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I swallowed and tried to think of something useful to say; nothing came to mind. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“I don’t know why I told you that. Did I want to shock you? Did I want you to think less of Nathaniel? Less of me?” He shook his head and started for the door again.

I was ready for him to leave because I didn’t know what to do with the mood he was in, and I really didn’t want more sex. The hard cramps had passed, but I was hurting, and would be for a while.

He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “Do you realize that most of the men in your bed are ones that she was with?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

He turned and looked over his shoulder at me. “Jean-Claude was with her and Gabriel; it was the price she demanded from him. You know she made Jason a werewolf?”

“Yeah.” I’d actually shared that memory with Jason. She’d tied him to a bed and cut him up while she fucked him. She hadn’t cared whether he lived or died. I’d been inside her head on the memory, and she hadn’t cared. She really was serial-killer material, because her pleasure had meant more to her than Jason’s life.

I got a whisper through my head. “Think harder, Anita.”

I shivered, and that made my lower body hurt. “Go, Richard, go, okay?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I need not to think about her so hard.”

“She talked to you?”

I nodded.

“You think you have her under control, and maybe you do, but you might just think on this. Jean-Claude, me, Jason, Nathaniel, all of us were hers first. Maybe there’s a reason you’re attracted to her old lovers.” With that very unsettling thought, he left, closing the door behind him. I was happy that Richard was doing therapy; it was helping, honest. The trouble was, he seemed to want me to do therapy with him, and that I wasn’t ready for.

17

I DID A quick cleanup, and then realized I had no clothes in the bathroom. My robe was lying in a heap beside the bed. Great. I wrapped the towel more securely around my hair, then wrapped one of the bigger towels around my body. One of the good things about being short was that the towel covered me from armpits to ankles. The funny thing was that almost no matter who was in the other room, they’d probably seen me nude at least once. I should have just walked out and gotten my clothes out of the armoire and ignored everybody. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t that comfortable around my own nudity. There were days when I was pretty sure I’d never be that comfortable.

Worse yet, my gun was outside in the bedroom. My clothes I could live without, but that I’d left my gun in the other room said just how much Richard affected me. He made me forget myself, even the parts of me that almost no one else could drive from my mind. For some reason I just couldn’t go out there unarmed, I don’t know why. I just couldn’t do it. I was still aching all the way up to almost my belly button. The cramping had mostly stopped, but I was feeling stupid and vulnerable. I wanted a gun. It would make me feel better. There, that was the truth. I’d started hiding guns in the places where I spent a lot of time. They were for emergencies. This wasn’t an emergency, but…hell with it, it was my gun. If I felt the need, screw it.

I knelt down by the sink and opened the cabinet doors. I had to reach back and up into the plumbing to find it, but there was my Firestar duct-taped among the pipes. There’d been a couple of times when I’d been separated from my carry guns and needed a gun. So I’d given into my paranoia and hidden a few around. The Firestar wasn’t my main backup gun anymore, so it lived here as the ultimate hideaway. I brought the gun out into the light and laughed. There was writing on the tape. It read, “Anita’s gun,” in Nathaniel’s handwriting. He’d been with me the day I did it. Apparently he’d added his own little touch when I wasn’t looking. He’d handed me the pieces of tape. Had he written on it then, and I just hadn’t noticed, or had he come back later? I’d ask him.

It