Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(112)
spooned on the other side of Nathaniel so that our arms overlapped and held each other. Jean-Claude’s arms were long enough that his hand touched Dev.
Nathaniel was already asleep by the time Richard came out of the bathroom. He hadn’t brought any pajamas, so he was as nude as the rest of us as he left the bathroom door slightly ajar like a nightlight. He’d remembered, that was nice.
Dev tensed watching him walk around the room. The bed moved as he climbed in bed behind Jean-Claude. I heard my vampire fiancé make a small contented sound and then Richard’s arm was over him and touching me. Richard’s hand tensed, started to move, but I moved my hand so I could press his hand back on my side. I patted his hand and felt the tension leave his hand and arm. I put my arm back over Nathaniel and Dev, who reached up to touch my hand as if for reassurance. I wasn’t sure I could keep everyone out of my head, but I thought at him how happy I was to feel him on the other side of Nathaniel and how proud I was to call him my golden tiger, and my lover. He raised my hand and kissed my fingertips, which were about all he could reach without moving everyone.
Jean-Claude stroked his hand along Dev’s side under the silky sheets. Nathaniel snuggled lower in his sleep, and then Jean-Claude died. I felt him leave, heard the pained sound he usually made when it happened. Richard moved closer on the other side of him, holding him in place. I did the same on my side, so we held him as close as we could. We would hold him that way all day as we slept, and when he woke we were both there to see him smile up at us. Nathaniel and Dev kissed him, kissed me, then gave us the room, because the first time waking up together after such a long time apart needed to be just us. We started by cleaning up in Jean-Claude’s huge tub with its mirrored walls, but we didn’t end there. We ended on the bed in the silk sheets with our hair still wet, which is very bad for silk, but there would be other sheets to buy, and there would never be another first time for the three of us to wake up together and remind ourselves why we’d tried to love each other ten years ago, and why we’d failed, and why this time we just might succeed.
The wedding of the century is imminent for Anita Blake but first she must overcome the biggest obstacle of all: her family.
Read more for an exclusive sneak peek at
SLAY
the next Anita Blake novel.
I WAS STANDING AT the arrival area for the A gates at St. Louis Lambert International Airport trying to see through the continuing crowds of people that kept spilling out past the TSA agent sitting at the little lectern. Arriving passengers had been streaming past the roped-off lines of other passengers waiting in line to go through security and depart. None of them had been my family, either coming or going. I was nervous, which made me want to touch the gun at my waist, but since I was carrying concealed and people tend to panic if you flash in the airport these days, I resisted the urge.
Flashing the gun would have flashed my U.S. Marshal badge, too, but I’d found that people who wanted to freak about the gun never seemed to see the badge clipped next to it. I really didn’t want my dad and stepmom’s first glimpse of me in eight years to be kneeling on the floor with my fingers laced behind my head while some newbie from Metro police was yelling at me to comply. I was also really beginning to regret the high, spiked heels. They took me from five-three to five-seven and made my legs look long and shapely, and looked amazing with my short swishy skirt, but the heels weren’t made for standing around in the airport on hard tile floors. Walking was fine in them, I’d even been learning to dance in heels this high as we looked at possible footwear for the wedding, but standing was beginning to hurt.
“You’re actually scared,” Nicky said beside me. He stood like a friendly, blond mountain, so muscled that he’d had to get his leather jacket custom tailored to fit over his upper body. The jeans he had gotten from a bodybuilder site, but he’d wanted a jacket that could cover carrying concealed and for that he’d had to buy from a site that catered to athletic men and even then he’d had to find an in-town tailor. He wasn’t nervous and reaching for his gun like a dangerous comfort object. He was standing cool and calm, keeping an eye on the crowd and the customers who went into the little store against the opposite wall. I caught a glimpse of a slender figure picking up a magazine from the rack near the entrance to the store. They were wearing an oversized hoodie, nondescript jeans, and jogging shoes. They looked like a dozen teens to twenties that had passed by us, so why had they caught my attention? I tensed, trying to feel if it was a vampire, or something else supernatural that wasn’t on our side, and then Ru turned around so I could see his face and a bit of his short blond hair. His bored why-did-my-parents-make-me-come-here expression never changed, but his startling dark eyes looked into mine. He was part of my security tonight. He and his sister, Rodina. I hadn’t even caught a glimpse of her yet; then I realized that Ru had done something small on purpose so I’d look at him. He was still undercover, but he wanted me to see him, so I’d feel better. Seeing him helped me feel better about Deimos, the ancient vampire who had come to town recently and attacked us. We’d almost canceled my family’s visit, but after the one attempt Deimos had left us alone. We were hoping he’d found us too powerful and just gone back into hiding. We’d delayed my family’s visit for weeks, but when we couldn’t find him, and he didn’t try to find us again, we finally had to move forward with fitting my dad for his outfit if he was giving me away. Since he was very Catholic and I was marrying