"Adam's house is only a hundred yards from mine," I told him dryly. Samuel would have been right about any other wolf, but Samuel made his own rules. If he wanted to live in peace with Adam, he could manage it.

"Please." His tone was as far from pleading as it was possible to get.

"No," I told him.

There was another, longer pause.

"So how are you going to explain to your neighbors that there is a strange man sleeping on your front porch?"

He'd have done it, too—so I let him move in.

I told him that the first time he flirted with me, he'd be out on his ear. I told him that I didn't love him anymore, though it might have had more effect if I had been entirely certain of that myself. It helped that I knew that he didn't love me, hadn't loved me when he tried to elope with me when I was sixteen—and he was who-knows-how-old.

It was not really as bad as it sounded. He grew up at a time when women married much younger than sixteen. It's hard on the older werewolves to adjust to modern ways of thinking.

I wish I could hold it against him, though. It would help me keep in mind that he still only wanted me for what I could give him: children who lived.

Werewolves are made, not born. To become a werewolf, you need to survive an attack so vicious that you nearly die—which allows the werewolf's magic to defeat your immune system. Many, many of the werewolf's kin who try to become werewolves themselves die in the attempt. Samuel had outlived all of his wives and children. Those children of his who had attempted to become werewolf had all died.

Female werewolves can't have children; their pregnancies spontaneously abort during the moon's change. Human women can have children with werewolves, but they can only carry to term the babies who have only human DNA.

But I was neither human, nor werewolf.

Samuel was convinced I'd be different. Not being moon called, my changes aren't violent—or even really necessary. I once went three years without shifting to my coyote self. Wolves and coyotes could interbreed in the wild, why not werewolves and walkers?

I don't know what the biological answer to that is, but my answer is that I didn't care to be a broodmare, thank you very much. So, no Samuel for me.

My feelings for Samuel should have been neat and tidily put in the past—except that I hadn't entirely been able to convince myself that all I felt for him was the lingering warmth anyone would feel for an old friend.

Maybe I'd have come to some conclusion about Samuel who had, after all, been living in my home for better than half a year, if it hadn't been for Adam.

Adam had been the bane of my existence for most of the time I'd lived in the Tri-Cities, where he ruled with an iron hand. Like the Marrok, he had a marked tendency to treat me like one of his minions when it suited him, and like a human stray when it didn't. He was high-handed, to say the least. He'd declared me his mate before the pack—and then had the gall to tell me it was for my own protection, so his wolves wouldn't bother me, a coyote living in their territory. Once he said it, it was so—and nothing I could say would change it in the eyes of his pack.