I think the gesture surprised Nicky, too, because he sat back from me. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“She’s rolled you,” Jacob said, and he started to lay me down on the floor and the suit jacket under my head. He moved away, and I grabbed his wrist. The moment I touched him his pulse sped against my hand and the hunger rose inside me in a wave of heat and need that pulled me up, sitting, and leaning toward him.

He angled in, as if for a kiss, and a pentagram appeared between our faces, dangling on the end of its chain. I half-expected it to glow, but it didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t quite vampire enough yet. But it let Jacob jerk free of me and go stand near the door.

I looked up at Ellen and her not-glowing pentagram. “Harm none is the rule, Ellen; bad witch, no cookie.”

She swallowed hard enough for me to hear it, and backed away from me with the pentagram still bare in her hand. I think she’d thought it would glow, too. Did the fact that it didn’t make her wonder if she’d lost some of her faith?

I started to fold back toward the floor, and Nicky caught me, lowering me to the ground. I watched the witch’s wide eyes and smelled her fear. “Threefold law, Ellen; what you do to others comes back threefold.”

She was by the door now. Jacob had walked out while I was scaring his pet witch. “How do you know that? You’re supposed to be Christian,” she said.

“I have friends in your faith. They’re good people.”

“Implying that I’m not,” she said, and she was angry now.

I lay there cradled in Nicky’s arms and said, “I’m not implying anything, I’m stating fact. You are a bad witch.”

“You’re a bad Christian,” she said.

I laughed, and she flinched. “God forgives me; how forgiving are the powers you’ve been praying to lately? You aren’t powerful enough to cut me off from all my people without help from something.”

“I am powerful enough.” But her voice was too strident; she didn’t believe it.

“Can you smell the lie, Nicky?”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was thick again. It was almost as if without his Rex there, my hold on him was growing stronger. Was it that, or was it just him touching me?

Jacob appeared in the doorway again. He said, “You fed on my energy just from touching my arm, didn’t you?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Nicky,” he said, “do you want to feed her?”

“You mean sex?” Nicky asked.

Jacob nodded. Ellen had moved out to stand beside him in the doorway.

Nicky looked down at me, that one eye pale in the moonlight streaming through. “Oh, yeah.”

“You know it’s a bad idea, right?” Jacob asked.

“Yep,” Nicky said.

Jacob nodded. “Make it quick. We don’t have all night.” Then he and Ellen left, closing the door behind them.

Nicky looked down at me and there was something fragile on his face, almost fear, like a child when you close the door at night, but they know the monster is still under the bed. Nicky looked down at me with a knowledge on his face that he was holding the monster in his arms. I’d have comforted him, but it would have been all lies.

The hunger rose in me like a tide that came higher each time I denied it; eventually, if I didn’t feed voluntarily, it would choose the method of feeding and one of us might not survive that choice. “I need to feed,” I said.

“You mean you need to fuck,” he said.

“That’ll do,” I said.

He grinned, making his face look younger, more the joker I’d met in the restaurant. Was it only hours ago? “I’m guy enough to want to do a good job, and it feels good enough to touch you that I want to make sure you enjoy yourself enough to want to do it again.”

I smiled up at him and wasn’t sure if it reached my eyes. “It’ll be good.”

“How can you be sure?”

I could have said a lot of things. I could have explained that your inhibitions took the place of a lot of foreplay. Instead I leaned in and kissed his chest where it showed above the overlarge neck of the tank top. The hair was softer than it looked, and like his brown eyes, darker than the blond hair. It didn’t mean he wasn’t a natural blond, but it made the chances less. There was enough muscle on his chest that I had to work to get a mouthful of meat and bite down.

“Ow,” he said.

“If you don’t like teeth and nails then you’ll have to protect yourself, because there is going to come a point where I won’t remember to behave.”

“Are you saying you’ll hurt me?”

I studied his face, tried to see by moonlight if he meant the question. “Haven’t you ever been with another shapeshifter?”

He just shook his head. “After what happened to his first pride, Jacob forbids it.”

I ran my hand through that silky hair again. “Oh, Nicky, you are missing so much.”

“After what you’ve done to us in just one afternoon, I understand Jacob’s rule.”

“What have I done to you?”

“Divided us. If Silas hadn’t come in when he did, we’d have fought over you.”

I traced the edge of his face under the fall of hair. “You wouldn’t have had to fight if Jacob shared as well as you do.”

“He’s our Rex. Kings don’t share well.”

“My leopard king does.”

“Leopards aren’t lions,” he said.

I pushed him back toward the ground and he let me do it. That was one test passed. I needed to know that he wasn’t so dominant that he’d crash my life around all our ears. I raised my skirt up enough so I could straddle him, and the feeling of him hard and ready pressed against me, bowed my spine, and made me shudder above him. God, he was so hard.

His hands found my waist, helped steady me above him. I leaned over him, but the height difference forced me to stop straddling the business end and move up to his waist. I waited to feel the guns at his waistband but it was smooth, nothing there to find.

He answered the question as if he’d felt my hesitation. “Jacob took the guns after the fight. I don’t think he trusts me anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” and I meant it. They were bad guys and they were murderers, but still his life was about to change forever, and you should always apologize if you know you’re about to fuck someone’s life over.

His hair had fallen back when he went to the ground and I could see all of his face. “You’re beautiful.”

“Isn’t that my line?” he asked, and then he turned his head so that his missing eye was more in shadow. I remembered when Asher used to use shadows and his hair to hide from me. I’d broken him of it, convinced him he didn’t need to hide anything from me.

I touched Nicky’s face, turned him back to look at me full-face. I leaned over and began to kiss his forehead. I covered his face in kisses, one inch at a time. I kissed first one soft eyebrow, then the place where the other eyebrow would have been. He tried to turn away, but I held his face between my hands. He let me lay a gentle kiss on one closed eyelid, then on the soft slickness of the scar tissue on the other side. I kissed my way down his face until I found his lips, and there I stayed longer. I kissed him until his arms came up and held me back. Kissed him until he rolled me over so that he was on top and I was on the floor. But he was too tall for missionary. I needed to see his face, his eye, for this to work.

I pushed at his chest. “You’re too tall! I don’t want to stare at your chest the whole time; I want to see your face.”

He laughed. “You just don’t want your ass on the bare ground.”

“That, too, but I need to see your face.”

He rolled to the side and looked at me. “Why?”

“I want to watch your face while we make love.”

“I don’t think Jacob will wait for us to make love.”

“Fine,” I said, “I want to watch your face while we fuck.”

He made a sound halfway between a laugh and a snort. “You aren’t like any woman I’ve ever met.”

“You have no idea, Nicky, not yet.”

“Show me,” he said, and he rolled back closer to me.