32
The rest of the afternoon appointments were damned boring compared to the Browns. Thank God. Nathaniel sat, quietly, in a corner of my office through all of them, just in case. Bert didn’t argue now. I’d had two appointments with lawyers to discuss wills and other privileged material. They’d objected to Nathaniel, but I’d told them that legally the conversation with me wasn’t privileged, so why did they care. Legally, I was right, and lawyers hate for a non-lawyer to be right. Or at least the ones I meet get cranky about it. So then, they’d wanted to know who he was and why he got to sit in on their meetings.
I told the first one, do you want this meeting, or don’t you, and he let it go. The second one didn’t let it go. My fingers hurt where I’d torn off the nails. My face hurt even if it was healing. My pride was hurt from having sex in the office. I was not happy, so I told the truth.
“He’s here in case I have to have sex.” I smiled when I said it, and knew that it didn’t reach my eyes, but I didn’t care.
Nathaniel had laughed and done his best to turn it into a cough.
The lawyer, of course, didn’t believe me. “It was a perfectly legitimate question, Ms. Blake. I have every right to protect my client and his interests. You don’t have to insult us with ridiculous lies.”
So I stopped insulting him with lies, and we got down to business.
Every client, or group of clients, had to ask about Nathaniel. I told them he was everything from domestic help, to lover, to office boy, to personal assistant. Nobody liked any of my answers. I stopped caring long before I stopped seeing clients. I actually started telling the truth again, and the two new groups that I told it to got insulted. Insulting lies, they called it. Try to tell the truth, and no one believes you.
What I’d wanted to talk about all afternoon had been my beast. I had a lycanthrope right there, and we didn’t get five minutes of peace to even begin the discussion. I had so many questions, and no time to ask them. Maybe that was why I was so grumpy to the clients. Maybe, or maybe I’m just grumpy. Even I wasn’t sure sometimes.
It was seven o’clock by the time we climbed into the Jeep. Bert had passed my 7:30 cemetery appointment on to Manny without me having to ask. He even apologized for overbooking me. He always overbooked me, and he’d never apologized before. I think the realization that I could call a vote and get his ass kicked out had made him a better boy. Or maybe it was just the realization that I knew that any one of us could call a vote and kick him out. If Bert had any weakness in business it was assuming that those of us without a business degree didn’t understand business. A little fear isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it can be downright therapeutic for some people. I didn’t expect for the nicer version of Bert to last, but I’d enjoy it while I had it.
I’d actually turned off onto Olive in the direction of the city. I had just enough time to drop Nathaniel off at Guilty Pleasures and be only about fifteen minutes late for what was now my first outside appointment of the evening.
“Where are you going?” Nathaniel asked.
“Guilty Pleasures,” I said.
“You need to eat first.”
I glanced at him as I slowed for a stoplight. “I don’t have time to eat.”
“You know how when you don’t feed one hunger the other hungers get worse?” His voice was so gentle when he asked, but I’d begun to mistrust that particular gentle tone. It usually meant he had a point to make, and he was right, and if I’d only accept it, I’d see that he was right, too. It usually meant that the argument was lost before it had begun. But I never considered defeat a reason not to put up a fight.
“Yeah, I know. If I deny theardeur the beast wants meat more, or the vampire wants blood. I know all that.”
“So what happens if you don’t feed your human stomach, you get hungry, right?”
The light changed, and I eased forward. Saturday night traffic on Olive was always fun. “Yeah,” I said. I was looking for the trick, and didn’t see it.
“So if your body gets hungry for normal feeding, then doesn’t that make all the other hungers worse?”
I almost hit the car in front of me, because I was staring at him.
I had to slam on my brakes and endure much horn blowing, and, if it hadn’t been so dark, I’m sure I’d have seen some hand gestures. “What did you say?”
“You heard me, Anita.”
I sighed and started paying better attention to the traffic. But inside I was kicking myself, because it was so simple. So terribly simple. “I don’t eat regularly when I’m working, and that usually means that I’m running home with theardeur riding me every night.”
“Sometimes twice a night,” he said. “How much do you eat on those nights? Real food, I mean.”
I tried to think, and finally had to say, “Sometimes nothing.”
“It would be interesting if you kept a food diary to see if there was a correlation between starving your human body and the other hungers rising.”
“You talk like you know this already,” I said.
“Haven’t you noticed that lycanthropes cook and eat?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I thought about it. Richard cooked, and had always been either taking me out to dinner or wanting to cook for me. Micah cooked, though Nathaniel did more of it. We usually had a house full of wereleopards for at least one meal a day.
“You mean there’s a reason that all the lycanthrope men I’ve dated have been domestically talented?”
He nodded. “We need to eat a nice balanced diet, heavy on protein.
It helps keep the beast at bay.”
I glanced at him, and in the near dark of the streetlights, he was mostly in shadow. His lavender shirt was the palest thing about him.
“Why didn’t someone mention this to me before?”
“We’ve been treating you like you’re mostly human, Anita. But what I saw today…” He seemed to be searching for words. Finally he said, “If I didn’t know that you were human and couldn’t slip your skin and be a leopard for real, I’d think you were one of us. The way you felt, the way you fought, the way you smelled, everything was shapeshifter.
You did not come off like a human. Turn into the parking lot here,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we need to talk.”
I did not like the sound of that, but I turned in to the strip mall that had Culpeppers at one end. I parked in the first space I found, which was far away from any restaurant. Most of the stores were dark and closed. When I turned off the engine, the world was suddenly very quiet. The traffic on Olive was still snarling by, and in the distance was music from one of the restaurants, but inside the Jeep it was quiet. That silence that you get inside cars after dark. With one switch of a key, the space inside a car becomes private, intimate.
I turned to face him, having to work against the seat belt, but I wasn’t comfortable taking if off until I was ready to get out of a car. “So, talk,” I said, and my voice sounded almost normal.
He turned in his seat as far as his seat belt would allow. He knew my thing about seat belts. He faced me, putting one knee up to prop himself against the center panel. “We’ve been treating you like you’re human, and now I’m wondering if we were right.”
“You mean I’m going to shift because I’m in a new triumvirate?”
He shook his head, and his long braid slid across his lap like a heavy pet. “Maybe what happened with that has made it worse, but I think one of the reasons you haven’t been able to get a handle on theardeur is because you’ve been taking almost all your advice from a vampire. He doesn’t need to eat, Anita. There is only blood lust and theardeur for Jean-Claude, that’s it. A lycanthrope doesn’t stop being human. You still have to eat like a person, you just add the hunger of the beast, but you don’t lose a hunger, you just add on to it.”
I thought about it. “So you mean that since I’m already fighting off normal hunger pangs, that it makes it harder to fight theardeur?”