River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(12)

"Your dress?" he said, sounding intrigued.

I snorted. "Very funny. The trailer. You know about bags of holding, right? The nifty magic items that can hold more things than would ever really fit in bags of their size?"

"Really?"

I sighed. "The make-believe magic item from Dungeons and Dragons." I craned my neck around, and said, "Don't tell me you haven't played D and D. Is there some rule that werewolves can't indulge?"

He leaned his forehead against my shoulder and laughed. "I may have been born in the Dark Ages"--actually he'd been born in the fifties, though he looked like he was only in his midtwenties; being a werewolf halts and reverses the aging process--"but I have played D and D. I can tell you for certain that Darryl has never indulged, though. Paintball is his game."

I took a minute to picture Darryl playing paintball. "Scary," I muttered.

"You have no idea."

Adam rubbed his cheek against mine and went back to his task. "I could just pull this apart, instead of unbuttoning it," he said ten minutes later. It was a serious offer, spoken in a hopeful- but-doomed voice.

"You do, and you get to sew all the buttons back on," I told him. "Jesse is planning on reusing this."

"Soon?" he asked.

"Not that I know of."

"Somehow," he grumped, "that's not as reassuring as it ought to be."

"Gabriel's going to college in Seattle in the fall," I reminded him. "I think you're safe this year." My right-hand man had a thing for Adam's daughter, and right now he was living in the tiny manufactured home that the insurance had replaced my old trailer with. A situation that made them happy and Adam antsy. He liked Gabriel, but Adam was an Alpha werewolf--which put him off- the-scale protective of his daughter.

Eventually, Adam managed the buttons. While I hung the dress up and put it in the closet (yes, there was a closet), Adam stripped off his tux and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He didn't often dress down that far. Except for when he was working out, usually slacks and a button-up shirt was as grubby as he got. My clean shirt and jeans were dressed up for me. I was a mechanic by trade, and it was a rare thing when my fingernails were clean. Somehow, we fit together anyway.

He bought us milk shakes and burgers (one for me, four for him) from the nearby restaurant, filled the diesel tanks in his truck, and we were back on the road.

"Are we going to Portland?" I asked. "Or Multnomah Falls?"

He smiled at me. "Go to sleep."

I waited three seconds. "Are we there yet?"

His smile widened, and the last of the usual tension melted from his face. For a smile like that I'd ... do anything.

"What?" he said.

I leaned over and rested my cheek against his arm. "I love you," I told him.

"Yes," he agreed smugly. "You do."

THE COLUMBIA GORGE IS A CANYON THAT RUNS nearly eighty miles through the Cascade Mountains, with the Columbia River cutting through the bottom. It is part of the border between Washington and Oregon. Most of the travel is on the main, pided highway on the Oregon side, but there is a highway on the Washington side that runs most of the length of the gorge. Though the western part of the gorge is a temperate rain forest, the eastern section is dry steppe country with cheatgrass, sagebrush, and breathtaking basalt cliffs that sometimes form columnar joints.

Adam turned off the highway at Biggs and took the bridge back over the Columbia to the Washington side. That bridge is one of my all-time favorites. The river is wide, a mile or nearly so, and the bridge arches gracefully up and over the water to the town of Maryhill.

It was founded by financier Sam Hill (as in "where in Sam Hill?") in the early twentieth century. He'd envisioned a Quaker paradisaical farm community and named the town after his wife, Mary Hill. She might have thought it was cooler, I suspect, if it weren't out in the middle of the desert with about two inches of soil. There isn't much left of the town--a few small orchards, a couple of nearby vineyards, and a state-run campground--none of which made Maryhill special.

But Sam Hill hadn't stopped with the town. He built the very first WWI memorial, a full-sized replica of Stonehenge visible from the highway on the Oregon side of the river.

We turned west once we were over the bridge, though, away from Stonehenge and Maryhill. After ten or fifteen minutes of driving down a narrow highway that cut its way along the desert-steppe country of the Columbia Gorge, we came to a campground. Though it was groomed to within an inch of its life, there was no one inside. Adam pulled in the driveway, took a card off the map holder on his sunshade, and swiped it though the control box next to the gate. A green light flashed, and the gate slid open.

"We have it to ourselves," he said. "I did some of the security here, and they told me we could stay even though it doesn't officially open until next spring. I'm sure the shower in the trailer works, but the ones in the restrooms over there are a lot bigger."

I looked around the campground, where tall oaks and maples gave shade to the graveled RV spaces. The big trees weren't natural for this part of the state, any more than the green, green grass --someone had spent a lot of time tending them.

Adam pulled into a spot halfway between the gray stone restroom and the river. I found myself frowning at one of the trees. It must have been sixty feet tall, its roots buried deep in the earth where it wouldn't disturb the groomed campground.