“You, Richard. I was thinking about the first time I saw you. You were in Jean-Claude’s bed in the offices at the Circus of the Damned with the woman shapeshifter beside the bed. You were both nude, and I never asked what you were doing in the bed with a naked woman in the room. I never asked how you ended up there like that.”

The anger began to seep away, leaving his face confused, more real somehow. “What do you want me to say about it?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking that I never questioned it. I never asked if you and Rashada were lovers. You asked me out the same night, so I assumed you weren’t dating anyone else. Was I naïve, Richard? Was I just that naïve then?”

His face softened, and he smiled. He came to us then, not angry, or arrogant, but gently. I was able to watch his face as he moved instead of staring lower. Point for me, but honestly the look on his face in that moment meant more to me than seeing him nude.

He touched my face, and his skin was warmer than it should have been. A warmth to cuddle against on a cold night, and I moved my face against that touch, and he turned his hand so that I could lay the side of my face in the warm cup of it.

“We both were,” he said softly, and I realized his other hand had reached past me. I turned my head, and his hand was big enough that my face still rested against it when I could see that he was touching Jean-Claude’s hair.

Richard drew us in toward him until our faces were close together. They had to bend down to touch their faces to mine. Jean-Claude’s and my hair mingled, all black curls, so that it was hard to tell whose hair was whose. Richard’s hands were on the back of our heads, fingers worked through the curls so I could feel them on the back of my skull. His fingers moved against my skin as if he were massaging. I knew he was doing the same to Jean-Claude. I could have had the tactile memory to go with it, truly felt what Jean-Claude was feeling, but he knew that freaked me out, so we’d been working on me simply knowing without the whole show. I just knew what Richard was doing.

He pressed our faces together and whispered, “If we’d known what would happen, would we have run from each other?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but Jean-Claude did. “Ask, rather, mon ami, if we would all be alive now, if we had not had each other to turn to in times of trouble? Ask how many of our vampires and wolves would be dead, or trapped by sadistic masters?”

“Not just my wolves,” Richard said. “Anita and Micah have helped a lot of the shapeshifters in town.” I heard his breath go out in a long sigh. He moved his head enough to lay his lips on my forehead. It was almost too soft to be called a kiss. “If you want to keep Asher as your second, your témoin, and keep the werehyenas in town, we have to tame him.”

“Oui,” Jean-Claude said.

“Define tame,” I said.

Richard laughed, pulling back enough to look at both of us, but longer at me. “That suspicious tone in your voice, it’s so you, Anita, so very you.”

I frowned at him, one hand on my hip, the other still on Jean-Claude’s hand. “I’m still me, Richard. How else would I sound?”

“How can I love you and still want to do such terrible things to you and with you? How can it be okay with you that I like what I like?”

Jean-Claude went very still beside me. “I don’t want to have this talk again, Richard,” I said.

“Me, either,” he said. He looked at Jean-Claude. “I want to have sex with Anita. I’m willing to touch you and be touched. I want to torment Asher with the fact that he can’t have me.” A look went through those chocolate-brown eyes and they suddenly looked darker. “I want to watch his face while Anita goes down on me, and I go down on Anita. I want him to watch you fuck Anita, and think he’s not getting you. I want to cause him pain while you do it, and know that he’ll enjoy the pain, too.” That dark look in his eyes became fierce, not anger, but fierceness. “The thought excites me.”

His words made me glance down, and his body was responding to the thought. I flicked my eyes back up to his face and found him looking at me. He’d noticed what I’d done, or maybe he’d sensed it the way I’d sensed when he’d petted Jean-Claude’s hair.

“Do you want me?”

“What?” I asked.

“Do you want me, Anita?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, either. I opened my mouth, closed it. Jean-Claude said, “Truth, ma petite, the truth.”

I said the only truth I’d had since almost the first time I saw Richard. “Yes.”

He smiled, but it held that fierceness that I wasn’t sure I understood. “Good,” he said, “because I’ve missed you.” He moved so fast, I made that girl-scream squeal. He was just suddenly holding me around the waist. My pulse was in my throat, thudding against my skin. My feet were dangling above the ground and I was looking into his eyes from inches away. My hands were on his arms, but not in a useful way.

“That scared you.” He leaned his face in against mine, not quite touching, and sniffed the air above my skin. The gesture made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “Your skin smells so good because you’re afraid of me, Anita. I like it, do you understand that?”

I had to swallow to whisper, “Yes.”

“I want you afraid; do you understand that?”

“It’s that chase-the-prey thing, I get it,” and again my voice was a whisper.

A low growl trickled out from between those soft, human lips. My pulse sped up again, as if I’d choke on it. “Do you trust me?” he whispered, but his voice held that same edge of growl, as if his voice were deepening.

I swallowed twice. I didn’t trust my voice, and knew that the real answer was maybe, but Jean-Claude was there and I trusted him to see that things didn’t get out of control. So I nodded yes.

“Good,” he said again. I felt his muscles tense, and then I was airborne and falling toward the bed.

9

I HIT THE bed, hands slapping against it to take the impact, but the bed was soft enough that it wasn’t an impact; it was just startling as hell. If it had been a real emergency I’d have had time to sit up, to scramble for something, but it wasn’t that kind of emergency, so I lay there on the bed trying to breathe past the nearly painful beat of my pulse in my throat. I was staring up at Asher’s body. There wasn’t time to admire the view as he looked down at me, because the bed moved and I started to sit up, and Richard was there.

He dropped the full weight of his body on me and kissed me at the same time. I was suddenly trapped underneath him, and almost choking on his kiss. It was too fierce, too much, and I wasn’t there yet. I pushed at him, fought against the kiss, finally grabbed his ponytail and was able to use it to lever him away from my mouth. My teeth were gritted as I said, “You haven’t done enough for me yet, Richard.”

He stared down at me, and I saw the thought go through his eyes that he was probably big enough to force me. He was bigger than I was, and I was unarmed; only trust had let him get to this point with me. Trust in him and trust in Jean-Claude. The fact that I felt that thought cross all the way through him gave me a glimpse into some of the demons he’d been fighting. It wasn’t just being a werewolf, or being Jean-Claude’s wolf to call, that haunted Richard. There were parts of him that would have been there even if he’d been as human as he wanted to be. I watched that part slide through his true-brown eyes and felt that shiver of fear trail over my skin again.

He moved down and though the hold on his ponytail had kept him from my face, it didn’t stop him from sliding down. When he had enough slack he kissed my upper chest, gently, very gently. He kissed his way down the exposed line of my breasts with the zipper and the leather framing them, but each kiss was ever so gentle. I let his hair slip through my fingers as he kissed his way down my body through the leather. He laid his head on my lap through the soft leather of the dress, and just the weight of him there made me close my eyes and shudder. When I opened them my head must have gone back because I was staring up the line of Asher’s body. He met my gaze, and there was in his eyes something so not submissive, or even bottom. The look he gave was most definitely dominant. Asher was a bottom and he was a better submissive than I would ever be, because he was the one who explained to me that I was never a submissive. I was a dominant who sometimes bottomed, but it’s not the same thing as a true switch to submissive. Asher could be submissive and things that just pissed me off excited him, but it was a thin line for him. He could switch in the middle of a scene faster than anyone else I’d ever seen. One minute the lamb and the next the lion. I was looking at the lion now. His gaze went down the line of my body to Richard, and I was almost certain that it wasn’t me that had switched him to predator. It was the sight of Richard’s nude body lying there so close, but still so far away.