He recognized the line guys usually give girls and laughed. I undid another button and slid my whole hand inside his shirt to get him back on the right track. "So what were these preppie girls like?"

"Like? For one thing, they'd never paw me in a public park, just to make me forget that I broke my vow never to raise any more zombies."

I drew back, caught.

"Not that they wouldn't paw me in a public park just for the heck of it."

I slapped him lightly on the chest for leading me on while I was leading him on. "I'm jealous."

"Don't be," he said. "I found out their game by senior year. I was the hot ethnic flavor of the year. A way to defy their parents, have some kicks and not get bored. I was just a diversion."

"That you are." I toyed with his nipple again.

"Delilah, stop that! You wanted to know. Listen, some wanted their parents to know they were seeing me, just to jerk them around. Others never wanted anyone to know but their very best friends. Guess how I found out?"

"Very best friends can be treacherous. 'Them', Ric? You were a serial gigolo?"

"Yeah. I was young, they were ready and so was I. It was too easy to be right."

"And I'm hard."

"Yes. What really turned me off was why I wasn't good enough to date for real."

"Which was?"

"It wasn't my Mexican blood. It wasn't my lurid background. One of the other guys told me why, finally, meaning to piss me off. It was that my adopted parents weren't high enough on the Washington social register."

"What did you do to get back?"

"What makes you think I did something?"

"You don't allow those you…owe something… to not pay for the privilege."

"There was this townie gossip blog. I hacked in and altered a really vicious column before it time-posted. It hit the Web and a lot of trust fund babies lost their graduation trips to Europe."

" Europe, really?"

"Especially Spain."

"Think they guessed it was you?"

"Naw, they thought they'd fooled everyone."

"So how'd you end up in the FBI?

"My adopted father wanted me to go into the military, like he had. I would have obliged him, except I knew having men ordering me what to do in that no-questions-allowed way would… I'd kill someone first. So he got me some internships with the suburban police, a D.C. crime lab. I had all the right qualifications for Quantico and was accepted by the FBI as soon as I was eligible. They value Spanish speakers now."

"And your special talents-?"

"I just wanted to forget about that. It'd been years. I was a privileged white-collar kid. Then they took us to the body farm-you know, real bodies in various states of decomposition. My fingers twitched for wanting a twig. It started happening again when we were examining possible death scenes. I finally picked up a dead stick and let myself "discover" a disruption in the earth. I had to go off by myself to do it, so I got a rep for being a human bloodhound on some trail only I scented. With the Millennium Revelation, lots of strange things were happening. They were uneasy about me, but also pleased by my usefulness."

"Why didn't you stay?"

"Got too hard to conceal what I was really doing. Dowsing for the dead is nothing a seriously scientific crime-solving organization wants to claim even these days. It was better I consult out of town. I'm taken for a science geek, not anything cheesy like a psychic, and I make sure to make it seem that way."

"Nobody would ever mistake you for a science geek," I said. I ran my hand over his muscled bare skin and then up under the shirt collar, stroking the side of his neck. "What were they like, those society witches?"

"Nothing like you."

"Nothing?" I challenged.

"They weren't about me or even the sex. It was all about them. They were shallow and artificial."

"But good-looking."

"Sure. They'd had plastic surgery since their pre-teens. They didn't care about me and I didn't care about them when I learned to see through the American princess façades. Not one of them could fight off a werewolf."

"But you were dazzled at first, admit it."

"No argument. I was a teenage boy. We're nine parts testosterone and one part horny. You should be glad, paloma, that I didn't break my heart over anyone else, so it's all in one piece for you."

"Hmm."

I stroked the bat bite again, hyped to feel his carotid artery bound at my teasing touch. I could almost understand the vampire's predatory enjoyment in sensing signs of vulnerable human circulatory systems that thrust so near the surface.

"Are you going to take me home and to bed," Ric asked, "or just drive me crazy in the park?"

"Yes. Both."

My feelings for him were incredibly fierce, both possessive and protective. Was it because I'd never felt much affection at all from and therefore for other people?

Or because something of Lilith sang through my blood? In lore, the original Lilith was an Eden-exiled femme fatale, a devouring goddess, and a succubus, a "night hag" who haunted men's dreams and beds, a psychic vampire who drained men sexually.

It scared me, how deeply I wanted Ric, but I wasn't interested in draining him. Quite the contrary.

"Home," I said.

Chapter Seven

He followed me from the parking area across Sunset Road and pulled the Corvette into the driveway beside Dolly after I'd disarmed the gates' security system so we could enter. I unlocked the quaint wooden cottage front door with the remote.

When he joined me at Dolly's driver's door, the public kid gloves were off. He pushed me flat against Dolly's sun-warmed Detroit metal as soon as I got out.

"The last time I was here your wild wolf-dog attacked me, knocked me flat on my back on the floor and attempted to tear out my throat."

"He was just trying to get you to hold still while he licked your hands whole again."

"After that, you straddled me, pinned my hands above my head, ripped open my fly and ravished me, chiquita."

"Someone had to. You'd been so wracked up from cutting your hands to shreds on the barbed wire you used for dowsing rods, you needed to feel something pleasurable fast."

"This time, I'm going to ravish you." He eyed the greenery. "Where's the dog?"

"Out probably. He has his rounds to make."

"You don't know where he goes?"

"His breed was born to run, so he takes gallops around town. I can't possibly walk him enough for the exercise he needs."

"Can you give me the exercise I need?"

"Oh, I think so." I pulled his tie knot loose, yanked the top button of his shirt free and fastened my mouth onto his bared, brown throat like a rabid bat.

His lean strong body rippled against mine, all muscle, now aroused and hard. Ric picked me up, cupping my head against his neck so my mad, bad succubus kiss couldn't stop. He bounded up the few steps to the door, pushed it open, and carried me upstairs.

He found the bedroom without help and set me down while I clung to his shoulders and neck.

He found something else without help. In no time he'd stretched my hands above my head and tied them to the large gargoyle carving of one bedpost with his silken tie. If anyone else had bound me, I'd have panicked. But I'd taken control of his hands and arms the first-and last-time we'd made love here, and understood his desire for a return ravishing.

It was play, it was deadly serious passion, it was scary and it was divine. I was pulsing with excitement, my body writhing to excite his even more. His gaping shirtfront made my mouth lunge for him, seeking any part of him to fasten on, lips, neck, nipple, but he bent down out of reach to take off my high heels. Once they were gone, I balanced on my toes like a ballerina, light and spinning. He knelt there still, then undid the side zipper on my skirt. I'd thought from the day we met he'd unzip my skirt as if it was a polite social gesture.