Dancing With Werewolves (20 page)

“Really? Where?”

“My place.”

We left before the werewolves had really begun to dance, but it wasn’t a full-moon night anyway.

Ric opened the Corvette’s passenger door. The car was a low-riding hammock with rocket power. The seat was already half-reclined by design, but at least he didn’t bother snapping the seat belt for me. Not being belted in didn’t worry me. Ric drove as if he was one with the car, fast and powerful, outrunning everything . . . Juarez, Haskell, my old nagging fears.

The low car thrummed along the asphalt as it wove its way out of the mountains, clinging to every curve with a dreamy sense of déjà vu. Again the powerful engine vibrations massaged my spine. Again Ric’s hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the motion. After a while, all my cares and woes had been outrun. I was only here, only now, only with him.

He seemed to sense my evolution from edgy fear to edgy interest.

No full moon flirted with us through the Vette’s blue-tinted glass roof. No werewolves haunted the hills as they ran through the freedom of their change.

It was just us and the night, and this time he wasn’t taking me to be dropped off primly at my cottage door.

This time he was taking me home with him.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Ric’s car stopped, purring. The end of motion disoriented me. Ric opened the car door, pulling me up and out. My ankles wobbled as my hands returned to his shoulders, his to my hips. We had cruised past a gated entry and were in a newer housing development, nice but not palatial. He waltz-walked me inside, past a courtyard where wind chimes and a huge central fountain made aural love to each other.

Inside the house was dark, quiet. It wasn’t that large, but everything about it felt chosen, sensual, perfect. A huge stainless steel refrigerator purred against one wall. Faint light glinted off dark granite countertops and other stainless steel appliances. Ric paused at a long kitchen island, where he caressed the granite, black with glittering silver and blue veins, like precious ores. “It’s called blue pearl. You. Me. Here.”

“Horizontal,” I protested. Besides, it looked like a sacrificial altar.

We were in another room where I heard water flowing, clinking like tiny coins in fountains. It was cool there, humming with an air-conditioned serenity. Ric sat me down on the hard edge of an interior fountain. He slipped off my Cinderella slippers, set my feet in cool water. I hadn’t known my dancing-princess soles were burning until then. My soul, burning. His fingertips dribbled fountain water on my chest, which he licked off until his mouth had pushed my neckline down. My nipples blossomed in his mouth and exploded at the touch of his teeth.

He pulled me up and onward, pushing me down on a velvet sofa to put my shoes back on. Why? He was taking me apart and putting me back together, and all the while the dark, soft sound of his unseen rooms ate away at my composure.

Bedroom. Music. It was a smart house. Sound had followed us through, tinkling, glittering, humming. Celtic? Spanish? New Age? All of the above.

I noticed a low bed on a pedestal, satin sheets. Mirrors.

“Is this a vampire’s lair?” I joked, afraid of the way everything about him was pushing into me. Claustrophobic again, in my own body and not remembering why.

He danced me into another room, pushed a light switch, flooding us as if we were in a photo studio.

The master bathroom. I saw a blue pearl granite hot tub sunken in a rim of unlit candles. Mirrored doors, windows, a big mirror over the double sinks.

“See my reflection?” he asked. “Do I look like vampire to you?”

He looked like dark hands moving over my pale skin, a lowered angled face making love to this woman in the mirror, my double with her clothes half off and still hidden, still private.

He finger-walked my skirt up to my hips. In the mirror. His feet pushed my shoes apart, spread my legs like a cop doing a very personal arrest. A shattering memory of Haskell drowned in a sudden liquid shot of desire. Ric wasn’t, never would be, Haskell, and I was finally able to make distinctions between my fears and my desires.

“Glad you wore those hot mama shoes again,” Ric said. “Make you just the right height for me.”

I was pretty

non compos mentis

by then, but I liked

being just right for him and I knew what he meant. We’d

been brushing against each other all night, hip to hip, so

I just purred a little.

“This is the way we stood in the park. You remember? In daylight. This is what you ambushed me into wanting, into feeling, into wanting to do with you. It was just the usual water-witching demonstration, except you were so soft, so moist, so cool, an oasis of flesh. I owe you an orgasm.”

So I’d felt more than a hard-on back then. I leaned my head back on his left shoulder, watching his hands on me, playing at the extremities of our mirror image, not quite revealing myself to me, or to him. I saw faint auras, mine ice-blue, his hot and yellow. They melded to make green and purple where they touched.

“Nice cologne.” I inhaled deeply. I’d first scented it in the park when all my senses had sharpened. “What’s it called?”

