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 her bruised 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 c
ontinued. “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.
“No,” she said. “He started calling me. I answered the first one—I didn’t know it was him. I said too much. But that was the only one of his calls I took until he changed his number. After that time, I only answered calls from people I knew.”
“I’ll need the phone numbers he used,” Warren said.
She nodded. “I have them on my phone. He sent e-mails, too. I read up on stalkers and all the advice I found said that I shouldn’t respond in any way at all. So I didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “Then the presents started to arrive. I order a lot of things online. The first one I thought was a misorder—a red silk scarf. I called the place that had sent it and found out that someone had purchased it in person and had it sent to me. They wouldn’t give me the name.”
“They’ll give it to me,” said Warren. “Do you still have the address?”
She nodded. “On my laptop. I’ll go get it.” She pushed away from the table and made an escape. Up the stairs.
I looked at the stairway thoughtfully, then looked at Adam. “I thought she’d be using the guest suite.”
“She was afraid to be on the ground floor,” he said, and I could tell by the way he said it that I wasn’t going to be happy about which upstairs room she’d taken. Warren gave him a guy look, the one that said, I wouldn’t be you in a million years, but good luck.
“She likes the peach room,” I said. It was the bedroom next to ours.
“Blue makes her sad,” he told me. The blue guest room was across the hall and next to Jesse’s room.
There was nothing to say that needed saying. I stood up, collecting as many dirty plates and silverware as I could. Adam touched my arm.
“Mary Jo,” he said. “If you’ll help Mercy clear the table, I’ll grab the tablecloth and toss it in the laundry.”
Mary Jo waited until we were in the kitchen loading the dishwasher to say anything to me. “It’s not her fault,” she said finally.
“What’s not her fault?” I asked. “That Christy attracted a stalker?”
Her face flushed. “That there’s tension between her and Adam. They were a couple for a long time. She called to see if I’d come and defuse the situation, so that you’d be more comfortable. She’s trying.”
I shut the dishwasher and started it. “Yes,” I said. “She is trying.” I didn’t say what Christy was trying. I was pretty sure it wasn’t what Mary Jo thought it was.
Her eyes narrowed at me, so I guess my tone wasn’t as neutral as I’d hoped.
“It’s okay to like her,” I told her gently. “To worry and feel sorry for her. That’s all just fine. I want her safe, too.”
I wiped my hands off on the back of my jeans and let my voice drop into a threat. “Just be careful, Mary Jo. Be very careful. You’ve made mistakes before. Everyone makes mistakes. One you should not make is to imagine that Christy will ever be Adam’s mate. He is mine, and unlike her, I don’t throw away people who are mine.”
Mary Jo met my gaze, and I held hers. Held it until she looked at the floor and tipped her chin, exposing her neck.
Jesse had told me about her mother and Adam, back when she’d been too young to know that people shouldn’t share other people’s pain, and I had been too … too involved to stop her. Her mother had told Adam he scared her, that the werewolves scared her, and that he smothered her. But I’d always thought that the real trouble between them had a lot to do with Adam’s looking younger than she did. Which made her attraction to a younger man … something to keep in mind.
I returned to the dining room and the interested faces of Adam and Warren. Both of them had heard the conversation between Mary Jo and me, but before they could say anything, Christy was back with her laptop.
She sat next to Warren, and the two of them paged through her e-mail. Adam’s phone rang, and he glanced at the number.
“I hired a man to watch over Christy’s condo,” he told us. “This is he.” He put the phone to his ear, and answered, “Hauptman.”
“It’s Gaven,” said a stranger’s voice; in the background, I could hear sirens. “There is a situation here.”
Adam stiffened. “He’s there?”
“Uh, no. That is, may
be, but I haven’t seen him. I’ve been watching your wife’s … sorry, ex-wife’s apartment building since about two this afternoon. I haven’t seen anyone who matches his description, but her building is on fire—you might be hearing some sirens. The fire definitely started on her floor, and I’m pretty sure it was set in her condo. I happened to be looking up and saw a flash of color—flames in one of the windows of her place. I called it in myself—though downtown Eugene isn’t exactly deserted this time of day, so I won’t have been the only one. The fire department is fighting it, but it’s going up fast. It’s been—” There was a pause and a muffled swearword. “Sorry. Pieces of it are falling, and I was a little too close. It’s only been ten minutes, and the whole place is in flames.”
I glanced at Christy, who was watching Adam with a little frown that made me realize that she was the only one in the room who couldn’t hear the other side of Adam’s conversation.
“You’ve told what you saw to the police?” Adam asked.
“Gave my card to the fireman who’s giving orders. Told him I’d seen something. He’ll relay. I’m planning on cooperating fully with the authorities.”
“Of course.” Adam glanced at Christy, who had come to attention at the word “police.” “They already know that there is a problem. Make sure they make the connections, all right? They have my number, but it might not hurt to give it to them again.”
“They’ll want to talk to her, too,” the investigator said.
“What’s wrong?” Christy asked.
Adam held up a finger. “Of course. She’s not answering her phone directly. They’ll have to leave a message for her to call them back.”
“Right.”
Adam ended the call and looked at Christy. “I think your stalker just burned down your condo, building and all.”
She paled. “Did they get everyone out?”
Adam shook his head. “It’s a big building. There is no way that they could know that this early. They’re still fighting it. They’ll know more in a few hours, but it could be days before everyone is accounted for.”