hadn’t known about Charles. Truth was that in my heart of hearts I’d been a lot more scared of Bran’s son Charles than I’d ever been scared of Bran. I just never believed that Bran would really hurt me. Charles … Charles would do whatever he had to. I was still more scared of Charles than Bran, but not as scared because Adam had my back.
“The shoes were not the brightest idea I’ve ever had,” I admitted. “But I was provoked.”
I met Adam’s eyes, and we stared at each other for a minute, then I started to snicker. He laughed and pulled me into his body. I relaxed—and it felt like the first time I’d relaxed since Christy came to stay with us.
“The shoes didn’t really have anything to do with Bran,” I told him.
“Leah is his mate,” he said. “Of course it had something to do with Bran. Especially when he couldn’t figure out who was stealing her shoes.”
I laughed again, tried to stop, while I said, “Only one shoe.”
“One of each pair. At a time. Forty-three shoes gone over a five-week period. Sometimes two or three shoes in the same day. Not a scent trace to be found. Just like a wizard had conjured them away.”
I blinked away tears and tried to stop laughing. It wasn’t that funny—it was the release of the tension that had been building up for days. “I actually can’t remember what it was Leah did, specifically. But I’m sure it was something worse than making me Enemy Number One because I let her tablecloth get stained.”
“Samuel said Leah put out a bounty on the shoes and the thief.”
That sent me off again.
“Her face,” I managed. “If only I had a photograph of her face.” Though I had a pretty good memory of it. “I thought she was just going to spontaneously combust right there in front of us—barefoot.”
“When Samuel told me about it, he asked me to find out how you managed it without leaving your scent behind. He said that when he asked you, you told him that you were keeping your secret in case you had to do the same to him someday.”
“Fishing pole and a big hook,” I told Adam because I’d do better than shoes if I had to get back at him for something. “The hardest part was shutting the closet without going into the room.” I thought about it. “Okay, the closet door and getting out of the house forty-odd times without getting caught. Thank goodness I spent a lot of legitimate time over at that house, so I didn’t have to try to cover up my scent except to keep it out of Bran’s bedroom.”
“What did you do with the shoes? Samuel said Bran searched your foster parents’ house for them.”
I snickered again. “Searched every day, sometimes twice a day—every time a shoe disappeared. Bryan got mad about it eventually, but Evelyn thought it was funny. I dumped the shoes in a glacial lake that was about three miles from our house. In between trips, because I couldn’t quite manage to make it there unseen every day, I hid them in the bed of Charles’s truck.”
“I thought you were afraid of Charles.”
I nodded. “So was everyone else, though. And he only drove that truck when he absolutely had to.”
“You said you tossed all of them in the lake. I thought one of those shoes returned a few years later? Where did you hide it?” His eyes were happy.
“In the lake with the rest.” I shivered in reflex. “It took me four hours of diving in that lake to find a shoe—and that was a glacier-fed lake. Most of the shoes had rotted into mush, but there was a steel stiletto with this wiry mesh stuff that looked pretty good. By that time, Bran had quit looking, so I didn’t have to be so careful.”
Bryan and Evelyn had both been dead then, too, and I’d been living alone in their house that no longer really felt like my own. Not even their ghosts had lingered with me. I didn’t tell Adam that, he was too perceptive, and I was too prone to self-pity with Christy living on the other side of my bedroom wall.
I cleared my throat. “I had to work on that stupid shoe for months before it didn’t look like it had spent two years in water. But her face at the sight of it sitting on top of the Christmas tree was so worth