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I felt the bed move on the other side. I had to fight the urge not to grab Jason’s arm or something, anything to keep him with us. Anything not to be alone with Nathaniel. Ronnie was right, it wasn’t rational, but I felt like if I consumated our relationship, I had to keep him. She was wrong. It wasn’t sex that was a commitment for me anymore. The ardeur had taken that away from me. But sex with the right person was still a commitment, and the person bending in to kiss me, oh, so gently, was the right one.

I turned out of that kiss, to see Jason going for the bathroom. “I’ll turn the shower on, enjoy.”

“Sorry to kick you out of your own bed,” I said. And I was, for more than one reason.

He grinned, and tried not to, as if he were pretty sure it would get him into trouble. “It’s not like I won’t be back in it.”

I stopped Nathaniel from pressing closer with a hand on his shoulder, and stared at Jason. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He fought to control his face, and failed, and finally looked pleased with himself. “You can’t feed on Nathaniel, it’s too soon. Jean-Claude won’t wake for awhile yet. And if Jean-Claude won’t wake, then Asher is out, too.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “So?”

“If there’s another shapeshifter here that you’d rather feed on than me, I’ll get them for you. Graham is just down the hall.” The look on his face said, plainly, he didn’t expect me to take him up on it.

“You arrogant little—”

“Uh-uh-uh,” he said, “now is that anyway to talk to someone who’s going to let you feed on the very essence of his body?”

I scowled at him, then looked at Nathaniel. His face was utterly peaceful. “And you’re okay with this?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah, honestly?”

“As long as I’m first, yes.”

“I could stay and help with the foreplay,” Jason said.

Before I could answer, Nathaniel answered, “Not the first time, Jason. I want this to be just the two of us.”

Jason grinned more for me than Nathaniel, because he could see the expression on my face caused by Nathaniel’s casual attitude toward making it a threesome later. “I’m going to go hide in the bathroom now.” He shut the door behind him, and we were left with the bedside lamp.

I looked at him, sort of outraged. “Thanks for volunteering me for a threesome.”

He looked puzzled. “I sleep with you and Micah almost every night.”

“But we’re not having sex all at the same time.”

He looked at me, and the look said that I was protesting too much.

“We don’t,” I said.

“Anita, you wake up, you need to feed, and whoever you didn’t feed on the day before you touch, but the other man doesn’t always crawl out of bed. I’ve watched you have sex with Micah more than once, and he’s watched you feed off of me.”

The headache was begining to pulse behind my eye. I was having trouble swallowing, and it had the familiar taste of panic.

“I know that you and Jean-Claude are with Asher together. I know that that’s a true threesome.”

“Not all the time,” I said, and even to me it sounded weak.

He frowned at me. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying being with two men at the same time, Anita.”

My pulse was threatening to choke me. “Yes, there is,” and my voice was breathy.

“Why, why is it wrong?” He leaned into me as if he’d kiss me, but I leaned away, and it was one of those stupid moments, because leaning away put me on the bed, so that I was looking up at him. There was no logic to pulling away from a kiss and putting myself flat on the bed. Of course, there was no logic to the screaming panic inside my head either.

He propped himself up on his arms and looked down at me with that smile that said I was being silly. I understood in that moment that I’d been wrong to think of him as a child. That one look let me know that in his own way, he’d been as careful of me as I’d been of him. That he thought of me as sheltered, innocent. That in many ways, I was a child in the face of his experience. It was one of those moments when a relationship changes, when the way you look at the world suddenly expands or explodes, and the world that was, isn’t the one that is there a