Chapter Forty-Three

Quicksilver and I hoofed it back to our Sunset Road home, footsore but happy to be together and free. I patted his head as I punched in the code that would open the gates to our cottage.

"They didn't much like you at the Gehenna, but I sure was glad you were there."

He made excited whining sounds that meant: let me in and at my food bowl, Mama!

Inside I found the cottage rooms neat, cool, empty, and peaceful.

Only the blinking red light on the cottage's non-vintage answering machine intruded on the homecoming mood.

First I filled Quick's water and food bowls.

Then I gobbled some cherries and grapes from the refrigerator and poured myself a gleaming goblet of Merlot. I've never been a wine snob and Hannibal Lector can keep his "nice Chianti" for the liver-eating among us, which were unfortunately too populous lately, post Millennium Revelation.

Then, ever the reporter, I skimmed the Las Vegas papers that had piled up and found a second front-section story that made me raise my eyebrows and then some.

Last... I listened to my messages.

First.

"My God! Del! Where are you? I'm frantic. Your cell is on voice mail. All I get here is an answering machine... "

Ric's voice. I replayed the message. Would I like to be a spider-sylph with him in my web! Truthfully, the sound of his voice snapped me the last bit out of a very bad dream.

I redialed instantly and got his cell phone.

"Del! You're back. What the hell happened? I've been frantic-"

Hey, I liked somebody being frantic about me, especially twice.

"I'm okay. It's been... surreal. Can we meet? Talk about it? I've drummed up some good leads."

"Leads? Do you have any idea? I need to see you."

"Right. I have lots of new info."

"Screw the info. I need to see you. See that you're all right."

"Where? When?"

"Now. Um, I don't know. Where do you want to be seen?"

"With you."

There was a long pause. "I know you've been through something. I don't know what. What will make it better?"

"You."

An even longer pause.

"How?"

"Just get over here."

"Your dog on the premises?"

"Yes, but he'll be off for a run by the time you get here. He's ready for one."

Ric arrived only ten minutes after Quicksilver left.

I let him in, kissed him with fresh layer of Lip Venom on, and then settled him down with his own glass of Merlot. Between my tingling lip gloss and the wine, he was licking his chops like Quicksilver enjoying a steak.

"You're going to make me an addict of a girly beauty product," he said. "So where have you been?"

"And where have you been? But me first."

"Suits me, believe it."

I told him about my abduction and brief magical stage career at the Gehenna. I didn't mention my new mirror-melting facilities.

"I'm not surprised," Ric said after a couple steadying sips of wine. "You did the right thing. Undercover credo: don't struggle when you're outmanned, pretend to go along, and then get the hell out. Plus, you've identified one of the corpses in Sunset Park. Good job."

I loved it when Ric treated me as an investigative equal. I'd been kidnapped by a couple of incompetent wise guys. It had been more freaky than threatening, and I had gotten myself free, with more knowledge than we'd had before. Of course, I didn't mention the mirror or the "girl I'd left behind... "

"So I come home to a pile of newspapers," I went on.

"I subscribe too."

"Then you must have read this little article."

I knew the small-type headline by heart: City detective attacked in sinkhole. I watched his face as he saw it: total LE (law enforcement) non-reaction. That's when I knew.

"What's the Sinkhole, Ric?"

"Badder than bad. More north than North Las Vegas. Actually, its location seems to... move. You don't want to go there, even if you can find it. It's where the worst predatory unhumans hang out, the penny-ante, low-brow loser unhumans, I should say."

"Kind of a Brigadoon for hell-raiser set. Why do you think Detective Haskell was there?"

"Probably had a snitch in the area. Haskell is pretty penny-ante and low-brow himself."

"True."

I got up, collected Ric's wine glass, and refilled it. Mine too. When I brought his glass back, I brushed knuckles with him.

He flinched. Not much. Just enough.

I sat down opposite him. "The newspaper says that Haskell was attacked and beaten. Pretty badly."

"Couldn't have happened to a nastier guy."

"He's in the hospital, Ric. The story says he was mutilated. In a very sensitive area. Chewed."

