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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.
    “Monarch butterflies,” said Adam. “Can you imagine the poor things trying to figure out their migration route from the Tri-Cities?”
    “She has to be stopped before she destroys the ecosystem,” I told him, only half-joking. “And I can only think of one way to do it. My sister eloped under the pressure of planning her wedding with my mother. I guess I can, too.”
    He laughed—and looked a lot less tired.
    “I love your mother,” he said with honest satisfaction that lowered his voice to a purr. “I suppose preserving the Tri-Cities’ ecosystem is a valid reason for jumping the gun. Let’s get married, then. I have my passport with me. Do you have your birth certificate, so we can get the license, or do we need to go home first?”

    IT WAS A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT, SO IT took us two days to get married. Eloping just isn’t as quick as it used to be unless you live in Vegas, I guess. Of course, we still might have made it in one except that I insisted on Pastor Arnez doing the honors. He’d had a funeral and two weddings to work us around.
    Adam had lost a lot of things fighting in Vietnam. His humanity and belief in God were just a few of them, he told me. He wasn’t thrilled about a church wedding, but he couldn’t really object without admitting that it was anger, not disbelief, he felt about God. I was just as glad to avoid that argument for a while.
    We meant the ceremony to be a small thing, Adam, Jesse, and me, with a pair of witnesses. Peter, the pack’s lone submissive, stopped in at the house at just the right time and so was pressed into service as a witness. Zee, my mentor, who would step in and run my business while we were gone on our impromptu honeymoon, was thus brought into our plans almost immediately and claimed the privilege of second witness. Despite rumor, the fae have no trouble going into a church of whatever denomination or religion. It is the steel that the early Christian church brought along with it that was deadly to the fae, not Christianity itself—though sometimes the fae forget that part, too.
    Somehow, though, word got out among the pack, and most of them managed to be at the church on Tuesday morning by the time Jesse and I drove in. Adam was coming separately with Peter in a nod to tradition. He had had to stop for gas, so Jesse and I arrived first, and when we parked, there were a lot of familiar cars in the lot.
    “Word travels