he said. "I might have let you pay for the dent - "
"Don't even try to lie to me," I huffed indignantly, and he laughed again.
"Fine. I wouldn't have. But it's a moot point anyway, because after the wall fell on it, fixing the dent was out of the question. And the ice elf's lack of control was completely the vampire's fault - "
I could have kept arguing with him - I usually like arguing with Adam. But there were things I liked better.
I leaned forward and kissed him.
He tasted of blood and Adam - and he didn't seem to have any trouble following the switch from mild bickering to passion. After a while - I don't know how long - Adam looked down at his bloodstained shirt and started laughing again. "I suppose we might as well go bowling after all," he said, pulling me to my feet.
Chapter 2
WE STOPPED AT A STEAK HOUSE FOR DINNER FIRST.
He'd left the bloodstained coat and formal shirt in the car and snagged a dark blue T-shirt from a bag of miscellaneous clothes in the backseat. He'd asked me if he looked odd wearing a T-shirt with tuxedo pants. He couldn't see the way the shirt clung to the muscles of his shoulders and back. I reassured him, truthfully - and with a straight face - that no one would care.
It was Friday night, and business was brisk. Happily, the service was fast.
After the waitress took our orders, Adam said, a little too casually, "So what did you see in your vision?"
"Nothing embarrassing," I told him. "Just one time when I brought cookies over to you."
His eyes brightened. "I see," he said, and his shoulders relaxed a bit, even if his cheeks reddened. "I was thinking about that."
"We okay?" I asked him. "I'm sorry I intruded."
He shook his head. "No apologies necessary. You're welcome to whatever you pick up."
"So," I said casually, "your first time was under the bleachers, huh?"
He jerked his head up.
"Gotcha. Warren told me."
He smiled. "Cold and wet and miserable."
The waitress plunked our food down in front of us and hurried on her way. Adam fed me bites of his rare filet mignon, and I fed him some of my salmon. Food was good, company better, and if I had been a cat, I'd have purred.
"You look happy." He took a sip of his coffee and stretched out a leg so his foot was against mine.
"You make me happy," I told him.
"You could be happy all the time," he said, eating the last bite of baked potato, "and move in with me."
To wake up next to him every morning . . . but . . . "Nope. I've caused you enough trouble," I told him. "The pack and I need to come to . . . detente before I'm moving in. Your home is the den, the heart of the pack. They need a place where they feel safe."
"They can adjust."
"They're adjusting as fast as they can," I told him. "First there was Warren - did you hear that after you let him in, several other packs have allowed gay wolves to join, too? And now there's me. A coyote in a werewolf pack - you have to admit that's quite a lot of change for one pack to take."
"Next thing you know," he said, "women will have the vote or a black man will become president." He looked serious, but there was humor in his voice.
"See?" I pointed my fork at him. "They're all stuck in the eighteen hundreds, and you're expecting them to change. Samuel likes to say that most werewolves have all the change they can deal with the first time they become wolf. Other kinds of change are tough to force on them."
"Peter and Warren are the only ones who've been around since the eighteen hundreds," Adam told me. "Most of them are younger than I am."
The waitress came and blinked a little as Adam ordered three desserts - werewolves take a lot of food to keep themselves fueled up. I shook my head when she looked my way.
When she left, I took up the conversation from where I'd left off. "It won't hurt us to wait a few months until things settle down."
If he hadn't basically agreed with me, I'd have been sleeping in his house already instead of making do with dates. He understood as well as I did that pulling me into his pack had caused a lot of resentment. Maybe if it