he was holding one of his silk ties—deep blue with chocolate highlights that were the same color as his eyes.
“Not that one,” I said. “It’s my favorite.”
He lifted it and wrapped it around my eyes anyway. “Mine, too,” he said. Then he put his lips against my ear and whispered, “I like it when you wear my clothes.”
I didn’t object again. There were always dry cleaners.
He picked me up again—this time avoiding both the cut on my back and the sore muscle. He took his time getting from the bathroom to the bed. By the time he set me down on the cool sheets, I had forgotten all about my aches and pains.
It took him a while, but eventually I forgot my own name. I remembered his, though.
Sweaty, panting, and happy, I lay contentedly facedown on the bed while Adam cleaned the mess we’d made. He put ointment on my back and only then untied the tie covering my eyes.
“I think it will survive,” he said, sounding a little surprised.
“Quality pays off,” I murmured.
“You should eat something,” he said.