Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

“I love you more.”

“I love you most.”

“I love you mostest.”

We hung up and I turned to find Jean-Claude out of the bathroom shirtless, but with his leather pants fastened. He was as dressed as he could get until he was sure it was safe to put the white shirt back on or he got a second, darker shirt.

“I really do like you in the blue; thank you for not getting dressed yet. Which of our cats was on the phone, for that is your endearment only to the two of them,” he said.

I ignored the compliment, because saying that it had been accidental rather than undressing for him on purpose seemed the wrong thing to say, so I said, “Glad you like it, and it was Micah; apparently he told Lisandro to alert him if we had any free time to talk.”

“Talk?” Jean-Claude said. “About what?”

“He didn’t say, but he’s already up the like bajillion steps from the underground apartments, so he’ll be here in minutes and you can ask him.”

“The steps were designed to discourage intruders, ma petite .”

I laughed. “Seriously, how many steps are there, has anyone ever counted?”

I would say he sat down on the couch, but that doesn’t really cover it. He draped himself artfully on the couch, long pale arms stretched along the back of it, so that the leather of the couch acted like a frame for his body. He rested one booted ankle on his opposite knee so that he managed to look both like a tough from some Old West movie and suggestive.

“Do you do that on purpose or are you just naturally that decorative?” I asked, leaning my butt against the desk.

“I did have a natural flair for being, as you say, decorative, but centuries of practice do, indeed, make perfect.” He smiled, obviously pleased with himself, and it made me smile, because once he’d hidden from me just how much he liked himself. I didn’t blame him, because I had so many issues with my own physicality that I’d been uncomfortable with how very comfortable he was in his own skin and with his own beauty.

He held one hand out toward me, and I went to him, because when someone you love holds out their hand to you, that’s what you’re supposed to do. I curled up beside him in my new blue undies and he drew me in against his body, holding me close with one arm.

“You may distract our leopard king dressed like this.”

“I don’t have time to talk and distract him,” I said, laughing, and started to get up, but he pulled me back down, and then there was a knock on the door.

“Just a minute,” I called out.

Lisandro said through the door, “It’s Micah.”

“I’m not exactly dressed,” I said, “so him, but not you.”

Lisandro laughed. “I’m going home to my wife at the end of shift, I won’t peek.” The door opened with a glimpse of Lisandro’s dark figure turned away so he couldn’t see into the room and Micah could walk past him.

Micah came through the door like he came through every door, as if the room were his room, or at the very least he was thinking of purchasing it. It was a surety and security in himself that he’d had since I’d met him. He was wearing blue jeans and a deep green T-shirt fitted to his lean runner’s body, because he was exactly my height, and when a man is that short he needs fitted clothes, or he always looks like he’s borrowing someone else’s. His dark brown hair was back in a braid, or something so tight that you could barely tell that it curled. Loose, it fell past his shoulders. He almost always kept it back, and if I hadn’t threatened to cut my hair short if he cut his, he’d have cut it boy-short, but I loved his hair, and he loved me.

He smiled when he saw us, his delicate triangular face alight with some inner joy; the sunglasses that hid his eyes stopped us from seeing that happy thought fill his eyes, but as if he heard my thought he took them off and let us see his chartreuse eyes. They were more green than gold because of the shirt he was wearing, but you could still see the yellow in them like sunlight shining through some jungle canopy. They were leopard eyes trapped in his human face; he’d had brown eyes in human form once, but that was before I met him. To me, Micah’s eyes were always this amazing color, in whatever form he took, human or leopard.

“Well, don’t you look pretty as a picture,” he said, his voice full of that happiness that showed in his face.

“Join us and it will be prettier,” I said.

He shook his head but kept walking toward us. “A man’s got to know his limitations, and since I’m third prettiest in the room, I won’t add to the beauty factor.”

I frowned. “You are beautiful,” I said.

“You are beautiful in your own right, mon ami .”

He grinned, standing just at the edge of the couch looking down at us. “I know I’m attractive, I’ll give you pretty, though when I was younger I hated being told I was pretty.”

“Not manly enough,” I said, and held my hand out to him.

He took my hand but didn’t sit down. “No, maybe if I’d been taller it wouldn’t have bothered me as much. It certainly doesn’t bother Jean-Claude.”

“Oh, mon chat , when I was your age men wore elaborate wigs and clothes more elaborate than women’s fashion today. A pretty man was prized, and if he could ride, hunt, and use a sword, then he was the height of everything that was best in a man.”

“I can’t imagine a world where I didn’t get grief for looking the way I do as a man.”

“It was a man who taught me how to wear high heels, because that’s what noblemen wore.”

“Nice.”

I pulled on Micah’s hand. “Cuddle with us.”

He grinned and shook his head. “If I cuddle with you wearing that I’ll get distracted, and we need to talk.”

My smile faded around the edges. “That sounds ominous.”

Jean-Claude held me a little tighter. “In all the centuries I have been alive, no conversation that began with the equivalent of ‘we need to talk’ has ever gone well.”

“I don’t mean it like that, but I’ve been trying to talk to just the two of you for a few days now and the scheduling hasn’t worked out. I know Anita has to be on the road in a little less than forty-five minutes, and Jean-Claude has at least two hours before he can leave the building safely for Guilty Pleasures.”

“You checked our schedules,” I said.

“I know your schedules, or at least Jean-Claude’s. Yours is too flexible to memorize.”

“Okay, sit down and talk instead of cuddle.”

He gave me a look that took in every inch of me in the nice bra and panties. “I’ll try, but you in more clothes might help me focus on talking.”

I blushed and hated it.

He grinned and leaned down to lay a careful kiss on my mouth. “I love that you still blush.”

I frowned at him. “Well, I don’t.”

“It is very endearing,” Jean-Claude said.

“Don’t you start.”

“What is it you need to speak about?” he said, looking up at Micah.

Micah sat down on the couch, holding my hand, but perching on the edge of the couch as if touching me at all would make him forget what he wanted to say. “You know that I don’t have a problem with Jean-Claude and you getting married. You can only legally wed one person and that’s got to be our master, which is him.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You have been most gracious,” Jean-Claude said.

“You know that Nathaniel and I have been talking about having a handfasting ceremony with Anita for the three of us.”

Jean-Claude nodded.

“We’ve been talking about getting rings to go on the right-hand ring finger for our threesome.”

“I wish you better luck getting her to approve designs than I am having.”