Dancing with Werewolves Read online

Chapter 16~18

   

  Chapter Sixteen

  "Well?" Godfrey asked, sounding way too anxious for such a cool character in such formal clothes.

  Quicksilver, on his chain, and I stood in the driveway, gazing on our new digs.

  The place had a separate entry gate. Hector's joint loomed like Manderley behind it, grand but totally separate, a mountain behind a molehill. This was indeed a "cottage": one story, with a storybook roof of thick-piled green shingles that mimicked the thatch roofs of, say, the Shire. Or Forever England. Or Disneyland.

  Rose bushes, climbing ivies, and tall spears of larkspur and hollyhock surrounded the stone walls, wafting an earthy, sweet scent a supermodel would have killed to call her own and bottle.

  But it was all mine for a reasonable monthly rent. A half-circle of brick steps led up to the iron-hinged wood door. Mullioned windows peeked out from the riotous foliage.

  "Well?" Godfrey asked again.

  "I'll sure whistle while I work here," I said. This was my little lost Wichita house, only six times better. My throat swelled almost shut with emotion.

  "Here is the key. " Godfrey planted a credit-card-size oblong of plastic in my palm.

  He chuckled at my expression. Nobody had ever much chuckled at me in my life, and I liked it.

  "Master Nightwine is thoroughly high-tech," Godfrey went on. "He simply adores the illusion of low-tech. Hence my humble employment. "

  "There's nothing humble about you, Godfrey, but the manners. "

  "Precisely so, Miss. "

  He handed me a plain white card with seven numbers written on it, and then leaned close to whisper in my ear. That pencil-thin mustache tickled. Scratch getting one for Ric.

  "This is the code that disables and reinstates Master Nightwine's surveillance cameras at this location. In case. . . Master Quicksilver is entertaining the ladies some night. "

  Quick whimpered and licked me anxiously on the wrist. I couldn't always read dog language, but apparently he didn't like being used as an excuse.

  We all three knew who wanted to control whose privacy.

  "Very good, Godfrey. You are the perfect man's man, and the even more perfect woman's man. "

  He bowed. "I should warn you that Master Nightwine's fascinations with all things vintage and filmic extends to the inanimate as well. "

  Darn it! Godfrey talked too much like a college professor sometimes. I tried to translate his message.

  "You mean, he collects film things as well as people?"

  "Exactly, Miss. "

  "You mean. . . things like my new residence?"

  "Exactly, Miss. You are indeed quick-witted. I would refer you to a mid-nineteen-forties film featuring a fine actor-friend of mine named Robert Young. It was called The Enchanted Cottage. "

  "And just what was enchanted about it, Godfrey?"

  "Oh, my. I may become. . . unmanned. It is an old-style romantic fantasy. Unabashedly sentimental. "

  "I've read a few romantic fantasies. " And had never believed a one.

  "Not of your era, Miss. A facially scared World War Two veteran, Robert, meets a young but plain woman played by Dorothy Maguire. Only inside the enchanted cottage can the beauty of the inner selves they see in each other shine through. "

  "A fantasy indeed. "

  "But most affecting. "

  "I'm no longer affected by fantasies, Godfrey. "

  "Very good, Miss. Master Quicksilver. I'll leave you two to get acquainted with your new residence. "

  After he'd gone, Quick and I eased on down the fieldstone walk to the door. The card slipped easily into the old-fashioned Alice-in-Wonderland keyhole. The round-topped door squeaked open on reassuringly old hinges.

  We moved into a slate-floored entry hall. Cozy rooms opened off it to either side: a kitchen and dining room, a little laundry room with a big dog bed, a back stoop and a clothesline in the garden!

  Also. . . I found an office off the kitchen and a media room off the parlor. A circular staircase led to a loftlike bedroom with a huge four-poster bed topped by a mountainous embroidered feather quilt and. . . a master bath with a triple mirror, double sinks, a huge walk-in closet, and a Jacuzzi.

