I lowered myself into the leather seat and pulled the safety belt over my shoulder to snap it into the latch. We zoomed into the dark, up Highway 15 that paced the neon-lit Strip for a few miles. Then the car charged onto a rough-and-ready ribbon of unpaved road into the empty desert dark where the stars gathered into a mascara-thick layer of glitter. We were on an endless zigzag toward the Spring and Sheep Mountains. In the blue-tinted glass roof above me stars whizzed past like comets.
"Werewolves are ultra discreet," Ric told me, the dashboard lights playing laser tag with his clear-cut features. "They can afford to be, since, unlike vampires, they can pass as perfectly human most days of the month…if they're not raising obvious hell like your biker gang. Everyone overlooks it. Cops. Media. Tourists."
He went on, as if lecturing at some alternate world Quantico. "Some werewolves are almost like us, except for a little moon-madness once a month. Not too different from the female of our species."
He glanced at me sitting a little stiffly in a seat that was semi-reclined by design. "Nice shoes, by the way."
"Thanks. What am I going to see at Los Lobos?"
"Mostly traditional Hispanic werewolves. Not many gray timber wolves or white Arctic ones. Yellows and reds, in daily life everything from gang-bangers and taquiera owners to music idols. A mix. Werewolves come in all styles and flavors. Some are enforcers for the casino owners. Some are the owners. Some are wait staff. Some are your friendly neighborhood janitors and maids."
"And you?"
"I'm your friendly Latino ex-FBI guide. I don't belong anywhere, but I go everywhere. Okay?"
"Yeah. Lone wolf. I get it."
Chapter Eighteen
I'd bought a doll-size purse on a long chain that I could wear while dancing, so the mall sales clerks had advised. It fit fine on the teeny table made for cocktails and appetizers.
The room, with a mirrored ball high above flashing laser lights, was dark and cavernous, divided down the middle at ceiling level by a Plexiglas sheet that reflected the mirrored ball, Below it, Us and Them mingled. Most looked like thee and me. But some of Them were scary, at least to someone who'd done the Asphalt Stomp with a full gang only a couple nights before.
Some were half-changelings on two feet with snouts and body hair disturbingly like fur but without the rabid expressions of the gang that had attacked me. Some were dressed. Some were undressed except for the rust and cream fur that reminded me that Quicksilver was silver and black and cream, and bigger, a seriously large-boned dog who could take out a gang of lean, agile werewolves. I was glad none of that bunch had managed to penetrate his thick fur, after what Ric had said about the half-weres’ lethal bites.
Ric allowed me to savor one huge Midnight Margarita, moon-blue from Curasao, before he coaxed and prodded me onto the dance floor. All around us human couples were swirling and twirling in the sexy Latin couples dance called salsa. Others not so human were bumping and grinding, doing the werewolf two-step.
"I can't dance," I told Ric again. Don't ask me.
But Ric was in his element, actually in his shirtsleeves, which played up his warm mahogany coloring. I was overdressed for a roomful of petite yet full-bodied Latina women slithering like snakes in their low-rise jeans and plunging, shrunken, midriff-baring tops. Ric was The Man in his white business shirt, high-end slacks, and brassy gold belt.
"It's just a three-step," he said. "Cha-cha-cha."
I mimicked his steps, looking down, trying to master the simple pattern as it shifted from forward to back and side to side.
I watched his feet, his legs, his hips. He had rhythm, that inborn Hispanic sway. All the men in the room, hairy or not, had it. Their moves were as macho as a matador's, sexy and sleek.
I was watching Ric's hips more than his feet.
One, two, three. Oooh! That ultra-slim gold belt was almost over the top, but it gleamed like the scales on a serpent in Eden.
He caught me moving to the motion of his hips, not his feet. He smiled with almost palpable pleasure, slid the belt out of his tailored pant loops even as we kept up with the steps and the music, and refastened its gold links around my hips.
Then he whispered: "As Jimmy Buffet says, 'I wanta see some movement below the waist out there.'"
"I don't have a waist." I sounded like a prig even to myself.
"Oh, yeah? Just watch." Rick grinned, hooked his thumbs in my skirt's elastic waistband and pulled down about three or four inches. I gasped as the cold metal of his belt hit my warm flesh. The skirt was barely riding on my hips, my navel was sucking air, and whistles echoed all around us. Wolf whistles, of course.
I could have died from embarrassment.
Other dancers were watching us out of the corner of their eyes. Some brown, Some black. Some lupine yellow. An awful lot of the chicks here sported pronounced widow's peaks.
Right. One, two, three, gulp.
My chilly Irish genes couldn't match their hot-blooded native grace. My two left feet could barely manage to keep from tangling with Ric's sure-footed moves.
"Pay attention, paloma," Ric advised. "All you need to do is change your weight from step to step and you'll be Jennifer Lopez. One-two-three."
"Fuck one-two-three! I don't ever balance on one foot. Someone…something might get me off-balance."
As he had, calling me by a Spanish name that sounded pretty and so natural. I'd made everybody call me the gender-neutral "Del" for so long that a three-syllable name seemed…way too intimate.
Ric gave up on trying to hold me in the usual my-left-hand-on-his-shoulder, my right hand a pump-handle-in-his-left-hand position. He pulled me aside, to the edges of the dance floor. Put my hands on his shirted shoulders, his warm palms on my hips, my air-chilled bare hips.
"Hit me. One-two-three."
I glanced at the Hispanic tootsies slinging hotsy-totsy hash from hip to hip all around me. They slithered like serpents, their pelvises jiggled like aspic, their legs strutted and three-stepped and they didn't even wear the sweet Wicked Witch of the West shoes I did.
Okay. One-two-three-Boom. I watched Ric's eyes darken as my hips brushed his palms. Just barely. One-two-three-boom. Okay. He wanted it. He got it. My way. Just nearly there, but not quite. His pupils grew midnight-dark. He wasn’t leading, I was. From the hip. From the heart. One-two-three. Boom.
The heat, the noise, the rhythm. It was getting to me. Moon madness. I let my hands slither down from his shoulders and undid the third button on his open shirt collar.
His eyebrow rose.
I swung my left hip hard into his right hand and undid another button.
Wolf whistles became a chorus, echoing around us from the hard wooden dance floor. Olés echoed encouragingly. We were making a spectacle of ourselves, and I was now the main instigator. But the music was so engaging, so insistent.
On the next hip swing I undid another button. The skin beneath the shirt was as smooth and mocha-colored as a really great creamy latte and all this exercise was making me thirsty.
Ric suddenly swung me out, twirled my arms around myself and pulled me hard against him. My own crossed arms held me prisoner, pushing my back into his front, my cleavage into full focus as he looked down at me.
"The werewolves are dancing their paws off. Look."
Forced to take my eyes off him, off us, I saw that the Plexiglas flap had descended to the floor like a transparent iron curtain, dividing the dancers into Us and Them. Ric and I were on the tourist side. The transforming werewolves were circling madly in a salsa gone mad on the other side of the see-through barrier.