Kiss the Dead (40 page)

“Sounds like a plan.”

I lowered myself on top of him, and even with all the prep work I was still tight, wet, but tight. “Gods,” he said, “I’d forgotten how tight you stay even wet. It feels so… damn… good.”

I sat on top of him with him buried inside me as deep as he could go, our bodies married more intimately than anything else could make us. The feel of him inside me so far, so deep, so big, closed my eyes, bowed my spine above him. I whispered, “Feels so good.”

His voice was low, hoarse as he said, “Dance for me.”

I danced for him, finding a rhythm that rocked my body over and around his, and he began to push with his thighs, legs, abs, so that we got a lower body workout that no gym could offer. He stared at me as we made love, his eyes getting wider, and then between one dancing movement and another, the orgasm caught me and I writhed and screamed above him. “I won’t last if you do that again. Change positions.”

“What? Where?”

“Me on top. Couch.”

“Okay.”

He actually started on his knees with him pinning my left leg against the back of the couch, so the angle was a little deeper, a little more, as he began to push his body in and out of mine. I rose up enough to watch him slide in and out; one moment I was watching our bodies, feeling the pleasure build, and the next stroke pushed me over and I was writhing, shrieking, fingers digging into the red couch, as if holding on tight enough would remind me that I wasn’t just boneless, wordless, warm pleasure.

“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.

S
OMEONE 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?”

“Maybe he thought he’d stand a better chance of living through it with the police watching you.”

I looked at Micah. “Are you saying that he felt safer with the cops than with us?”

“He’s human; that means a lawyer, and a trial if he turns himself in, but if he meets you on a hunt you can kill him. He might wonder what you’d do in private with all your shapeshifter guards around you.”

“Good point.”

“Clean up, get dressed, get armed, and someone will drive you to talk to him.”

“I can drive myself.”

“You said the first time was a trap to kill you. They know you’re on your way, why not ambush you en route?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. “Okay, I’ll take guards, but they can only go so far into the police station; beyond that they just have to sit and twiddle their thumbs.”

“Thank you for just saying okay, and not arguing.” He smiled and kissed me, then licked his lips.

I frowned. “You tasted Dev on my lips, didn’t you?”

His eyes rolled upward, as if he were thinking, and then I realized he was tasting. “Mm-hm,” he said.

“You know, if you weren’t a wereleopard that would probably bother you.”

He shook his head. “It’s not being a wereleopard that makes sharing you okay with me, but I probably wouldn’t let you know I could taste another man on your lips if I weren’t a wereleopard. If I were just human, I’d pretend more.”

Once I would have had to ask questions to understand what he meant, but I totally got it now. Sometimes I thought a little bit more “animal” would help a lot of people be more real and honest in their lives.

“I’ll rinse off in the showers. I’ll be quick.”

“Dev will be there; resist temptation.”

I frowned at him. “I have bad guys to catch, I won’t get distracted.”

He raised an eyebrow.

I grinned, and blushed, then rolled my eyes. “Okay, I won’t get distracted today.”

He smiled, and kissed me again. “That’s my girl.”

And I was.

W
HEN TAKING BODYGUARDS
to a police station, you have to make sure that none of them have outstanding warrants. The wererats especially recruited from some rough places. Bram, tall, very dark, and handsome, with the military haircut that he just kept getting redone, waited with the car. He’d been army, rangers, and then a wereleopard had attacked him in some jungle somewhere, and he’d had a medical discharge. The army’s loss, our gain.

I purposefully didn’t bring anyone that I was dating. I didn’t want any more problems with the women at work, or the men for that matter. The multiple gorgeous boyfriends seemed to piss both groups off, just for different reasons. The men got all insecure, and the women got all jealous. So, Godofredo’s tall, dark, and very solid muscle stayed at the car with Bram. I took Claudia and Pride in with me.

Claudia was partially to amuse myself. I loved watching the male cops react to such a large, beautiful, and physically imposing woman. It just giggled me, and I was starting to own the things that made me happy, not because it made sense, or was horribly important, but it was just a happy.

Claudia had thrown a black windbreaker over her arsenal, and her arms, so that she didn’t frighten the other police too badly. I loved that she was another woman, and she looked as dangerous as she was; I was always too small to scare people just by showing up. Pride stood beside her like a gold shadow to her dark beauty. He was six-one to Mephistopheles’ six-three. Pride’s hair was short, falling in curls about an inch below his ears. His face was a little more triangular than Dev’s, and his eyes were a pale gold that wasn’t quite a brown and wasn’t dark enough to be wolf or lion amber. I’d asked Pride what he put on his driver’s license and he’d said brown, but it was a lie, just like Nathaniel was forced to put blue on his license, because lavender wasn’t an option. Standard answers rarely covered the men in my life, or even the ones who worked for me.

Pride was handsome, broad shouldered, athletic, and good enough armed and unarmed that Claudia didn’t have a problem with him being her backup. She had no higher praise. But honestly, Pride’s two greatest assets for today were that he wasn’t my lover, or anyone else’s permanent sweetie, and he was gorgeous. I was hoping I could sort of wave him in the direction of Detective Arnet, Millie, and all the women at work, and distract them from my actual boyfriends. Maybe I could even take some pressure off Brice, though honestly my main interest was me. Brice was new, and one of the loves of his life hadn’t been threatened by Arnet. She was beginning to spook me, and I wasn’t easy to spook.

The only serious downside that Pride had was that he didn’t flirt. He could seduce, or date, but he seemed incapable of light flirting. But the other gold tigers that I wasn’t sleeping with had other issues; one was a hothead, another was a serious historian and scholar and loved his books more than anything, and the last one was scouting out another vampire kiss where weretigers were the main animal to call of the Master of the City, so Pride was it.