Trying hard to infuse every brush of his fingers against her skin with platonic feeling, he kneaded her back, then her shoulders and finally her upper arms, trying the entire time to block out her satisfied groans and whimpers.

When his hands started to ache, he tentatively pulled away. "That better?"

"Yes. Thank you" She didn't withdraw.

In fact, to his great and keen dismay, she leaned against him and reached back to loop an arm around his neck. "I missed you."

"Did you?" He'd missed her. At least, part of him had.

She gave a little sigh. "Do you know you are still the only man I have ever slept with?"

"Congratulations. You went a whole month without boning someone else." He felt her laugh, and smiled, though it hadn't been meant as a joke. Somehow, the thought of her with another man horrified him more than the dangers posed by the Oracle and the Soul Eater combined. "Listen, I should go."

"No." Her arm tightened around his neck. "Stay with me."

What would it hurt? He didn't particularly want to travel down the road his thoughts were leading him on, but he couldn't help it. Every moment of every day, he thought of her. Not because he wanted to, but because there was some broken pipe in his brain that kept sputtering out toxic drops of her until his head was completely polluted. Now the leak had become a flood, and his fear—a very real, paralyzing fear—was that his brain would never dry out. He'd just stagger through the rest of his life drowning in her.

But it infuriated him that he couldn't just turn off the way he had with all those other women. She was dangerously close to becoming an obsession, and if he didn't control himself now, he might never be able to.

He shoved her off him under the guise of clumsy gentleness and tucked the blanket around her, pointedly ignoring the hint of dark color that peeked over the lacy edge of her bra. "You had a bad night. We both did. You're not physically up to anything… physical."

"Werewolves heal quickly" She cocked her head.

"Yeah, well." He scratched his neck, a nervous tic that seemed to emerge only around her. "I'm not up to it."

Frowning, she crawled forward, rising to her knees to loop her arms around him again. "Did you get hurt?"

He didn't return her embrace. "Yes."

She finally got it. It took her long enough.

With a wounded look, she eased away from him. "You are not still angry about what happened between us?"

"Of course I am!" he cried. "Jesus Christ, it's only been a month! What kind of inhuman bitch are you, to ask me that?"

Her eyes flew open in shock, then narrowed again. "Not a human. I did not think that was news to you."