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Micah frowned. “You don’t look happy now. Did I do something wrong?”

I shook my head, squeezed his hand, and led him towards the living room. He pulled me back towards him. “No, you thought of something that bothered you. What was it?”

I sighed. “Truth?”

He nodded. “Truth.”

“Just wondering how awkward it’s going to be when you and I are in the same room with Jean-Claude.”

He pulled on my hand, drawing me against him. I put a hand up to keep our bodies from touching completely, and found his heartbeat under the palm of my hand. Even through the cotton shirt, I could feel the thud of his body, as if his heart were naked in my hand. I had to raise my head just a little to meet the green gold depths of his eyes.

His voice came out a little breathy. “I told you, I want to be your Nimir-Raj, whatever that means, whatever it takes.”

My own voice wasn’t doing much better than his. “Even if that means sharing me with someone else?”

“I knew that coming in.”

I felt a frown forming between my eyes. “You know what they say about things that are too good to be true, don’t you?”

He touched his fingertips to my face and bent towards me, speaking softly as he moved. “Am I too good to be true, Anita?” He whispered my name against my lips, and we kissed. Gentle, soft, wet. His heart was beating so fast under my hand, my pulse was in my throat, and I think I’d forgotten to breathe.

He drew back first. I was breathless and a little disoriented. There was a look on his face—delight, I think—with the effect the kiss had had on me.

It took me two tries to find my voice. “Too good to be true, oh, yeah, definitely.”

He laughed then, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard him laugh before. It was a good sound. “I can’t tell you how much it means to see that look in your eyes.”

“What look?”

He smiled, and he was suddenly all male, pride, pleased with himself, and something else—almost embarrassed. He touched my face. “I love the way you look at me.”

It made me lower my eyes, and I blushed, even though I wasn’t thinking a damn thing that was sexual.

He laughed again, a surprised burst of sound that held so much joy. He laughed the way children laugh before they learn to hide how they feel. He picked me up around the waist and swung me around the kitchen.

I would have told him to put me down, but I was laughing too hard.

“I hate to interrupt,” Donovan Reece, the swan king, said from the doorway, “but I told them you’d help us.” He frowned at us, his pale, pale skin, showing almost no lines, as if his skin was like the water that his alter form swam upon. He had obviously decided not to wait outside.

I asked, still held above the ground in Micah’s arms, “Help you do what?”

He shrugged. “Nothing important, just find some missing alphas and try to convince the Kadru of the werecobras that her Kashyapa, her mate, isn’t dead, just missing with the rest. Trouble is,” Reece said, “I think she’s right. I think he’s dead.”

Micah let me slide back to the ground. I wondered if my face looked as grim as his. Marianne tells me that the universe/deity loves me and wants me to be happy. So why is it that every time I get a little happy all hell breaks loose? The message seems clear, and it’s not about love.

44

DONOVAN REECE HAD curled up on the far end of my white couch. He was dressed in blue jeans so faded they were almost white. His pale pink shirt brought out the natural pink and blue undertones of his near translucent skin. He was beautiful, but not in the way a man or woman is beautiful, in the way a statue or a painting is beautiful, as if he wasn’t quite real. Maybe it was because I knew that he had baby swan feathers on his chest, but of all the people in the room he seemed the most surrealistic.

A tall woman with hair almost as white as his sat on the arm of the couch by him. Her pants were black leather, her loose-fitting blouse a pink that matched his shirt, almost. I’m not sure I would have remembered the woman if