Craeg looked across the aisle. “I look ridiculous? Have you checked in the mirror? I didn’t know that crank case oil was a fashion statement.”

“Stop avoiding. What’s up, my man.”

As they trundled along, heading for the dematerialization spot, he found himself talking. “I can’t … You know, it’s not right.”

“What isn’t.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Still waiting for a noun. I know you’re a redneck, but you do have a vocabulary, if rumor serves.”

Craeg just shook his head. There was no way he was going to disrespect Paradise by laying their private business out—even to a guy like Axe, who seemed, if only because he was, in his own words, a committed narcissist, likely to keep shit tight.

“I don’t know,” Axe said as he stretched his legs out across the seats and leaned against the bus’s darkened windows. “She seems different from her kind. I don’t think you have to worry.”

Yeah, females were totally opposite from males, weren’t they.

And in this case, he was the one being a pussy. She was not. She was ready for their next level—and he suspected he might just be hiding behind her virtue: Once again, he was protecting himself. And when he thought about how she made him feel?

Still seemed like a smart … if perhaps unsustainable … plan.

Christ, they were going to end up alone at some point tonight. It was fucking inevitable. And after two phone sex seshes with her, he was more desperate than ever, a panting, starved, crazy male with an ever-ready cock, and enough orgasms on backup to dehydrate him to the point of needing Gatorade through a vein.

He wanted to believe he could keep to his resolution, he really did.

The trouble was, nothing made him more shortsighted than his name leaving her lips on a gasp.

One syllable and nothing fancy, his was not a regal name. But all she had to do was say it and he was gone, gone, gone. Putty in her hands. Blank of any intention other than getting inside of her and staying there.

Oh, man, he was in such trouble here.

As Paradise entered the human club, shAdoWs, she looked around and thought … yeah, no. Loud music was thumping to the point where she heard it in her skull. Dark purple and red laser beams shot this way and that through air that was thick with human smells. And the overwhelming attention she got was not anything she was interested in.

Having no idea where Craeg, Boone, and Novo were, she walked through the gyrating crowd, and as she went along, human men watched her, assessed her, hoped to catch her eye. She supposed some of them might have been considered attractive, but it was more along the lines of her wandering through someone’s room and noticing a chair with a good slipcover.

The fabric might be nice, but she’d never take it home.

Or in this case, sit on the damn thing.

The building that housed the club had been a warehouse, it looked like, and there was something incongruous about its three-story-high open space nonetheless feeling claustrophobic. Then again, there were just too many people crammed into the center. Where did you just hang out, she wondered. And how did all of them know each other? Everybody seemed to be touching … everybody that was around them.

Working her way across the floor space, she discovered there were booths along the perimeter of all that writhing. Maybe her people were there? Jeez, did she even have the right club—

“Hey, baby, come with me.”

A rough hand grabbed her waist and hauled her up against a sweaty body. Glaring at the human man, she tried to push him away, but he latched hold on her wrists, yanking her in close.

“I know you want this,” he slurred, rubbing his hips against her. He smelled like old cologne, older cigarette smoke—or maybe that was weed?—and a very-not-hot kind of desperation. “Kiss me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come on, you want it. I know you want it.”

Fuck this, she thought.

With a quick jerk, she freed her right arm and punched him in the throat with her knuckles—and as he bent over and grabbed at his neck, she had to stop herself from breaking his nose with her knee.

Leaving him to gag, she turned and—

Ran smack into Craeg’s enormous chest.

“I was coming to save you,” he said dryly. “But I already learned firsthand you can hold your own—so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t need me.”

Instantly, everything about the club changed. The air was no longer stuffy; it was filled with sexual heat. The lasers weren’t blinding; they were scintillating. The music wasn’t loud; it was erotic.

The humans were still annoying, but come on, even true love could only do so much.

God, he looked amazing. Tall and broad, big and strong, that Orange cap on his head just like the night they’d first met. That simple white T-shirt showing off his muscles. Those jeans … Jesus, those worn, soft-as-skin jeans that gave her peeks of his thighs in the places that were torn.

“Dance with me,” she said as she leaned into him so he could hear her over the din.

The bill of the baseball hat kept her from seeing his eyes, but she felt them running over what she had changed into before leaving the house: her low-cut blouse and her short little skirt and her tight little jacket were all for him, and they had obviously captivated the guy. He also seemed to like her hair, that she’d left loose, and what she’d done with her makeup.

“Craeg,” she repeated. “Dance with me.”