Nathaniel moved closer to Jean-Claude, drawing me in tighter with him, so that we were hugging him at the same time, and then he raised his face up to the other man. At five-nine he didn’t have to go up on tiptoe for Jean-Claude to bend down and take the kiss he was offering. It was more delicate and chaste than ours had been, but it was the first public kiss between them . . . ever. I caught a flash of light and realized someone had used a phone to capture the moment. It would be on Facebook before we left the reception. Crap.
Jean-Claude pulled back with a pleasant expression on his face, but I’d been looking at his face for over six years now, and I knew he was as puzzled as I was, because he and Nathaniel didn’t kiss. They weren’t lovers.
Nathaniel smiled up at him, then turned and kissed me with the taste of Jean-Claude still on his lips. My own lipstick came back to me, smooth and slightly sweet. It’s funny that I didn’t really taste my lipstick when I wore it, but when I kissed the men and then they kissed me back, I could taste it more sometimes.
Nathaniel turned from us and reached for Micah. He hesitated a moment, but then went to him, and they kissed. Micah tried to keep it chaste, but that wasn’t what Nathaniel wanted, and instead of drawing away from the other love of our lives, he let Nathaniel draw him into the kiss. Nathaniel’s hands went underneath Micah’s suit jacket the way mine had with Jean-Claude, but there was something about watching those strong arms wrap around each other that moved me more. They kissed each other in private and public, but this was probably one of the most passionate ones I’d seen from them where outsiders could see.
Normally, it would just have been exciting seeing my men together, but I had a flash of emotion from Nathaniel that he couldn’t keep to himself behind his metaphysical shields. He was happy, fiercely happy. It was the wedding and that we were planning our own commitment ceremony. He’d never thought he’d ever have anyone who loved him enough to put a ring on his finger, and now he had two people.
We’d told Tomas that we weren’t just survivors, we were thrivers, and we were, we all were.
Love makes you closer, but when you have metaphysical ties to each other, it can be a level of emotional and mental closeness that is either heaven or hell. With Nathaniel it was usually heaven, and that was good, because Jean-Claude and I had had our share of being tied to people who were hellish. Think about being able to feel someone’s emotions, get glimpses of exactly what they’re thinking, and the love you had for one another had turned to hate years ago; now think of being bound like that forever, literally forever, with no way to break free. Hell about covers it.
We were thrivers; all four of us were that and so much more.
“This one needs a ring, and soon, ma petite,” Jean-Claude whispered through my mind, as if a thought could talk back to you. Years ago “hearing” someone in my head like that had scared the crap out of me, and I’d fought hard to stay free of it, but it was a heck of a lot more private than whispering.
I had to concentrate hard to think back at him without speaking out loud. “Yeah, he’s got wedding fever like a girl.”
“You will never be so moved by a wedding, ma petite.”
Out loud I said, “No, but I’m still going to marry you.”
He drew me into his arms again, and this time the kiss was less careful, lipstick be damned.
In her twenty-fifth adventure, vampire hunter and necromancer Anita Blake learns that evil is in the eye of the beholder . . . keep reading for an excerpt from
CRIMSON DEATH
Available now!
I’D FALLEN ASLEEP cuddled between two of the men I loved most, with one arm flung across their naked bodies so I could touch the third. All three of them were warm when I fell asleep, but when my phone woke me hours later, only two of the bodies in the bed were still warm. The only vampire in the bed had died when the sun came up a mile over our heads in our nice safe cave of a bedroom. It was great for vampires, but if you were afraid of the dark or didn’t like the idea of tons of stone pressing down on your head, well, you couldn’t sleep with us.