“My marriage was far from perfect!”
“You know, every time I think I like ya just enough, you go and say something like that, and I like ya even more.”
“There is something very wrong with you,” I told him as he helped me right my clothes.
“And you love it,” he said, kissing me.
“Yeah, I kind of do. Which means there’s something wrong with me, too.”
I was proud of myself, knowing that I’d said I loved it and not him. I hadn’t melted into a postorgasmic puddle of overenthusiastic-to-the-point-of-being-sad confessions of affection. I’d come out of my first sexual experience (involving another person) in three years with about seventy percent of my dignity intact. Even if I had, technically, had sex with him before our first actual date.
I liked my relationship with Wade. It was comfortable and fun and seemed to meet both of our needs for now. Would I like to see it grow into more? Absolutely. But with things being so unsettled with my custody case and my attachment to Finn, I didn’t know if I could handle “more” right now. Barn sex and sassy banter were my current limit.
Wade smirked, offering me his hand as if he were a knight aiding a lady stepping down from a carriage and not the girl he had just ridden hard and put up damp. He helped me slide into my jacket and carefully folded the collar under my chin. “I think the rain’s let up a little bit. Do you want to make a break for Murphy?”
I grinned at him, toying with the buttons of his own jacket. “Would it be weird if I said no?”
“Well, as much as I am sure I would enjoy round two, I’m gonna have to get some juice and a cookie in me, or my whole standin’-upright situation is gonna get ugly.”
“Yeah, I should probably start carrying an emergency blood-donor pack in my purse for next time,” I said.
“You sure you don’t already have one in that giant-ass bag?” he asked wryly. “And it’s kind of nervy of you to assume there’ll be a next time.”
I gasped. “First of all, that’s a fair statement about my bag. But who said that the donor packet would be for you?”
“Oh, so you’re going to just bite me and drop me?”
“Well, if you didn’t like it, I’m sure I could find someone who—”
Wade caught my wrist and yanked me close for a hot, demanding kiss. “I liked it,” he told me, his voice stern. “Trust me, I liked it.”
“Good. Let’s go get you that cookie.”
I had officially taken the evening off. Between work, Les and Marge, the Pumpkin Patch madness, and whatever I was doing with Wade, I felt like I’d been missing too much time with Danny. So I’d sent Kerrianne home at sundown, made Danny’s favorite chicken nuggets with a bandanna tied around my nose, and spent the evening watching him run around our front yard, searching for Bigfoot tracks. Eventually, he got tired of chasing his own tail like a Jack Russell terrier and joined me on the front-porch swing, where we read Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses (six or seven times).
I was proud of my progress—having Danny sit on my lap, letting my chin rest on his sandy hair without a twinge of worry about whether I would be tempted by his blood. Now that I’d experienced live feeding and connected it to sexy Wade-based feelings, there was no way I could consider it in any way related to Danny. Ever.
“Mom, who would win in a fight, a werewolf or a vampire?” Danny asked, flipping through his copy of Bigfoot Cinderrrrrrrella.
“Well, sweetheart, there are a lot of Web sites devoted to this debate, but I’m not really sure.”
“But werewolves have fangs and claws, and they’re super-fast,” Danny reasoned.
“And vampires have fangs, and they’re super-fast. And they’re super-strong,” Finn noted, stepping onto our porch.
My sire had just walked onto my front porch mid-conversation, as if it were totally normal for him to drop by in the middle of the night. I smiled, because I couldn’t think of any other expression that wouldn’t convey, Oops, I slept with some other guy since the last time I saw you.
While I was the master of multitasking, I was not good at this semi-sort-of-juggling-two-men thing. Surely this was going to come back and bite me in the ass. I knew that on the scale of potential evil I could do as a vampire, it was pretty minor. Still, I knew I was going to have to make it clear to one of them at some point that he was relegated to the friend zone.
I just had to figure out which one it would be.
Finn returned my smile, looking at me like I was something precious, which was not helping me in terms of friend-zone designation. It was the sort of expression you’d hope to see on the face of a husband and father returning home at the end of the day to find his wife and child waiting for him—except that he wasn’t Danny’s dad . . . or my husband . . . or even my significant other . . . and he was a dead guy.