Jeff opened blue eyes, grinned at me. “If you’re feeling left out . . .”
I almost threw out an instinctive no, but I decided to throw him a bone. “Oh, Jeff. It’d be too good—you and me. Too powerful, too much emotion, too much heat. We’d come together and boom”—I clapped my hands together—“like a moth to a flame, there’d be nothing left.”
His eyes glazed over. “Combustion?”
“Totally.”
He was quiet for a moment, his index finger tracing a pattern on the knee of his jeans. Then he nodded. “Too powerful. It’d destroy us both.”
I nodded solemnly. “Probably so.” But I leaned over, pressed my lips to his forehead. “We’ll always have Chicago.”
“Chicago,” he dreamily repeated. “Yeah. Definitely.” He cleared his throat, seemed to regain a little composure. “When I tell this story later, you kissed me on the mouth. With tongue. And you were handsy.”
I chuckled. “Fair enough.”
Catcher and Mallory walked in, Catcher in the lead, Mallory behind, one hand in his, the fingers of her free hand against her lips, her cheeks flushed.
“Sword,” Catcher said, before dropping her hand and continuing through the gym to the door on the other side of the room.
“Was that an instruction or an agenda, do you think?” I asked Mallory, who stopped in front of me.
She blinked, her gaze on Catcher’s jeans-clad ass as he passed. “Hmm?”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “I’m in love with Ethan Sullivan and we’re going to have teethy vampire babies and buy a house in Naperville and live happily ever after.”
She looked over at me, her gaze as vacant as Jeff’s had been. “It’s just—he does this thing with his tongue.” She trailed off, lifted an index finger, crooked it back and forth. “It’s kind of a flicking?”
Before I knew what I was saying, but finally at the end of my Mallory-and-Catcher rope, I spilled out a plan in a quick tumble of sound. “I love you, but I’m moving into Cadogan House.”
That got her attention. Her expression cleared, her brow furrowing. “What?”
Instantly deciding it was probably for the best, I nodded. “You two need your space, and I need to be there to do my job effectively.” Left unspoken: I did not need to hear or see anything else regarding Catcher’s sexual prowess.
“Oh.” Mallory looked down at the floor. “Oh.” When she looked back up again, there was sadness in her eyes. “Jesus, Merit. Everything’s changing.”
I squeezed her into a hug. “We’re not changing. We’re just living in different places.”
“We’ll be living in different ZIP codes.”
“And, as I’ve said before, you have Sexy Bell to keep you company. You’ll be fine.” I’d probably be fine, too, assuming I could convince myself and the other Cadogan vamps that I could live under the same roof as Ethan without impaling him on the business end of an aspen stake. That was going to require some Mallory-worthy creative thinking.
Mal squeezed me back. “You’re right. You’re right. I’m being ridiculous. You need to get in there, do that vampire thang, mix it up.” Then she quirked up an eyebrow. “Did you say you were in love with Ethan?”
“Just to get your attention.”
Probably.
Shit.
“Gotta say, Mer, I’m not loving that idea.”
I nodded ruefully and began the walk toward the locker room. “Just be glad you’re not me.”
Minutes later, I emerged barefoot and ponytailed, ready for another night of training to protect, among others, a man I apparently had conflicting feelings about. Mallory and Jeff sat in chairs on the other side of the room. Catcher hadn’t yet emerged from the back, so I moved toward the body bag that hung in one corner of the gym, curled my hands into fists, and began to wail.
In the couple of sessions I’d had with Catcher since Commendation, we’d trained with pads, practicing jabs and front kicks, guards and uppercuts. The practice was designed to increase my stamina, to give me a vocabulary of vampire fighting basics, and to ensure that I could pass the tests required of Cadogan guards. But I’d usually been too worried about learning the moves, the forms, to find therapy, solace, in the movements.
With Catcher in the back, there was no such distraction.
I aimed a bare-handed jab at the logo in the middle of the bag, thwack, loving the flat thud of contact and the flight of the bag in the other direction. Loving the fact that I’d made it move. Enjoying the fact that I’d imagined green eyes peering out through the logo, and had nailed the spot just between those eyes.
Thwack. Thwack. A satisfying double punch, the bag standing in for the man I’d become honor-bound to serve, whom I was becoming a little too interested in.
I stepped back, pivoted on a heel, and swiveled my hip for a side kick. It probably seemed, to the casual observer, that I was warming up, taking a few well-aimed kicks at an inanimate object.
But in my mind, thwack, I was kicking, thwack, a certain Master vampire, thwack, in the face.
Finally smiling, I stood straight again, planting hands on my hips as I watched the bag swing on its chain. “Therapeutic,” I concluded.
The door at the back of the gym opened, and Catcher walked through, the katana, sheathed in gleaming black lacquer, in his right hand. In his left was a wooden bar in the shape of a katana—a long slice of gently curving, gleaming wood—but without the hilt or any other physical distinction between the handle and blade. This, I’d learned, was a bokken, a practice weapon, a tool for learning swordsmanship sans the risk of an amateur slicing through things not intended for slicing.
Catcher moved to the center of the mats, laid the bokken down, and with a slow, careful movement, the blade angled just so, unsheathed his katana. The naked steel caught the light, glinted and made a metallic whistle as he pulled it through the air. Then he motioned at me, and I joined him in the center of the mats. He turned the katana, and one hand near the hilt, offered it to me.
I took it, tested the weight in my hand. It felt lighter than I’d imagined it would given the complicated combination of materials—wood, steel, bumpy ray skin, corded silk. I gripped the sword in my right hand beneath the hilt and wrapped the fingers of my left hand below it, four finger spaces between my hands. It wasn’t that I’d studied up. I just mimicked the hand positions he’d demonstrated with the sword he usually didn’t let me hold, the sword he treated with careful reverence.
I’d asked him earlier in the week about that reverence, why he stilled when the blade was revealed, why his gaze went a little unfocused when he unsheathed it. His answer—“It’s a good blade”—was less than satisfying, and, I guessed, barely the tip of that iceberg.
Sword in hand, I held it before me, waited for Catcher’s direction.
He had plenty.
For all his lack of loquaciousness in discussing why he liked the sword, he had plenty to offer in how I should relate to it—the position of my hands on the handle (which wasn’t quite right, despite my careful mimicry), the position of the blade relative to the rest of my body, the stance of my feet, and the carriage of body weight as I prepared to strike.
Catcher explained that this, my first time with the sword, was only to accustom me to the feel of it, the weight of it. I’d learn the actual moves with the bokken because, although Catcher was pleased with what I’d learned so far, he had no confidence in my ability to manage the katana. At least not to his nitpicky expectations.
When he said that, I paused in the middle of a stance he’d been teaching me, looked over at him. “Then why do I have this katana in my hands?”
His expression went immediately serious. “Because you’re a vampire, and a Cadogan vamp at that. Until you know the moves, until you’re ready to wield the sword as an expert”—the tone in his voice made it obvious that he’d settle for nothing less—“you’re going to need to bluff.” He raised a hand, pointed at the blade of the katana. “She is, among other things, your bluff.”
Then he slid a glance to Mallory, and gave her a wicked look. “If you aren’t ready to truly handle the sword, at least learn how to hold it.”
There was a sardonic grunt from her side of the gym.
Catcher laughed with obvious satisfaction. “It only hurts the first time.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Mallory drily responded, one crossed leg swinging as she flipped through a magazine. “And if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times—magic does not belong in the bedroom.” But while her eyes were on the magazine in her lap, she was grinning when she said it.