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waist. His hands were on her ass, holding her in place. The clothes were still in place, but if we didn’t go to the bedroom soon he’d be doing her here.

“What do you think, Mephistopheles?” I asked the man kneeling at my feet.

“I don’t know,” he said, as if thinking were hard. He rubbed his face against my hand again. “As long as you touch me, I don’t think I care what else happens.”

I squeezed Micah’s hand. He reached out and touched the other side of Mephistopheles’ face. Our leopards rose and poured down our hands. Normally they would have slid into and out of each other as if we could be rubbed inside and out by warm, muscled fur, but our beasts poured down our hands and into Mephistopheles. It shouldn’t have worked. He was tiger, and Micah and I as Nimir-Raj and Nimir-Ra were so not, but the muscled fur flowed into him and through him so that it was like a metaphysical ribbon flowing from us to him and tying in a soft, eager, silken knot inside him, around the golden tiger that looked up at us like a golden haze around his face.

“They’re not going to make it to the bedroom,” Claudia said, and she was walking away from us. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this again, not this soon.”

I said, “It’s not the ardeur.”

“Not yet,” she said and kept on walking. The other guards spread around the room so that Jake wasn’t left alone, and Pride was a little closer to them.

There was a prickling rush of energy and the scent of pine and forest was thick on my tongue. Richard flowed from wolf to human, gentler and more instantaneously than I’d ever felt. He knelt on knees and one hand, nude and human, his hair spilling around his face. The look that had been in the wolf’s eyes made me dread seeing his human eyes when he raised his face to the light. There was a moment of anger and resentment in his face, and then I watched him struggle to control himself. He succeeded. The effort showed, but that didn’t make it any less good. He said, “I know that I was supposed to be your king, Anita.”

I don’t know what I would have said to that, but Richard looked away from us and to Jean-Claude and Envy. He went to the other man and left us to our own devices. I waited to be jealous, but I wasn’t. Part of it was that he’d used up that part of me that wasted that kind of emotion on him. The other part was that look in his eyes made me remember why we weren’t together, and why Micah was the one holding my hand.

Our beasts wove in and out of the three of us like some sinuous sea creature. It was as if someone had a fur glove and was caressing us all over and over, except it was warm and alive. I felt the weight building low in my body, and knew if we kept doing this it was going to work for me.

“If we’re doing more than this, we need to do it soon,” I said in a voice that was already breathy with anticipation.

“Do you need sex to make him your tiger to call?”

“I didn’t with Domino or Haven.”

Mephistopheles opened his eyes and said, “This is amazing, but God, please tell me I’m getting sex, too.”

We stared down into those lovely eyes, that handsome face, and I remembered the last wereanimal who had said something similar to me over and over again: our dead Rex.

“Sex, ma petite, no more holding back. They are ours, or they are not.”

“Ours,” said a growling voice, and I knew it was Richard. Just the sound of his voice made me glance at them. Jean-Claude was still holding her, but Richard on his knees was sliding a pale silken thong down her thighs. Richard liked giving oral sex. The thought of it tightened things low in my body so sudden and sharp that Micah had to steady me.

The energy that had been so warm, so alive, suddenly spiked and Mephistopheles cried out. His hands reached out, clutching at the front of my belt and Micah’s arm. His eyes were closed and I doubted he even knew what he’d grabbed. It was sexual because sex had caused him to reach out, but it was more about holding on so he didn’t fall.

Micah steadied the other