Page 43 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

The call ended.

No one spoke as I set the phone face down on the bedside table.

Mary was already moving. She pushed the sheet back, or tried to. Lincoln caught the edge before she could get tangled.

“Don’t,” he said.

Her face snapped toward him. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t run while your legs are shaking.”

“My legs are none of your business.”

“They were very much my business when they were wrapped around my neck.”

Color flashed across her face. “That’s not helpful.”

“It wasn’t meant to be helpful. It was meant to slow you down.”

“I don’t want to be slowed down.”

“I know.”

His voice stayed warm, and that was why she didn’t break against it.

I moved off the bed and picked up the robe from the floor, then held it out. “Mary.”

She looked at the robe. Then at me. “My name is Marli. Or at least, that’s what Damien knows me as.”

The age lie sounded easier now. “No,” I said gently. “It isn’t.”

Her eyes glittered. “It was another lie for you, this time it was the one I gave your son.”

Lincoln sat up behind her, sheet low over his hips, one hand still open near her but not touching. “Mary, we need the truth.”

“I’m trying to give it to you.” Her laugh was small and sharp. “Yet you seem to be collecting it efficiently without me.”

“Did you know who we were?” Lincoln asked.

She looked from me to Lincoln, horror spreading across her face. “No. He said his fathers were in England, not Boston.”

“We live in London,” I said. “We came to Boston for work. But we used to live here for a while.”

Her eyes lowered to the floor. “I can’t do this.”

“What a mess,” Lincoln said, and the words came out rougher than mine would have.

Mary flinched.

He softened immediately. “No, love. Not you. Not us. The situation is a mess.”

She shook her head.

I hated Damien then. Unfairly, perhaps. He hadn’t made us open the door, or made Mary cross the hallway, or made scent answer scent in a room neither Lincoln nor I had wanted to leave. But she was here because he’d been careless with her first. And now she was looking at herself like a crime.

“Listen to me,” I said.

Her laugh came back, brittle but lovely. “Listening got me into my ex-boyfriend’s dads bed.”