Blade sipped his brandy and stroked her auburn hair. Meg was trying. She was also getting a bit disgusted with him. He was waiting for the gleam of pity in her green eyes, just as he was waiting for her to unsheath her claws. He did not have long to wait.

Meg stood up. «It is just no use, Richard. You must admit that I have tried. Whatever can it be?»

Blade looked at her over his brandy bell. «I don't know, Meg. I'm sorry. The only thing I know is that it can't be you. It isn't your fault.»

Meg took up her glass. She pressed the brandy bell against one buoyant breast, then against the other. Her rose-pink nipples were hard and long.

«I'm going to have to do something,» she told Blade without looking at him, «or you must do something. I'm all stirred up now and I'll never get to sleep unless something happens.»

Blade was silent. It was an invitation that he did not feel like accepting. He had no objections to oral sex-he was a man of the world and had been a womanizer since his teens — but in this instance it was not the answer. Oral sex, to him, was only an adjunct, a pleasant enough fore-interlude to normal sex. And that he could not achieve. To hell, then, with any of it. Such were his feelings at the moment.

Meg spoke her feelings a moment later. She squinted at him and did not quite mask the pity or the contempt or the anger. It was not anything she could help-she was a woman, a disappointed woman, and she was a feline.

«A big chest, broad shoulders and legs like trees; they don't always tell the story, do they, Richard? But who would have guessed? Certainly I didn't. I thought we were going to have a wizard of a time in bed. Now it turns out that you are less than a man.»