Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(13)

The front door opened, and I didn’t have to back out of the kitchen to see who it was; Adam had a presence I could feel from anywhere in the house.

“Hey, honey,” said Christy. “I’ve got BLTs going on the stove. They’ll be done in about ten minutes if you want to go upstairs and get cleaned up.” She glanced at me, and said, “Oops. Sorry, just habit.”

“No worries,” I said pleasantly, as if she hadn’t bothered me at all when she’d called my husband by an endearment—then could have shot myself because I saw the satisfaction in her face. My reaction had been too controlled to be real, and she’d caught it.

“Maybe you could set the table?” she asked lightly.

As if it was still her kitchen, her house to rule.

“I need to get out of these clothes,” I said. “You should ask Jesse to set the table since you took over her job tonight. We might have one more for dinner—a new wolf in town.”

I left before she could reply and rounded the corner for the stairs to see Adam. He walked with me up the stairs.

“Any luck hunting down the guy who hit her?” I asked, stripping off my clothes once we were in our bedroom. Even though my overalls absorbed most of the mess of mechanicking, the clothes I wore under them reeked of oil and sweat.

“No. It’s not that we can’t find people named Juan Flores, it’s that there are too many Juan Floreses,” he told me. “John Smith would be easier, though it helps that he doesn’t look like most Juan Floreses. He’s around six feet tall with blond hair; she said his English was good. He has an accent, but she doesn’t think it was Mexican or Spanish, despite his name.”

“She met him in Eugene?”

He shook his head. “Reno. She was out partying with some friends. He was a friend of a friend. Rich—with cash—not just credit cards. He talked about Europe like he was very familiar with it, but he didn’t tell her if he was living there or if he just traveled there a lot.”

“Cash means real money,” I said. “Not just someone pretending to be wealthy.”

“Probably,” Adam agreed.

“Did she call the police when he hit her?”

“She called them before he broke into her apartment and started hitting her. He left when he heard the sirens, though it might have been the frying pan she hit him with.” There was admiration in his voice, and I did my best not to flinch. Of course he was proud of her. It takes guts to fight back effectively after a hard hit to the head. “The police didn’t have any better luck than I’m having running the name he gave her.”

Adam stripped off his tie and unbuttoned the cuffs of his dress shirt impatiently. “Later that night, someone mugged the man she went out with after she returned to Eugene. Broke his neck and took off with his wallet. She’s sure it was Flores, that stealing his wallet was just a cover. The police are undecided but told her that she might find somewhere else to be while they ran down leads.”

“If her boyfriend is responsible, he kills pretty competently,” I said, pulling on clean jeans, which were in a drawer with a stack of other clean jeans.

I’d gotten used to keeping my clean clothes folded in drawers and dirty clothes in a hamper in the closet. Adam had gotten used to calling me when he was going to be late from work. I had learned that it was those things, compromise in the form of phone calls and folded clothes, that cemented the bedrock of a relationship. I wondered what habits Adam and Christy had left over from their marriage.

“I thought so, too,” Adam said, unaware of the twist of my thoughts. “My sources say that the kill was clean. Not so clean it couldn’t have been an accident—but unusual in a mugging, especially in Eugene, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of that kind of crime. So maybe he spent some time in the military.”

“Or as an assassin or crime lord,” I said.

Adam snorted as he pulled on a faded green t-shirt that said I HEART COYOTES. Yet another sign that folding my clean clothes wasn’t too big a price to pay to make him happy. He didn’t have any I HEART CHRISTY shirts—or I would have burned them already. “You have an overactive imagination.”

“Says the werewolf,” I told him. Instead of my usual after-work t-shirt, I changed into a fitted shirt in a shade of lavender that looked good against my skin and showed off the muscles on my arms. Christy wouldn’t know that it was any different from what I usually wore. I didn’t have her soft curves, so I’d emphasize what I did have.

“You got my text about Zack Drummond, right?” The lavender contrasted nicely with my brown eyes. Maybe I should put on eye shadow? “Seems like a nice guy. Thought walkers like me were a myth.”

Adam grinned at me. “I think you’re pretty special, too.”

I kissed his cheek and rested in his arms for a moment before I broke away to find socks and shoes. No eye shadow. Christy wouldn’t know I didn’t wear makeup unless we were going out, but everyone else would. I usually went barefoot in the house, too, but with Christy in the kitchen, bare feet felt too vulnerable.

“Warren’s coming over tonight to grill Christy about her stalker and see if he can learn anything useful.”

“Good,” I said. “Cool.”

Warren had been working as a private detective for a while. He was smart about people, and he’d gotten good at finding secrets. But that wasn’t why I was pleased. Warren was my friend, and Christy didn’t like him. That left dinner tonight stacked in my favor—not that I really thought I needed the advantage.