Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(5)

Sherwood stood up and shook, splattering them (and Adam and me) with more water, his expression smug.

Adam had curled around me to protect me from the worst of it, so I could feel the exact moment at which he relaxed and laughed.



* * *



—

Adam took me home while the pack cleaned up.

“Privilege of rank” was all Adam said when I protested that we should help in the cleanup. But I knew that the reason we were leaving was because he was still worried about me.

I was fine. I’d had concussions before, and this was not one. But I wasn’t going to argue with Adam—I just rolled my eyes at Mary Jo behind his back.

She stuck her tongue out at me and crossed her eyes. We had been getting along better recently. Some of that had to do with the utterly charming deputy she was dating—so she wasn’t lusting after Adam. I thought about it for a second and decided that maybe all of it had to do with her new boyfriend. I liked that she was happy.

Adam caught her expression—she hadn’t been trying to hide it from him—and turned to look at me. But he was too late; I had my eyes front and center and my face innocent.

“I heard your eyeballs roll,” he told me, which was a phrase he used on his daughter, who had been the empress of eye rolls when she was thirteen.

I laughed.

“We’ll see you all in an hour at Uncle Mike’s,” Adam told them.

“We’ve got this, boss,” said Warren.



* * *



—

I got waylaid telling Adam’s daughter, Jesse, about my bruise and all the mud, so Adam had the shower running before I got up to our room. I started stripping out of my muddy clothes as soon as I closed the bedroom door. By the time I walked into the bathroom, I was already naked—and Adam had turned off the water and was reaching for a towel.

“Nope,” I told him, swiping the towel out of his hands and dropping it on the floor.

He narrowed his eyes at me—or at least I think he did. I wasn’t looking at his face.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

“Pish-posh,” I scoffed—an expression I’d stolen from Ben. Most of his British words were NSFW, but I liked “pish-posh.” “It’s a bruise. It’ll go away. And you promised me sex in the shower.”

“I think that was you promising me,” he told me.

“You, me, who cares?” I grabbed his hand and dragged him back to the shower. “Nudge.”

It was a big shower, plenty big enough for two.

“No fair deploying the WMDs,” he pretended to grump. “Nudge” was our code word, never to be resisted but also not for overuse. But I could tell he approved of my plans no matter what he said.

“When you are dealing with a big bad wolf, you have to deploy all the weapons you have,” I explained, turning on the water.

I did not wince when the water stung my cheekbone. He saw it anyway, putting one hand up to protect my face.

“I did not expect joy,” he told me, kissing the sensitive skin just behind my ear.

“What?” I asked, distracted.

He pulled back and met my eyes, his own dark chocolate, the pupils wide with passion. “You bring me joy,” he said clearly. “I never expected this. I don’t deserve it—but I am claiming you for my own.”

“Well, yes,” I told him. “I thought we’d established that when I claimed you for my mate and then my husband. I get you. You get me. No take-backs.”

He laughed. Kissed me.

I buried my face against him and just breathed in. He brought me joy, too. But he also brought with him this steady certainty that I had someone in my corner.

When I was a teenager, my home had been torn away with the deaths of my foster parents. My foster mother had died trying to become a werewolf. Unwilling to live without his mate, my foster father, Bryan, killed himself, leaving me alone at fourteen. I spent the next two years living on my own on the outskirts of the Marrok’s pack, under its aegis if not its certain protection. When I was sixteen, I lost even that.

I’d learned to stand on my own two feet by then, though. I’d lived a mostly solitary life for years and thought I was content. Then Adam showed up and turned my world upside down.

I wrapped my arms around him, taking in his solid presence, this man of duty and solid strength, this man who loved me when he could have had anyone. There were no words for how much I loved him. At least no words that I knew. But I did know how to show him.

That was joyous fun for both of us.

When he carried me out of the shower a limp, thoroughly loved mess, he whispered, with a growl in his voice, “No take-backs.”



* * *



—

Uncle Mike’s was a pub run by fae for the supernatural denizens of the Tri-Cities. From the outside, it looked like a somewhat-seedy dive located in what had been an old warehouse in an industrial area of Pasco, not a place where anyone would expect to find a pub.

There were quite a few bars and pubs in the Tri-Cities where the tourists could meet some of the fae—carefully selected to make good impressions. There was even one pub that was currently the setting of a low-budget reality TV show about tourist and fae interactions. Uncle Mike had opened his pub for the tourist trade briefly, but the need for us to have our own place, where we could be ourselves, was too great. Petitioned by his usual customers—and a few of the more unusual ones—Uncle Mike had closed his doors to the general public once more.