"Okay, hombre," I said, reaching under his tie to undo a button of his shirt. "Tell me how the poor orphan Mexican desert boy learned to be so slick and sexy."
I'd distracted him, as I'd hoped.
"You're pretty slick and sexy yourself."
"I was a later bloomer. You obviously managed to sow your wild oats, as they said in olden days, when I was still in knee-highs.
"Knee-highs, huh? Very sexy in the right context. Catholic schoolgirl look."
"I did that high school uniform bit. An all-girl high school. Catholic, natch."
"Good girl. I attended an all-boys prep school run by Christian brothers. We had uniforms too."
"Ooh, you must have looked delish in a uniform. No wonder the girls were all crazy about you." I undid another button and he caught his breath.
"As a matter of fact, they were." He was teasing back, waiting to see how far I'd go. "I was the hot new kid. I'd made the news a couple years back as 'feral boy,' but my adopted mother had given me every behavioral test in the book; taught me English, plus a few other languages; civilized manners; gave me an accelerated learning program. After that, the hotties from the nearby girls' prep school were ready to put me through every test drive they could think of."
"It must have been… guy heaven."
"Yeah. I couldn't believe my luck. They were all on the pill and they planned to get all the thrills they could before settling into a semi-arranged marriage with some WASP Stepford husband."
"Didn't the other guys get jealous? Wasn't being from Mexico a problem?"
"This was D.C. Lots of foreign ambassadors' kids and wealthy elite kids attend such schools. Besides, my adopted mother had taught me all the romance languages. Castilian Spanish, French and Italian. I have a gift for languages."
"Impressive. You can use your French on me any time It sure says romance. Wow. You aren't only good-looking, but smart."
He recognized the line guys usually give girls and laughed. I undid another button and slid my whole hand inside his shirt to get him back on the right track. "So what were these preppie girls like?"
"Like? For one thing, they'd never paw me in a public park, just to make me forget that I broke my vow never to raise any more zombies."
I drew back, caught.
"Not that they wouldn't paw me in a public park just for the heck of it."
I slapped him lightly on the chest for leading me on while I was leading him on. "I'm jealous."
"Don't be," he said. "I found out their game by senior year. I was the hot ethnic flavor of the year. A way to defy their parents, have some kicks and not get bored. I was just a diversion."
"That you are." I toyed with his nipple again.
"Delilah, stop that! You wanted to know. Listen, some wanted their parents to know they were seeing me, just to jerk them around. Others never wanted anyone to know but their very best friends. Guess how I found out?"
"Very best friends can be treacherous. 'Them', Ric? You were a serial gigolo?"
"Yeah. I was young, they were ready and so was I. It was too easy to be right."
"And I'm hard."
"Yes. What really turned me off was why I wasn't good enough to date for real."
"Which was?"
"It wasn't my Mexican blood. It wasn't my lurid background. One of the other guys told me why, finally, meaning to piss me off. It was that my adopted parents weren't high enough on the Washington social register."
"What did you do to get back?"
"What makes you think I did something?"
"You don't allow those you…owe something… to not pay for the privilege."
"There was this townie gossip blog. I hacked in and altered a really vicious column before it time-posted. It hit the Web and a lot of trust fund babies lost their graduation trips to Europe."
" Europe, really?"
"Especially Spain."
"Think they guessed it was you?"
"Naw, they thought they'd fooled everyone."
"So how'd you end up in the FBI?
"My adopted father wanted me to go into the military, like he had. I would have obliged him, except I knew having men ordering me what to do in that no-questions-allowed way would… I'd kill someone first. So he got me some internships with the suburban police, a D.C. crime lab. I had all the right qualifications for Quantico and was accepted by the FBI as soon as I was eligible. They value Spanish speakers now."
"And your special talents-?"
"I just wanted to forget about that. It'd been years. I was a privileged white-collar kid. Then they took us to the body farm-you know, real bodies in various states of decomposition. My fingers twitched for wanting a twig. It started happening again when we were examining possible death scenes. I finally picked up a dead stick and let myself "discover" a disruption in the earth. I had to go off by myself to do it, so I got a rep for being a human bloodhound on some trail only I scented. With the Millennium Revelation, lots of strange things were happening. They were uneasy about me, but also pleased by my usefulness."
"Why didn't you stay?"
"Got too hard to conceal what I was really doing. Dowsing for the dead is nothing a seriously scientific crime-solving organization wants to claim even these days. It was better I consult out of town. I'm taken for a science geek, not anything cheesy like a psychic, and I make sure to make it seem that way."
"Nobody would ever mistake you for a science geek," I said. I ran my hand over his muscled bare skin and then up under the shirt collar, stroking the side of his neck. "What were they like, those society witches?"
"Nothing like you."
"Nothing?" I challenged.
"They weren't about me or even the sex. It was all about them. They were shallow and artificial."
"But good-looking."
"Sure. They'd had plastic surgery since their pre-teens. They didn't care about me and I didn't care about them when I learned to see through the American princess façades. Not one of them could fight off a werewolf."
"But you were dazzled at first, admit it."
"No argument. I was a teenage boy. We're nine parts testosterone and one part horny. You should be glad, paloma, that I didn't break my heart over anyone else, so it's all in one piece for you."
"Hmm."
I stroked the bat bite again, hyped to feel his carotid artery bound at my teasing touch. I could almost understand the vampire's predatory enjoyment in sensing signs of vulnerable human circulatory systems that thrust so near the surface.
"Are you going to take me home and to bed," Ric asked, "or just drive me crazy in the park?"
"Yes. Both."
My feelings for him were incredibly fierce, both possessive and protective. Was it because I'd never felt much affection at all from and therefore for other people?