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could answer, she raised her voice. "It's not here."
    "It's under the old copies of
Art Papers
."
    "It's not here."
    Sunshine entered the room. Walking with the grace of a fairy princess, she wore a long-sleeved purple dress so bright, he had to squint from the hue. As she crossed in front of the window, he realized the material was rather sheer, gifting him with a pleasant view of her lush, ample curves and the fact that she wore nothing beneath that dress.
    Nothing except her tanned skin.
    His throat went dry.
    She was wiping paint from her hands with a towel as she moved to the nightstand without even glancing his way.
    "It's right here," she said, pulling out a magazine and handing it to the older woman.
    Finally, Sunshine looked to the bed and met his gaze. "Are you hungry?"
    "Where are my clothes?"
    She cast a sheepish look at Starla. "Did you ask his name?"
    "It's Steve."
    "It's not Steve."
    Sunshine paid him no attention as she turned Starla to face him. Both women stared at him lying there on the bed as if he were some inanimate curiosity.
    Talon moved the pink sheet up higher over his waist. Then, suddenly self-conscious, he moved his bare leg under the cover as well, and bent his knee so that the center part of his body wasn't quite so obvious underneath the thin cotton.
    Still the two women stared at him.
    "You see what I was telling you?" Sunshine asked. "Does he not have the most incredible aura you've ever seen?"
    "He's definitely an old soul. With Druid blood. I'm sure of it."
    "You think?" Sunshine asked.
    "Oh, yeah. We need to talk him into letting us do a past-life regression and see what we come up with."
    Okay, they were both nuts.
    "Women," he said sharply. "I need my clothes, and I need them
now
."
    "See," Sunshine said. "See the way his aura changes. It's absolutely living."
    "You know, I've never seen that before. It's really different." Then Starla drifted out of the room as she flipped through the magazine.
    Sunshine was still wiping paint off her hands. "Hungry?"
    How did she do that? How could she shift from one topic to the other and then back again?
    "No," he said, trying to keep her on the main point. "I want my clothes."
    She actually cringed. "What happened to the tags in your pants?"
    Talon frowned at the odd question. He was keeping a rein on his irritation and temper, but something about being around this woman made it difficult. "I beg your pardon?"
    "Well, you know they were covered in blood…"
    A bad feeling settled into his stomach. "And?"
    "I was going to clean them, and—"
    "Oh shit, you washed them?"
    "It wasn't the washing that damaged them so much as the drying."
    "You dried my
leather
pants?"
    "Well, I didn't know they were leather," she said softly. "They felt really soft and strange so I thought they were pleather or something. I wash my pleather dress all the time without it disintegrating and shrinking like your pants did."
    Talon rubbed his forehead with his hand. This was so not good. How on earth could he get out of her apartment in the middle of the day with no clothes on?
    "You know," she continued, "you really shouldn't cut the tags out of your clothes."
    It had been a long time since he had felt real, deep aggravation, but he was starting to feel it now. "Those were
custom
, handmade leather pants. They never have tags."
    "Oh," she said, looking even more sheepish. "I would have bought you some more, but since they didn't have tags in them, I didn't know what size to buy."
    "Great. I live to be stuck in strange places, naked."
    She started to smile at him, then pressed her lips together as if thinking better of it. "I have some pink sweatpants that really wouldn't fit you, and even if they did, I'm sure you wouldn't want to wear them anyway, would you?"
    "No. Did you wash my wallet too?"
    "Oh, no. I took it out of your pants."
    "Good. Where is it?"
    She became quiet again and a feeling of doomed dread consumed him.
    "Do I want to know?" he asked.
    "Well…" He was