Laurell Hamilton - Kiss The Dead

“Anita!” And he began to move faster, harder, his careful rhythm forgotten in the needs of his body, the feel of mine, and my pleasure rode on the almost frantic shoving of his body into mine. I screamed, and tried to move underneath him, but he tightened his hands on my thighs and forced me still as he began to go fast and faster, deep and deeper, until he began to hit the end of me with every other stroke, not pounding, but a tap, a pulse, and then finally he couldn’t hold that rhythm either and he drove himself home, burying as deep in me as he could, in one last shuddering push that made him cry out my name, and made me scream one last orgasm that drowned out everything.

He pulled out, which made me writhe again, and then pushed me a little to the front of the couch so he could collapse behind me. He wrapped me in his shaking arms, a dew of sweat on his chest as he hugged me to him, our bodies spooning as he fought to catch his breath. His heart pounded against my back, and I lay there breathless, twitching, my body immobile from the waist down, as the aftershocks shivered and played through my body.

He whispered, “I’ve missed girls.”

I managed to whisper, “I noticed.”

That made him give that low, masculine chuckle, and he hugged me close, tucking me in against his body, curling around me. We fell asleep curled in each other’s arms, on the couch in the living room where everyone had to walk past to get to anything farther underground. For me to forget we were in semipublic, and both of us to forget to clean up first, meant the sex was good, and we were both tired. Not a tiredness of lack of sleep, but more of too many things happening in too small a space of time. It had been a night and now a day of too much emotion. Dev and I slept all the bad away wrapped in a cocoon of flesh, and sex, and relief. As much as he loved Asher, he was never going to be able to give up women, and he knew I would never ask him to give up men. The sex was Dev’s way of saying he was done with Asher, or at least done with the old rules. In trying to keep the Devil to himself, Asher had made certain he wouldn’t be able to keep him at all. I slept in the Devil’s arms and knew that for this Mephistopheles, the heaven of love had come at too heavy a price, and he was ready to come back to the purgatory of I-like-you-lots-let’s-fuck. It wasn’t true love, but it wasn’t exactly not-love either.

SOMEONE WAS STROKING my face, saying softly, “Anita, Anita, wake up, sweetheart.”

I cuddled into Micah’s hand, and then realized that the body behind me wasn’t Nathaniel, too tall, too broad, and all I could feel was Micah’s hand, not his whole body pressed to the front of me. It made me blink awake. I saw the living room in the Circus, and remembered sex with Dev, knew it was his arm around my waist, his body pressed against the back of mine.

I raised up enough to realize I’d been lying on a pillow and Dev’s arm. He moved in his sleep and made a soft groan.

“How long have we been asleep?” I asked.

“Guards say less than two hours,” Micah said.

I looked up at Micah. His hair was loose around his shoulders and he was wearing a pair of jeans, T-shirt untucked, which usually meant he’d dressed in a hurry. He liked his T-shirts tucked in like I did, and he always did something with his hair.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, and just like that a spurt of adrenaline washed over me. I was alert, realizing I’d left my weapons in a pile against the far wall, out of reach. Shit, that was careless.

Dev tensed against me and raised that big upper body off the couch, behind me. “My arm is completely asleep; fuck.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Micah said, “everyone’s safe.”

I sat up and felt the dried stickiness between our bodies give way. Dev yelled, “Ah, holy shit!”

I froze in midmovement. “What?”

“Condom… glued… to body… and you,” he said in a tight, pain-filled voice.

“That’s why you clean up afterward,” Micah said, but he was laughing.

“Sorry,” I said, “I won’t move.”

“It’s okay… damage done. Damn!”

“I didn’t move,” I said.

“I did.”

“I thought you said, damage done.”

“You’re unglued, but I’m stuck to myself.”

Micah was laughing full out now. He stood up and offered me a hand. I took it, but I was already looking at my weapons all the way across the room. Technically we were safe, and there were always bodyguards around, but… guns are useless if they’re out of reach.

He pulled my hand so that I was standing in front of him. He wrapped his arms around me, but kept them a little higher on my back than usual. He was still laughing, his face alight with it, those green-gold eyes sparkling. It made me wonder if a natural leopard would look like that if it laughed like a person.

“Everything is okay, Anita, you don’t need the guns.”

I wrapped my arms around him and looked into his eyes. Flat-footed we were even, eye to eye. “Am I that easy to read?”

“For me,” he said, smiling.

Dev got up carefully from the couch. “I’m going to clean up.”

“Anita needs to rinse off, but only rinse off, no shower sex.”

I looked at him, and Dev said, “I think I lost skin off my bits, so she’s safe; ow.”

“Zerbrowski called,” Micah said.

I tensed all over again. He hugged me tighter and repeated, “They need you at the station, that’s all.”

“Why? What’s happened?” I couldn’t relax into his arms this time. Zerbrowski wouldn’t have called if there wasn’t something wrong.

“They’ve got a man who claims to be the human servant to a master vampire named Benjamin. He won’t speak to anyone but you.”

I started to say I didn’t know a master vampire by that name, and then the light dawned. Barney the vampire, Barney Wilcox, our first suspect in the abduction of the girl, had said that the leader of their rebel movement was named Benjamin. Barney had said Benjamin was old school and had a human servant. I hadn’t believed him, or I’d thought his “leader” was pretending to be that powerful so the others would follow him. I hadn’t believed that any vampire powerful enough to have a servant would buy into such modern ideals as vampires being independent of any master, just good little citizens. I’d assumed any master vampire would know better.

“Is he really a human servant?” I asked.

“They can’t tell. You know that one of the points of having a human servant is that they can be the vampire’s human presence. If he seemed like anything else, he’d be a bad human servant, right?”

I thought about it, then nodded. “Though by that definition I suck as a human servant, since I so don’t hit the radar as human.”

“You’re a special case,” he said.

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Were you expecting Benjamin or his representative to show up?” he asked.

“No, I thought the other vampire was lying, or being fooled. I’ll get dressed and check him out.”

“Clean up first, trust me,” he said, smiling.

“The police or the would-be human servant aren’t wereanimals; they won’t be able to smell anything.”

He smiled a little wider. “Anita, rinse off, make it fast, but the police are sitting on your visitor. He’ll be waiting when you’re ready.”

“I didn’t hear my phone, did I?” I asked.

“Apparently not,” he said.

“So Zerbrowski called you to get me.”

“It’s daylight, he can’t call Jean-Claude.”

“True.”

“What’s wrong? You look way too serious. What are you thinking?”

“That the first time Benjamin’s name was mentioned it was a trap to kill me, and now his servant just walks into the police station to talk to me; why? Why not try to contact us in the old vampire tradition of meeting under a white flag to negotiate?”