“Night,” he murmured into my hair.

“Is that with a
K?
”

“No. I’m definitely not that noble.”

Below the line of the mirror, his fingers slipped into me, toying with my inner silk, a movement so easy, so natural. An action only in the mirror, where neither of us could see while his fingers delved where we both could only feel. His left forefinger reached up to tease the spaghetti straps off each of my shoulders in turn, using just his nail. That roving fingernail edged my camisole neckline down in eighth inches until only the swollen precipices of my nipples held up the soft fabric.

“You like to tease yourself,” I managed to say.

“You too.”

“I teased you?”

“You didn’t know it but what do you think it was like, this strange lush woman in my arms in a public park, writhing against me in broad daylight?”

“It was night to me. All dark, all dancing in the dark.”

Even as my insides heated to the boiling point, a small cold voice I’d always had in my head, along with Irma, uncoiled.
You’re ruined. You can’t escape the past you don’t know.
And I remembered every nerve-wracking, uncertain, humiliating failure of my so-called life. The Reporter stirred, came forward, said objectively . . .

“Forty percent of women are non-orgasmic.”

And, as far as I could remember, which wasn’t much, I was personally batting zero percent in my personal life when corpses and ex-FBI guys who could dowse for the dead weren’t involved. There were no dead bodies here now.

Ric looked so good in the mirror as he made love to me, his dark lashes sexy shadows on high cheekbones. His fingers pulled out of me. Warned maybe. They lifted before me in the mirror, slick and shiny. He brought them up to my face and painted my lips with their transitory glisten. I inhaled his fingertips, pulled them into the hot cavern of my mouth.

“I live in Las Vegas,” he breathed in my ear. “I don’t believe in odds. My whole life has been bucking the odds.”

He pushed my skirt up in back, pushed me over until my hands under his grasped the smooth gilded faucets. We were dowsing for the depths within ourselves. I heard the hiss of a zipper, the notched touch of metal teeth, felt the brush of silken linen, then pure soft silk, and velvet flesh stretched taut to push home into me.

“In the park,” he was saying, “the wand had never driven so hard and strong and deep for the ground, but it was driving somewhere else, too. Not just down and back, as we passed over it, and as the rod will do. It ached to enter you. I couldn’t blame it. I felt that urge too, but I couldn’t let that raw wood violate you. It took all my strength to control it. To keep it away. To keep you untouched. To keep you to myself.”

I felt an irresistible object pushing into the most wounded part of me, a no man’s land of mystery and perhaps even hysteria, on the soft friction of velvet against silk. Velvet had nap. Silk would give first, as scissors cut paper.

“I hurt,” I said. But it wasn’t his impending presence; it was as if a rubber band had shrunk between my legs.

“That’s good, Delilah,” he murmured, “and I can make it hurt more and less and better.”

I glanced up at Ric in the mirror. His face was cast down to watch my body, his hands moving on me but not further invading me until I said so. Somehow that reflected face seemed a truer window than any I’d ever looked through or into for a long, long time. I believed what he said, that the tightening lovely ache inside me, at my innermost gateway, would evaporate with his entry.

“Yes,” I said, loving how he waited until my last
ssss
had faded into a sigh before he did more.

He was murmuring musical, sexy Latin words now. Their sibilant alien sound pierced me to the bone. The swollen ache became an eruption as he rocked into me. Suddenly my interior was a vast tense, spreading plain. The outer limits of my senses stretched, screamed their joy at being explored. Something was gathering, on the high plain fringes, something cataclysmic, storm-laden.

“Let it go,” Ric urged in English. “Let yourself go.”

I was running with the wolves. Werewolves. Whole-weres. Running like quicksilver or my Quicksilver, under the moonlight, my body a bright full moon aching for observation of its wonders.

I threw back my head, let the earth’s silver dowsing rod delve me like a dream lover, and howled my freedom to the star-sprinkled skies.

                                                                                          * * * *

My face was turned into Ric’s shoulder again. We were upright, I pressed against him, he against me, still joined.

What if you didn’t know anything about yourself? Not really.

Like most people, I’d grown a protective shell, only mine was thicker than most. Hard as nails. The phrase meant the metal nails that won’t bend under the hardest hammering, but I always thought of women’s fingernails when I heard it: that odd growing part of us that is such slight protection, brittle enough to break at one wrong glancing word or gesture; tough enough, if we’re driven enough or desperate enough, to wound.

