some color in his cheeks and was just a much happier kid.
Nathaniel gave me a brilliant smile as he turned bread in his mitted hands and saw me. He put the bread on the cooling racks by the sink, and took the mitts off as he moved toward me. Sin turned from stirring something and smiled; some thought or emotion chased across his face so fast that I couldn’t read it, but it wilted his smile around the edges for a minute, whatever it had been. He finally said, “Hey, Anita. Glad you’re home.”
There it was, a simple sentence that stood in for a whole bunch of words that might get said later, or might never get spoken out loud. At least he’d know not to say out loud,
Nicky started taking the bacon out of the pan with tongs. The bacon looked very crisp, just the way I liked it. He glanced back at me and said, “Breakfast is almost ready.”
Gina and Zeke said hello, and the baby laughed, that low gurgly laugh that some boy babies have, and girl babies never seem to.
I said hi to everyone, but walked to meet Nathaniel in the middle of the kitchen floor. He’d tossed his oven mitts on the kitchen island, and rolled toward me in that sexy, swinging walk that he used onstage, the roll of his lovely hips that made the customers at Guilty Pleasures scream with delight, but this show was all for me. It was also the real deal. It was hard to explain how it was different, but there was a difference, or maybe what was different was what happened next.
I smiled and he smiled back. His lavender eyes were darker and not just from the purple apron that covered his bare chest. His eyes showed his emotions; richer color meant happy him, though truly purple dark eyes were angry him. It would be three years together in about a month; I knew his face the way I knew my own, maybe better. I didn’t spend much time gazing into my own eyes. The smile he gave me was one you never saw at the club; it was a smile that filled his eyes with… love. That he loved me was there in his eyes, in his face, and I knew my face reflected it back like water reflects the sun back at itself, in a blinding dazzle of happy light.
My arms slid around his waist, hands sliding over the rougher fabric of the apron, to the smooth, muscled glide of his bare waist and back. God, he felt so good, just that much, and it made me close my eyes for a moment. He pulled me into his body, so that we touched from chest to groin. He didn’t press me too tightly, just touching, so to truly feel if he was happy to see me I’d have had to grind myself against him. I didn’t, because we weren’t alone, but he had a smile on his face that let me know that he knew I’d thought about it. The smile was mostly mischievous, with an edge of wicked fun, and in his eyes was a confidence that he knew exactly how he affected me, and just how beautiful he was. Once he’d believed that only his beauty and his ability at sex made him worth anything, but he knew he was so much more to me than just that; it had given him a confidence that he hadn’t had when I first met him.
“Kiss,” Cynric said, “so the rest of us can have a turn.”
I gave him an unfriendly look, but Nicky added, “Food’s getting cold, Anita.”
Nathaniel just leaned his extra height downward, curving his body toward me. I would have argued with everyone, but Nathaniel just went with it, which made me rise up on the balls of my feet and lean my face up toward his.
We kissed, a brush of lips that became a caress of mouths, but chaste by our usual standards. I drew back from the kiss, my hand behind his neck, gazing up into his eyes at that startlingly close distance. I wanted to push my tongue between his lips, to do so much more with my hands, but we had an audience, and especially the baby. There was a time when I wouldn’t have worried about a baby that young, assuming he wouldn’t pay attention, but Matthew, who was now three, belonged to a widow of one of Jean-Claude’s vampires, and we babysat Matthew sometimes. He insisted that he get a kiss from me every time I saw him. But what creeped me was that he wanted a kiss on the mouth, like the other big boys, because all the big boys kiss ’Nita. His mother, Monica Vespucci, thought it was cute. I didn’t. Matthew had obviously formed very firm opinions of grown-up behavior, at what I thought was too young an age to care.
Nathaniel and I had discussed how bothered I was about the toddler’s attitude, so he just let me go with a smile, raising my hand up to lay his lips against my knuckles, and then moving back to start cutting the cooling bread into thick toast-size pieces.
Nicky and Cynric came forward at the same time. They looked at each other. Cynric was nearly as tall as Nicky now, but Nicky was still almost three times as broad across the shoulders and chest, which meant the younger man looked almost fragile beside him.
“I’m her blue tiger to call,” Cynric said. His hands were in loose fists at his sides. He was visibly fighting to keep his shoulders from hunching up, or to keep from giving any of those secondary clues that men do before a fight starts.
“And I’m just her Bride of Dracula, her cannon fodder,” Nicky said, but there was nothing in his voice that said he thought that was a bad thing, or a lesser thing.
“Exactly,” Cynric said.
“If we were doing some formal vampire thing, you’d go first, but this is just us in our kitchen, and by shapeshifter rules I can still beat the shit out of you.”
I must have made some involuntary movement, because Nathaniel said, “Anita.” It made me look at him where he stood across the kitchen. He shook his head. I was supposed to let them work it out. I trusted Nathaniel’s opinion in that moment, but if it came to a fight I was stopping it.
“Almost everyone in Micah’s pard can beat him up, but they let him lead, they respect him as their Nimir-Raj.” Cynric didn’t sound angry, just trying to understand.
Nicky nodded. “True, but you don’t just earn leadership by beating up people; it’s one of the reasons I wasn’t the Rex of my old lion pride. I probably could have won the fight with our king, but he was a better leader than I was, and I knew that without having to fight him.”
Cynric frowned, face going all serious. “But your old Rex was a fighter and a mercenary; Micah isn’t.”
It was Gina who spoke; her face wasn’t happy now. Her dark eyes were haunted as she moved toward them. “Micah saved me; he saved us all. He offered himself to Chimera in our place. He was powerful enough that Chimera couldn’t force him into animal form as a punishment like he could Zeke. Micah changed into his leopard form and took the punishment, even though he didn’t know if he’d ever come back to human form again. That’s why his eyes are leopard eyes. His eyes were brown before.” The tall woman hunched in on herself, hugging herself as if she were cold in the warm kitchen.
Zeke spoke in that gravelly deep voice from where he sat at the table. “You have no idea what it’s like to be trapped for weeks in animal form. You think you will go mad, and then you hope you become all animal, because then at least you won’t know, won’t remember being human.”
The baby in his lap had stopped laughing and was watching his father’s face in that solemn baby way, as if he were filing it all away.
Cynric went to Gina and hugged her. “I’m so sorry, Gina, I didn’t mean to make you sad.” He hugged her tight, stroking her hair like you’d soothe a child. He looked at the werewolf. “I’m sorry, Zeke, I won’t bring it up again.”
Gina hugged him back, and turned, wiping tears away, and went back to her husband and baby.
Cynric motioned to Nicky. “You get your kiss first, and not because you’d win a fight with me. You’re right, dominance isn’t just about who’s stronger, sometimes it’s about being smarter, and I so am not today. I knew better than to bring all that up in front of them.”
Nicky gripped his shoulder. “You learn a lot faster than I did at your age, Sin.”
Cynric grinned and rolled his eyes. “Is that a compliment, or should I be insulted?”
Nicky gave him a little push with his hand, grinning back. The small push moved Cynric back by inches. Nathaniel was smiling at both of them. Our eyes met across the kitchen and his seemed to say,
Nicky turned to me, face still shining with humor. He wrapped me in his big arms, pulling us close together. I had other men in my life who were taller than Nicky, but no one as muscled up. Truthfully, it was a little too much of a good thing for my preference, but it had just become Nicky, and I knew how to wrap my much smaller body around him, cuddling in among all those muscles, all that strength. Every man in my life had his own feel, his own taste, his own style of… most things. Nicky was like a muscle sandwich of manly goodness.
