“Drake, what is it with you?” she asked abruptly. Her scent shift warned him—from playful soap bubbles to fresh green leaves—even if her tone hadn’t. “Seriously. I mean, you swoop down on me all Knight in Shining Armani—which is nice, if weird—and you don’t ask for anything at all, and you’re super nice, but you must want something. I mean, here we are, and you haven’t kicked me out, which frankly, most men—”

“Spare me your knowledge of most men.”

“Okay, okay. But seriously. What’s your deal?”

“It’s a double deal,” he said after a long pause. “And either one will, as you might say, freak you out in the extreme.”

“Oh, dude, I’d never say anything so lame…well, why don’t you try one, see how that goes.”

“Uh…”

“Come on, come on! Then I’ll tell you something about me. Something nobody else knows.”

“You mean besides the fact that you have smelly feet?”

“Draaaaaaaaaaaake!”

“All right, don’t yowl. Okay. Well. Here it is, then.”

She propped her chin up on her fist and waited.

He coughed.

She kept waiting.

“Well. Ah. You see, it’s difficult to just—you know—blurt it out like this—”

“Are you hoping I’ll die of old age so you won’t have to say it?”

“Fine, fine,” he practically snapped. “I’m a werewolf.”

Silence.

“I know,” he continued, easing a hand over her thigh and, emboldened when she didn’t run screaming from the room, patting her tentatively. “It’s startling, but you don’t have to be afraid, because I’d never hurt you or eat you—ah, that is to say, outside the bedroom I would never eat you, and—”

“Oh, Christ! That!” She batted his hand away. “I knew about that! You were supposed to tell me something I didn’t know.”

He actually shook his head to check his hearing. No, there was her heartbeat, lub-dub, lub-dub, and her breaths, and the hum of electricity, and the cool clink of the freezer making an ice cube. Everything was working fine. “What?”

She lunged upward, hopped off the bed, and started pacing back and forth. Moonlight splashed her as she stomped—an enraged goddess etched in cream. “Well, what else would it be? You’re super-strong, super-fast, you’re blind but you get around better than I do…plus, you’re a doctor, for God’s sake. How could you be such a good doctor without, I dunno, super everything else? It was either that or I figured you were an alien. But after just now—the bushes, you know—I figured you probably weren’t an alien. Besides, this wolf stops me from throwing myself off the roof and then you just happen to show up a few hours later?”

He blinked at her. “Oh. I must say, this is very anticlimactic.”

“Serves you right for assuming I was a dumb-ass.”