"Look, I didn't mind Warren or Mary Jo. Mary Jo even knows one end of a wrench from another and helped out. But Honey… doesn't her mate desperately need her to sit and be pretty for his customers?"

Honey's mate-and-husband was a plumbing contractor, Peter Jorgenson. He was a wiry, homely, quiet man who did more work in an hour than most people did in their entire lives. Despite being a bimbo with no appreciation for anything except what she could see in a mirror, Honey loved her husband. Though when she said so, she always prefaced it with how she didn't care that—unlike herself—he wasn't a dominant wolf. Not that she ever talked to me: she didn't like me any more than I liked her.

"Peter follows my orders," Adam told me.

Adam was Alpha, so Peter followed his orders. Honey was Peter's wife, so Peter gave her orders—which she followed. Male werewolves treat their mates like beloved slaves. The thought set my back up.

It wasn't Adam's or Peter's fault that werewolves had yet to come out of the Stone Age. Really. It was just a good thing I wasn't a werewolf or there would be a slave rebellion.

I aimed a kick at Adam's knee that he caught and used to drag me forward and off balance. Then he did something complicated and I ended up face down on the mat twisted like a pretzel while he held me there with one hand and a knee.

He smelled like the forest at night.

I slapped the mat quickly and he let me up.

"Adam. Close your eyes and envision Honey in my shop. She wore three-inch heels today." The thought of her was like a dash of cold water in my face—which I needed.

He laughed. "Out of place, was she?"

"She spent the whole day standing up because she didn't want to risk staining her skirt on any of my chairs. Gabriel has a crush on her." I frowned at him when he laughed again. "Gabriel is a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old male. If his mother finds out he's flirting with a werewolf, she'll quit letting him work at the shop."

"She won't find out Honey is a werewolf. Honey isn't out yet. And Honey's used to male attention, she won't take Gabriel seriously," Adam said, as if that was the point.

" I know that, Gabriel knows that—his mother won't care. And she will find out. That's just the way my luck runs. If Gabriel leaves, I'll have to do my own paperwork." I hadn't meant to whine, but I hated paperwork and it hated me back.

Sylvia, Gabriel's mother, had just found out that Zee was fae. She'd been okay with that, because she already knew and liked Zee when she found out. But I doubted she'd be so accommodating about werewolves, especially pretty female werewolves who might be after her boy.