Moon Called (Mercy Thompson #1)(24)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"Adam tore a strip off me for being so hard on you," he said, his voice coaxing. "He was right. I was mad because I don’t like hurting someone unnecessarily, and I took it out on you. Can I come in and talk to you instead of the door?"

I rubbed my face tiredly. I wasn’t sixteen anymore, to run away from difficult things, no matter how attractive that option was. There were, I thought reluctantly, things I needed to say to him as well.

"All right," he said. "All right, Mercy. I’ll see you in the morning."

He had turned around and was already walking away when I opened the door.

"Come in," I said and shivered when the wind blew through my shirt. "But you’d better hurry. It’s colder than a witch’s britches out there."

He came back and stomped his feet hard on the mat, leaving behind clumps of snow before stepping inside my room. He took off his coat and set it on the table near the door, and I saw he’d found a shirt somewhere. They kept stashes of clothes around town, in case someone needed to dress quickly; unisex things mostly, like jeans, T-shirts, and sweats. The T-shirt he wore was a little small and clung to him like a second skin. If he’d had an extra ounce of fat or a little less muscle, it would have looked stupid, but he was built like a Chippendales’ dancer.

His body was lovely, but I don’t know if anyone else would have called him handsome. He certainly didn’t have Adam’s strikingly beautiful features. Sam’s eyes were deeply set, his nose was too long, his mouth too wide. His coloring in human form was much less striking than his wolf: light blue-gray eyes and brown hair, streaked just a bit from the sun.

Looking at his face, I wasn’t objective enough to decide how attractive he was: he was just Sam who had been my friend, my defender, and my sweetheart.

I glanced away from his face, dropping my own so that he couldn’t read my anger-and whatever other emotion was hammering at me-until I’d gotten it under control. If he read the wrong thing into it, that wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t let him in to argue with him.

"I didn’t think you were going to talk to me," he said, with a shadow of his usual warm smile in his voice.

"Me either," I agreed grimly to my shoes-I wasn’t going to get through this if I had to look at him. "But I owe you an apology, too."

"No." His tone was wary. Apparently he was too smart to believe my submissive gaze. "You have nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have snapped your nose off earlier."

"It’s all right," I told him. "You were probably right. I found Mac dead and Adam almost in the same shape-and I panicked." I walked to the bed and sat on it, because it was as far away from him as I could get in the motel room. Only then did I dare to look at him again. " My apology is years overdue. I should have talked to you before I left. I should have told you I’d decided to go to Portland." But I was afraid I might do something stupid like shoot you or, worse, cry  –  but he didn’t need to know that part.

The humor that usually touched his face leaked away, leaving behind neutral wariness, as if he were watching for a trap. "My father told me he’d spoken to you and persuaded you to go to your mother’s house instead of running off with me," he said.

"How long did you wait for me?" After Bran had caught us necking in the woods and told me he was sending me to Portland, Samuel had decided that he’d take me away with him instead. I was supposed to sneak out and meet him in the woods a mile or so from my house. But the Marrok knew, he was like that. He told me why Samuel wanted to take me as his mate-and it hadn’t been for any reason I could accept.

So while Samuel waited for me, Charles was driving me down to Libby to catch the train to Portland that morning instead.

Samuel looked away from me without answering.

In his own way, Samuel was the most honorable person I’d ever known-something that made his betrayal hurt worse because I knew that he’d never meant me to believe he loved me. He’d told me he would wait for me, and I knew he’d waited long after he’d realized I wasn’t going to come.

"That’s what I thought," I said in a small voice. Damn it, he shouldn’t still affect me this way. I found that I was taking deeper breaths than I normally did, just to breathe in his scent.

"I should have told you I’d changed my mind," I told him, clinging by my fingernails to the threads of what I needed to tell him. "I’m sorry for abandoning you without a word. It was neither right nor kind."

"Father told you to go without talking to me again," Samuel said. He sounded detached, but he’d turned his back on me and was staring at a damp spot on the rug near his boots.

"I am not of his pack," I snapped. "That has always been made perfectly clear to me. It means I didn’t have to obey Bran then. I shouldn’t have, and I knew it at the time. I’m sorry. Not for leaving, that was the right decision, but I should have told you what I was doing. I was a coward."

"My father told me what he told you." His voice started calmly enough, but there was a tinge of anger weaving itself through his words as he continued. "But you should have known all of that already. I didn’t hide anything."

There was no defensiveness in his voice or in his posture; he really didn’t understand what he’d done to me-as stupid as that made him in my eyes. It was still good, somehow, to know that the hurt he’d caused me had been unintentional.

He turned, his eyes met mine, and I felt the zing that had once been as familiar as his face. Part of it was attraction; but part of it was the power of a dominant wolf. The attraction brought me to my feet and halfway across the room before I realized what I was doing.

"Look, Samuel," I said, coming to an abrupt halt before I touched him. "I’m tired. It’s been a rough day. I don’t want to fight with you over things that are long past."

"All right." His voice was soft, and he gave a little nod to himself. "We can talk more tomorrow."

He put his coat back on, started for the door, then turned back. "I almost forgot, Charles and Carl took the body-"

"Mac," I told him sharply.

"Mac," he said, gentling his tone. I wished he hadn’t done that, because his sympathy brought tears to my eyes. "They took Mac to our clinic and brought back your van. Charles gave me the keys. He would have returned them himself, but you left the room too quickly. I told him I was coming to deliver an apology, so he gave them to me."

"Did he lock the van?" I asked. "I’ve a pair of guns in there, loaded for werewolves-" Mention of the guns reminded me of something else, something odd. "Oh, and there’s a tranquilizer dart of some sort that I found near Adam when I moved him."