Dancing With Werewolves (11 page)

Chapter Eighteen

I’d bought a doll-size purse on a long chain that I could wear while dancing, so the mall sales clerks had advised. It fit fine on the teeny table made for cocktails and appetizers.

The room, with a mirrored ball high above flashing laser lights, was dark and cavernous, divided down the middle at ceiling level by a Plexiglas sheet that reflected the mirrored ball. Below it, Us and Them mingled. Most looked like thee and me. But some of Them were scary, at least to someone who’d done the Asphalt Stomp with a full gang only a couple nights before.

Some were half-changelings on two feet with snouts and body hair disturbingly like fur but without the rabid expressions of the gang that had attacked me. Some were dressed. Some were undressed except for the rust and cream fur that reminded me that Quicksilver was silver and black and cream, and bigger, a seriously large-boned dog who could take out a gang of lean, agile werewolves. I was glad none of that bunch had managed to penetrate his thick fur, after what Ric had said about the half-weres’ lethal bites.

Ric allowed me to savor one huge Midnight Margarita, moon-blue from Curaçao, before he coaxed and prodded me onto the dance floor. All around us human couples were swirling and twirling in the sexy Latin couples dance called salsa. Others not so human were bumping and grinding, doing the werewolf two-step.

“I can’t dance,” I told Ric again.
Don’t ask me.

But Ric was in his element, actually in his shirtsleeves, which played up his warm mahogany coloring. I was overdressed for a roomful of petite yet full-bodied Latina women slithering like snakes in their low-rise jeans and plunging, shrunken, midriff-baring tops. Ric was The Man in his white business shirt, high-end slacks, and brassy gold belt.

“It’s just a three-step,” he said. “Cha-cha-cha.”

I mimicked his steps, looking down, trying to master the simple pattern as it shifted from forward to back and side to side.

I watched his feet, his legs, his hips. He had rhythm, that inborn Hispanic sway. All the men in the room, hairy or not, had it. Their moves were as macho as a matador’s, sexy and sleek.

I was watching Ric’s hips more than his feet.

One, two, three.
Oooh!
That ultra-slim gold belt was almost over the top, but it gleamed like the scales on a serpent in Eden.

He caught me moving to the motion of his hips, not his feet. He smiled with almost palpable pleasure, slid the belt out of his tailored pant loops even as we kept up with the steps and the music, and refastened its gold links around my hips.

Then he whispered: “As Jimmy Buffet says, ‘I wanta see some movement below the waist out there.’”

“I don’t have a waist.” I sounded like a prig even to myself.

“Oh, yeah? Just watch.” Ric grinned, hooked his thumbs in my skirt’s elastic waistband and pulled down about three or four inches. I gasped as the cold metal of his belt hit my warm flesh. The skirt was barely riding on my hips, my navel was sucking air, and whistles echoed all around us. Wolf whistles, of course.

I could have died from embarrassment.

Other dancers were watching us out of the corner of their eyes. Some brown, Some black. Some lupine yellow. An awful lot of the chicks here sported pronounced widow’s peaks.

Right. One, two, three,
gulp.

My chilly Irish genes couldn’t match their hot-blooded native grace. My two left feet could barely manage to keep from tangling with Ric’s sure-footed moves.

“Pay attention,
paloma
,” Ric advised. “All you need to do is change your weight from step to step and you’ll be Jennifer Lopez. One-two-three.”

“Fuck one-two-three! I don’t ever balance on one foot. Someone . . . something might get me off-balance.”

As
he
had, calling me by a Spanish name that sounded pretty and so natural. I’d made everybody call me the gender-neutral “Del” for so long that a three-syllable name seemed . . . way too intimate.

Ric gave up on trying to hold me in the usual my-left-hand-on-his-shoulder, my right hand a pump-handle-in-his-left-hand position. He pulled me aside, to the edges of the dance floor. Put my hands on his shirted shoulders, his warm palms on my hips, my air-chilled bare hips.

“Hit me. One-two-three.”

I glanced at the Hispanic tootsies slinging hotsy-totsy hash from hip to hip all around me. They slithered like serpents, their pelvises jiggled like aspic, their legs strutted and three-stepped and they didn’t even wear the sweet Wicked Witch of the West shoes I did.

