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.

We went downstairs just as a knock sounded on the door.

Christy dodged past us, and said over her shoulder, “I invited Mary Jo to join us for dinner.”

I decided that I was going to have to get rid of the chip on my shoulder, or the next week or so was going to be unbearable. Christy cooked dinner. She was welcome to invite anyone to dinner, especially one of the wolves who had a standing invitation to the Alpha’s table at any time anyway. Mary Jo was Christy’s friend.

Christy was acting as though my house were still hers. It wasn’t. But as long as she kept her actions to those acceptable in any guest, there wasn’t a lot I could do to fix it without appearing to be jealous, insecure, and petty. So I’d swallow my first reactions and deal, until it was time to set her straight.

When Christy answered the door and let her in, Mary Jo hummed in sympathy at the nasty bruise.

“You need to have that looked at.”

“Nothing broken,” Christy told her. “Just bruised, and it will fade in time. Adam made me go to a doctor. A good thing, too, because Mercy was about to take me to the doctor herself.”

An exaggeration. Maybe.

Mary Jo apparently thought so, too, because she gave me a cool look. “It looks like it hurts.”

Christy touched her cheek, then shook her head. “It could have been worse. A man I dated a couple of times turned up dead, and I’m pretty sure Juan is responsible.”

“Ahh jeez,” Mary Jo said. “I’m so sorry.”

Warren came in. He didn’t knock and thus avoided the chance that Christy would answer the door again so she could make everyone think either that I was using her to do all the menial tasks or make me think she was trying to reclaim her home. Or both at once.

Probably she was just doing normal things, and I was being paranoid and jealous.

Yes, I was going to have to work on my attitude. Adam kissed the top of my head.

“Let’s all move to the dining room,” Christy said. “I put dinner out there. Is your new wolf coming, Mercy? If we wait much longer, dinner might get cold.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe something came up.”

“Let’s eat without him, then,” she said. “If he comes later, he can have leftovers if there are any, or I can make him a sandwich.”

There was room at the kitchen table to eat there, but the dining-room table had been set with a tablecloth and good china and all. I wondered if Jesse had set it, or if Christy had done so while Adam and I were up changing. The only time I used the dining-room table was on Sunday breakfasts or holidays when everyone didn’t fit in the kitchen.

I sat down on Adam’s right, and Christy took the seat to his left before Jesse could sit in it. Jesse smiled apologetically at me and took the next seat over.

“All right, everyone,” Christy said as soon as everyone was seated. “Dig in.”

The sandwiches were all cut into triangles and set on a plate in the center of the table, a gloriously beautiful presentation with bacon cooked exactly right, red tomatoes, and bright crispy lettuce on golden toast. A huge, cut-glass bowl held a salad and sat next to a plate with homemade croutons.

Cloth napkins were folded just so, and there was a vase with the first of the spring lilies from the front flower bed. The whole table looked as though Martha Stewart and Gordon Ramsay had both come to my home to prepare a casual meal for a few friends.

Mary Jo took a bite of the sandwich and all but purred. “I haven’t had a BLT this good since that picnic you had out here that Fourth of July, do you remember? You made BLTs and carrot cake. I have missed this.”

That started a conversation about the better old days that eventually spread to include Adam and even Warren. Jesse met my eyes and grimaced in sympathy.

I didn’t know if Christy was taking over my home on purpose or by accident, but I had my suspicions. I knew what I would do if someone else had Adam. I might use my fangs or a gun instead of a BLT dinner, but Christy’s weapons were different from mine. I did know that the only way to take control back was to be a witch—and that was just another way of losing.

“Do you like your sandwich?” Christy asked me as the good-old-days talk started to wind down.

“It is very good,” I said. “Thank you for making dinner.”

Mary Jo gave me a look. “I’d have thought that just having flown in and being hurt, someone else could have cooked tonight, Christy.”

“That was my job,” said Jesse. “But Mom said—”

“I told her that I wanted to make her favorite dinner because I don’t get much chance to see her.” Christy looked up, her blue eyes—Jesse’s eyes—swam with tears that she bravely held back. “I know that’s my fault. I’m not a good mother.”

She wasn’t lying. She believed everything that she said. I had to give her credit for accepting the responsibility for what she’d put Jesse through—but the thing was, she was looking at Adam when she said it. Then she looked around the table. She didn’t look at Jesse. This wasn’t an apology; it was a play for sympathy. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Jesse put her fork down, carefully. “Thank you for dinner, Mom. It was good. I just am not feeling well tonight. I’m going to head up and do some homework.”

She picked up her plate and carried it into the kitchen and left us in silence. If I said anything, I worried she’d make Jesse’s leaving or her bad parenting my fault, so I kept my mouth shut. I don’t know why no one else said anything.

“You see?” said Christy huskily as soon as Jesse was out of human earshot. “I don’t know why I said that, I knew it would upset her. She doesn’t want to hurt my feelings—but she can’t lie, either.”

I’d lived through Christy’s drama for a while now—Sorry, Jesse, I know I was supposed to pick you up or you were supposed to fly down, but it just isn’t convenient right now with reasons that varied from new boyfriends to trips to Rio. Work trips, really. I knew that she was good at manipulating people, and still the expression on herbruised face made me feel bad for her.

“It’s all right,” Mary Jo told her. “You’ll have time now to fix things between you.”

And abruptly all my sympathy died away, washed away by dismay. Just how long was Christy planning to stay?

