He shook his head. “It was when he sent her away.”
Anna knew the story, so he didn’t repeat it. His brother had decided that a sixteen-year-old coyote-shifter Mercy might be a way for him to have children who survived and set about courting her. Bran had intervened before Samuel had done irreparable damage to her—or to himself. But it had cost them all anyway.
“We had a couple more musical nights after she went to live with her biological mother. At the second one, Bran concluded by saying that they had served their purpose, and it was time to move on.”
“Without Mercy to battle, it wasn’t fun anymore,” said Anna.
“That’s what I think,” Charles said. “No one ever had the nerve to ask my da.”
“No wonder Leah thinks reestablishing that tradition would be bad news,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should make this barbecue a onetime event.”
“This event Leah thinks you don’t want,” Charles said, unable to hide his amusement. “She’s probably ready to make it a daily thing at this point.”
“I can’t cancel it altogether,” Anna told him after a moment. “If I switch sides again, even Leah will know that I’m playing her. But I think I can get her to make me do all the work for it. I can make it as different from those nights as possible. Maybe no children.” She paused. “Or if we never want to repeat it—only children.”
Anna was pretty good at getting people to do what she wanted. Once in a while, she stepped on toes when she did so because the instinctive deference that most wolves felt for the more dominant was just missing in her. She was getting much better at dancing around the dominance thing, though.
Leah wasn’t smart, but she’d been around a long time. And if she’d trained Mercy—well, Mercy had trained her back. She might see through what Anna was doing because of that. But if Leah made a fuss, he’d take care of it. Brother Wolf liked that idea.
“Stop it,” Anna said firmly. “I can take care of myself.”
“Of course you can,” he said, surprised. “That doesn’t mean I can’t do it, too.”
She shook her head at him, but he knew she was laughing inwardly because Brother Wolf told him so.
“And you tell everyone you don’t understand people,” she said.
“I don’t,” he told her contentedly. “I just understand you.”
CHAPTER
2
It took Anna the better part of an hour to drive twenty miles.
Since she had become Charles’s mate, most of the time she felt as though she belonged here, in the wilds of Montana. Then she’d take a drive with Charles in the mountains and be forcibly reminded that she’d been raised in a city.
True, some of Chicago was a wilderness in its own right, but even in the bad areas, roads could be relied upon to be paved, wide enough to get at least one car through, and she’d been able to trust that there wouldn’t be a freaking tree growing up in the middle of the road, hidden by a sharp bend.
If she hadn’t been wearing her seat belt for that one, she might have gone through the windshield. Charles, who hadn’t been, had braced himself just before she hit the brakes, and she wondered uncharitably if he’d known about the tree.
“No,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “I just saw it the same time you did.”
“Why is there a tree in the road?” she grumbled.
“That’s one of those questions without a correct answer, right? Like when a woman asks if her pants make her look fat.” There was no amusement in his voice or eyes, but she knew he felt it all the same, and her lips curled up in response.
She edged the truck around the tree. “At least you didn’t say, ‘When a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very much . . .’”
Charles laughed—and she felt proud of herself, because he didn’t laugh easily.
“I haven’t been up this way in five or six years,” he admitted. “There wasn’t a tree growing here then. But it’s not a big tree, and aspen can grow three feet a year.”
“No one has been up this road—and I use the term loosely—in five years?” she said. “I thought Bran was up here last fall.”
“There’s another road,” he said. “It’s probably in a little better shape for most of the way because it’s traveled more—but this way is faster.”
“As long as we don’t hit any trees,” she said.
The tree wasn’t the only obstacle. Though the road apparently wasn’t traveled much, there were long stretches with deep ruts. There were rocks—some the size of her fist, with sharp points that might bruise a tire and cause it to go flat; some the size of a bowling ball, which could puncture the workings on the underside of the truck. In a couple of places grass and bushes had grown so thick that she could only guess where the road was. She’d slowed down so much that she thought they might make better time on foot.
“Get your wheels out of the ruts,” Charles advised her in that even voice he had that told her he’d been fighting those words for a while. “You could lose an axle if the hole in the road gets too deep.”
She knew that. She’d just forgotten.
“This isn’t a road,” she told him indignantly, with a growl she hadn’t meant to use. “It’s just wagon tracks through rocks and mud.”
But she pulled the wheel to the left, and the truck tipped a little as the wheels climbed up on the side of the track. Their bumpy ride got a lot bumpier because the bottom of the ruts were a lot smoother than the sides, but the scrape of rock on the underside of the truck happened less frequently.
The road got drier as it climbed out of a ravine, then got mushy again as it dropped over a ridge in the mountain they were, as far as Anna could tell, circumnavigating.
Charles came to alert. Reading his body language, she brought them from a crawl to a full stop before he said anything. She didn’t bother to try to pull to the side because there wasn’t a side to pull off onto; besides, they hadn’t seen another car since she’d turned off the main road.
Charles was out of the truck before she’d come to a complete stop. She turned off the engine and got out to join him.
“Hester and Jonesy don’t drive,” he said. “So why am I seeing fresh tire tracks?”
Anna looked down, and there they were—tire tracks. She should have noticed them.
She tried to redeem herself. “ATVs, right?” The odd-to-her-city-eyes vehicles were as common in the rugged country of Montana in the summer as snowmobiles were in the winter. “Four-wheelers.” Because there were older three-wheeled ATVs. “At least two of them because there are two sizes of tires.”