Free Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION by authors_sort Page A

almost sure she was right. But one of the cars I could see was Ben’s red truck. I wouldn’t leave a fifteen-year-old alone if Ben was around no matter whose daughter she was.
    No one bothered us as we walked through my back field.
    â€œNice car,” she murmured, as we passed the donor Rabbit’s corpse. “Dad really appreciates you setting it out herefor him. Good for you. I told him the next time he annoyed you, you were likely to paint graffiti on it.”
    â€œYour father is a subtle man,” I told her. “I’m saving the graffiti for later. I’ve decided that the next time he gets obnoxious, I’ll take three tires off.” I held my hand out and canted it, like a car with one wheel.
    She giggled. “It would drive him nuts. You should see him when the pictures aren’t hanging straight on the walls.” We reached the back fence, and she climbed cautiously through the old barbed wire. “If you do decide to paint it—let me help?”
    â€œAbsolutely,” I promised. “I’ll wait here until you’re safely inside.”
    She rolled her eyes again, but grinned and sprinted for her back porch. I waited until she waved to me once from Adam’s back door and disappeared inside.
    Â 
    When I took the garbage out before I went to bed, I noticed that Adam’s place was still full of cars. It was a long meeting, then. Made me grateful I wasn’t a werewolf.
    I turned to go into my house and stopped. I’d been stupid. It doesn’t matter how good your senses are if you aren’t paying attention.
    â€œHello, Ben,” I said, to the man standing between me and the house.
    â€œYou’ve been telling tales, Mercedes Thompson,” he said pleasantly. As Jesse had said, he had a nifty English accent. He wasn’t bad-looking either, if a trifle effeminate for my taste.
    â€œMmm?” I said.
    He tossed his keys up in the air and caught them one-handed, once, twice, three times without taking his eyes off mine. If I yelled, Adam would hear, but, as I told him earlier, I didn’t belong to him. He was possessive enough, thank you. I didn’t really believe Ben was stupid enough to do something to me, not with Adam within shouting distance.
    â€œÂ â€˜Stay here a moment, Ben,’ ” Ben said, with anexaggeration of the drawl that Adam’s voice still held from a childhood spent in the deep South. “ ‘Wait until my daughter has had a chance to get to her room. Wouldn’t want to expose her to the likes of you.’ ” The last sentence lost Adam’s tone and fell back into his own crisp British accent. He didn’t sound quite like Prince Charles, but closer to that than to Fagan in Oliver .
    â€œI don’t know what you think it has to do with me,” I told him with a shrug. “You’re the one who got kicked out of the London pack. If Adam hadn’t taken you, you’d have been in real trouble.”
    â€œIt wasn’t me that done it,” he growled ungrammatically. I refrained from correcting him with an effort. “And as for what you have to do with it, Adam told me you’d warned him to keep Jesse out of my way.”
    I didn’t remember doing that although I might have. I shrugged. Ben had come to town a few months ago in a flurry of gossip. There had been three particularly brutal rapes in his London neighborhood, and the police had been looking in his direction. Guilty or not, his Alpha felt it would be good to get him out of the limelight and shipped him to Adam.
    The police hadn’t anything to hold him on, but after he’d emigrated the rapes stopped. I checked—the Internet is an amazing thing. I remembered speaking to Adam about it, and I warned him to watch Ben around vulnerable women. I’d been thinking about Jesse, but I didn’t think I’d said that explicitly.
    â€œYou don’t like women,” I told him.