Bullet Page 0,139

the shirt and realized it was low-necked, not as much as some I owned, but enough that there was a lot of creamy goodness going on in the front of my shirt. The moment I realized I hadn’t really seen what I was wearing all day, that sort of scared me.

“Am I in shock?” I asked.

He laid his hand over mine where I was gripping the sink. “I’m not sure, but I think it hurt you to have to . . . kill Haven.” He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into a hug. I kept gripping the sink and stayed stiff in his arms. He laid his head against my hair. “Anita, please, talk to me.”

I let go of the sink and wrapped my arms around his waist. I held on and didn’t know what to say. I said the truth. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say how you feel.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

He held me tighter, kissing my hair, pressing me against him. “He had to die, Anita.”

“I know that.”

“But you didn’t have to do it. Any of the guards would have done it.”

I pushed against him, until he let me go. I backed away, shaking my head. “I did have to do it. It was my fault. I thought I’d tamed him. I thought it would all be all right and I was wrong. I was so wrong, Nathaniel, so wrong.”

“He wasn’t willing to share,” Nathaniel said.

“It was more than that and you know it. The signs were all there. He attacked you and Micah and got pissed because I helped you win the fight. He kept wanting me to put him first in my bed if not in my heart.”

“You told him that wasn’t going to happen,” Nathaniel said.

“I know that. I didn’t lie to him. So how did we end up with him trying to kill you and Travis, and killing Noel? How did we end up with Haven dead? How could I have let it get that out of hand, Nathaniel?”

“You did not make Haven do any of this,” he said.

“But I’m supposed to be this uber-dominant of all the wereanimals, and I’ve just finished failing the lions so badly. How can I add more wereanything? I can’t handle what we have already. How can I add more when I don’t know what went wrong with the lions?”

“Haven went wrong with the lions,” Nicky said.

I looked at him. “You told me just a couple of hours ago that if I’d let you fight him, you’d have killed him, and Noel would be alive and Nathaniel wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“I didn’t say that,” Nicky said.

“You said that I felt guilty about mind-fucking you and that made me not want to let you and Haven work things out, or something like that.”

“But it shouldn’t have been necessary for me to fight Haven. If he’d had his pride well organized I would have just been more muscle, but he let his personal feelings get in the way of being a good Rex. He let his obsession with you ruin everything else.”

“Gee, Nicky, that makes me feel so much better.”

He sighed, frowning. “I don’t mean it like that. I mean that Haven wasn’t a good Rex, you know that. The fact that he tried to beat Noel and Travis to death for having sex with you when they hadn’t had sex with you says that he was letting his feelings blind him.”

“I didn’t have sex with them, not until last night anyway. I still don’t remember everything I did last night, but I know I did something with Noel.”

“A strong wereanimal can tell when someone is lying, Anita. We can smell it, taste the pulse speeding, like a furry lie detector.”

“I know that,” I said.

“But Haven couldn’t tell that Travis and Noel were telling the truth about not sleeping with you.”

I looked at Nicky. “Say that again.”

“Haven was a powerful werelion. He should have known that Travis and Noel were telling the truth, Anita.”

“Yes,” I said, “he should have. Why didn’t he know?”

“He let his emotions overwhelm what he smelled, or tasted,” Nicky said, and that was an insult among the wereanimals. To say someone was nose-blind, or couldn’t taste his way out of a wet paper bag, meant essentially that he was doing the human equivalent of refusing to see the truth.

Gregory said, “Some men don’t want to believe that it’s them you don’t want. If they want a woman badly enough and she doesn’t want them,