  Quick leaped atop the four-poster, deflating the quilt about three feet. Methought the dog bed in the laundry room would make a good footrest in the parlor. After a half-hour of exploring, Quick and I retreated to the front parlor, where I'd installed the dragon urn of Achilles' ashes on the mantel. The place was thronged with window seats, so Quick stretched out full-length on one. I'd poured a glass of sherry from the quaint, mid-nineteenth century bottle on the silver salver. Say that three times fast: quaffing sherry from the silver salver.

  I had one thing in common with Hector Nightwine, odious as it was to contemplate. I too liked to combine high and low tech. From this Stratfordian retreat of an Old World cottage I would penetrate New World perfidies of expendable media personalities, crime new and old under the sun, the fate of lost body doubles, and the world wide web of crime and extortion and immortality that made modern Las Vegas all things extravagant and evil.

  Quick barked, short and sharp.

  I just nodded in reply.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I reached Ric on his cell phone, his face tattooed into my memory from Nightwine's videos like my own personal R-rated image.

  "Delilah," he said when he recognized my voice, as if he just liked saying my name.

  I like hearing it, from him. Damn it, but Nightwine and his prying cameras had been right on: Ric and I had that certain something going.

  "I need to see you," I said. Literal truth.

  " Sunset Park? Hot dog stand. "

  "No. Someplace else. " I didn't want us on camera anymore.

  " New York, New York food court? Lunch?"

  "Yeah. How will I recognize you?" My voice had taken on an alien, flirtatious tone. Ever since I'd tapped into the dead woman's pheromones I hadn't been myself. I liked some things about that, and hated some things. Rick was among the things I liked.

  "I'll be the guy who wants to try dowsing indoors," he said.

  We shared a cozy corner at a plastic table in the urban New York City-themed food court with plastic chairs and food and knives and forks. Surrounded by faux brick walls with acres of iron fire-escape ladders, I told Ric about my strip mall attack the night before. I needed answers.

  "So who were those matted men who tried to make hamburger patties of me?" I asked him. Maybe not so surprisingly, he knew.

  "Nasty customers, a rogue gang of rabid half-werewolves. They'd been vampire-bitten in their human forms. It makes their own bites poisonous, even lethal, if you get enough, and they remain half-changed all the time. Not all the half-weres go rogue, but when they do you don't want to mess with them. "

  "Why aren't there billboards warning against them, like they used to do with AIDS?"

  A few years after the Millennium Revelation, an inoculation had made AIDS and all sexual diseases history, at least in the Western world. It drove religious fundamentalists crazy to lose such a sure-fire deterrent to sex, and it made AIDS as legendary as the Black Plague.

  "They're an animal form of AIDS, all right," Rick said, "but this is all top secret. It would kill the tourist business if it got out. The big hotels have security teams to take them out if they come too close, but the half-weres are cagey. They make lightning raids, usually at lower-end businesses, sometimes to steal. Sometimes to enlarge the pack. "

  "What do you mean 'enlarge the pack'?"

  He leaned over the plastic table to brush my hair off my shoulders, just for the heck of it.

  "Brides," he intoned like Bela Lugosi, following up by leaning way too close and kissing my neck. I laughed, but I didn't mind "necking" with a man who didn't need to tap my jugular like a keg
at a frat party.

  "Listen, Del. " Ric's voice did a hot blowjob on my neck. "Werewolves run this town. "

  "You're kidding! These are the only ones I've ever seen,"

  "Because they're stuck in mid-change. Frustrates the hell out of them. Most of our regular werewolves are no worse than the mob bosses who founded Las Vegas in the forties. "

  I stared at him.

  "Sure, those old mob guys were pretty bad, but they mostly killed each other. With bullets. Now that whole mob thing has gone corporate. With the Millennium Revelation it became obvious to some of us in law enforcement that werewolves had worked their way up the management ladder in Vegas. Figures. Unlike most supers, they only go feral three nights of the full moon a month, give or take a little waxing or waning. They pass as human and deal as humans most of the time, no more ruthless or crooked than the real thing. "

  "Amazing. In Kansas we only had the occasional were-cow. "

  This time he laughed. "I think that I shall never see, a were as weird as. . . Elsie?"

