My business didn’t need me to go into work this morning, but I would need a place to lick my wounds and the garage would do. If I lost my nerve here, I had a place to run.

My second choice was to keep braving on—and trust Adam not to leave me hanging out on a limb.

My fingers numb with terror, I unzipped my jeans. I didn’t say anything, because I was afraid that my voice would tell him that it wasn’t desire I was feeling—though while hauling him up the stairs my skin had been hot with anticipation.

I was risking my marriage.

Men couldn’t fake desire the way a woman could. Not that I could, and certainly no woman with a werewolf for a lover could fake it for long. But a man’s desire was obvious and unmistakable.

There were a dozen reasons floating around in my head, in my heart, for why Adam might not be interested. There were werewolves invading our territory. There was whatever had him putting up barriers between us. There was the fact that he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in however long. It was daytime and he should be getting ready for work.

And if he rejected me—however gently he did it—I would never find the courage to open up like this to him again.

There were tears gathering in my eyes at the thought of losing us, losing what we were. But I felt that it would say something equally bad about our relationship if I didn’t take this risk. So I tipped my head down and blinked hard as I slid my jeans and—the hell with it—switched my grip so my panties slid off my hips at the same time.

I couldn’t look at him as the cloth puddled on the carpet. I could barely breathe. I knew it was a balmy sixty-eight degrees in the room, but I felt like I was in an ice cave. Naked, I stepped away from my clothes and then stopped, forcing my hands to remain at my sides and not move to protect my bareness from his sight.

Adam had seen me naked before—but I don’t think I’d ever felt more vulnerable. Because this wasn’t about being naked in flesh—it was about risking myself to help him. Help us.

Possible disastrous story lines ran in my head as I stood there. I imagined him expressing his sadness that I had put him on the spot. I heard him tell me that this wasn’t the time for such a thing—that he’d made it clear that sex was off the table until he’d figured out whatever knotty problem his head was all tangled up in. Rapidly I conjured up failure, and imagining that was nearly as traumatic as the real thing might be.

I was seriously considering throwing up, when warm hands closed over my shoulders and Adam’s face pressed against my neck.

“Fucking hell,” Adam said about the same time I realized that my neck was damp with his tears. “I don’t deserve you, my love. I don’t deserve this, Mercy—but by God I will take it. I love you, too.”

And on his last word, our bond blazed open between us, but, in this moment, it conveyed only emotions, not thoughts. I didn’t know if opening the bond was intentional on his part, or if it was a product of his control slipping. Carried by that tie, the deluge of his emotions crashed through me, a complex mix of incredulousness (I had, by golly, surprised the heck out of him), exhaustion, and love before it was all consumed in a blaze of desire.

Sheer relief let my own tears, now quite out-of-date, fall down my face. Oh thank God, it had worked. There would be a tomorrow for us. I hadn’t screwed everything up even more than it already had been.

“Why are you cryin’, darlin’?” he asked me in a murmur—then stiffened a little, as if remembering the place he’d brought us to over the past few weeks.

“Fear,” I answered him honestly. “If you hadn’t touched me when you did, I was making a beeline to the bathroom so I could throw up.”

He laughed, as I meant him to. I didn’t ask why he’d been crying. Maybe he would think I hadn’t noticed. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. But today was to give him a safe space to be, work off some stress, then rest. He wasn’t in a place, I didn’t think, where honesty about what he was feeling outside this moment was going to do any of those things for him.

His strong hands were so very warm on my chilled skin. His arms, restrictively tight around my ribs, nonetheless let me breathe. I took a moment to take in his scent. The force of relief rushing through me temporarily short-circuited the arousal I would normally have felt naked and in my husband’s arms.

That was okay, though, because the touch of Adam’s fingers that ran with hot, slow possession from my shoulders, down my back, and around my butt would have been enough to spark passion from an icicle. His hard body, both familiar and more necessary for the time we had not touched, softened my stress-tensioned muscles.

“Shhh,” he whispered in my ear. “We’re good. We’re good.”

That hand on my butt lifted me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist as he took us toward the bed—before diverting to a side table, where he set me down.

With the thin light streaming through the edges of the blinds, Adam slid to his knees without ever losing contact with my body and loved me with his mouth and hands until I forgot my grand scheme to get Adam to loosen up and give him some peace, no matter how temporary. I forgot everything except his touch. Adam was usually a generous lover, and today was no exception.

