She spoke in that breathless, hiccuping voice that serious crying can give you. "I'm sorry. Oh, God, Anita, I'm sorry. I'm just so jealous."
I raised eyebrows at her. "What are you talking about? Jealous of what?"
"The men," she said in that shivering, uncertain voice. It was like she was someone else for a moment, or maybe this was a part of Ronnie that she didn't let people see. "All the damned men. I'm about to give up everybody. Everybody but Louie, and he's great, but dammit, I've had lovers. I hit triple digits."
I wasn't sure that being able to number your lovers at over a hundred was a good thing, but it was something that Ronnie and I had also agreed to disagree on a long time ago. I did not say, Look who's the whore or other hurtful remarks I could have made. I let all the cheap shots I could have made go. She was the one crying.
"And now I'm giving it all up, all of it, for just one man." She leaned her hands against the cabinet as if she needed the support.
"You said sex with Louie was great. I think you've used words like fantastic, and mind-blowing."
She nodded, her hair spilling around her face so that I couldn't see her eyes for a moment. "It is, he is, but he's only one man. What if I get bored, or he gets bored with me? How can just one be enough? The last time we were both cheating a month after the wedding." She looked up at that last remark, her gray eyes wide and frightened.
I made a small helpless gesture and said, "You're asking the wrong person, Ronnie. I'd planned on monogamy. It seemed like a good idea to me."
"That's exactly what I mean." She wiped at the tears on her face in harsh, angry motions, as if the touch of them made her even more upset. "How is it that you, my girlfriend who had only three men in her entire life, ends up dating and fucking five men?"
I didn't know what to say to that, so I tried to concentrate on the hard facts. "Six men," I said.
She frowned at me, her eyes taking on that look that meant she was counting in her head. "I only count five."
"You're leaving someone out, Ronnie."
"No"—she started counting on her fingers—"Jean-Claude, Asher, Damian, Nathaniel, and Micah. That's it."
I shook my head again. "I had unprotected sex with one more man last month." I could have said it differently, but maybe if we got back to my personal disaster, we could stop talking about Ronnie's penis envy. She needed more therapy than I knew how to give lately.
She frowned harder, and then she got it. "Oh, no, no," she said.
I nodded. Happy to see from her expression that she got the full awfulness of it.
"You had sex with him just once, right?"
I shook my head no, over and over again. "Not just once."
She was looking at me so hard that I couldn't hold her gaze. Even with the tear tracks drying on her face, she was suddenly Ronnie again. Ronnie had a good hard stare. I couldn't meet it and was left looking at the cabinets. "How much more than not just once?" she asked.
I started to blush and couldn't stop it. Dammit.
"You're blushing—that's not a good sign," she said.
I stared down at the countertop, using my long hair to hide my face.
Her voice was gentler when she said, "How many times, Anita? How many times in the month you've been back together?"
"Seven," I said, still not looking up. I hated admitting it, because the number alone said louder than any words exactly how much I enjoyed being in Richard's bed.
"Seven times in a month," she said. "Wow, that's…"
I looked up, and the look was enough.
"Sorry, sorry, just…" She looked as if she wasn't sure whether she was going to laugh or be sad about it. She controlled herself and finally sounded sad when she said, "Oh, my God, Richard."
I nodded again.
"Richard." She whispered his name and looked suitably horrified. It was worth a little horror.
Richard Zeeman and I had been off again, on again for years. Mostly off. We'd been engaged briefly until I saw him eat someone. Richard was the leader—Ulfric—of the local werewolf pack. He was also a junior high science teacher and an all-around Boy Scout. If Boy Scouts were six-foot-one, muscled, amazingly handsome, with an equally amazing ability to be self-destructive. He hated being a monster, and he hated me for being more comfortable with the monsters than he was. He hated a lot of things, but we'd made up just enough to have fallen into bed in the last few weeks. But as my Grandma Blake told me, once was enough.
Of all the men in my life, the worst possible choice to be the father would be Richard, because he of all of them would try for the white picket fence and a normal life. Normal wasn't possible for me, or him, but I knew that, and he didn't, not really, not yet. Even if I was pregnant, even if I kept being pregnant, I wasn't going to marry anyone. I wasn't going to change my living arrangements. My life worked the way it was, and Richard's idea of domestic bliss was not mine.
Ronnie gave an abrupt laugh, then swallowed it. I was glaring at her. "Come on, Anita, I'm allowed to be impressed that you've managed to have sex with him seven times in the space of a month. I mean, you don't even live together, and you're having more sex than some of our married friends."
I kept giving her the look that makes bad guys run for cover, but Ronnie was my friend, and it's harder to impress your friends with the scary look. They know you won't really hurt them. The fight was dying under the weight of friendship, and my problem being more immediate than her years of issues unresolved.
Ronnie touched my arm. "Oh, it wouldn't be Richard's. You're having sex with Nathaniel at least every other day."
"Sometimes twice a day," I said.
She smiled. "Well, my, my…" Then she waved her hand as if to keep from distracting herself. "But the odds are that it's Nathaniel's, right?"
I smiled at her. "You sound happy about that now."
She shrugged. "Well, a choice of evils, ya know."
"Thanks a lot, Ronnie."
"You know what I meant," she said.
"No, I don't think I do." I think I was ready to be angry about her thinking the men in my life were a choice of evils, but I didn't get a chance to be angry because two of the men in my life were coming through the front door.
