Page 10 of Moonlight's Mate
“I’m sure you handled it.”
He hazarded a lightning glance her way, but her expression was clear. She meant what she said. “Might not be the sort of problem that goes away so quick.” He told her about the imp and Orson’s plan to case the town. “I called some people, asked about unrest among the fae,and what I heard isn’t good.”
For a long moment, only the breeze in the pines broke the silence. Then she grabbed her coffee cup and turned away. “I don’t have decaf.”
For another not-quite-as-long moment, shock locked his muscles before he jumped the steps two at a time to follow her into the house.
The front room was her business office. One lemon-yellow wall boasted design awards. Three computer screens crowded a pine desk big enough to have made his woodworking uncle jealous. Splashes of paprika-red and cool lime tones brightened the central hallway that led past a tiny bedroom on one side and bath on the other. He poked his nose in each, breathing her spicy amber fragrance.
Her call echoed down the hall. “Do you want this coffee or not?”
He sauntered to the kitchen and great room at the back of the house and dug in his heels again to admire the view framed in the floor-to-ceiling windows. While the porch at the front of the house had faced the pretty little lake below, the back looked out to the mountains, just trees and sky and freedom. Unlike the cheerful office, it looked wild and a little lonely.
The view of a woman who wanted no one to hold her back.
Merrilee shoved a mug at him. The mug was big, almost a soup bowl, and the coffee was black, just the way he liked it.
Did she know he drank his coffee black, or was she just not willing to give him the pleasure of cream and sugar?
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you have any hazelnut oat milk?”
She gave him an incredulous look. “Where is the imp carcass? I want to see it.”
He shook his head. “It was mostly dissolved when I stopped by on the way here. Orson and his quartet started out at dawn. I expect they’ll have a report for me by lunch.”
“I want to hear everything they find,” she demanded.
“Good coffee,” he said.
She paced toward the windows. “My mother told me stories of the fae.”
“I think every wereling mother did. Hard to keep a kid safe under the covers in bed with bogeyman tales when youarethe bogeyman.”
Her lips quirked. “Yeah. She told me if I kept sneaking out at night, they’d steal the verita luna from me.”
He studied her over the rim of his mug. “What were you sneaking out for?”
She shrugged. “My grandmother wasn’t getting any younger, and since my mother wasn’t Alpha, I’d decided the more I ran, the sooner I’d change. I figured running under the moonlight would make me better.”
“I thought fighting would make me better. Takes more, doesn’t it?”
She gave him another look, more speculative this time. “Anyway, Mom was always trying to find a way to keep me home until she could finally turn me over to Grandmère.”
“According to my sources, your mother probably wasn’t stretching the truth too far about the fae.” He headed for one of the chairs pulled up in front of the windows, forcing her to follow, and settled into the deep, overstuffed cushions with an appreciative grunt. A heather-gray throw on the back of the chair tickled his nape, as if wanting to swathe him while he contemplated the view. “The fae queen warps human desires into the magic that empowers her. Who knows what she would do with wereling passions?”
Merrilee lowered herself to the chair beside his but stayed perched on the edge. “Is that what you think this is about? The fae queen coming after werelings?”
He shrugged. “I’m told the imps are her creatures, used for spying. This wasn’t a courtesy call.”
She drank the last of her coffee in one slug and surged to her feet. “I still want to see what’s left of the imp.”
He looked at his coffee mournfully. With a huff, she plucked it from his hands and went to the kitchen to transfer it to a travel mug. She topped it off before screwing on the cap, and he felt an inexplicable surge of pleasure at the small kindness. Itwasgood coffee.
They left the house after she fetched shoes and a coat, and she pulled the door closed behind them.
“Lock it,” he said. “Until we know what’s going on.”
Her jaw worked, but she nodded. “I’ll have to find the key. Go ahead and I’ll meet you there after I borrow a car.”
