Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(16)

“We’ve got our date night scheduled,” I said, smiling.

He smiled wide enough to flash a gleam of fang even in the dim light of the alley. “You, Nathaniel, and me.”

I grinned back. “Yep, though Angel keeps asking about a foursome.”

“I didn’t say no, just not this date night.”

“You’re going to make Angel feel insecure if you keep putting it off,” I said.

He laughed. “Nothing makes Angel insecure, she’s beautiful and she knows it.”

“You’re right, but like all really secure women she won’t keep sex on the table forever if you keep saying no.”

“I didn’t say no. I said I wanted it to be a foursome with you and Nathaniel, which means we’re working around all our schedules.”

“The cry of real polyamory is ‘Let me check my calendar,’?” I said.

We both laughed. Then we were left looking at each other.

“I would like to kiss you good-bye,” he said.

“I want to kiss you good-bye, too, but I think we both need to get to work.”

“No, you need to get ready for your date night with Jean-Claude.”

“You’re right, so I’m going now to do what I need to do, and you’re going to do what you need to do,” I said.

“Then go,” he said, looking at me. He didn’t want me to go, and I didn’t want to go with the desire hanging in the air between us. If we could have shared blood or had sex, then it would have been sated, until the next time. The three of us were still working out the power dynamics. Nathaniel was my leopard to call; he shouldn’t have been in charge of how things worked, but he wasn’t conflicted about what he wanted from our threesome. He had helped Damian get over his conflicts, and then me, so now I had another vampire in my life that I craved. I wasn’t in love with Damian, though, not yet.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Go,” he said, and he looked so pleased with himself, pleased that I was having such a hard time walking away from him.

I rolled my eyes at him and walked away down the alley toward the sidewalk and the growing crowd. I had to find my SUV and go to the crime scene, so I could get changed and have my date night with Jean-Claude.

“I love that you want me, Anita.”

I was tempted to say I know, but Damian was not as secure as Angel, so I said, “I love that I want you, too, Damian.” I meant it, but I was careful to keep walking forward and not look back just in case.





5

I’D STOOD BESIDE a lot of dead bodies with Dolph by my side towering over me at six foot eight.

Captain Dolph Storr towered over most people, but since I was five foot three I was used to being the smallest person in the room, so it had never bothered me. His hair was still dark, cut close to his head so that it didn’t touch his ears. His suits always looked fresh from the closet no matter what time of day or night it was, and he was still built bulky but trim like a football player or a wrestler. We stood with the plastic booties over our shoes, his shiny loafers and my trainers. The fancier my upcoming wedding got the more casual I was dressing, like a throwback to when Jean-Claude and I first met, when I wouldn’t have known fashion if it bit me on the ass. I did realize it was a way of rebelling against the expectations of the upcoming wedding, but sometimes you gotta go with the coping mechanisms that work for you.

The body was really just black bones with the skull opened in one last soundless scream that highlighted the fangs in the middle of all the human teeth. I knew the body had been inert, dead when it burned so there’d been no screaming, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head as I stared down at the open mouth trapped in the burned remains. It lay twisted in the ruin of a nearly oval hole burned into the carpet. One side of the open drapes was barely singed at the bottom, just starting to catch fire when the fast-thinking maid had come in with a fire extinguisher and saved the rest of the room. In fact, extraordinarily little of the room was burned.

“Vampires burn too fast and hot for the room to be this untouched; the maid was very quick on the draw with the fire extinguisher,” I said.

“She was, we got very lucky that so much of the room is still intact.”

“I don’t want to see another scene like the New York hotel,” Pete McKinnon said from behind us.

We glanced back as he joined us, and I was suddenly the very little middle to a very big male sandwich. McKinnon was as broad through the shoulders as Dolph, and over six feet tall, just not as over as Dolph. They’d played football together in college, but where Dolph’s hair was still the nearly black it had always been, McKinnon’s was gray with more white in it than when I’d met him six years ago. Dolph looked almost unchanged, but Pete looked older and more tired, just like he had when I met him. He’d put on a little more weight around the middle, but not much.

I offered him my hand before I realized we were both wearing the crime scene gloves and that meant touch nothing, not even each other. “Hello, and congratulations on the promotion to the big committee appointment,” I said.

“Thanks, if I’d known the job came with a permanent move to Washington, DC, I might have hesitated. Wife isn’t too pleased being that far away from the kids and grandkids.”

“I’m glad for your expertise, Pete,” Dolph said, “but how did you get on the ground this fast?”