I heard them unlocking the door before it opened, and their voices came raised and a little breathless from the run. They'd been able to run faster and farther without me along. I was, after all, still human, and they were not.
Standing between the island and the cabinets, we couldn't see the front door, only hear them laughing as they came toward the doorway to the kitchen.
"How can you do that?" Ronnie asked, voice soft.
"What?" I asked, frowning.
"You were smiling."
I looked at her.
"You smiled just at the sound of their voices, even with everything…"
I stopped her with a hand on her arm. One way I knew I didn't want them to find out about the maybe-baby was by overhearing a conversation. Their hearing was a little too keen to risk it. And here they came, my two live-in sweeties.
Micah was in front, looking back over his shoulder, still laughing, talking. He was my height, short, slender, and muscular in that swimmer sort of way. He had to have his suits tailored because he needed an extra small athletic cut. You didn't get that off the rack. He'd come to me tanned and stayed that way from jogging outside, mostly shirtless, all summer and autumn. He'd added a T-shirt to the short-shorts today. His hair was that deep, rich brown that some people get after starting life as very blond. His dark hair was tied back in a low ponytail that couldn't hide how curly it was, almost as curly as mine. He'd taken off his sunglasses, so when I moved into his arms I could look up into his chartreuse eyes. Yellow-green leopard eyes in his delicate face. A very bad man had forced him to stay in leopard form for so long that when he came back to human he couldn't come all the way back.
We kissed and our arms just seemed to automatically glide around each other, to press our bodies as close together as we could wi
th clothes on. He'd affected me this way almost from the moment we had seen each other. Lust at first sight. They say it doesn't last, but we were six months and counting.
I melted against his body and kissed him fiercely, deeply. Partly it was what I always wanted to do when I saw him. Partly I was scared, and touching and being touched made me feel better. Not long ago I'd have been more discreet in front of company, but my nerves weren't good enough to pretend today.
He didn't get embarrassed, or tell me "Not in front of Ronnie" the way Richard would have done. He kissed me back with the same drowning intensity, his hands holding me like he'd never let me go. We drew back, breathless and laughing.
"Was that for my benefit?" Ronnie asked, and her voice was not happy.
I turned around, still half in Micah's arms. I looked at her angry eyes and suddenly was ready to be angry back. "Not everything is about you, Ronnie."
"Are you telling me you kiss him like that every time he comes home?" The anger was back, and she used it. "He's been gone, what, an hour? I've seen you greet him after a day's work, and it was never like that."
"Like what?" I asked, voice sliding down. If she wanted to fight, we could fight.
"Like he was air and you couldn't breathe him in fast enough."
Micah's voice was mild, placating, trying to talk us both down. "Did we interrupt something?"
I turned to face Ronnie squarely. "I'm allowed to kiss my boyfriend the way I want to kiss him without getting your permission, Ronnie."
"Don't try to tell me you weren't rubbing my face in it just now with the show."
"Go get some therapy, Ronnie, because I am fucking tired of your issues raining all over me."
"I confided in you," she said, voice strangled with some emotion I didn't understand, "and you put on a show like that in front of me. How could you?"
"Oh, that wasn't a show," Nathaniel said from just inside the doorway, "but if it's a show you want, we can do that, too." He glided into the kitchen on the balls of his feet, showing both the grace of his dance training and that otherworldly grace of the wereleopard. He pulled his tank top off in one smooth gesture and let it fall to the floor. I actually backed up a step before I caught myself. I hadn't realized until that moment that he was angry with Ronnie. What little cutting remarks had she been making to him that I hadn't heard? When he told me she didn't see him as real, he'd been trying to tell me more than I had heard. That I'd missed something big was there in his angry eyes.
He tore the tie from his ponytail and let his ankle-length auburn hair fall around his nearly naked body. The jogging short-shorts didn't cover that much.
I had time to say, "Nathaniel—" and he was in front of me. That otherworldly energy that all lycanthropes could give off shivered from his skin and along my body. He was five-six, just tall enough for me to have to look up to meet his eyes. His anger had turned them from lavender to the deeper color of lilacs, if flowers could burn with anger and force of personality. Nathaniel was in those eyes, and with that one look he dared me, challenged me, to turn him down.
I didn't want to turn him down. I wanted to wrap his body and that skin-crawling energy around me like a coat. Lately almost any stress seemed to feed into sex. Scared? Sex would make me feel better. Angry? Sex would calm me. Sad? Sex made me happy. Was I addicted to sex? Maybe. But Nathaniel wasn't offering actual sex. He just wanted as much attention as I'd given Micah. Seemed fair to me.
I closed the distance between us with my hands, my mouth, my body. The energy of his beast spilled around us, making me feel like I was being plunged in a warm bath that had a mild electric charge. He'd been one of the least of my leopards until a metaphysical accident had taken him from pomme de sang to my animal to call. I was the first human servant to gain the vampire ability to call an animal. All leopards were mine to call, but Nathaniel was my special pet. We'd both gained power from the magical bonding, but he'd gained more.
He lifted me up, using just his hands on my thighs.
Even through my jeans he made sure I knew he was happy to be pressed against my body. So happy that it forced a small sound from me.
Ronnie's voice came harsh, ugly, like she was choking on her anger. "And when the baby comes, are you going to fuck in front of it, too?"
Nathaniel froze against me. Micah's voice came from behind us. "Baby?"
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Micah ab-13 Page 13