He stripped off his leather jacket and dropped it on the floor. Then he sat down on the bed and pulled off his boots. He heard her tennis shoes hit the floor as he stretched out on the bed next to her without looking at her. Talk. She'd said "talk." And he'd do that best looking at the wall.

He waited for her to begin. If he started asking the questions he had, Anna might not ask him what she needed to know. It was something he'd learned a long time ago with less dominant wolves.

After a while, she flopped down on the bed beside him. He closed his eyes and let her scent surround him.

"Is this bonding thing as weird for you as it is for me?" she said in a small voice. "Sometimes it's overwhelming and I wish it would shut down, even though it hurts when it does. And when it is narrower, I miss the intimacy of knowing what you're feeling."

"Yes," Charles agreed. "I'm not used to sharing with anyone but Brother Wolf." His mate, he thought. She'd had a rough time, and she needed everything he could give her. So he used the words that he didn't trust himself with to tell her what he could. "I don't care what Brother Wolf thinks of me. You... I care. It's... difficult."

She moved until her breath touched the back of his neck. Very quietly she said, "Do you ever wish it hadn't happened?"

At that he sat up and turned to her, examining her face for hints of just how she'd meant the question. His sudden move made her flinch, and if the bed hadn't been so big, she'd have fallen off in her scramble to get away from him.

He closed his eyes and controlled himself. There were no enemies here to slay. "Never," he told her with utter sincerity he hoped she heard. "I will never regret it. If you could have seen my life before you came into it, you would not ask that question."

He felt her warmth, smelled her closeness before she touched him. "I cause you a lot of trouble. I'll probably cause you more before we're done."

Charles opened his eyes and let himself drown in her scent, in her presence, and kissed a freckle that graced Anna's cheek. Then the one on the side of her nose and another just above her lip. "For a long time, my brother Samuel has been telling me that I needed something to shake me up."

She kissed him-a rare enough occurrence that he held perfectly still and savored it for the gift of trust it was. She'd been tortured by monsters, and sometimes they still held sway over her.

Anna pulled herself away. "If this keeps up, there won't be any talk."

Good, he thought. But he knew there were things she still needed to discuss, so he lay back down and pillowed his head on his hands though there were at least three layers of pillows on the bed.

"I keep feeling like we're doing it wrong," she said. "That this bond between us is meant to be much more than we're allowing it to be."

"There is no wrong between us," he told her.

She made a frustrated noise, so he supposed that wasn't the answer she was looking for. Charles tried again. "We have time, love. As long as we are careful to set our feet on the path we want to follow, we have a very long time to get it right."

He could feel her focus her attention on him. "Okay," she said finally. "I can live with that. Does that mean I get to tell you when I think you're walking in the wrong direction?"

He grinned. "Could you help yourself?"

"There is no wrong between us," she repeated his words with more satisfaction. "That means yes, right?"

He looked at her again, "That means yes. Right."

"And you are as confused about this as I am?"

It seemed important to her that they were on equal ground. But he could not lie to her. "No. Differently confused, I think. And possibly more confused. You haven't had the better part of two hundred years to decide who you are and who you aren't. When that all changes..." Charles shrugged.

He wasn't used to all of this emotion. He'd taken the feelings and desires of his human half and stuffed them somewhere so they wouldn't interfere with the things he had to do. And now they were all back, and he had no tools to deal with them-and he wasn't stupid enough to think that they would ever allow themselves to be stuffed away again.

"Differently confused," she said. "Okay. That's okay."

She reached out and touched his arm, drawing a finger down. "When I touched you today... it feels as though you have two souls in one body. Is that how I am?"

"Anna," he told her. "You are how you are. Brother Wolf and I... You know I was born werewolf and not Changed. That has left some differences, I think. To function, most werewolves have to make their wolf obedient if not completely subservient. After a while, the wolf spirit is reduced to a part of the man's spirit. An unthinking, violent part full of instincts and desires but no true thoughts."

He looked at her pale hand on the green silk shirt he wore. "I am not my grandfather, to look into the heart of man," he told her. "I don't know that what I've told you is truth. It is just what I've seen and felt.

"Brother Wolf and I reached a different compromise. In situations where I am better able, he allows me full control-and I extend him the same courtesy."

"Two souls," she said.

"No," he shook his head. "One soul, one man, two spirits. We are one, Brother Wolf and I. Inseparable. If he died, so would I."

"Have I crippled my wolf?"

He rolled on his side, drawn closer to her by her concern. "It isn't something to be mourned. It is simply survival. But if it helps, I think you and your wolf have reached a different compromise altogether." He smiled. "I think that's why Brother Wolf chose you in the first place-before we'd had much more than a chance to say hello. We balance, you know. You to me, your wolf to mine. She's shy unless you are threatened, but she's all there."

Anna closed her hand on his arm. "Okay. I can deal with that better than the alternatives."

"Do you need any more words between us?" he asked, her touch making his voice go husky.

Chapter FOUR

BEFORE she could answer, his cell phone rang. It wasn't his da's ring-and if they'd been home, he'd have let the answering machine pick up. But this wasn't home. He was here to do a job, and that meant answering phone calls at inconvenient times. So he snagged his coat off the floor and took his cell out of the pocket.