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“Since I heard the phrase and thought it was funny as hell.” I was still leaning against the cabinet, because there was way more anger in her toward me than I understood. The vampire thing I could sort of understand, but her problems with me letting men into my life, that seemed harder to work around.

“Lunarly challenged, I’ll have to tell Louie. He’ll get a kick out of it.” The moment she said it, her face fell, and the weight of it all came crashing down on her. “Oh, shit, Anita, what am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.” I came back to sit at the table and patted her hand. If it had been Catherine, she’d probably be clinging to me for support, but Ronnie had my issues on closeness, so we didn’t hug as much. Alright, Ronnie had my old issues on closeness, except about sex. I’d never understood why if you don’t want someone hugging you for comfort that you’d be okay with fucking them, but that was just me.

“I don’t want him just gone from my life, but I’m not ready to get married. I may never be ready to get married.” She looked at me, and there was such anguish in her eyes. “He wants children. He said, one of the reasons he’s happy that I’m not a shapeshifter is so we could have children. Anita, I don’t want children.”

I squeezed her hand and didn’t know what to say.

“I’m a private detective, and I’m thirty. If we got married we’d have to start thinking about kids right away. I’m not ready.”

“Do you want kids, ever?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I grew out of wanting two kids and a white picket fence about five years ago. I don’t think I ever really wanted it, but it’s what you’re supposed to want, you know.”

“I know.”

She looked at me with her serious, sad eyes and asked, “Do you want kids?”

“No,” I said, “my life doesn’t have that kind of room.”

“No, if you had a different job, would you want to be a mother?”

“Once upon a time I thought I’d get married and have a kid or two, but that was before.”

“Before what, Jean-Claude?”

“No, before I became a vampire executioner, and a federal marshal. Before I realized that I’m probably never going to get married. My life works for me right now, but it wouldn’t work for a child.”

“Why, because you don’t have a husband?”

“No, because people try to kill me on a semiregular basis.”

“Speaking of violence, what happened to your door?” she asked.

“Gregory broke it down because I wasn’t answering the phone and he heard screams.”

“Why did he hear screams?”

“Without mentioning vampires, I can’t tell you the story.”

She sighed. “I thought Jean-Claude was a passing thing, your one big fling. You know, he’s the bad guy that you have this great sex with, then you wise up and move on.” She looked at me, and she really looked at me, searching my face. “He’s not a fling for you, is he?”

“No,” I said.

She took in a lot of air, then let it out slowly. “I’m not saying I want or could handle all the details, but tell me enough so I know what happened to your door.”

Even edited down, the story took a while. We were just past the point where Richard dumped me royally, when Nathaniel and Gregory came into the room.

Ronnie had her face all set for massive sympathy, and was actually reaching out to offer a hug, when she saw them. Her face froze, and her arms just stopped moving, as if she was suddenly a statue in that kid’s game.

Nathaniel was nearly naked, wearing only a leather thong and a whole bunch of straps across his upper body. So many straps that for a moment it gave the illusion that he was bound in some way. He padded into the room, looking totally comfortable in his nearly nothing bondage gear. That might have been what stopped Ronnie in her tracks, or then again, it might have been Gregory. He was still in leopardman form, and still totally nude. He wasn’t happy to be nude anymore, but he was still naked except for his very natural fur coat.

From the look on her face, I wasn’t sure Ronnie had really seen that much of Louie in ratman form, or if she had, he’d been more discrete than Gregory was being. He had three straps in his clawed hands and