Hand shaking as she pointed to the back of the church, she took a breath to start in again, gulping it back when Jenks kissed her soundly, wrapping her slim form in his arms and body, their wings somehow not tangling as they hovered in the hallway.

“I’ll take care of it, love,” he said when they parted, his emotion so earnest that I dropped my eyes, embarrassed. Matalina fled to the desk in a dusting of mortified red, and after grinning at us in some masculine display of…masculinity, Jenks flew to the back of the church.

“Jack!” he shouted, the dust slipping from him a brilliant gold. “You know better than that. Get your brothers and get out here. If I have to dig you out, I’m going to clip your wings!”

“Huh.” Ivy’s long fingers carefully picked up a cracker. “I’ll have to try that.”

“What?” I asked, shifting to prop my clipboard up on my knees.

Ivy blinked slowly. “Kissing someone from agitation into bliss.”

Her smile widened to show a slip of teeth, and a sliver of ice dropped down my spine. Fear mixed with anticipation, as unstoppable as jerking my hand from a flame. And Ivy could sense it as easily as she could see my embarrassed flush.

Pulling herself upright, she stood. I blinked up at her as she stretched, and brushing past me in a wave of vampire incense, she headed for the door as the doorbell rang.

“I got it,” she said, her pace provocative. “David left his hat.”

My exhaled breath was slow and long. Damn it, I was not an adrenaline junkie. And Ivy knew we weren’t going to shift our relationship in either direction. Still…the potential was there, and I hated that she could flip switches in me as easily as I could flip them in her. Just ’cause you can do something, doesn’t mean you should, right?

Exasperated with myself, I grabbed the empty cracker plate and headed for the kitchen. Maybe I needed a midnight run myself to clear my head of all the vamp pheromones in there.

“Cat in the house!” came Ivy’s call, and then a different voice filtered in, stopping me cold.

“Hi, I’m Marshal.”

If the mellow, attractive voice hadn’t jerked me to a halt, the name would have, and I spun in the hallway.

“You must be Ivy,” the man added. “Is Rachel in?”

Four

“Marshal?” I exclaimed as my thoughts realigned and I figured out who was standing in our threshold. “What are you doing here?” I added as I headed back.