“I have a request,” I told Adam, as he handed the parking ticket to the lady in the booth.

“What’s that?” He looked exhausted. This was his second trip this month to the other Washington on the opposite side of the country, and it was wearing on him. I hesitated. Maybe I should wait until he’d gotten a good night’s sleep.

In the backseat of the Rabbit, Jesse giggled.

She was a good kid, and we liked each other.

Today, her hair was the same dark brown as her father’s. Yesterday, it had been green. Green is not a good hair color on anyone. After three weeks of hair that looked like rotting spinach, I think she finally agreed with me. When I got up this morning to go to work, she was in the process of dyeing it. The brown was somewhat more unexpected than the green had been.

“Hush, you,” I told her with mock sternness.

“No cracks from the peanut gallery.”

“What do you need?” Adam asked me.

I already felt better with him home—the restless anxiety that was my constant companion when he was away had left and taken with it my panicky trapped feeling, too.

The lady in the parking booth nodded and waved us on because we’d timed Adam’s flight right and had only been there fifteen minutes—

still in the free-parking time allotment.

The balloons beside her made my stomach clench, especially the gold ones.

“I want to get married,” I told him, as Adam put the Rabbit in gear, and we put the balloons behind us.

He tilted his head and eyed me briefly before turning his attention back to the road. Likely his nose was giving him a taste of what I was feeling.

Most strong feelings are vulnerable to detection when you live with werewolves. My nose was good, too, but all it told me was that he’d had a woman sitting next to him on the flight home, because her scent clung to his sleeve. Often our mating bond allowed us to know what the other was feeling or, more rarely, thinking, but it wasn’t working that way right now.

“I was under the impression that we are getting married,” he said cautiously.

“ Now, Dad.” Jesse stuck her head between the bucket seats of my Rabbit. “She wants to get married now. Her mom called on Friday and has given up on the doves—”

“I thought you’d already told her no doves?” Adam asked me.

“— and the pigeons,” his daughter continued on blithely.

“Pigeons?” said Adam thoughtfully. “Pigeons are pretty. And they taste pretty good, too.” I hit him in the shoulder. Not hard, just enough to acknowledge his teasing.

“—but finally decided that butterflies would be better,” continued Jesse.

“Butterflies and balloons,” I told Adam. “She wants to release butterflies and balloons. Two hundred balloons. Gold ones.”

“I expect she’s trying to get Monarch butterflies if she wants gold balloons,” Jesse said helpfully.