Ric put down the wine glass. He stood up. A good offense is the best defense. "What? You think I'm a freaking werewolf?"

"I can see your bruised and cut knuckles from here. I think you should tell me what you did."

"Am I asking you the gory details of your sojourn at the Gehenna? I'm sure there are some."

"A few. Nothing serious. What did you do to Haskell?"

"First I got seriously mad. No one mauls you but me."

"I'm so flattered."

"So I faked a snitch appointment and went down to the Sinkhole at night and beat the hell out of him. It was a fair fight. If he'd had any balls he could have beat the hell out of me."

"Apparently he doesn't have much for balls now."

"That wasn't me. I left him unconscious and got out of there. He didn't even see what hit him, didn't know who I was. Something else must have got to him after I left."

"You don't sound sorry."

"Are you?"

"We might be. He's still alive. He must have you on his list of possibles."

"No, I tell you. I dressed for the neighborhood. You wouldn't have recognized me. He didn't see anything coming but my fists. I suppose you're pissed because I went out and avenged your honor. You're liberated and you wanted to do it yourself."

"I'm liberated," I agreed, "and I want... you."

He actually waited for the rest of my sentence. "I want you to... "

Here's the thing. Sure, I wanted to solve the crime, get the better of Nightwine's pride and money, establish myself as a player in Las Vegas, get the hot story, save that poor dead girl's soul maybe, but mostly I wanted Ric.

"I want a date. Formal."

"Easy." He sounded relieved. The little woman just wanted a formal night out, a date. "Where? When?"

"Some hotel. Some restaurant. You know Las Vegas, but maybe you don't know me. You pick. The place, the time, the action."

I almost heard his breath stop.

I'd been putting my faith in him and I didn't really know a thing about him, except he was as good as I was about maintaining secrets. Seeing Madrigal and his mysterious assistants had made me unhappy with the status quo with Ric. This wasn't going to work unless I got behind those very attractive barriers he erected. Why did he never shed his clothes? Why did he like to control my vertical and horizontal so much?

Yeah, I had phobias to overcome. But so did he.

This had to be an equal deal. I was willing to play a little strip poker if I got a little strip poker back in return. So. My challenge. Me. Stripped. And his play. Next.

Chapter Forty-Four

Ric stood up, clearly confused. Intrigued. Hot. Cold. Wary.

"You're not mad that I took out Haskell?"

"You're not mad that I crashed the Gehenna? Good. Now we only need to find out who the dead guy in Sunset Park was. But before that, there's something I want more."

I leaned into Ric, running his silk-wool blend jacket lapels through my hands. I'd learned that he liked that once-removed form of intimacy. I wanted, as I'd just thought, more.

"Your clothes always feel so good," I said. Then... "I'd love to slow-dance naked in your arms."

I felt him catch his breath, then think about it. We'd been intimate, but this was intimate on my terms, not his.

"Sounds like a plan," he said carefully, as if not believing his luck.

My own breath stopped. I'd wondered about his reticence. His privacy. What it hid. I didn't just want me naked with him. I wanted him naked with me. I wanted to tease him past his shelters, his borders. We were both experts at emotional poker playing. Sometimes you have to raise the stakes to see the other player's cards.

His eyes were all pupil, dark, half-satisfied already. "One condition."

"Only one?"

"You wear something that makes getting you out of it interesting."

I thought. Nodded. "So where in Las Vegas can we do this naked tango?"

Ric had taught me to be a tad exhibitionistic lately, but Los Lobos was out. Maybe in his mysterious, dark, glittering house of mirrors...

"Your naked dance. First drinks and dinner. Then we cha-cha. A big Las Vegas evening out. Leave it all up to me. I'll pick you up tomorrow at... seven."

"Isn't that a little late?"

"It's going to be a long, late night."

His words resonated in my throbbing heart, pulses, and especially elsewhere.

"Long?" I repeated.

"Naked," he echoed.

We nodded, agreeing and excited by it.

