He followed me from the parking area across Sunset Road and pulled the Corvette into the driveway beside Dolly after I'd disarmed the gates' security system so we could enter. I unlocked the quaint wooden cottage front door with the remote.

When he joined me at Dolly's driver's door, the public kid gloves were off. He pushed me flat against Dolly's sun-warmed Detroit metal as soon as I got out.

"The last time I was here your wild wolf-dog attacked me, knocked me flat on my back on the floor and attempted to tear out my throat."

"He was just trying to get you to hold still while he licked your hands whole again."

"After that, you straddled me, pinned my hands above my head, ripped open my fly and ravished me, chiquita."

"Someone had to. You'd been so wracked up from cutting your hands to shreds on the barbed wire you used for dowsing rods, you needed to feel something pleasurable fast."

"This time, I'm going to ravish you." He eyed the greenery. "Where's the dog?"

"Out probably. He has his rounds to make."

"You don't know where he goes?"

"His breed was born to run, so he takes gallops around town. I can't possibly walk him enough for the exercise he needs."

"Can you give me the exercise I need?"

"Oh, I think so." I pulled his tie knot loose, yanked the top button of his shirt free and fastened my mouth onto his bared, brown throat like a rabid bat.

His lean strong body rippled against mine, all muscle, now aroused and hard. Ric picked me up, cupping my head against his neck so my mad, bad succubus kiss couldn't stop. He bounded up the few steps to the door, pushed it open, and carried me upstairs.

He found the bedroom without help and set me down while I clung to his shoulders and neck.

He found something else without help. In no time he'd stretched my hands above my head and tied them to the large gargoyle carving of one bedpost with his silken tie. If anyone else had bound me, I'd have panicked. But I'd taken control of his hands and arms the first-and last-time we'd made love here, and understood his desire for a return ravishing.

It was play, it was deadly serious passion, it was scary and it was divine. I was pulsing with excitement, my body writhing to excite his even more. His gaping shirtfront made my mouth lunge for him, seeking any part of him to fasten on, lips, neck, nipple, but he bent down out of reach to take off my high heels. Once they were gone, I balanced on my toes like a ballerina, light and spinning. He knelt there still, then undid the side zipper on my skirt. I'd thought from the day we met he'd unzip my skirt as if it was a polite social gesture.

"Such a demure little skirt, Delilah. Opaque linen. Surely you wore it to excite me with its modesty. Is my friend the silver chain curled around your hips under here, warm and glittering? So delicate, so strong."

His forefinger touched the revealed chain and only a distracting question kept me from coming right then.

For the first time I remembered the silver familiar. Where was it? Had it morphed into the chain? No, I'd worn the real chain this morning. Was it curled into a tight little ball playing peek-a-boo in my cleavage? Would Ric find it and wonder? Would I have to explain?

I sent out an all points bulletin over my body, which was difficult to do with certain central points so awash in sensation. Ah, there it was! Formed into a toe ring on my right foot, either too discreet or embarrassed to remain in the path of major erotic stimulation. Lucky Ric wasn't a foot fetishist.

Right now his fetish was navel-gazing. And sucking. He'd pulled the gaping skirt waistband down to reveal the thin chain swagged beneath my navel, and then began kissing his way upward until he had to stand.

"And this neat white blouse that buttons down the front under the jacket you left in the car. Surely you didn't want me to rip it open, ruin it, just to see your breasts. Just to see the full tops of your breasts inside those push-up bras you wear." Buttons flew as he bared me.

"I don't wear push-up bras," I said indignantly. I didn't need them. Oh. His hands were underneath the satin cups, pushing me mostly out.

Before I could react, he reached down to pull my tight linen skirt up to my hips until it was a cummerbund.

"And you don't wear hose in the heat, of course, but, what, no panties, not even a shred?"

I murmured mindlessly in self-defense, because I did indeed wear a brand-new thong, and it still felt darned uncomfortable up my back crack. So much for Irma's lingerie advice. His finger had found that narrow bridge of silky fabric and teased it aside.

His hands ran up my bare arms to my secured wrists, linked fingers with me as his body leaned hard against my mostly naked parts.

"You like this vertical, I know, Delilah. And I'm very vertical at the moment, I think you can tell."

The more intimate Ric got with my body, the more he used my formal name. I moaned. "Por favor, por favor," I murmured, knowing how much Spanish from my mouth pleased him. The hard ridge in his pants was pressing into my naked pelvis, the closed zipper welt thin and hard. I rocked my hips into it, until that welt slipped between my slick labia. I was aching to fuck his clothes again. Why did he never strip fully for me? Why did he make me always push forward to feel him? Maybe because it made me wild with desire.

"Now, my love? Are you ready? Ahora?"

I was murmuring his name and the word ahora over and over. Now, now, now.

His thigh pushed my legs apart, only a little because of the tight skirt. He'd moved a hand to work his fly open and then spread the warm fingers of his other hand on my lower back as he tilted my pelvis to receive his erection and I wrapped my thighs around his hips.

Our positions were constrained. I was constrained. My vagina was tight. The penetration was slow and tantalizing. I started to scream with release at the first hint of the first thrust, as Ric's hot mouth closed on my neck to give me my own vampire-bat suction-bruise.