  "So I'm from a farm state. I guess I'm just a hick. "

  He brushed his lips over my neck again, paused to suck a little. A little bit more. A lot.

  "No hickeys," I told him. "I've had it with a lifetime of passes at my jugular vein. You swear you're not a vamp in disguise?"

  "I'm not a vamp, in disguise or out. Look. You're an investigative reporter. You have a professional need to know these things. The moon will be full tomorrow night. You should see a cross-section of our werewolf population, not just the Wild Bunch. "

  "Yeah?"

  "I'll take you there. "

  "I'm not sure I want to tangle with those things again. "

  "No, it's perfectly safe. Los Lobos. A salsa club. We'll go dancing. Werewolves love to dance. "

  "Dancing?"

  "Yeah. Clubbing. "

  "Sorry, I'm Black Irish. "

  "Whatever that is, I'm more than okay with it. "

  "We Irish don't dance. "

  "You ever see any of the eighty-one touring companies of River Dance?"

  "Yes. "

  "That's not dancing?" he asked.

  "Only with our feet. " I pushed my arms stiff against my sides, made a poker face, did one tiny jig step at the ankles under the table. God forbid anyone should see me cutting loose. "It's inbred. Sorry. "

  He didn't discourage easily but leaned closer, nibbling on my earlobe. All lips, no teeth. What a relief.

  "That strait-laced Irish jig of yours is a cousin to the flamenco, one of the sexiest dances on earth. We Spanish can speak with our feet, as well. "

  "Salsa's like flamenco?"

  "Nope. It's a lot easier. . . and looser. "

  "I can't see werewolves without going to a dance club?"

  "It's the only place you can eyeball the full range of werewolves, the wonder of the change. Come on, it's a hot underground club and even a few gutsy tourists get there. Aren't you up to confronting what the Polyester Set is?"

  That last dig did it.

  He was still in sell mode. "The moon is just about to pop into full. I'll pick you up tomorrow night at nine. "

  "So late?"

  "We want to be there at midnight, when the wolves run. "

  "Three hours to kill?"

  "Los Lobos has knock-out margaritas, a mariachi band to die for, and killer appetizers. "

  I wasn't crazy about all those lethal figures of speech, but Ric was inviting me into an element of his culture, if not his world (I hoped). His equally inviting voice and eyes made it hard to say no. Someday soon maybe I wouldn't be able to say no to him about something way more serious.

  The next day I hied to the Fashion Show Mall on the Strip and hinted to saleswomen older and bonier than I was where exactly I was bound. They winked and sold me a three-tiered indigo silk skirt with flounces at the bottom and a mesh camisole to match, plus a black lace mantilla for a shawl.

  At home, I pulled my Wicked Witch of the West fifties plastic-and-rhinestone heels out of their box. Weird how everything vintage had survived the weather witch's insty tornado. Maybe old, pre-Millennium Revelation things didn't do post-Revelation hexes. The clear plastic heels twinkled with aqua rhinestones and the vamp (excuse the expression, it's a shoe thing) outlined my toes and instep with flamboyant rhinestone coronets.

  Overdressed? Maybe. But then, could I really compete with Ric, who was a dandy sartorial blend of a young Tom Wolfe (ouch, wrong family name) and early Prince?

  Before I left, I checked myself out in the full-length mirror at the end of the hall. The lighting here was dim, but the rhinestones on my shoes sparkled. I squinted. Wait! The rhinestones looked red, not blue. In fact, my whole figure looked angular and black and I had a green face and damned if I wasn't seeing the real Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz wearing Dorothy's ruby slippers. Nightwine's "enchanted cottage" was getting to my imagination.

  I stamped my foot in spunky Dorothy fashion. "Get out of my mirror, you mean old witch!"