Oh, some of us flaunt our fingernails, paint thin clear enamel carapaces over them, sometimes tinted as pink as rare meat, sometimes bold and red as a stoplight, sometimes glittery like jewelry. But they are still a fragile element of our bodies, no matter how thick the shell over the exposed nerves and thin-skinned flesh beneath, and pulling them out was an ancient form of torture.

My nail polish was neutral and effacing, but as impervious as shellac.

The Wichita, Kansas, TV studio had the usual food room: sink, microwave, dishes, silverware, vending machines. Although the on-camera women were supposed to be uniformly slender, the support staff brought homemade pastries and desserts. We gathered around the treats to nibble or gorge, depending on our metabolisms and moods of the moment.

One time a woman had exclaimed that some hit of whipped-cream, chocolate-laden sugar was “better than sex.” A quick poll named the top better-than-sex dessert: carrot cake. A lone vote for banana cream pie won a lusty group laugh, and the woman who craved those huge trans-fatty glazed donuts was told with giggles and knowing titters that she could combine the two. I’d laughed knowingly too, although I only got the reference now. My own fave had been lost in the hullabaloo: gourmet coffee and chocolate.

Now I knew that little office coffee klatch conversation for an exchange so shallow that even Irma at her ditziest was light years away from explaining the enormous risk and reward of having sex.

The wellsprings of trust involved dazzled me. The emotional liberation of feeling trust on such an intimate level left me with a peace and gratitude for being alive I’d never imagined. All the happy TV commercial couples, the hyper-passionate romance-novel couples, had seemed part of some elaborate play everybody else liked to pretend they were now starring in. What I felt here and now was real. Was it love? That fast and easily? I didn’t know. I’d just have to trust that, whatever it was, it was right for us both. That, beyond the first-time mechanics and even though he whispered—warning, apologizing—that I’d be . . . tender,
delicado
. . . the next day, as long as I felt this inner conviction, I’d never be sorry. Trust. It meant that Ric would not hurt me, and if he ever did, I knew the pain would be mortal.

That’s how I felt as I beached myself on Ric, feeling his body as a solid breathing wall behind me. His fingers were caressing my inner outer edges. A wall. A wave.

His shirt collar was still open. In the mirror I glimpsed a shadow, blue-black, the only dark place on him besides his hair and eyelashes. My open mouth swiveled to that sole entry to him.

He was still inside me, against me, behind and in front, fingers and one long, hard thick finger, so I felt deliciously surrounded. I let myself sag against him, held up by his invasive prongs like a paper doll on pushpins.

The shadow at his throat, his collarbone, teased my eyes.

My head lolled on his shoulder. “What’s this?”

His face was close, focused down on me, eyes slit. I touched his skin under the slightly open collar.

“What do you think you feel, what do you see?” he asked.

I brushed his collar aside. Frowned. “You’re . . . wounded.”

He made a humming sound like a purring cat. My fingers pressed against the shadow. Puffy flesh, darkening as I touched it.

“Ric! Did . . . I do that?”

“Yeah. When you zoned out over the dead zone in the park. You . . . spasmed. All over. I felt every tremor. Then you turned your head into my neck and shoulder. And bit. You did that.”

I stared at his bruised skin just peeking beyond the white starched corner of his shirt.

“I bit you?”

“Yeah.”

“No! I’m not a vampire! I hate those bloodsuckers. I’d never do that.”

He touched my lips, pushed his forefinger onto the ticklish top of my mouth until I panted with a strange sort of lassitude.

“Maybe you’re a werewolf. I don’t care. It’s okay. It’s a totally human thing, called a love bite, a passion mark, a hickey.”

What was I?

                                                                                          * * * *

“A deliciously passionate woman,” he told me in the kitchen, where he applied an ice pack and antibiotic ointment to his neck on my insistence.

What I regarded as a scary untreated wound he seemed to consider a sensual trophy. Weird. But what did I know about any of this?

“But I need a little R&R until our next round. Waiting makes all the difference,” he added, his eyes hot-fudge warm.

Not me!
I resisted, not insisted. I feared, not dared. I was a . . . nice person.

Not hot.

Ric came close again, pulled me hip to hip. “We could . . . share a shower. A bed. Sleep. Or we could do what I really, really want to do.”

“And that is?”

“I want to drive . . . you . . . home again.”

Oh. The very thought of that low, leather-lined car with major vibrating road feel undid me. Ric’s hands on the stick shift. Right. Drive me home. The reins were back in his hands. Drive me.

By now the semireclining passenger seat, sans seatbelt, would have been tolerable, but Ric didn’t lower it. Instead, he pulled me down sideways once we were on the road, across the central compartment, my head pillowed on his iron-muscled thigh that any woman would have killed to have.