Ethan went into the connecting room and shut the door between us. I sat down on the edge of the king-size bed, my arm in the sling, and hugged it a little closer to me, carefully.

   “How much pain are you in?” Domino asked.

   “Enough. I want this healed.”

   He came to stand near me. “I mean, are you in so much pain that it’s going to interfere with the sex?”

   “My concentration may not be what it’s supposed to be,” I said.

   He knelt in front of me. I was suddenly looking into those red-and-orange eyes. They so looked like tiger’s eyes in his human face, but strangers would ask where he got the cool contacts. Very few people saw the reality of him. I wasn’t sure if they lied to themselves, or if other people were just that blind to anything outside the ordinary. Micah’s leopard eyes didn’t have clean circles of color between his gold and yellow. It was more an intermingling of the two colors, but Domino’s red and orange were separate, not perfect circles, but the imperfections of it made the two colors bleed over just a little here and there, so the illusion was less fire and more water, as if his eyes held both heat and cool, flame and liquid. I touched his face, laying my fingers beside those eyes and tracing downward along his cheek to find the softness of his lips with just the tips of my fingers. The movement made him close his eyes for a moment and let his breath out in a long sigh that seemed to hold months of stress and tension, just blown away with one breath.

   I caressed his hair next, playing with the scattering of white curls as if someone had spilled white rose petals into all that raven-black hair. He was watching me now, the tiger eyes full of so many emotions that no real tiger would ever feel, because they couldn’t possibly overcomplicate their lives as much as humans did.

   He touched my face and his hand was big enough to cup the entire side of it, so that I laid my cheek in his hand as if it were a pillow and let myself relax into the nearly fevered warmth of his skin.

   I said, out loud, “So warm.”

   “I have warmer places on my body.”

   “Show me,” I said.

74

   ONCE HE WAS nude, I could see the play of new muscles under his skin; he was beginning to bulk up and I could trace the shadow lines of a six-pack across his stomach just hidden below a layer of warm, soft, kissable skin. He was only a few pounds from having that cut fierceness that graced the cover of so many magazines, but he looked beautiful just as he was, and I knew through dating so many dancers and weight lifters that a true six-pack is either a very clean diet, or genetic luck, or a combination. We all hit the gym to stay in shape for our jobs whether it was stripping onstage, performing in ballet, fighting monsters, or guarding other people’s bodies, but for that fitness-model look you had to spend almost more time in the gym than with the people you loved, and it just wasn’t worth it to me.

   Domino had to help me off with my clothes; getting the sling off had been almost the most painful part. First it was straightening the arm, which hurt, and then letting the arm hang hurt. We ended up putting the sling back on once I was nude. That way I wasn’t wincing every time I moved.

   “Why does this hurt so much?”

   “You had a piece of someone driven into your arm so deep that you almost had to have surgery to have it removed,” he said.

   “Oh,” I said, and after that, I stopped asking stupid questions, or tried to; I sometimes say what I’m thinking too much when foreplay is just starting. I did my best not to ask anything else that obvious. Either I managed it, or Domino didn’t care enough to comment. He just ran those warm hands over my body, and he was right; other parts of him were even warmer.

   I tried oral sex on him in one of my two favorite positions, with him lying flat on the bed and me kneeling over him, but I couldn’t bear for my arm to hang at the angle I needed. I straightened up with him firmer than when I’d started, but not to my usual level of happy. I knelt beside him and said, “I’m sorry my arm is in the way.”

   “I would love for you to go down on me later when you’re feeling better, but I understand that you’re hurting. Let’s fix that.”

   “Sounds good. How?” I was cradling my arm now. It wasn’t aching anymore; it was just hurting. Waves of pain were radiating from my arm, up my shoulder, down the side of my body. It was not as bad as when they’d cleaned and treated the wound, but it was bad enough that I was beginning to wonder how I was going to get past it for sex. I liked a little pain with my sex sometimes, but this was not the right kind of pain. This just fucking hurt.

   “I can feel the echo of how much you’re hurting,” he said.

   “I’m sorry for that,” I said.

   He touched my good arm. “You don’t have to be. It’s part of my job as your beast half to feel what you’re feeling and help you heal it.”

   “Domino, I’m not sure if I can do this hurting this much.”

   “You’ve just gotten spoiled sharing our healing abilities,” he said, smiling and trying to make light of it.

   “Yes, I have gotten spoiled. I’d forgotten what a bitch it was to get hurt during an investigation and still have to keep going.”

   “I have an idea,” he said.

   “I’m all ears.”

   He looked me up and down, lingering on my breasts. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, and he touched where he’d looked the longest, and it felt nice to have him caress my breasts, but the pain overwhelmed it.

   He finally propped pillows up against the headboard and helped me recline with pillows helping to hold my arm in place, so I didn’t keep having to use my good arm to hold it. He started caressing my thighs and passing that warm hand over the front of my body. He didn’t try to go for the gold, didn’t try to play with me, but just kept petting me with those big, warm hands of his, and I started to relax into the pillows and his touch. He finally started touching more to the point, helping me spread my legs wider so he could lie between them tracing the edges of me, petting me and finally laying one big hand over the front of me so that he cupped all of me in the fevered warmth of his hand, pressing the palm of it against me, so that it was almost like being held, but just there. It was so gentle and I felt myself growing wet and tension trying to leave. I wanted what went with that tenderness.

   He began to play with me, tracing over that sweet spot that had swollen at all that gentle foreplay. I couldn’t have handled rough tonight. Domino ran his fingers over and around, and then over, caressing, teasing, until my breath came faster and my body felt eager for more. I expected the orgasm to come, but I stayed on that edge. The pain wouldn’t let me release myself to the pleasure.

   “It feels good,” I said in a breathless voice.