Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

all.
    Somewhere along the way, we made it into the trailer and up on the soft queen bed that was made with clean, new sheets—in fact, the whole trailer smelled brand-new. Trailers like this were expensive. Who did he know who would loan him a brand-new trailer?
    That thought left me, too, and when we were finished, I was as hot and sweaty as I’d been before I first jumped into the river, the trailer smelled like us, and Adam was asleep.
    Mating is a lot more permanent than marriage. Partly, I think, it’s that usually if you find your mate, he’s not going to be someone you need to divorce. Abuse is almost not possible when two people are connected by a mating bond, and it gives you insight into your mate that allows you to avoid the nastier fights that snowball into cold distance. And partly it is that magic is somewhat harder to deal with than legal paperwork, and the mating bond is pack magic.
    Given that, I hadn’t really expected for the actual wedding to matter so much to me.
    “I like having you wear my ring,” said Adam, his eyes yellow and gleaming out from under half-opened lids. Sometimes the mate bond gives more insight to one or the other of us. He seemed to be responding to the gist of what I’d been thinking, while I was being kept in the dark. “I like that people can just look at you and know that you are taken, that you are mine.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “And yes, I know that sentiment is at the top of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s list of things not to say to a modern woman.”
    Something was bothering him, I thought. The last sentence or two had been just a little too tight.
    “Uhm,” I said, rolling over so I could lick a bead of sweat off his chest. He tasted like Adam. Who needed champagne? “You better not take off your ring without a really good reason,” I told him, letting my inner coyote out where he could see her. Maybe he needed to know his possessiveness was returned, in spades. “And if your ex-wife or any moderately attractive woman from thirteen to seventy is in the area, you should be aware that there is no reason good enough for you to take off your ring.”
    He laughed, and I rolled again, until I was all the way on top of him.
    I hadn’t gotten it right yet, hadn’t worked out what was bothering him. Our bond might be talking to him, but it wasn’t letting me know anything that was going on behind his eyes—which had gone dark again. That’s the problem with magic. You start counting on it, and it disappears out from under your feet and leaves you floundering worse than if you’d never had it in the first place. So all I could go on was what most other women had to use to interpret their mates’ moods.
    I had known Adam for more than ten years—I’d known his ex-wife, Christy, too. Maybe his problem was rooted in his first marriage. She’d been big on personal freedom—as long as it was her freedom. She’d been jealous of the pack; jealous, also, I thought, of Jesse, their daughter. She didn’t love him, but she had wanted to be the center of his world and would tolerate nothing else.
    Maybe he felt that he was trying to do that to me. Maybe we both needed to lighten up the atmosphere a bit, give ourselves time to deal with all the changes.
    I nipped his ear lightly. “If it were socially acceptable to tattoo my name across your forehead, I’d do it.”
    “I only see my forehead when I look in a mirror,” he said. “I see my hand a lot more often.”
    “It wouldn’t be for you,” I told him. “You know who you belong to. It’s for all the other women. Only fair to warn them when the wrong word might get them hurt. This coyote has fangs.”
    His chest vibrated under me, the laugh not making it all the way out yet. He relaxed subtly.
    “I thought that if you’re feeling primitive about this, it is only fair to let you know that I’m feeling pretty primitive, too,” I informed him lightly.
    Then I rolled off him and over the edge of the bed to drop down on the floor. I kicked my swimming suit, now cold and clammy, aside. “However, you ought to know that I can’t work at the shop with my rings on unless I want to be known as Nine-Fingered Mercy. And”—I put my fingers on the pawprint just beneath my navel—“having gotten all the tattoos I ever intend to, I won’t tattoo your name on my forehead or anything like that.”
    He jumped out of bed and strode to his suitcase. He unzipped the outer pocket and pulled out