It had been a careful kiss in many ways—one, so my red lipstick didn’t smear like clown makeup, and two, so I didn’t nick my lips on the delicate points of his fangs as I pressed my mouth against his.
Jean-Claude drew back with a sigh. “Ma petite, you quite undo a man pressing so much of yourself against him in this dress.”
I grinned up at him as I went back to being as flat-footed as my heels would allow. “It’s not often that I can get this reaction from you in public. I like it.”
He leaned in and whispered against my hair, “As do I.”
Nathaniel came up beside us, sliding an arm around both our waists, which made us look at him. Jean-Claude raised a speculative eyebrow. I saw the mischief in Nathaniel’s eyes and knew that he was about to do something that I might regret, or it might be really fun. Either way, we were in public, and mischief didn’t always translate well in the rumor mill. St. Louis was actually getting mentioned regularly on some of the celebrity gossip shows thanks to Jean-Claude. The rest of us usually got mentioned only in reference to him. I was good with that; the big engagement announcement had moved me up the professional gossip food chain a bit, and I wasn’t good with that. Speculation seemed to be, “Would Anita Blake, infamous for playing the field, really commit to even the most beautiful vampire on the planet?” People were terribly invested in the princess (apparently that was me in this version) picking just one prince, or picking the prince (which was definitely Jean-Claude), because happily-ever-after couldn’t include more than one prince, not even in the twenty-first century. Since I would have married all three of the men legally if I could have, the idea, even certainty, in the press that I’d marry Jean-Claude and we’d both become happily monogamous was the same kind of thinking that made people who were bisexual think that marrying one sex would make them magically not be attracted to the other half of the population. It had taken me years to own the fact that it just didn’t work that neatly. The rest of the world was still looking for love to be simple, like a fairy tale. Why did most people want love to fit inside a child’s story? Why wouldn’t they let true love grow up and be real?