“You are evil,” I said, tempted, feeling my body respond to the images and memories of being with him.
“I could be,” he said, nuzzling my neck again. He stopped, his breath hot on my skin, still damp and bruised from his bite. He sniffed, stiffened, and leaned his body back from me. “I . . . I bit you.” He sounded surprised, and maybe horrified. He hadn’t realized he had been biting me. Not good, but not totally unexpected. Rick had not been able to shift into his cat, held in human form by the magic woven into the tattoos on his shoulder, magic that might be attached to me somehow; the golden eyes, still visible among the scars, sometimes got hot when he was with me. Or maybe the magic had nothing to do with me. No one knew.
I touched his shoulder and felt the heat from the tats. Yeah. The magic—whatever it was—in them was activated. “Cat mating behavior,” I said calmly, sliding my hand down his arm to his wrist. “You didn’t break the skin.”
“But I could have.” He dropped his head to my shoulder, his mouth moving on my flesh as he added, “I’m sorry.”
“No harm, no foul,” I said, keeping my tone light. “But I was serious about feeding me. I’m starving.”
I felt his lips move into a smile and he pressed them to my neck. Heat blossomed all over again, but sweeter and more tender. I batted tears away. I had missed this. “So am I,” he whispered back, his meaning something totally different.
I chuckled and he eased back from me. “Fried everything?” I asked.
“And lots of it. But I’m warning you. Fried food is no substitute for sex in an alley.”
“I don’t wanna know how you know that,” I said. “Ewww.”
? ? ?
We ended up at ACME Oyster House on Bourbon Street, sitting at a table in back of the well-lit restaurant, surrounded by both locals and tourists, where Rick ordered and we ate servings of Boo-fries (which were covered with roast beef and gravy), char-grilled oysters, fried crawfish tails, and softshell crab po’boys. The entire meal was a heart attack on platters and so good I wanted to cry when I got too full to eat more. We finished off lunch with beer, which, considering our metabolisms, meant it was all for the taste and not for a buzz. And Rick paid with a “company” credit card.
“Sooo,” I hedged. “Was this a date or business?”
“Yeah.” And he gave me that smile. Oh, good merciful heaven. I remembered that smile, the one he used to give me when we woke up together. “Question,” he said. “If I found that sex was safe—”
“In a heartbeat.”
“Good to know.” He smiled and licked a minuscule speck of hot sauce off his lips, which was what I wanted to do. Dang it. “There’re differing opinions in the were community about sex and infection. Most say it isn’t possible to transmit during sex, that the grindys don’t kill for misbehavin’. The same people also say that it isn’t worth taking a chance, so they mate only within the community.”
Community. A were community? Yeah. That. A community that I wasn’t part of. But I kept my reaction and the odd surge of disappointment to myself. Casually, I asked the question “Were community? In the U.S.?”
“No. The werewolves are too reclusive. The community is online, worldwide. I have contacts in Africa, which helps. Not Kemnebi,” he said, before I asked about his onetime mentor and full-time enemy. “I’ve met this African werelion online, Asad. In human form he’s this huge black guy, and some kind of war chief for his human tribe, the Fulani. He’s been . . . He thinks he can find a way to help me.”
Help him shift into his werecat, which would end the pain of his body always trying to free his cat. End the insanity-agony of the three days of the full moon when he was trapped on the verge of the shift, his mind held together only by a music spell woven by Big Evan. “That would be wonderful,” I said. Deep inside Beast thought, Could run with mate. Could hunt with mate.
“So. What are you working on?” Rick asked.
“We’re gonna talk about work?”
“That’s something won’t end with us in bed, you maybe infected, and us maybe killed by my own personal killing machine.” He was talking about Pea, the neon green, kitten-sized grindylow that had been assigned to Rick to keep him from spreading the were-taint. “Spill it, babe.”