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“Oh, was my sister flirting with you?” Butterfly laughter fluttered in my stomach—or maybe that was just last night’s dinner.

“Your sister always flirts with me, except when she can flirt with Damiel.”

“Then I’ll make sure to invite your father the next time we come over here. And your mother too. It wouldn’t be a real family dinner without some drama.”

“Leda, you enjoy stoking the fire far too much,” Nero said, wrapping his arms around me.

“Was that an invitation to stoke your fire, General?”

He snorted. “I hope your jokes improve as the day progresses.”

“I doubt it. I wasted all my weekly snark on Colonel Fireswift yesterday. And he didn’t even flinch. Ok, maybe he did flinch once or twice. In horror.”

“Fireswift will survive. And suffering builds character.”

“More words of wisdom from your father?” I teased.

“Damiel isn’t wrong about everything.”

That was high praise among angels.

“Nice to hear you two are getting along better,” I said.

“We haven’t tried to kill each other yet this month.”

“Oh, come now. Don’t be so melodramatic.” I leaned in and kissed him. “Even though I know melodrama is very befitting of an angel. Especially the male angels. You’re such drama queens. That’s why Tessa loves you all so much.”

Nero’s face was as hard as granite. “You don’t say.”

“But I think my sister is just messing with you and Damiel to get a reaction out of you.”

“I wonder where she could have learned that,” Nero said drily.

My smile was pure innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The first time we met, you propositioned me.”

“I did no such thing!” I protested.

“You did,” he replied with a smooth smile. “When I asked why you wanted to join the Legion, you said, and I quote, ‘I hear angels are great in the sack’.”

“That was not a proposition. It was my aggravation shining through at being asked that question twenty million times.”

Nero pressed on, undaunted. “And then you offered to tell me your bra size.”

“That was a joke!”

“Later you made mention to me of a ‘second date’.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know, for someone with such a picture-perfect memory, you sure have a talent for rearranging reality to suit your purpose.”

“Those are hardly mutually-exclusive skills. In fact, they are quite complementary. As I’ve told you many times, Pandora, you have to know the rules inside-out in order to bend them to your needs.”

“Or outright break them.”

He nodded. “If necessary.”

“Necessary.” I chuckled. “While we’re on the topic of the sins of our first encounter, my love, was it truly necessary for you to interview me by sending me after three vampires? What do the Legion’s regulations say about that?”