Talk about twenty-four hours of sheer anticipation. Ric wouldn't pick someplace... public. Would he? Then again, he liked to show me off. I preened a little at the thought of his Latino possessiveness, a trait someone like me, always listed on the orphanage records as unwanted, unspoken for, would treasure. My wounds, his wounds, our aphrodisiac.

He called my cell phone that afternoon. "Drinks at the Palms' Ghost Bar, dinner at the Paris restaurant in the Eiffel Tower."

"Those are primo venues. How did you-?"

"No questions. This is just a friendly dress code alert."

"Expensive too. And neither of those places have dancing."

"Nor nudity."

I could tell my crazy impulse had really turned him on. Me too.

I ransacked my closet, looking for the perfect gown to get out of. Who was I? A stripper? Yeah. Something spectacular. Something... very frustrating. My fingers hesitated over the black velvet thirties Nora Charles gown. Perry Mason had returned it with a disturbing message: no DNA on it other than mine. Not even Snow's? What was he, invisible? In that case, Claude should have left a traceable memoir of his playful butt pinch. Time to figure that out later.

The gown? No. Too Snow. I didn't like to mix my... encounters.

At last my fingers slid along the slippery surface of one of my oldest vintage gowns. Made to order for my querido amigo. I smiled wickedly. Yes.

I wore a long, black velvet thirties cloak when Ric called at my door.

"That's it? That's all?"

I shrugged and slipped out the door before Quicksilver could get a piece of my cloak or of Ric. The cloak had an ivory satin lining that almost caught in the door of the Corvette as Ric ushered me in.

Ric was wearing an off-white blazer that looked as smooth as clotted cream over an ice-blue silk shirt carelessly open at the neck. His trousers were black wool-silk with a formal satin stripe up the side. Las Vegas dressy casual.

We skipped the line of gaggling tourists in front of the elevator to the Palms Hotel's Ghost Bar, the city's hottest destination, and fifty-five stories up. No shorts, no hats, no tennis shoes, no baggy or torn jeans allowed. Dressy sandals permitted, no flip-flops.

The Ghost Bar. I knew I'd be uneasy there. My kind of medium had not been defined yet when this place had been created. Sitting in this nineteen-sixties meld of blue and green furniture against silver and ice-white, I let my cloak fall back to swathe the chair behind me and studied the holographic photos of motion picture stars on the wall.

I knew Ric was studying my pale satin gown, all buttoned up to the neck in back and down to my wrist, thinking of my all too solid flesh beneath it. Nothing intrigues like extreme modesty.

I inspected the ghostly faces on the wall. The images blurred as you moved past them. They simulated life. Only, I felt them. Even the animate silver necklace around my neck thickened with my second-hand emotions and tightened into a dog collar under the pale satin.

I sensed their unspoken anxiety at being reduced to dead icons and instantly knew the weaknesses their fame had hidden. Watch me, love me, pick me! Hadn't I felt that all in the orphanage, on my own lonely stage? And hadn't I also found fulfillment in front of a camera? Playing a persona, a crusading journalist in my case.

I felt their pain. Idolized. Commercialized. So much more than mere image.

Clark Gable. Carole Lombard. Mae West. Gary Cooper... Cary Grant. Irene Dunne. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. Katharine Hepburn. John Wayne... Tyrone Power. All dead and harried. All silver screen stars. Some had lived into Technicolor days before fading into forgotten idols. All had made their marks in silver nitrate in shimmering black and white. Glowing. Vibrant. Powerful.

That was their heyday. I felt it in my soul. But it wasn't gone. Their images began to move in the hokey holograms. Some of them had been lovers, I sensed. Some of them had even been Howard Hughes's lovers! They were much better off captured in this holographic Hall of Fame, not preserved as Hughes was, old and at his worst, still trying to hang on to his money and power no matter the cost, to himself or anyone else.

No, these kings and queens of old-time Hollywood were best viewed through a Vaseline-coated camera lens of memory. They sensed that I was simpatico, sensed my admiration, my emotional guardianship. Delilah, they sighed. You see us. You love us. You will preserve us.

How?