Okay. One-two-three-
boom
. I watched Ric’s eyes darken as my hips brushed his palms. Just barely. One-two-three-
boom
. Okay. He wanted it. He got it. My way. Just nearly there, but not quite. His pupils grew midnight-dark. He wasn’t leading, I was. From the hip. From the heart. One-two-three.
Boom
.

The heat, the noise, the rhythm. It was getting to me. Moon madness. I let my hands slither down from his shoulders and undid the third button on his open shirt collar.

His eyebrow rose.

I swung my left hip hard into his right hand and undid another button.

Wolf whistles became a chorus, echoing around us from the hard wooden dance floor.
Olé
s echoed encouragingly. We were making a spectacle of ourselves, and I was now the main instigator. But the music was so engaging, so insistent.

On the next hip swing I undid another button. The skin beneath the shirt was as smooth and mocha-colored as a really great creamy latte and all this exercise was making me thirsty.

Ric suddenly swung me out, twirled my arms around myself and pulled me hard against him. My own crossed arms held me prisoner, pushing my back into his front, my cleavage into full focus as he looked down at me.

“The werewolves are dancing their paws off. Look.”

Forced to take my eyes off him, off us, I saw that the Plexiglas flap had descended to the floor like a transparent iron curtain, dividing the dancers into Us and Them. Ric and I were on the tourist side. The transforming werewolves were circling madly in a salsa gone mad on the other side of the see-through barrier.

Some had already dropped to all fours, beautiful silver-tipped coats reflecting the rainbow shards cast by the mirrored ball, a kind of full moon, high above. The half-weres still danced a ragged form of salsa, their throats extended as they howled at each other and the unseen moon outside.

Camera flashes pinned them in a strobe-light landscape of alternating light and dark.

I turned my head, my face, into Ric’s shoulder. We were

molded against each other, like we’d been in Sunset Park

when he, I . . . we had found the dead bodies. I felt again

that unexpected, alien surge of long-dead desire, welling

through me into Ric.

He remembered it too. He was murmuring into my hair, Spanish words that sounded like an incantation. Some I knew.
Linda.
Beautiful.
Querida
. Beloved.
Mi tigre hembra
. That last word was one for a Spanish dictionary. No one had ever . . .

My knees lost it first. I sagged against him.

Then he lost it.

Ric one-two-three’d me around a corner into the rest room hallway, pressed me against that wall, pushed a thigh between my legs until they were very happy, and kissed me into a paper doll.

My heart was beyond pounding, it was thrumming along with the salsa beat and the vibrating floor and walls, the werewolf howls. Ric’s hands against the wall above my head put me in the close custody of his body. He lowered one hand to run a thumb over my sensitive inner lower lip, pulling a veil of saliva over it.

“You don’t wear lipstick.”

“With my coloring? I’d look like a clown on the Fourth of July.”

“I can redden your lips.” He ran his tongue over them and I felt the gesture everywhere. “
Via con
mi?
” he asked.

Go with him?
I understood that much Spanish.

“We’re here to see the werewolves. Dance, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“They are us. The car? We’ll see ’em before we go-go.”

Go-go-go!

We didn’t make it inside the car. Or just barely here. The full moon was a huge silver Spanish coin in the sky over Ric’s shoulder when he bent me back like a ballroom dancer and pushed me against the still-warm windshield of his Corvette and went down on my bared navel.

I was so used to unwanted guys grabbing for my neck and breasts and crotch that this sensual assault on my middle felt like . . . something new, something delicious, something all fingertips and tongue, something passionate on the special, small scale, something really, really personal. His borrowed belt was nicely in the way so he had to fight it for possession, and it was as warm as melted gold now, more mine than his.

I plunged my fingers into his thick dark hair, watching his thumbs press into my not-model-concave belly. His tongue fought to penetrate my navel and bring me off with purely oral persuasion. I wanted to suck him into myself, here at this one point of contact.

His head lifted off me, like a dog’s or a wolf’s, alert, guarded, listening. “They’re coming. We need to get safe. And then watch.”

Inside the car, we huddled together as the great, galloping werewolves flowed past us until the small sports car shuddered on its suspension. I heard screams in the distance, amid the avalanche of howls. Human screams.

