A private smile flirted at Jack's lean mouth, and he flipped his longish, dark hair back from the part down the middle as he returned his lover's smile.

Teague flushed, the red mottling his Irish-fair skin, making the freckles stand out on his razor cheekbones. Abruptly, Teague's attention was very seriously on the short young woman at the head of the table. She was plain and freckled, with wide hips and shoulders and a flat chest, and at first glance looked incongruous with her tall, anime-beautiful mates, Green and Bracken. One look at the deference everybody at the leader's table paid to the little college student, and she suddenly assumed a glamour all her own.

Right now, that glamour made Teague laugh a little at something she said, and Jack would be jealous, but she smiled at Jack as she said it and waved gaily, and it was obvious that whatever it had been, she didn't have any designs on Jack's chosen mate.

He couldn't say the same thing about the breathtakingly pretty woman sitting next to him.

"I like the way he looks at you," Katy Garcia said lowly, her own dark hair floating around her face in a spangle of silver from something she'd put in it when she dressed for dinner. She had clear, dusky skin, a heart-shaped face, flared hips, a tiny waist, and lush breasts. If it hadn't been for her direct gaze and the wisdom in her brown eyes, he would have said the silver spangle was overkill.

"What do you like about it?" Jack asked, curious, and the smile she slanted up at him was speculative and sultry. Jack's mouth went suddenly dry, and he realized that Teague wasn't the only one who knew how to send hot looks. Katy saw him blush, and her eyes grew positively predatory.

"It's the way I used to look at smack," she murmured, "all hot, like it was everything I ever wanted, like it would make my heart beat and fill my stomach and caress my skin...except..."

"Except what?" Jack asked, surprised that his voice didn't squeak. Between Teague's looks -- oh, he gave them all day -- across the common room, in their own shared bedroom as Jack was reading, across the table at breakfast... all day long those hungry, devouring looks -- but between them and Katy's playful, seductive voice...

Goddess, he had a hard-on that wouldn't quit.

"Except he doesn't want anything from you," Katy finished wisely. "I wanted that smack -- I needed what it had to give me. He doesn't want anything from you, does he? He just wants to give and give and give until you have to stay with him, doesn't he?" She shuddered a little, ecstasy by proxy. Until she came to Green's, no one had wanted Katy. Now that she was clean -- becoming a werewolf did that to you -- it was clear that smack had been a pale substitute for the drug she'd really wanted.

Jack looked at her, wondering if that low, sultry voice was his imagination, if she really wanted him as well as Teague. She'd made her attraction -- her lifelong crush, actually -- on Jack's lover absolutely clear. But since she'd never been competitive with Jack, had never tried to vie for Teague's affections, never tried to show Jack up or seduce Teague behind Jack's back, Jack had no choice but to accept her friendliness -- and her willingness to help them through their first transition -- for what it appeared to be.

But that didn't keep her from being brutally honest, either.

"So, Jacky," she was saying now, since his attention seemed to be cleaved between her honest conversation and his own covert observations of the man he'd loved for over a year, "what's it like to be looked at the way he's looking at you?"

"What's it like?" Suddenly Jack's attention was all on Katy, the question vibrating through him like a cathedral bell. What was it like to have Teague turn those burning, brown-green eyes on him, wanting him, yearning for him, begging him to be ready and willing, hands on the bed, ass in the air, accepting his rough, desperate sex as the only love he could give?

It's like a hand on my ass, a mouth on my cock, fingers on my nipples, a voice in my ear whispering sex, a come so hard it hurts...

And one of those shudders of sixth sense that he'd been having since he'd been bitten shook him hard, and he looked up to find Teague's eyes fastened hotly, hungrily, not just on Jack, but on the both of them, Jack and Katy, their heads bent together and almost touching, the breath of their conversation in the midst of the weekly banquet close enough to be a scent on the other's skin.

Jack's eyes connected with Teague's, the current flowing between them so thick he wondered that anyone in between them didn't get fried by the electricity.

"If you want to know what it's like, Princess," Jack murmured, "why don't you look at him now, because he's got us both in his sights." ENDEXCERPT