"You'd have to ask Eric about that."

"I think you would have to tell him. The queen's wishes are Eric's orders."

I could feel my face fall. I didn't want to tell Eric, the sheriff of Louisiana's Area Five, anything. Eric's feelings for me were confused. I can assure you, vamps don't like feeling confused. The sheriff had lost his memory of the short time he'd spent hiding in my house. That memory gap had driven Eric nuts; he liked being in control, and that meant being cognizant of his own actions every second of the night. So he'd waited until he could perform an action on my behalf, and as payment for that action he'd demanded my account of what had passed while he stayed with me.

Maybe I'd carried the frankness thing a little too far. Eric wasn't exactly surprised that we'd had sex; but he was stunned when I told him he'd offered to give up his hard-won position in the vampire hierarchy and to come live with me.

If you knew Eric, you'd know that was pretty much intolerable to him.

He didn't talk to me any more. He stared at me when we met, as if he were trying to resurrect his own memories of that time, to prove me wrong. It made me sad to see that the relationship we'd had—not the secret happiness of the few days he'd spent with me, but the entertaining relationship between a man and a woman who had little in common but a sense of humor—didn't seem to exist any more.

I knew it was up to me to tell him that his queen had superseded him, but I sure didn't want to.

"Smile's all gone," Quinn observed. He looked serious himself.

"Well, Eric is a…" I didn't know how to finish the sentence. "He's a complicated guy," I said lamely.

"What shall we do on our first date?" Quinn asked. So he was a good subject changer.

"We could go to the movies," I said, to start the ball rolling.