Ric touched my hand. The music had a relentless, funky beat. Pre-orgasmic. "This place speaks to you."

Right. Shut it up!

"You speak to me," I said.

He was... the Sheik of Araby... Rudolph Valentino... Ricardo Montalban... Ricky Martin... my Latin lover. He pulled me up from the cocktail table and led me onto the glass-floored balcony at the Ghost Bar lounge with its fifty-some-floor drop to the Nude Bar far below. People were swimming nude below, and even at this impossible distance I must have felt exposed.

"I don't notice any lingerie impressions under this gown," Ric murmured in my right ear.

"It would ruin the lines." I struggled to keep my composure as the migrating silver familiar became a thong panty, delicate but way too intimate and... cold!

He looked down those tens of floors. "So the people looking up from the Nude Bar far below-?"

"-would see France if they had fantastic vision." And no silver thong in the way, Irma added impishly.

"Not as fantastic as my imagination," Ric said. "You ready for... dinner?"

"Sounds like a plan."

The Paris restaurant was only a third of the way up the Eiffel Tower but the view of the Strip and its lights was fabulous.

We were shown to the primo table, at the exact right angle of the restaurant overlooking the Bellagio's dancing fountain light show. The dinner had a dozen courses, small and exquisite.

Each approach of the head waiter and underlings, each sweep of new people being seated, gazing at us as they passed and were ushered to a lesser table, wondering how we rated the primo spot, locked us into public behavior that only intensified our hidden private agenda: calculated seduction.

When dessert was finished, I passed on the after-dinner coffee. While Ric sipped his, I slipped the rhinestoned lipstick case holding the small bottle of Lip Venom from my purse and brushed it carefully over my lips. It was almond-colored and super-shiny, like my gown.

Ric's eyes, coffee dark, devoured my every gesture. I was becoming quite the femme fatale where he was concerned, but this femme had butterflies as well as fine food in her stomach.

"Something new?" he asked, eyeing the gown.

"This is a wedding gown."

"I can see the something blue," he said, gazing into my eyes. "What's old and borrowed?"

"The gown is old."

"I guess I'll have to find something that you can borrow."

"I can think of something of yours I'd like to borrow already."

After our highly visible dinner on the Strip, Ric drove me onto the highway and its river of headlights. We headed north of the city until it became dark and deserted. No one was going this far. I'd never gone this far. We turned onto a narrow straight road like the one to Los Lobos, except there were no mountains. We were deep into the desert itself. The car stopped on this path to nowhere. Ric opened my car door. I unclasped the cloak. He escorted me out, eying the modest front of my ivory satin gown in the moonlight.

He lifted my left arm, studied the twelve satin buttons closing the sleeve from wrist to elbow.

"I've decided tonight that you're a really promising sadist, my darling Delilah."

I lifted an eyebrow.

"I'm even more afraid that I like being your masochist," he conceded.

Well, that revved my engines! Ric mine, to do with what I pleased. What pleased me, pleased him. And vice versa.

He rested my hand on his shoulder and began undoing the buttons along my left arm.

It had taken me forty minutes to do the sleeve buttons and the back of the gown except for six inches between my shoulder blades. For that stretch I'd needed the kitchen witch. She had cackled over every button and had made me describe Ric in lewd, loving detail. Poor thing had been dead for several centuries and was now a domestic drudge. A little vicarious kick seemed the least I could do for her.

When the sleeve was undone, Ric did the Latin lover bit and kissed my knuckles, my wrist and my arm up to the elbow. Then he relinquished that arm and lifted my right hand to his shoulder. I managed to brush my knuckles across his lips before he started to undo that sleeve.

"What is this thing, really?" he asked.

"Gown from the thirties."'

"They did hand-sewing as late as that?"

"Oh, yeah. That's about all. The depths of the Depression. This wedding dress was rather... cheap at the time, really."

"Not my depression. Wedding dress. Well. We'll have to make this like the first time."

"It isn't."

"No reason it can't feel that way."

