Please tell me you have bajillions of the stuff.”
“Bajillions?” Another soft chuckle. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Bea’s shoulders sank, as did her wings.
“But I am comfortable, as they say. You won’t starve or be forced to live in a cardboard box anytime soon. I promise.”
A cardboard box? Did mortals do that? Bea shivered. She’d once had an aunt who would curl up to live in a crustacean shell. Ugh.
“What’s your job?” she asked. “Brit said something about you being an enforcer. Is that like a wolf cop?”
“In essence. Our pack polices the werewolf packs in Paris. Keeps an eye on them. Investigates the blood games and tries to ensure that no wolf makes the front page of Le Monde. That’s the local world newspaper.”
“Cool. So when do you have to guard the portal to Faery?”
“Not sure. Etienne, my pack principal, suggested I probably would not, since I’ve already gotten—”
“The short stick. I remember. You’ve sacrificed so much for your pack. Taking on a wife who is actually interested in having sex with you whenever you desire? Whew! That is so tough. I shed tears of pity for you, wolf.”
“Whenever I desire?” The wolf’s eyes twinkled. Actually twinkled.
“Pretty much.” She fluttered her wings.
“I thought you hated me.”
“Oh, I do.” She crossed her arms and tucked her wings down tightly, a forced show of dislike. Her new hubby’s chuckle made it difficult to keep her nose up and her back straight. So she put her wings away. “Wings are too much for you to handle.”
“I bet they are. I can take you shopping later,” he said. “Uh, you might need to wear something of mine, though.”
“I do have my wedding dress.”
“Which was so sheer every wolf in my pack blushed.”
“Not cool for shopping?”
He shook his head. “Paris may be avant-garde when it comes to fashion, but I don’t think it’s quite ready for a half-naked faery. Look through my closet and see what you can find.”
“You are twice as big as me. You’re troll size. Dwarf troll, at least. And I’m not keen on working the leather. You know an animal used to wear those pants before you decided to tug them on? But I’ll see what I can do. So, you got time for a quickie before you go back to work?”
He quirked a brow. “I thought you hated me.”
“Oh, I do. But I like this.” She danced up to him and drew her fingers down his chest and tapped his cock through the leather pants. “You saying you don’t like this?” Flinging her hair with a tilt of her head, she thrust back her shoulders, proudly displaying her breasts.
The wolf lunged and encircled her in his arms, his mouth landing on her nipple. Bea squealed in delight as he lifted her and laid her on the couch. “I have time,” he said.
* * *
Jacques always rode shotgun and, yet, mastered the radio when they were out on a job. He’d flicked the radio to a rap station, so Kir had turned the volume down. They compromised like a married couple.
Is that what marriage was about? Compromise? Seemed to Kir he and Bea got along just fine. When naked together. An afternoon quickie had put him in a great mood. Even if work was intense.
He’d heard about a pack in a northern banlieue, a city suburb, that was into something weird, and vampires were dying in stranger ways than the usual starvation, death by blood loss, or fighting to the death that some packs had a tendency to inflict upon them. They’d received a frantic phone call from a vampiress who was not in a tribe. Her boyfriend had escaped imprisonment from a pack and now lay on her floor, puking up black blood.
They arrived at the address in record time. Kir shifted the vehicle into Park and looked to Jacques, who smirked and stared at his hair. “What?”
“My man, you sparkle.”
“I— What?”
Jacques couldn’t hide his goofy grin. “So I guess it’s true what they say about faeries when they come, eh?”
What the hell did they say about faeries coming? And who were they?
Bea had come quickly this afternoon on the couch—ah. Kir glanced in the rearview mirror. Sunlight glinted in his hair. He slapped at the faery dust. “It’s all over me.”
“It has been since you came in this morning, but it looks like more since that quick stop at home.” Jacques’s laugh thundered inside the car.
The stuff was hard to get off, and he had some smeared above his temple. Still, he didn’t regret the quickie. Though he wasn’t going to allow Jacques one more moment of mirth.
He slammed his hand up under his friend’s jaw and silenced his laughter. “One more chuckle and you’ll be chewing spine.”
Jacques put up his hands in defeat and Kir dropped him immediately. It was an empty threat. They both knew the other would never hold good on a promise to violence, teasing or otherwise.
“Is it that noticeable? Maybe I shouldn’t go inside.”
“You got most of it off. Call it a night at the club. Let’s go in and check this out. Vamp shields up?”
“Activated,” Kir replied. Since childhood the two of them had shared an aversion to vampires and had playfully pulled an invisible shield of protection over themselves when they’d play vampires and werewolves.
If only he could do as much with his wife.
A wolf should be more upset about being married to a vampire—even if she was only half. But did a wolf who hated vampires have sex with one three times within a twenty-four-hour period? Something wrong with that.
And, yet, something so not wrong with sliding inside Bea and losing himself against her soft, petite body, drawing in her sweet perfume, drowsing him into some kind of all right.
“You coming?”
Jacques had started up the front walk while Kir was still contemplating running home for another round with his half-breed, pretty-smelling wife. But he couldn’t afford to let his thoughts stray in a vampire’s house, he thought, and followed Jacques inside. Vamp shields up, indeed. It wasn’t possible for a werewolf to do that—put up some kind of magical protection shield—but just thinking that he could bolstered his confidence. He knew to avoid the fangs, and the cross on the stake he’d stuck in his back pocket gave him reassurance.
A male vampire, probably late twenties, lay on the kitchen floor in a pool of black liquid. It looked like blood, but Kir couldn’t be sure what it was. Vampires bled red blood. Demons, and a handful of other species, bled black. And the victim’s girlfriend, who was sprawled beside his body, insisted he was all vamp, formerly a mortal
