Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(42)

He laughed, a low attractive sound that seemed to take him as much by surprise as it did me. "Okay. I give up. Guinevere was a loser." His smile slowly died as he looked behind me.

Samuel put his hand on my shoulder and leaned close. "Everything all right?"

There was a stiffness in his voice that had me turning a little warily to look at him.

"I came to rescue you from boredom," he said, but his eyes were on Tim.

"Not bored," I assured him with a pat. "Go play music."

Then he looked at me.

"Go," I said firmly. "Tim's keeping me entertained. I know you don't get much chance to play with other musicians. Go."

Samuel had never been the kind of person who put on graphic public displays of affection. So it took me by surprise when he bent over me and gave me an open-mouth kiss that started out purely for Tim's benefit. It didn't stay there for very long.

One thing about living a long time, Samuel told me once, it gave you a lot of time to practice.

He smelled like Samuel. Clean and fresh, and though he hadn't been back to Montana for a while, he still smelled of home. Much better than Tim's cologne.

And still...and still.

This afternoon, talking to Honey, I'd finally admitted that a relationship between Samuel and I would not work. That admission was making several other things clear.

I loved Samuel. Loved him with all my heart. But I had no desire to tie myself to him for the rest of my life. Even if there had been no Adam, I did not feel that way about him.

So why had it taken me so long to admit it?

Because Samuel needed me. In the fifteen years more or less between the day I'd run away from him and last winter when I'd finally seen him again, something in Samuel had broken.

Old werewolves are oddly fragile. Many of them go berserk and have to be killed. Others pine and starve themselves to death - and a starving werewolf is a very dangerous thing.

Samuel still said and did all the right things, but sometimes it seemed to me that he was following a script. As if he'd think, this should bother me or I should care about that and he'd react, but it was a little off or too late. And when I was coyote, her sharper instincts told me that he was not healthy.

I was deathly afraid that if I told him I would not take him for a mate and he believed me, he would go off someplace and die.

Despair and desperation made my response to his kiss a little wild.

I couldn't lose Samuel.

He pulled away from me, a hint of surprise in his eyes. He was a werewolf after all; doubtless he'd caught some of the grief I felt. I reached up and touched his cheek.

"Sam," I said.

He mattered to me, and I was going to lose him. Either now, or when I destroyed us both fighting the gentle, thorough care he would surround me with.

His expression had been triumphant despite his surprise, but it faded to something more tender when I said his name. "You know, you are the only one who calls me that - and only when you're feeling particularly mushy about me," he murmured. "What are you thinking?"

Samuel is way too smart sometimes.

"Go play, Sam." I pushed him away. "I'll be fine." I hoped that I was right.

"Okay," he said softly, then ruined it by tossing Tim a smug grin. "We can talk later." Marking his territory in front of another male.

I turned to Tim with an apologetic smile for Samuel's behavior that died as I saw the betrayed look on his face. He hid it quickly, but I knew what it was.

Damn it all.

I'd started out with an agenda, but the discussion had made me forget entirely what I was doing. Otherwise I'd have been more careful. It's not often I got a chance to pull out my history degree and dust it off. But still I should have realized that the discussion had meant a lot more to him than it had to me.

He thought I'd been flirting when I'd just been enjoying myself. And people like Tim, awkward and unlikable by most standards, don't get flirted with much. They don't know how to tell when to take it seriously or not.

If I'd been beautiful, maybe I'd have noticed sooner or been more careful - or Tim would have been more guarded. But my mongrel mix hadn't resulted as nicely for me as it had for Adam's second Darryl, who was African (his father was a tribesman from Africa) and Chinese to my Anglo-Saxon and Native American. I have my mother's features, which look a little wrong in the brown and darker brown color scheme of my father.

Tim wasn't dumb. Like most people who don't quite fit in, he'd probably learned in middle school that if a beautiful person paid too much attention to you, like as not, there was another motive.

I'm not bad looking, but I'm not beautiful. I can clean up pretty nice, but mostly I don't bother. Tonight my clothes were clean, but I wasn't wearing any makeup and hadn't taken particular care when I braided my hair to keep it out of my face.

And it had to have been obvious I'd been enjoying the conversation - to the point that I'd forgotten that I was supposed to be gathering information about Bright Future.

All this went through my head in the time it took him to clear his face of the hurt and anger I'd seen. But it didn't matter. I didn't have a clue on how to get out of this without hurting him - which he didn't deserve.

I liked him, darn it. Once he got over himself (which took a little effort on my part), he was funny, smart, and willing to concede a point to me without arguing it into the ground - especially when I thought he was more right than wrong. Which made him a better person than I was.