“Not until he gets what he wants.”

“Exactly.” I frowned. Wait. That didn’t make me feel much better.

“I will kill him,” he said darkly. “If he harms you in any way, the pain from the hellfire will be a pleasant memory for him.”

“I appreciate the offer of mayhem and torture, really. But it’s best if we stay calm and collected about this.”

“You seem calm and collected enough for the both of us.”

“I’m trying to stay Zen. I do yoga now, you know.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You do?”

“Well, I have an instructional DVD on yoga. Haven’t had a chance to watch it with all the drama going on lately, but I’m looking forward to it.”

“We must find a solution in three days. You cannot sire him.”

Thierry had a black-and-white attitude about pretty much everything. He drew his lines in the sand in permanent ink—and how he felt about Gideon was one of those lines. To him, Gideon was 100 percent evil incarnate. Couldn’t say I blamed him much for that impression. After all, Gideon was the leader of the hunters. They didn’t exactly make our lives a Technicolor musical production number. And Gideon, from everything I’d heard about him, had no problem getting his hands dirty when it came to slaying. He was exactly like Buffy—that is, if she was a six-foot-five billionaire playboy with hellfire scars from slaying a demon. And a tendency to kill things that weren’t actually evil.

So, really, not like Buffy at all.

“I need to get back inside,” I said, “and try to act like everything’s normal—”

Another kiss managed to easily push my words and thoughts away. Thierry could kiss. Six hundred years of practice would make someone an expert, after all. I’d prefer not to give a lot of thought to how many women may have come before me. We both had our romantic histories. His was simply a little longer than mine, that’s all.