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 a flat box, which he handed to me.

I opened it to find a thick gold chain with a battered military dog tag on it. Hauptman, it read, Adam Alexander. The last time I’d seen it, it had been one of a pair on the same steel chain lying on Adam’s chest of drawers.

“That’s to put your rings on when you’re at work,” he said, taking the chain from me and putting it around my neck. As he fastened the chain, he kissed the back of my neck. He stayed there for a moment, his fingers tight on the necklace.