  The figure wavered as if under water and I saw it had been myself, the way you can look at something very familiar and see it completely differently. A red nightlight from down the hall must have reflected in the rhinestones on my shoes. The light was so low that my clothes had lost their color, that's why the nightlight. I shook off my sense of seeing someone else look back at me. I didn't want to start the evening spooked.

  Plenty of time for that later, my pretty, Irma warned me with a sinister giggle borrowed pitch-perfect from the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Quicksilver, in the background, was bewailing my abandonment at the quaint cottage that was Hector's guesthouse and my new digs. I stood on Sunset Road, waiting for Ric. I didn't want to introduce Ric and Quicksilver at the front door, which the dog guarded like the drawbridge to the Tower of London crown jewel collection. Not that I minded that after glimpsing Las Vegas after dark. The older Corvette that cozied up to the curb was low, sleek, and colored bronze. As in "bronze god," no doubt. Ric leaned over to open the passenger door.

  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 da
ncing, 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. Ol??s 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.

  Some had already dropped to all fours, beautiful silver-tipped coats reflecting the rainbow shards cast by the mirrored ball, a kind of full moon, high above. The half-weres still danced a ragged form of salsa, their throats extended as they howled at each other and the unseen moon outside.

  Camera flashes pinned them in a strobe-light landscape of alternating light and dark.

  I turned my head, my face, into Ric's shoulder. We were molded against each other, like we'd been in Sunset Park when he, I. . . we had found the dead bodies. I felt again that unexpected, alien surge of long-dead desire, welling through me into Ric.

  He remembered it too. He was murmuring into my hair, Spanish words that sounded like an incantation. Some I knew. Linda. Beautiful. Querida. Beloved. Mi tigre hembra. That last word was one for a Spanish dictionary. No one had ever. . .

  My knees lost it first. I sagged against him.

  Then he lost it.

  Ric one-two-three'd me around a corner into the rest room hallway, pressed me against that wall, pushed a thigh between my legs until they were very happy, and kissed me into a paper doll.

  My heart was beyond pounding, it was thrumming along with the salsa beat and the vibrating floor and walls, the werewolf howls. Rick's hands against the wall above my head put me in the close custody of his body. He lowered one hand to run a thumb over my sensitive inner lower lip, pulling a veil of saliva over it.

  "You don't wear lipstick. "

  "With my coloring? I'd look like a clown on the Fourth of July. "

  "I can redden your lips. " He ran his tongue over them and I felt the gesture everywhere. "Via con mi?" he asked.

  Go with him? I understood that much Spanish.

  "We're here to see the werewolves. Dance, wasn't it?" I asked.

  "They are us. The car? We'll see 'em before we go-go. "

  Go-go-go! We didn't make it inside the car. Or just barely here. The full moon was a huge silver Spanish coin in the sky over Ric's shoulder when he bent me back like a ballroom dancer and push
ed me against the still-warm windshield of his Corvette and went down on my bared navel.

  I was so used to unwanted guys grabbing for my neck and breasts and crotch that this sensual assault on my middle felt like. . . something new, something delicious, something all fingertips and tongue, something passionate on the special, small scale, something really, really personal. His borrowed belt was nicely in the way so he had to fight it for possession, and it was as warm as melted gold now, more mine than his.

  I plunged my fingers into his thick dark hair, watching his thumbs press into my not-model-concave belly. His tongue fought to penetrate my navel and bring me off with purely oral persuasion. I wanted to suck him into myself, here at this one point of contact.

  His head lifted off me, like a dog's or a wolf's, alert, guarded, listening. "They're coming. We need to get safe. And then watch. "

  Inside the car, we huddled together as the great, galloping werewolves flowed past us until the small sports car shuddered on its suspension. I heard screams in the distance, amid the avalanche of howls. Human screams.