He began undoing the buttons on my other arm, painstakingly working the nooses of twined ivory thread off every stubborn satin-covered button, patient as a spider, as wired as a rodeo bull, his control building his excitement, as it built mine.

As my skin grew supersensitively charged with sexual electricity, I could no longer feel the location of my former silver thong. I fretted about where and how it might show up during this unveiling. Not to worry. The thought is mother to the act. I felt a fleeting shiver down one leg and under the arch of my right foot, almost making me giggle, a mood-destroying itch if ever there was. Something icy thin curled around my big toe. I was now the possessor of a terribly discreet toe ring, and free to let every other inch of my body luxuriate in Ric's slow, elaborate love-making.

He repeated the Continental kisses from my hand to my elbow and braced both of my arms on his shoulders. Then spoke.

"Now... for the fucking forty-eight buttons from your hot naked little ass to the sweet, soft virginal nape of your neck."

"You counted them. I'm flattered."

"Several times, like counting the number of beads on a rosary. You sure know how to get to a Catholic boy."

"I didn't go to Our Lady of the Lake convent school for nothing, but it was an all-girls institution and we wore navy and green uniforms. The only time we had a chance to dress up was when a senior girl got to wear her sister's wedding dress to crown the statue of the Virgin Mary with flowers for the May procession. I, of course, wasn't a candidate for Virgin crowning."

"And you had no sister to loan you a wedding gown anyway."

I hesitated. Was I an only child? Then what or who was Lilith? I hadn't told Ric about that part of my mission and now seemed a little late.

She who hesitates is lost.

Ric's fingers moved adroitly between the cheeks of my butt. "I'm going to take you apart from the bottom up, and then from the top down. Any objections?"

"Only if they turn you on."

"We don't need that, do we?"

I shook my head, leaning against him as his ringers began the long, delicious, interminable climb up my spine. His hands slipped inside of the satin gown as he opened it inch by inch, and my hips soon were pressed to the hard vertical divining rod of his erection.

An almost full moon was rising over his shoulder, showering us with warm white light.

"This satin matches the color of your skin," he said into my ear, my neck. "It's a real rush." He kissed me for the first time, and jerked back.

"Wow, that stuff is still like an electric shock."

"Lip Venom is guaranteed to please."

"Painted hussy. Then bite me again, baby."

We kissed while Ric wrangled slippery satin buttons through loops of twined thread. It would be tricky work even for a lady's maid.

The cool desert air ran up my spine along with the motions of his fingers and knuckles. I got really hot goose bumps. Ric finally undid the top button at my nape and pulled down the open gown in one sudden sweep, satin spiraling away into sand. I had what I had wanted, my naked body encompassed by his clothed one. It was the ultimate form of trust and a lot of other, less abstract needs and wants and emotions.

"You are so bold and beautiful," he said, his hands soft as silk against my bare skin. He pushed me away, looked at me. I'd seen lust a few times, but never such shattering love.

From far away I heard the music of an iPod in the car playing dance music, slow dance music. He pressed me to him, started those liquid Latin motions that were all hip and heart, his hands moving over my bare torso, molding me to his soft, expensive clothes.

They were his shelter, those clothes, their softness. I knew now that he'd felt a lot that had been hot, harsh, cold, and brutal. My body tried to soothe all that away. I was living satin in his arms, and the roughness I felt-of buttons, a cold gold belt, zipper, trouser welt-it roused and hardened me to meet him as an equal.

We stopped moving, stopped dancing. In the hills and mountains I heard wolves howling for home. We both wanted that.

I stepped away from him and felt the desert wind chill every inch of my naked skin. He stopped moving. Bereft. Out of control. Feeling the cold night wind, not for the first time.

I put a finger to his throat. "You. Se?or. I want you up against the car. I'm going to open you up from here... " I pressed my nail against his throat and ran my finger down the buttons of his shirt, past his guardian gold belt and down the swollen welt of his zipper to where it ended between his legs. "To there. Any objections?"

"God, no."

