I didn’t want to talk about Heath. That may be a small issue but it wasn’t going to be the big deal Duely thought it would be.

“Why are you awake?” I asked him.

“Just got in,” he replied. “Since you were fucking like maniacs up here, I decided to go home with a hot little blonde co-ed and her gay best friend. They were fast learners once she got over being bothered by watching her friend suck my dick. I told her to straddle my face and getting her pussy licked helped her get over it real damn quick then.”

I shook my head and held up a hand. “I don’t need the visuals, Duely.”

He chuckled. “What? You don’t want to imagine me fucking a hot big-tittied blond while a muscular soccer stud with a big dick takes my ass?”

“Stop!” I hissed.

Duely laughed and drank his coffee. “Go crawl back in bed with your sexy man, Snow White. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m about to go to bed myself.”

I turned to go back to the bedroom but decided to ask Duely’s opinion on my biggest fear. He would be honest with me. He’d tell me if I was being ridiculous or if there was a chance I’d end up going evil.

“Do you think... that my being in a relationship with a man will make me... different? More like my mother and sisters?”

He sat his cup down and stood up. “Do you care for him, Cat, or was that just a fuck?”

“I care for him,” I replied, still reeling from admitting that to myself earlier.

Duely smiled. “That’s why you will never turn into one of them. They don’t care. They fuck. They take. They feel nothing.”

I wanted to believe that.

“I hope you’re right. There is no going back now. I can’t... even if it means he’s safer away from me. It scares me that I feel that way.”

“Stop overthinking it. Enjoy it. You deserve to be happy. Let yourself be.”

The door behind me opened and I glanced back to see Rathe standing there in his boxer briefs, messy hair tucked behind his ears, and looking too wonderful for words. “Mornin’,” he said when our eyes met.

“Good morning. I’m sorry if we woke you,” I said, feeling shy in the light of day and with Duely as our audience.

“Only thing you need to apologize for is letting me wake up without you there beside me. That was pretty damn cruel.”

Oh, my heart was not going to survive him. “I’m sorry for that, too,” I replied shyly.

He nodded his head back toward the bed. “Come back.”

“Okay.”

He grinned then and the naughty gleam in his eyes had me wishing Duely would leave. I didn’t care that it was his apartment.