Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(22)

“Give her an inch, and she’ll take a mile,” warned Jesse.

I nodded. “That may be. But it will be okay; your mother is a good person.”

Jesse snorted.

“She’s a good person. She loves you.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to say the next bit very much. “She even loves your father still.” I could see it in her body language. “She’s a good person, but she is a weak person, too. She can’t take care of anyone else because she’s too busy taking care of herself.” I yawned, and Jesse nudged me.

“Go to bed, Mercy,” she said with a smile.

I got up and stretched. “We good?” I asked.

She nodded. “We’re good.”

Adam was holding the wall up outside Jesse’s bedroom when I opened the door.

“Good night, Jesse,” he said. “Your mom is already in bed.”

“Night, Dad,” Jesse said, dumping the stuff on her bed on the floor with all the other Jesse debris. “Turn out my light, okay?”

I hit the switch and shut the door.

“How long have you been there?”

He put his warm hand on the back of my neck and hauled me to our bedroom.

“Long enough to hear you defend Christy to Jesse—so, might I add, did Christy. I sent her to bed after you called her a Suzy Homemaker because she took offense at that.”

I shut our door, closing us in away from Christy. If she heard something she didn’t want to tonight, it was her own fault. I turned around, and Adam leaned against me, pushing me backward until the wall pressed into my shoulder blades.

“You are the opposite of Christy,” he told me seriously.

I raised my eyebrows. “You don’t think I’d ask for help if I acquired a stalker?”

His hard belly vibrated against mine as he laughed silently. “Maybe. Just maybe, and only if you thought someone else might be at risk. But I wasn’t talking about that.” He kissed me until the pulse in my neck jumped against his thumb. “She’s too busy taking care of herself to take care of anyone else, you said. That’s about the best description of Christy I’ve ever heard. You? You are too busy taking care of everyone else to take care of yourself.”

He kissed me again, then put his head down to whisper in my ear. “I like your way better.” And then he nipped my ear and slapped my hip lightly and stepped away.

“Morning comes early,” he said lightly. “Let’s get some sleep.”

“Adam,” I said quietly, hoping Christy couldn’t hear. “That whole spiel I told Jesse about why I didn’t set Christy on her ear tonight? I thought that up later. At the time, the real reason was the second one I admitted to, that I couldn’t do it without looking like a vindictive, insecure witch.”

He laughed, a soft sound shared by just the two of us. “I saw,” he said. “Christy boxed you in, and you skated through as gracefully as possible. Don’t worry, love, this was just round one, and she had the advantage with that shiner on the side of her face to gather sympathy. My money’s on you for the finish.”

4

“That bad, eh?” said Tad when he came through the door of the shop that next morning.

“She made breakfast,” I told him, looking down at the parts order I was putting together to hide my expression until I could make it more cheery. I turned two sets of spark plugs into four, stretched my mouth into an appropriate shape, and looked up at Tad. “Homemade blueberry muffins. I brought you some.” I nodded to the basket on the counter next to the till.

He shook his head. “Lots of teeth in that expression for a smile, Mercy.” He snagged one out of the top, took a quick bite, and paused. Gave me a humor-filled sympathetic look and took another, bigger bite. When he finished, he looked at me and snatched another muffin. “How long is she going to be here? And would she be interested in dating a half-fae younger man who is currently working for minimum wage?”

“And the horse you rode in on,” I groused at him without heat. “Until she’s safe, I suppose—though she’s making noises about moving here. I hope she was just saying that to torment me, but…” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’ll be looking for anyone”—other than Adam—“for a while. This guy she’s on the run from beat her up, and it is seriously looking like he killed another man she was dating, then burned down the building her condo was in.”

Tad took a third muffin and ate it in two bites. His voice was muffled with food when he said, “Nasty piece of work, him. Are you up for this?”

I shrugged. “Sure. If it gets too bad … how would you like a roommate?”

“If she can cook like this, okay by me.”

“I was talking about me,” I told him. I was joking. But there was a cold knot in my stomach anyway.

He came around the counter and kissed the top of my head. “Poor Mercy. Let’s go fix something you know how to fix. It’ll make you feel better.”

When I’d met Tad, a little over ten years ago, he’d only been a kid, and he’d been running this shop himself because his dad had gone on a two-month drinking binge after Tad’s mom had died of cancer. He’d been nine going on fifty then, and the only thing that had changed since was that someone had rubbed off the bright and shiny cheer that had been his gift to the world. If I ever found out who had done it, I might sic a werewolf pack on them.