I started at the bottom, as he had, caressing the weight, the length, pushing aside the soft expensive clothes, baring a few vertical inches of his torso, running my hands and mouth over what I exposed

He shivered. I shivered. Alone in the night. Outside ourselves. Beside ourselves. Inside ourselves.

We clung together. Slow dancing. Nothing to say. A bond forged stronger than stainless steel. Secret.

THE Car's long low hood vibrated as the engine idled in the night. Ric had turned it on, turned on the car stereo to some music that pumped iron. When he began to lower me to the car's warm hard steel hood, I clutched at his upper arms, his clenched muscles suspending me above the abyss in my own mind.

All motion stopped. "Can you lie back for me, my Delilah?"

Never could. Never had. Helpless. Pinned on a slab of something hard and inanimate, my feet barely touching the ground, my torso a target for a vicious game of darts. Having to submit. To lose. To lose everything. Everyone. Even Ric, maybe? Even now. The living nightmares crowded at the edges of the star-spangled night sky. Never! Never again!

"Maybe," I said, because it was Ric asking.

Like the road not taken, asking made all the difference.

I felt the strong arm and shoulder muscles that had wrestled the mysterious forces of the underground since boyhood holding me suspended over the car, over the edge as if I could hang like that forever in his arms, on my particular edge. It was my decision. My call.

This evening had touched so many sore spots on my soul. I never remembered anyone dressing or undressing me or even doing my hair. I'd always done it all myself, somehow, from the earliest age, at least in memory. That memory held no shred of someone giving a final pat to my coat buttons or my braids. No one crooning a lullaby, no one calling me a pet name, except when I was almost adult and cheerfully blue-collar waitresses or salesclerks would call me "hon" or "dearie." I was supposed to find this condescending, but I didn't. I enjoyed it. Pathetic, right?

So Ric's playing undo-the-buttons with me and his verbal, murmuring ways during lovemaking undid me. I would do almost anything for him. Maybe even this.

Is that what love was, pushing yourself beyond your most ingrained outer limits? I'd got what I had wanted. A narrow door of flesh to his innermost dark continent. Now he wanted, needed, my complicity. Small price to pay for a possible paradise.

I nodded and was lowered slowly onto the warm hood. It was like lying on the back of a purring hot steel tiger. Rick pressed down on top of me, the narrow warm slit of skin I'd unveiled feeling firm and smooth against my naked body. My hands could still cling to the strong, soft fabric of his jacket sleeves, cling and clench and hold on.

Meanwhile, he was murmuring his pleasure, solely in Spanish now. Every word was preceded by the possessive "my."

Mi belleza...

And I knew that the center of him was reaching for the center of me, dowsing, stiffening, plunging... I braced myself for this truly terrifying act, this terrible centerpiece of my nightmares.

Mi tigre hembra...

And I felt, beyond my fear, a stirring of excitement, a wanting to be found, discovered, to have that divine divining rod taking my measure, the measure of his tigress.

Mi oasis

And his shelter.

Mi agua

And I was his water.

Mi sangre

And his blood.

Mi virgen

And he was the first man to breach me, outside of my nightmares, before, and now in the very imitation of my worst nightmare.

And it was done.

My fists caught his arms and pulled him closer, farther in, nearer. I was so relieved I had to bite my lip. I almost laughed out loud with relief. He was so much smaller than my nightmare metal rapist, but of course you couldn't laugh. You couldn't tell a man that. He was still plenty large enough that I could tell I'd be muy delicado later.

But now I let the surge of pleasure take me and wrapped my legs around his hips and rocked in the thrilling lullaby of his hot Spanish blood and sweet Spanish words.

Mi desposada! he cried as my insides started quaking with satisfaction and we shuddered together, and I could scream this time, long and hard, as the killing pleasure took me.

Mi desposada. I'd have to look that one up...

"Are you all right?" he asked finally in English.

Given that I was laughing and crying and almost swooning, I could understand the question.

But I could only nod.

He was still holding me and still talking softly, more to himself them me, but the words were music to my soul, even in English.

"I love you so much, Del. You can't know what this moment means to me. Here. Now. I've been born again. I could die making love to you. But I never want to die so I can make love to you forever."

