The slip-on shoes and silky socks went first, then the men’s bedroom “butler” stand got the pants, shirt, and tie.

“You really like these things?” he asked of the briefs.

“Ah, yeah.” Trust the Swiss to engineer underwear to its most smoothly structured second-skin state.

Ric touched his neck bandage just below the beard line, then picked up an electric razor that looked like a Martian spaceship probe from The War of the Worlds.

I put a hand on his wrist. “Some like it rough.”

Actually, I wanted to get past the settling-in process to the thing all men hate: talking it over. I’d probably have to sleep with him first, which was fine with me.

He hesitated, then put down the razor and turned his bare brown back to me.

“You already knew,” he said.

“The other night, when I slept over in the den. I woke up first. You’d turned over in your sleep.”

“Damn! I never do that.”

“It was my fault. I can’t sleep on my back so you forgot to keep your back out of the light.”

“I thought you acted kind of… weird that morning.”

“Never try to fool an ex-FBI man.” I ran a finger down his shoulder blade.

He shut his eyes in remembered past pain and present pleasure. “So when and where’d you get the Midol touch, paloma?”

“Every miracle has its price.”

“My mom must have told you what and why. She swore it was just between us when I was ten years old.”

“You were a child and she was acting as your psychologist. Things change. People change.”

“You changed me.”

“Superficially.”

“No. You changed my past. You replaced my past with whatever you did to me last night. I’d be a fool to resent that, but I need to know what and why, just as you did.”

My fingers plucked the faint silver skeins of scars on his back like a harp, sending shivers of sensual pleasure through his frame.

He caught my wrists in his hands, then in a one-handed grip.

“No, Delilah. You don’t play me to distraction. I know I’m foggy about a lot of things. First a shower, then bed, then you spill your guts. Sí?”

I laughed as he pulled me off the countertop and tugged me toward the shower. It was one of those glass curves with a tiled wall and floor and sprays versatile enough for a car wash.

“I’m still dressed!” I objected, but I kicked off my casual mules as I went with him.

“Then you’ll have to get all those wet things off when we’re done. I’m not letting you loose to work your wiles. Trust me.”

I couldn’t stop laughing as he turned on the water. I shut my eyes to the warm tropical waterfalls of modern plumbing.

After all I remembered going through, and all he couldn’t remember going through, that simple chlorinated city water seemed to rinse our skins and souls clean.

Ric peeled me out of my sopping top and jeans until I was as naked and free as he was. Well, except for the silver familiar. It had curled down into a big toe ring, either shy or savvy about staying out of the way. Anyway, our impromptu coed shower had us both feeling safe and happy, even though that could never last.

“My bed this time, a real bed?” Ric asked. “You can be on top.”

Beds were my bête noire, thanks to childhood nightmares. I couldn’t bear to lie on my back, feel pinned. But if Ric was my bed and lay under me…

When we waltzed into the bedroom, smooching, and I finally dared really look at his bed, I melted like a shelled M &M.

The sheets were black satin, all the better to set off my Snow White skin. The many piled pillows were encased in blue satin, to set off my ballad-black hair and blue eyes.

Now I could harbor no doubt this man was as terminally crazy about me as I was about him. Color-coordinated bed linens, can you dig it? I shut my eyes. This felt like a continuation of the Inferno bridal suite wedding night, when I kissed my comatose prince whole and awake again.

“I’ve wanted you here for a long time,” he said. “I guess you can tell.”

“It’s only been weeks, Montoya,” I reminded him as I pushed him down, under me. Ric could sweep me away like a swooning bondage princess or let me ride him like a Valkyrie. What a guy. Thanks to Helena ’s shrink insights, I understood that his sexual versatility was adapting to my conflicting needs for both trust and independence… surrender and control.

Say, maybe I could accomplish another bit of sexual healing, as the song said.

I had to shut my eyes to block the image of his dead-to-the-world body crawling with black leeches and blue-winged tsetse flies feeding on his genitals as well as every inch of skin.

His ready erection then at my presence was his miracle, not mine, and I blessed his foster mother (yeah, she’d approve) for giving him this pleasant, delayed return to reality. Maybe I could extend it.

I glimpsed a familiar glint behind his head and pulled away the color-coordinated pillows.

“You have a mirrored headboard, Montoya?”

“I bought it before I knew you and about your mirror magic,” he protested.

But his protests, however sincere, were too late. I’d spotted the chrome border and churchlike spires at the top framing the beveled mirror squares.

“This is so tacky,” I said. “You have really gone over to Vegas glitz. Hunt-club Virginia bluebloods would be shocked. Stay right there.”

I raced into the master bath and the huge closet, snagging the sky-blue tie and a similarly smooth, silky black one to match the décor honoring moi.

Irma was trying to urge me to tasteful restraint, but that was exactly what I had in mind.

He’d been found in the Land of the Book of the Dead, slumped half sitting against a wall, his wrists in chains above his head.

I reappeared with the ties swagged around my hips entwined with the double glints of my own hip chain and the silver familiar. Belly-dancing gear was Ric’s Achilles’ heel.

“Delilah,” he said, his voice both a warning and a goad.

“Stay right there,” I answered, unleashing the ties and looping them around his wrists and the headboard spires. “I’m going to kiss you all over until you beg for mercy.”

The map of his face and body bites was burned into my memory. My Brimstone Kiss lips were going to visit the site of every atrocity, erased maybe, but still needing a sensory remodeling. Pleasure where pain had been. So simple.

He took it for an erotic game. That showed how far I had come, repressed Kansas orphan me. I could seduce Ric into taking this healing necessity that admitted how deeply he’d been lost, how close he’d been to a tortured-to-death vampire victim, as Delilah’s naughty little bedroom improvisation.

That we were here, able to make love and deceive ourselves, just a little, to get us through the night, testified to our mutual loyalty. I untied him just as playfully as I’d confined him.

“Don’t stop now,” he complained as his arms wrapped around me. “I’d love to do this same thing to you.” His luxurious, probing kisses punctuated a list of druthers.

“Here, paloma… on my midnight black sheets… your white naked body on your back… I’d make you moan… like you made me moan… when you made my back… your personal paranormal playground… and my old scars… my new erotic zone.”

Oh, oh, oh. I so wanted what he did. I was almost climaxing before his arms lifted my torso so he could impale my soft center and take me for a wild ride on a bucking bronco, my long hair whipping around my face and neck like a mane.

Ric was back, stallion-strong, loving me more than ever. His release matched mine and justified everything. For the first time, I felt less soiled by the Brimstone Kiss. For the first time, I felt a throb of inner peace that I had taken and given that potent kiss in such quick succession.

Everything was getting back to what it’d been Before.

Before the Karnak Hotel vampire Pharaohs had lured Ric into their power.