He kept moving into the eye of my orgasmic storm, prolonging it as I shuddered into whimpers and purrs and then, amazingly, peaked again. Only then did he climax.

Finally, our energy evaporated. We remained locked together like the Sunset Park lovers.

"Too rough?" he asked, his voice ragged.

I shook my head violently. Couldn't speak. My emotions were as wrung out as my body.

"Not rough enough?" He sounded unusually cautious.

I shook my head again. Spoke. "Just right. Dios, Montoya, you sure know how to rock my world."

"And you mine." His last parting thrust made me draw in a rasping breath, then he tucked away and zipped up. As he untied my hands, he murmured in my ear. "We're going to need a good supply of shirts and blouses, I think."

He buried his face in my cleavage as my arms came down. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, giving him the heat and nurture of my nipples. We ended in a mindless round of "te amos," and this time I had a Spanish soul and meant every repeated syllable I could find breath to croon.

When he pulled back, I was flushed with satisfaction and a bit of a blush.

"Yes?" he asked, reading my reservations instantly. He was a cop of sorts.

"That was, that was a bit, um, lurid."

"But you liked it. You came like a catamount almost before I could penetrate you."

I blushed more. "Yes, but bondage-"

He lifted each of my undamaged wrists and kissed them, then folded the wrinkled sky-blue silk tie and put it in his jacket pocket. The gesture made my heart pound afresh. He expected to use it again. The wetness between my legs warmed with a fresh flood.

He stroked the back of his fingers against my flaming cheek, then took my pulse under the skin he'd suckled. "Muy caliente," he murmured, "muy tempestado. Don't fight it."

"You know how I feel about being bound horizontal."

"This is being bound vertical. This is different."

True, but I still felt uneasy about my wildcat self, about how easy that self could break loose at the silken touch of his tie and the mere nudge from the head of his penis.

He smiled as his face neared mine. "You like it well enough to ravage the parts of me that the past has made sensitive." He showed his neck, the skin reddened, a new bruise already turning as dark as thunder.

I was a little shocked to see the fresh damage-and breathless. "Because it excites you and I like to excite you."

"This lovemaking excited you."

"It shouldn't have. I'm not a victim."

"Delilah. Often the things we fear the most turn us on the most."

"How do you know that?"

He chuckled. "My adopted mother, the psychologist. Oh, she didn't put it that plainly." He took my hands in his again, held them palm-to-palm as if teaching me to pray.

"Delilah, I most fear being under the control of others, but I also fear that the pleasure and release the bat-bite brought me during my youth was a sin in that desert wilderness of constant want and pain. When you use it with such wicked delight to excite me it frees me to enjoy the pleasure, because the woman I love has accepted everything I was and did and rejoices in my manhood, no matter how I arrived at it."

Tears were flowing. "Oh, God, Ric. I do! I do love you, I do want you. There's nothing wrong with you. It's me. I veer from being leery to distrustful, but it's of myself."

"I know." He lifted my hands above my head again. "But a bit of binding frees your hembra tigre, because you are not quite in control then, are you? Not quite responsible when I'm driving you so crazy."

I nodded. Slowly. Ric released my hands and leaned in to extract a string of sweet, deep kisses from my lips.

"Don't fight yourself, your own nature," he advised, "unless you don't want to feel like this again."

I hadn't known what "normal" or my own nature was since the Millennium Revelation. Somehow, I'd decided to fully accept exploring it with Ric. And I was liking it.

When I'd dressed again, I showed him to the door, where we dawdled over goodbye kisses.

"Umm," he said during a breathing break. "You look so... disheveled in those clothes."

"Linen wrinkles easily," I said demurely.

His eyelids were heavy, sexy. "I could make love again, just to your clothes."

"Guess I'll throw away my steamer, then, if you prefer me mussed."

"Absolutely." He kissed me like it was the first time, long and deep.

When he broke it off, though, he was back to business matters.

"There's one thing you can't put off, Del. "

He sounded sober, serious. My heart did a highland fling. I wasn't telling him everything about my investigations. I should, but...

"What, Ric?"

"The Cocaine groupie killing. The police still may like you as a suspect because the victim was seen pawing you in the Inferno security film. You'll need to be interviewed."

"My attorney," I told Ric, "can deal with the Las Vegas police if they want to interrogate me about the groupie death."

"You still using that Nightwine CinSim?"

"Perry Mason never lost a case or an innocent client."

"That was fiction, sweets."

"He'll be right with me all the time."

"Having a lawyer at an interrogation looks suspicious."

"They'll be star-struck, you know they will be. Perry is awesome."

"Maybe. You won't ask me to escort you there, but you'll let Mason accompany you to the police station. I'm hurt." I winced. "Meanwhile, let me work around the back door."

"With your police captain friend?"

"Colleague."

"Woman cop. Don't forget that for a moment, amigo mio. She likes you."

"All the better for you. We'll talk after it's over. When can you get in?

"Soon. Perry's on permanent retainer with Nightwine, remember. I'll have him set it up. Can you promise that Haskell won't be involved?"

"I'll hold Captain Malloy's flat feet to the fire if they don't keep that lowlife out of it."

"I don't like you holding anybody's feet but mine, but I promise I'll get in for my own special grilling."

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