I was too blown away to answer, or even to say: make up your mind.

I just clung to him, not believing I'd just cleared such a horrible personal block. Every word Ric said, in English or in Spanish, eased a senseless fear and a vague, terrifying memory. But I couldn't speak of my feelings. What I felt was beyond words.

"I suppose," he said finally, "I'll have to get you back into that dress with every last button done."

"You can skip a few now," I said, kissing him on the throat while I began closing him back into his clothes, "but not very many."

Chapter Forty-Five

I woke up in my cottage bed, alone, thinking of Ric. Desposada meant "bride." I'd greedily clawed through my Spanish dictionary for the word as soon as we'd kissed a lingering goodbye at the door and I'd gone inside. Quicksilver was sniffing and sulking, but I ignored him for the first time in our association to find that word and hold it to me.

Not that I wanted to get married or to "trap" a man or anything formal. To be wanted that much was the thing, after being unwanted for so long and pretending not to care. He'd had me on "Hello, this is my dowsing rod," but now I felt totally unhad, if that makes sense.

Still, I saw myself clinging to my dictionary and my word, pretty pathetic, pretty teenage.

On cooler reflection, I was still in the dark about Ric.

I'd taken the biggest risk of my life and for it I'd gotten an important step in my personal redemption, but only a slim bit of insight into Ric's complex soul. Finally I'd met someone who was more mysterious than I was. Someone who was also able to bring me deeper into myself than I'd ever allowed.

Was it love, or addiction, or an adrenaline high? Or an undercover operator using me?

Last night on the long ride home Ric had listened to my tale of long-lived werewolf casino bosses and lost dead daughters.

"We need to know who the man with her in the grave was. That's the key," he said.

I couldn't stop recalling our last moments on the car's hood. How he'd spun so that I was on top of him. No sense of binding, just Ric serving as my bed, his eyes and lips heavy and satisfied, content, liking my weight on his chest and hips, my fingers toying with his hair and lips.

I liked everything about him. Wasn't that a warning signal? I'd never had a decent connection with anyone male before.

"Querida," he'd said. "Don't run away on me now."

I'd run away before. From the orphanage. The convent school. I thought no one knew but me. Ric was The Man. Police. The FBI. He'd be able to check up on those things. Me. My history. He'd be able to manipulate me. My history.

He manipulated my hair as it fell over my shoulders onto his chest. My lips as they went dry and vacant, wondering what to say next.

"We have to find out who the man was," he repeated.

"The boy."

"Why do you say that?"

"They were just kids."

"She was immortal werewolf spawn."

"Not her fault! Or her choice. She was her father's daughter, and I wouldn't care to be in her shoes."

"Shoes. Tell me again what shoes she wore?"

"Platform heels. Satin. Navy satin. Made her taller. Older, she thought. She wanted to be older, so no one could control her."

"She's way older now." Ric frowned. "Do you think her father could have had her killed?"

"Her father?"

"You saw him."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"The pack is everything. With eternal life, family is less. He could sire more cubs. More beta bitches and more alpha bastards."

Ric ran his hands over my back and butt. "'Del. I know he's despicable. He also uses the CinSims like toilet paper and Mexican zombies as cheap labor. He may even be behind that stuff in Juarez. That's why I want to bring him down so badly. Help me."

Wow. Even I knew how seductive it was to have a man asking, "Help me."

I lifted myself away. "How will we find out about her guy?"

"Detective work," he said, sitting up and making extreme love to my bare shoulder. "Delilah. We'll never be free to live our own lives until we solve this murder."

I made that "we'll" into an "I" in my mind. Where could I find out about this dead, forgotten guy? Somewhere in Las Vegas.

Ric would be looking.

So would I.

I just wished I could fully trust him enough to tell him all the other aspects of my search. About my strange facilities and Lilith. Yet, despite my complete unveiling and satisfaction tonight, I'd still only literally unzipped a tiny sliver of Ric's soul. That wasn't enough.

I'd been born suspicious, raised alien and alone, and suspicious I would live... or die.