I lost track of time a bit, drowning in the heat he brought with him. The next thing I knew he was pushing inside me, the zipper of his jeans rough on my skin. He was hot and hard and mine.

I bit him on the neck, and he laughed, a husky, aroused sound that I hadn’t heard from him in far too long.

“You make this fun,” he said in a rough voice that contrasted with the smooth movement of his hips.

“Back atcha,” I managed, tight and full and wishing I could stay in this space for the rest of my life.

He moved again and I quit talking—but then so did he.

If his first acquiescence to my seduction was driven, as I thought it might have been, by his understanding of how hard it was for me to strip for him when I wasn’t sure how it would be received, there was no question of his need. When we both came, I was surprised in retrospect that the side table—sturdy as it was—had survived its encounter with us.

Adam picked me up again and took me to our bed. He looked at me sprawled languorously where he had put me and began stripping off his own clothes. Where I had jerked mine off in nervous rawness, he pulled his off slowly as his eyes—and other parts of his body—told me that he liked me naked on the bed. That was only fair because watching Adam remove his clothes was a treat I would never tire of.

He didn’t put any striptease in it, just a slow, predatory intent that made my heart, my eyes, and the rest of my insides pretty happy about it.

Werewolves, all of them, are hard-muscled because the wolf is a restless creature. Adam, though, considered staying in shape a thing of paramount importance—part of the need to protect those around him that made him an Alpha. His body was a weapon, like his guns, his knives, and his swords—and it would not fail him.

As a purely unintentional side effect, watching him pull off his shirt was very much like watching someone pull a sheet off a great work of art. Muscles bunched and slid as he dropped the shirt and took off his jeans and underwear.

“Mmm,” I said.

He smiled—and the tiredness around his eyes melted away. “Mmm back,” he said, putting a knee on the bed.

And after a while, with me lying on him like a sweaty limp noodle, he fell asleep. I lay very still to let him rest—and soon fell asleep, too.

Something was moving me around, sliding me across the sheets—but I was tired and buried my face in a pillow with an indignant and not-awake grunt. Warm hands on my rump hesitated. A big warm body—naked male body—pressed into my back.

“No?” he said.

I wiggled my hips in invitation, still mostly asleep.

His head moved next to mine. His mouth tickled my ear as he said, “Nudge.” And it wasn’t a question because he picked up my hips and slid inside.

I laughed, not because I was amused at anything—or at least not just because he amused me. I laughed because he made me happy. He gripped my hips and I joined the dance.

I WOKE UP SORE, RESTED, AND FRANTIC BECAUSE ONE of the blinds was up and I could tell that it was well past noon. There was a note on the pillow next to me. Written on it in thick black Sharpie and pretty decent calligraphy was:

AND SO IS THE FATE OF ALL THOSE WHO AWAKEN THE NUDGE.

On the other side of the paper, in regular pen and Adam’s angular all-cap printing, was:

THANK YOU, SLEEPING BEAUTY. HEADING TO THE OFFICE. WAS AFRAID IF I WOKE YOU UP I WOULD NEVER GET OUT OF THE ROOM.

The effect of this morning’s exercise, a few hours of needed rest, and the note was that I smiled all the way through my shower. The hot water eased the edge of soreness nicely, and by the time I got out I was ready to go to work.

It had been a lovely cease-fire, but I knew that the morning had not solved anything except, maybe, given Adam some happiness and rest in the middle of an unknown battlefield. I would know when Adam had worked out whatever was bothering him because he would tell me—and he would open up our mating bond, which was once again shut as tightly as a drum.

I dressed and pulled out the phone to text Tad that I was on my way—and found I’d missed a phone call from Stefan last night. He hadn’t left me a message. There was also a text from Jesse: Out with friends—took Aiden with. My friends think he is cute—if they only knew :P Back for dinner. Dad was cheerful when he came down! Go you!

I felt my cheeks heat up. But I knew that seducing Adam in the middle of the day was not going to be a secret.

I texted Tad and started out—pausing at the spare bedroom where Renny had been installed. But the room was empty and the bed was made. I texted Mary Jo to see if everything was okay, though I expected that it was. Had there been more trouble, or had Renny not recovered as well as expected, I wouldn’t have been allowed to sleep in this late.

Mary Jo texted back: Renny’s fine. Headache. Sorry to have missed his own kidnapping. He doesn’t remember anything at all. Poor Renny.