  "Macho fools," Ric said. "They block the packs' runs, try to out dance them. They scrape their skin on the ground and bleed, but even the hungriest werewolves won't pause now to eat. They're heading for the great open wilderness of their ancestors to mate. The mountains and desert and hidden oases. "

  Wolfish faces flowed directly toward us and then around Ric's low-slung car, which still rocked and rolled at their passage. I loved their harvest-moon-yellow eyes, all Kansas wheat fields, and their silver-tipped fur, all Hollywood. The half-breeds came later, scary hunched loping half-blind mutilated creatures, hunting the moon and missing. I'd seen their more lethal like in the Pet Palace parking lot and shivered a little.

  Ric held my hand, his eyes on me, not on the rushing hordes. "They were all as human as we are, once. The Millennium Revelation brought everything unhuman out. "

  "Not 'inhuman'?"

  "Unhuman is different from what we mean by inhuman. It's not always degradation. It's just a difference. Like between man and woman. "

  I felt that last difference and the urges it engendered. Everything that night enhanced Ric's desire. He'd brought me here to seduce me with it all, the unreal, the hidden, the wolfish heart of Las Vegas. Of himself. And even, perhaps, of myself.

  Always sensible to a fault, I lashed myself into the seat belt before he took off from the parking lot. His arm reached over me, pressing against breast, belly, pelvis.

  "The seat reclines. "

  In an instant, I was laid out almost horizontal.

  On my back. Bound. Every nightmare revisited. I couldn't breathe, and reared up like a drowning person.

  "Whoa. Del? What's wrong?'

  "I. . . don't. . . do. . . horizontal. "

  The seatbelt whipped free at his touch and the seat snapped more upright again. "It's gone. We're out on the lonesome highway. No seatbelts required. Delilah?" His hand spread on my pelvis, warm and possessive. "I won't hurt you. Relax. "

  The low car thrummed along the concrete, vibrating like a blender until my bones sang with the motion. His hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the car, with his remote touches. I envied the glossy cue-ball head of the stick shift his touch. I wanted it.

  His fingertips reached over to push the flimsy camisole up past my rib cage, to tease my skirt hem up to my hips. A luminous full moon rode in the dead center of the glass roof panel. Underneath me the steady thrum of horsepower vibrated my pelvis like a great cat's purr. Above me, a moon river of rushing werewolves seemed to meld with the ghostly clouds.

  Ric's hand spread on my belly, caressing, claiming.

  My primal fears wafted away into something I'd never felt except in Sunset Park. Primal desire. I was strangely out of it, dreamy. His fingers teased my skirt up over my bare hip, then caressed my breast under the camisole. Again I was lulled by that easy, fringe sort of lovemaking, what pleased him as he steered the car and trifled with my body swaying to the drone of the engine, the motion, the fondling.

  He parked on Sunset Road and insisted on escorting me to my front door. I disabled Nightwine's security systems with my codes so we could amble inside hip to hip, our fingers entwined. The heavy sweet scent of flowers draped the cottage and the silent night seemed enchanted.

  On the homey brick stoop Ric took me into the embrace of his smooth, expensive clothes to do the tongue tango again. We were pressed against the door, my hands stroking the muscles of his back through his silken shirt. They shifted while his hands tightened on the bare skin of my waist and hips.

  Then Quicksilver, detecting a stranger's presence, leaped and scrabbled and howled on the other side of the door like a manic werewolf. Sure killed the mood.

  "What do you keep in there, the Hound of the Baskervilles?" Ric asked.

  "Not quite. " I smiled mysteriously.

  He unclasped and teased the gold belt off my hips, then threaded it back through the belt loops of his pants at such a slow sensual pace that I almost lost it again.

  I watched him, loving this. I'd never had this. Being escorted home from a date by a man who'd disarranged my clothes and pushed into me from a dozen distracting directions.

  Taken home to my own little cottage, where someone waited who cared but might ask awkward questions. Well, ask in a canine way.

  I loved that Ric and I hadn't been to bed, stripped naked, that there was still so much more to discover about each other and our feelings, at our own tantalizing pace.

  We arranged to rendezvous the next day. In Sunset Park, where he could meet Quicksilver on neutral ground. It seemed like the obvious next step. One-two-three, bowwow.