She had a pretty good idea what Brooks had said that elicited earlier appreciative male laughter.
"Ah, you do?" Colin barely glanced at the gleaming knife.
"Umm, next time"-she really, really hoped there wasn’t a next time-"try playing good cop with me. It’ll work much better."
Using the knife, she began cutting the lasagna. Colin stood there, a faint tension emanating from him. He didn’t say anything, just watched her. She could feel his intense stare on her.
After a few minutes she broke, glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "Well, we have to eat, don’t we?" She muttered. Waving toward the table, she ordered, "Sit down. There’s no sense in wasting good food. Besides, we haven’t gotten to finish our talk about the Other." She could play the professional card too.
They did need to finish the lesson.
And she wanted him to stay.
It looked like they both had some trust issues, but, hey, no one was perfect.
Not the Monster Doctor and not a shifter.
But perfect…perfect could be boring, she realized. And after living too much of her life on a regimented, by-the-minute schedule, she was ready for a bit of imperfection.
The shifter had better not screw up again. One free pass was all he was going to get from her.
So he’d royally fucked up. At least the doc had let him stay for dinner.
Dinner. The woman had actually cooked for him. Put out candles. Nice plates.
He couldn’t remember anyone doing that for him before.
Sure, he’d had more than his share of women. But they’d usually gone out to restaurants. And the relationships hadn’t lasted past a few sexual encounters and a couple of fancy meals.
He’d never had this cozy, relaxed kind of date before. And, yeah, despite the fact that he’d spent the first half hour of his time there grilling her, he still considered it a date.
Number two for them.
He wondered if the doc would let him get to second base.
A guy could hope.
"So, that’s the main difference between wizards and warlocks. The warlocks have just as much power, but they use the darker magic, and if you ever make the mistake of calling a wizard by the term warlock, well"-Emily paused, downed a rather large swallow of her wine-"then you’re in trouble, because you’ve just seriously insulted the guy."
"Right. I’ll try to keep that in mind." Throughout their dinner, Emily had kept up a steady stream of conversation about the Other.
He now knew that charmers could talk with only one type of animal. Some charmers were born linked to snakes, some to birds, and so on.
There were two types of vampires, the born or the Blood as they were called, and the made or the Taken. To make a vampire, you didn’t need the three blood exchanges like the books said. No, according to Emily, one was all it took. The victim had to be drained nearly dry by the vampire, then the would-be vamp had to drink from the sire-that was what Emily had called the guy, a sire-and boom, you had yourself a brand, spanking new vampire.
He’d also grilled her about shifters. She’d been right when she mentioned earlier that he could smell others of his kind. He could. There was a wild, rich scent that clung to others like him. He’d first caught that scent when he’d been a nineteen-year-old rookie. He’d stumbled onto a bear shifter and been so surprised he’d nearly dropped his gun.
The bear had broken into a vacation home, ransacked the place. When he’d arrived, the shifter had changed in front of him, a quick, easy transformation from beast to man.
He’d apologized for the wreckage, saying, "Sorry, mate, the beast took over." He’d winked. "You know how it can get."
"So…" Emily said, her soft drawl pulling him from the past. "Anything else you want to know?"
"Yeah." He took a sip of his own wine. Normally, he wasn’t much for wine. Give him a beer and he was a happy man. But the wine Emily had, it was pretty good. Sweet. A little tangy.
The taste reminded him of her.
And he realized it’d been more than eight hours since he’d felt her lips beneath his. Too damn long.
He shifted in his chair. He’d had a hard-on from the moment he walked through her door. Her hair was down, looking all soft and silky around her shoulders. She was wearing a thin dress with delicate little spaghetti straps. One pull, just one quick tug, and he was sure he could snap those straps.
And he’d bet a month’s pay that Emily wasn’t wearing a bra. He could see the faint outline of her nipples. Those sweet, perfect nipples.
He could still feel them on his tongue, still see the flushed, pink-tipped areolas.
"Uh, Colin?"
He blinked, and realized that she’d just caught him staring at her chest.
Oh, nice. Definitely the way to charm a woman like her.
Playing the gentleman…not something he could do.
He managed to drag his eyes away from the too-tempting swell of her cleavage. He found her watching him, green eyes wide and mysterious behind the lenses of her glasses.
"You said you had something else to ask me."
"Right." He sat down his wineglass with a soft chink. "It’s about the wolf shifters."
She tensed. "What about them?" Her fingers toyed with the rim of her glass.
"Are they really as bad as folks say? The other shifters I’ve met, they all said to steer clear of ’em, said they’re dangerous." Dangerous. Yeah, that was one of the words he’d heard. A few others were psychotic, homicidal, and primitive.
Her fingers halted their stroking movements. Her eyes stared intently into his. "The wolf shifters are extremely dangerous, Colin. I can’t stress that enough. In them, the animal they carry-it fights the men and women for control."
"Some say they’re psychotic."
"That’s because some of them are."
Some, not all.
Emily rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Shifters, in general, are very intense creatures. But, well, I suppose you know that, don’t you?" She offered him a small, wan smile. "Wolf shifters, though, they can take that intensity to a whole new level.
"And when a wolf finds his mate, he will do anything, and I mean anything, to protect that mate. Attacking someone else, killing a person, it would be nothing to a wolf shifter if his mate were in jeopardy."
"But not all wolf shifters find their mates."
"No. They don’t." Emily leaned forward, her expression suddenly intense. "And I think that’s why the psychosis level is so high. These creatures want mates so badly, need them so desperately, and when they lose hope of finding their other halves, well, they lose control."
Now that was damn interesting. "You’re saying the mated wolf shifters don’t have this psychotic problem."
"No, I don’t think they do, unless their mates are threatened." Emily shook her head, sitting back in her chair. "Of course, this is just my opinion based on, well, instinct, I guess. It’s not like I’ve conducted a study on these guys."
"Right." Cause wolf shifters weren’t exactly bountiful in the population.
"But my opinion is based on conversations I’ve had with other shifters," Emily continued, her voice serious and professional. "And I truly think it would explain a great deal about the wolf shifter psyche."
He realized there was another question he needed to ask her. "You said you were involved with a shifter once."
"Yes." A faint pink flush covered her cheeks.
"But the first time we met, I got the impression you didn’t like my kind too much." He paused, long enough to make absolutely certain she kept looking in his eyes. "Or was it just me you didn’t like?"