“I don’t know,” Christy murmured sadly, her fork playing with the remnants of her salad. “I’d like to think so.”

Adam patted her on the shoulder.

I ate with steady determination that was not helped at all by the fact that the food was good. I could cook anything that went into the oven as long as it had sugar and chocolate in it. Beyond that, I was a pretty indifferent cook. Adam was a lot better than I, but his ex-wife was practically a gourmet chef. She’d made the mayonnaise on the BLTs from scratch.

“So,” Warren said, putting his silverware on his empty plate. “If you are through eating, I’ve got some questions about this ex-boyfriend of yours.”

“She’s hurt and tired,” said Mary Jo. “Can’t questions wait until she’s had a chance to recover?”

“No,” said Adam. “We need to deal with him, so Christy can go back to Eugene and get on with her life.”

Christy turned her wet blue eyes on my husband, and said, “I’ve been thinking of moving back home.”

The food I had just swallowed went down wrong and sent me off in a paroxysm of coughing.

3

“Well, now,” said Warren over the top of my coughing, Texas thick in his voice. “I don’t know ’bout all that, Miss Christy. Where you live is up to you. But the sooner we get rid of the man who is scaring you, the safer you are going to be. So I’m going to ask you to tell me how you met him and everything you can remember about him.”

Christy’s eyes got bigger at the solid authority in his voice, and she looked as though she were sixteen instead of the over forty I was sure of. “Okay,” she said.

He reached behind him and grabbed the notebook he’d tossed on the floor when we’d sat down, and said, “Let’s start with the first meeting. When and where?”

“A couple of months ago—early February, I can check for the exact date. My girlfriends and I were out gambling, a weekend in Reno. We’d gone to a show and were finishing up the night with dinner in one of the casinos. There were a lot of people around, and since we do this once a month, there were even a lot of people we knew.” She played with her plate. “This man came up to our table. He was beautiful—younger than me, in a suit that … You know that blue-gray suit you had that was so expensive?”

Adam nodded, and I found that I was jealous of her memory of seeing him in a suit, even though he wore suits a lot. But I’d never seen him in the blue-gray suit that she was talking about.

She kept her eyes on my husband as she continued. “It reminded me of that, not in color, but in the way it was shaped. He looked … expensive, but not in a ‘kept man’ or ‘I’m going to impress you’ kind of way. His eyes were bright, and he ignored the others, just looked at me. Tall, golden hair, swarthy skin—not the warm tones you usually see with South American Hispanics. More like Mediterranean dark. He was big.”

“How big?”

She looked at Warren. “Taller than you. Heavier—but all muscle. Like a bodybuilder.” Her eyes strayed to Adam. “He must spend a lot of time in the gym because the only other man I’ve seen quite that muscular is Adam. And when he looked at me, he saw me. Intense.”

She looked down and pulled her hands away from her plate. “It was intoxicating, flattering—to be the focus of such power—especially at my age.” She smiled tightly, glanced at me, then away. “I’m not eighteen anymore, and he didn’t look a lot older than that.” She’d met Adam when she was eighteen. He’d been older than that, a werewolf already. “He introduced himself, Juan Flores, though he didn’t have a Spanish or Mexican accent.”

“What kind of accent did he have?” asked Warren.

She jerked her attention back to him. “European. Not French, Italian, or German. I didn’t know it.”

“That’s not a crime,” said Mary Jo, because Christy had sounded like she thought that she ought to have known.

“Maybe it was a fake accent,” said Christy. “I’ve spent time in Europe, and I just couldn’t pinpoint it. He had a little British crisp in his English, like he’d learned it in Great Britain. I thought that was why I couldn’t pick it out. I didn’t even ask before I hopped into bed with him. I am so stupid.”

“Don’t blame the victim,” I told her with, I admit, a little of the irritation I was feeling. “Not your fault you didn’t recognize his accent. Not your fault he singled you out.”

“Adam told me that some of your friends knew him. That’s why you felt safe with him,” Warren said.

She nodded. “He’d done some business with Jacqui, one of my friends. She’s a financial officer at Nation First Bank, works their corporate and international accounts.”

“Her phone number?”

She blinked and rattled it off. At Warren’s urging, she also managed a better description of Juan. He coaxed her into remembering details about his habits of speech and dress. That he liked dogs and had two hulking dogs that looked enough alike that they must have been a breed, though she didn’t know what. He’d been impressed that she wasn’t afraid of them—it was at that point that his desire for a little fun had changed to something more possessive. He’d insisted that she stay an extra day at his expense.

“I was flattered at first,” she told us. “Who wouldn’t be? A rich, beautiful, younger man who appeared passionately attracted to me.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“I work,” she said a little defensively.

She did, though Adam supported her. He paid the bills for her condo, her car, her insurance, and her phone bills. He told me, once, that he felt he owed it to her. I’d told him that was between the two of them and promised (hand over heart) that I’d never fuss about anything he felt necessary.

She worked part-time at a travel agency that allowed her to travel more than she would otherwise have been able to. She put together tours and business meetings, and from what Jesse had told me, she was good at her job.

“I had some extra vacation I could take, but I didn’t want to use it all. When I told him that I had to go home … he was weird about it. Weird enough that I pretended to agree with him—and while he was in the shower, I left my suitcase, grabbed my purse, and ran. Took a taxi to the airport, where I rented a car and drove home to Eugene.”

“Did he just show up at your condo after that?” asked Adam.