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.
“Strip,” I said.
“What?”
“When the ardeur raises, the clothes will come off. We can either take them off now, or we can rip them off each other and have nothing to wear afterward.”
He frowned at me, looking skeptical, but he went to his knees again and lifted his shirt off in one motion. He looked better out of the shirt than in it.
I glanced away while I started getting out of my clothes. I did not want us to rip up another custom-made holster. I also wanted clothes after we finished. It was not the way I wanted to be naked in front of a man for the first time, but Jacob wouldn’t wait all night. I needed to finish this before he came back and checked on us. I needed to finish this before he figured out that I was going to do more than feed off of his lion. Because I had decided that I was going to roll Nicky like any good vampire, except because I wasn’t really a vampire, but something else, something more and less. I couldn’t use my gaze to make him do what I needed, but I could use the ardeur to tie him to me. I could put him in the place that Haven had been trying to get to all these months. I could make him my lion to call.
It was supposed to be an honor, something done with deliberation and care, like a marriage, but I didn’t have time for the niceties. It was going to be the metaphysical equivalent of a shotgun wedding. I wanted to ask Micah’s and Nathaniel’s opinion of it. I wanted Jean-Claude to talk to me first. I wanted my men, but in order to have them alive at the end of the night, I needed help now. That help was nude in the moonlight, and seeing him nude almost made me forget there was a plan. He was beautiful, all that muscle and eagerness painted in stark light and shadow, my moon and stars and darkness. I realized something I hadn’t before, the process had already begun. It was about to the point where Haven had stayed. I wanted him, and touching him felt unbelievably good, but I’d kept the Rex out of that last bit of me. It was almost as if by holding the spot open so long I’d left a vacancy sign, and the first new dominant lions I met had both tried to fill it. Shit.