“Macho fools,” Ric said. “They block the packs’ runs, try to outdance them. They scrape their skin on the ground and bleed, but even the hungriest werewolves won’t pause now to eat. They’re heading for the great open wilderness of their ancestors to mate. The mountains and desert and hidden oases.”

Wolfish faces flowed directly toward us and then around Ric’s low-slung car, which still rocked and rolled at their passage. I loved their harvest-moon-yellow eyes, all Kansas wheat fields, and their silver-tipped fur, all Hollywood. The half-breeds came later, scary hunched loping half-blind mutilated creatures, hunting the moon and missing. I’d seen their more lethal like in the Pet Palace parking lot and shivered a little.

Ric held my hand, his eyes on me, not on the rushing hordes. “They were all as human as we are, once. The Millennium Revelation brought everything unhuman out.”

“Not ‘inhuman’?”

“Unhuman is different from what we mean by inhuman. It’s not always degradation. It’s just a difference. Like between man and woman.”

I felt that last difference and the urges it engendered. Everything that night enhanced Ric’s desire. He’d brought me here to seduce me with it all, the unreal, the hidden, the wolfish heart of Las Vegas. Of himself. And even, perhaps, of myself.

                                                                                          * * * *

Always sensible to a fault, I lashed myself into the seat belt before he took off from the parking lot. His arm reached over me, pressing against breast, belly, pelvis.

“The seat reclines.”

In an instant, I was laid out almost horizontal.

On my back. Bound. Every nightmare revisited. I couldn’t breathe, and reared up like a drowning person.

“
Whoa
. Del? What’s wrong?’

“I . . . don’t . . . do . . . horizontal.”

The seatbelt whipped free at his touch and the seat snapped more upright again. “It’s gone. We’re out on the lonesome highway. No seatbelts required. Delilah?” His hand spread on my pelvis, warm and possessive. “I won’t hurt you. Relax.”

The low car thrummed along the concrete, vibrating like a blender until my bones sang with the motion. His hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the car, with his remote touches. I envied the glossy cue-ball head of the stick shift his touch. I wanted it.

His fingertips reached over to push the flimsy camisole up past my rib cage, to tease my skirt hem up to my hips. A luminous full moon rode in the dead center of the glass roof panel. Underneath me the steady thrum of horsepower vibrated my pelvis like a great cat’s purr. Above me, a moon river of rushing werewolves seemed to meld with the ghostly clouds.

Ric’s hand spread on my belly, caressing, claiming.

My primal fears wafted away into something I’d never felt except in Sunset Park. Primal desire. I was strangely out of it, dreamy. His fingers teased my skirt up over my bare hip, then caressed my breast under the camisole. Again I was lulled by that easy, fringe sort of lovemaking, what pleased him as he steered the car and trifled with my body swaying to the drone of the engine, the motion, the fondling.

He parked on Sunset Road and insisted on escorting me to my front door. I disabled Nightwine’s security systems with my codes so we could amble inside hip to hip, our fingers entwined. The heavy sweet scent of flowers draped the cottage and the silent night seemed enchanted.

On the homey brick stoop Ric took me into the embrace of his smooth, expensive clothes to do the tongue tango again. We were pressed against the door, my hands stroking the muscles of his back through his silken shirt. They shifted while his hands tightened on the bare skin of my waist and hips.

Then Quicksilver, detecting a stranger’s presence, leaped and scrabbled and howled on the other side of the door like a manic werewolf. Sure killed the mood.

“What do you keep in there, the Hound of the Baskervilles?” Ric asked.

“Not quite.” I smiled mysteriously.

He unclasped and teased the gold belt off my hips, then threaded it back through the belt loops of his pants at such a slow sensual pace that I almost lost it again.

I watched him, loving this. I’d never had this. Being escorted home from a date by a man who’d disarranged my clothes and pushed into me from a dozen distracting directions.

Taken home to my own little cottage, where someone waited who cared but might ask awkward questions. Well, ask in a canine way.

I loved that Ric and I hadn’t been to bed, stripped naked, that there was still so much more to discover about each other and our feelings, at our own tantalizing pace.

We arranged to rendezvous the next day. In Sunset Park, where he could meet Quicksilver on neutral ground. It seemed like the obvious next step. One-two-three,
bow-wow.