The best way to save a drowning man, his father had liked to say, was to teach him to swim before he fell in the river—so he could keep himself safe instead of depending upon you. His dad had been big on independence. He would have adored Mercy.
Adam set her on their bed and stripped off her clothes. She wasn’t usually a heavy sleeper, but a bad panic attack damn near put her into a coma. She also slept cold.
He rustled up one of his T-shirts, soft from wear, and put it on her. He was pretty sure that she had woken up sometime in the process, but she didn’t give him any help. He covered her up and kissed the soft spot between her jawbone and the back of her ear. She made a grumpy noise and rolled over to bury her head in her pillow, leaving her knees folded and her rump sticking up.
She looked like Jesse had when she was a toddler and they’d let her get too tired. After a moment, Mercy rolled onto her side, patted his half of the bed. Finding it empty, she tipped her face until one eye peered at him.
“You need to do Alpha stuff?” she asked, her voice foggy with exhaustion.
“Yes.”
“Got a call from the Prince of Darkness on the way to the pub,” she said.
“I know.”
She blinked at him, her other eye opening for a moment as she tried to read his expression.
He wasn’t sure what she saw, but it seemed to make her happy. “Okay. Didn’t want to lie to you. Tempted, though.”
“I get that,” he said. “Me, too, sometimes.”
Both of her eyes narrowed on him, more alert than they had been. “Anything I need to know?”
“Not tonight,” he told her. “We can talk in the morning.”
“Anyone die?”
“No one you know,” he assured her. “New Mexico business.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. “Gonna sleep now.”
“You do that. I’ll be up when I’m done with my Alpha stuff.”
“Okay,” she said, and her body went limp.
These were the things that he was privileged to see, vulnerabilities his tough-like-Timex mate kept well hidden. She had to be strong. It was a good thing she was.
His grandfather’s voice rang in his head: “A man protects his woman, Adam.”
He and his whole pack had been uprooted from New Mexico to protect her. Bran’s little coyote might have thought she’d been abandoned at sixteen by the pack that had raised her, but the Marrok hadn’t given up responsibility for her. When she’d moved somewhere without a pack to serve the Marrok’s purposes, Bran had given Adam his transfer orders.
Adam had resented that at first. Then he’d been bewildered by it. For nearly a decade he’d lived next door and a few acres away from her, and nothing had happened. For years nothing had happened.
Until it did.
When he first noticed his attraction to Mercy, Adam had mapped their relationship out. He had craved her kindness, her humor, and her body. He’d thought that her toughness and independence were an obstacle he had to overcome to get her to accept him. He had looked after his first wife. He would take care of his mate.
Hah.
On his way out of the bedroom, Adam stopped and looked back. Mercy had burrowed under the covers again until only a lump showed that their bed was occupied.
Thank God Mercy was tough.
He closed the door behind him and took one step down the dark hallway. Then he returned to his bedroom door and placed the flat of his hand against it. Then he leaned his forehead against the varnished wood and closed his eyes, expanding their mate bond.
She was sleeping, dreaming of something only a little worrying. It had to do with Medea—he’d gotten the feel of the cat’s purr. He slid his attention to the pack bonds, listening, for lack of a better word, to the general health and well-being of the pack.
He could feel Mary Jo’s emotional disturbance—and Honey’s, too. More of Honey’s distress than he’d have thought based on what she’d been like before they’d left. But Honey was good at concealing things.
Pack bonds only went so far. Adam couldn’t invade their privacy deeper to find out how much of their distress was due to Ymir’s attack, and how much was other things. Renny. Gary. Some boundaries shouldn’t be crossed.
He stayed there, basking in the power of his pack for a minute. Then he opened himself up to the new thing—the awareness that had begun after Mercy had faced down a troll on the suspension bridge and claimed the Tri-Cities as pack territory. That had been magic; they had all felt it when something happened. At that moment, he’d gained a link to the land his pack claimed for their own. He hadn’t figured out just what it was good for yet—he’d never gotten a warning of trouble from it.
A while ago, he’d dismissed it as one of those weird things magic sometimes did. He’d found it neither threat nor help, so he’d mostly ignored it. Until October.
Mercy wasn’t the only one the Soul Taker had affected. Since he’d fought that damned artifact, this bond had grown deeper in a worrying way. It was too easy to lose himself in the exploration of every roadway, every blade of grass, the ancient sheets of basalt that lurked beneath the earth. His territory.
“Is she okay, Adam?” Warren said, his voice calling Adam back to himself.
He blinked. If he’d been in wolf form, he’d have shaken the numbness off. In human-seeming, he just rubbed his face with both hands.
“Mercy?” Warren stood at the top of the stairs and looked worriedly at the door between them and Mercy.
“She’s okay,” Adam said. “Or at least she’ll be okay after some sleep. I was just recharging.”
As he followed Warren down the stairs to where his people were waiting, he realized that was true. He did feel better. Refreshed. And he hadn’t drawn that from the pack, had he. Had he?
Mercy crossed her ankles and rested her feet on the dash because she knew Adam hated that. He wasn’t worried about the car, but he’d seen photos of what happened to people in car accidents. He was a very good driver, but there was a “wintry mix” dripping down and he wasn’t the only person on the road.
Mercy wouldn’t walk away from a car accident the way he would.
One of the first things he’d noticed about Mercy was that she understood people. She really knew how to get under their skin. Under his skin.
Her feet on the dash told him that she was really annoyed with him. He wasn’t sure why. He dealt with it for a few miles, giving her a chance to tell him. Just outside of Eltopia, the car behind them fishtailed violently and pulled off onto the shoulder.
Mercy wiggled her feet.
“What did I do?” he asked in what he hoped was a reasonable voice.
She gave him a look that said his tone had been less inquiry and more demand. But she took pity on him because, when push came to shove, his Mercy was the more reasonable of the two of them.
“You need to be in New Mexico,” she said. “Darryl isn’t military, and neither is Auriele. He doesn’t know how to thread the needle between threat and cooperation that allows your company to work with the various military arms of the government.”
“Darryl will be fine,” Adam told her. “He’s smart.” Brilliant, in fact, which was why he had a bunch of letters behind his name and a big check for working with a think tank. “Auriele can charm the birds out of the sky.”
That last drew an incredulous look from Mercy that made him wave an acknowledging hand.
“Nothing you have seen her do,” he said, a little sadly.
Auriele had adjusted to Mercy as his mate. Mostly, she’d even quit blaming Mercy for hurting Adam’s first wife with her very existence. Christy was good at making her friends forget that Christy had left Adam a long time before Mercy had looked at him with anything besides exasperation. But Auriele didn’t go out of her way to be friendly with the woman she’d always see as Christy’s replacement.