Smolder (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #29)(20)

Out loud I said, “You can be louder in my head than this, the room is all friendlies.”

Jean-Claude just opened the link, and I was suddenly inside his head. It was disorienting enough that I reached out to steady myself but wasn’t standing close enough to anything. I felt a hand on my arm and wasn’t sure if it was Dolph or McKinnon, because my “eyes” were somewhere else. I saw the dressing table in front of him and had a sense of the mirror surrounded by lights. He was backstage at Guilty Pleasures; I’d almost forgotten he was going to do one of his rare stage appearances, which explained the array of eye shadows and other makeup scattered in front of him.

He usually just introduced the acts and spoke with the crowd in between the other dancers taking the stage, but once a month he took center stage. It had been about every three to four months, but some of the older vampires had complained he was their king and kings shouldn’t shake their booty onstage, but since they bitched, he did it once a month instead of four times a year. There was more than one reason we worked as a couple; a shared finger in the eye to other people’s expectations was one of them.

“You okay, Blake?” McKinnon’s voice.

Dolph’s voice was closer. “She’s okay.”

Knowing it was Dolph being such a good sport about the vampire powers helped me draw back enough to let Jean-Claude know what I’d learned in the last few minutes without being so far into his head that I couldn’t tell where he and I were separate. The ability to share this deeply, almost a body swap, had been one of the things that terrified me in the beginning. It still wasn’t my favorite part, but because we could do it, Jean-Claude knew the danger that he and all our people were in like magic, or maybe by magic. The line between psychic abilities and magic was thin and getting thinner, or maybe my ability to call my abilities psychic as opposed to magic was just the lady protesting too much.

My hands touched the makeup on my . . . his hands touched his makeup table, and he drew me out far enough that I was hovering like an invisible camera just above him. It was always the visual if we stayed separate from each other, like we hovered in the air and gazed down. Jean-Claude had done dramatic stage makeup around his eyes; something in all the blues, blacks, grays, and silver coaxed his eyes from a blue so dark it was almost black to something lighter, if you could call cobalt blue light. It was as if he’d taken his eyes from the blue just before the last light fades into night to twilight, when the sky hovers between cerulean and sapphire. It took me a few seconds to take in the perfect black curls that fell around his shoulders, or that he was wearing a shirt I’d never seen on him. The thought came through my head that it was a costume that went with the makeup.

“Anita, you okay?” Dolph said.

I closed my eyes for real, which didn’t do a damn thing to make me not see Jean-Claude inside my head. Sweet Jesus, and I was about to marry him. I was in love with him, had cohabitated with him for years and still there were moments like this when his beauty undid me. No wonder I’d fought so long and hard not to fall under his spell.

“I’ll see you at the club tonight,” I said. I knew it sounded abrupt, but it was one way to fight through the reaction I was having. Hell, I had used being cranky and unimpressed as a way to fight off my reactions to Jean-Claude for years.

“Is she still talking to someone else?” McKinnon asked.

“Yes,” Dolph said.

Jean-Claude whispered, “I cannot wait to see you in your new dress and shoes tonight, ma petite.”

“I can’t wait to see what you’re wearing, or not wearing,” I said, and just by thinking of him out of his clothes I fell into his eyes again. If Dolph hadn’t been holding my arm I would have fallen for real, as if his eyes were a dark pool of water that I could drown in and I would enjoy every compromised breath until I died. That fear had been what helped me fight my attraction to Jean-Claude for so long.

His own vampire marks combined with my natural ability with the dead should have kept me safer than this. What the hell was wrong?

“Ma petite, have I suddenly become irresistible?” I heard the smile in his voice; it helped me push back so that I could see his face and that smile most seductive. I could see all that exotic makeup again. He was breathtaking. My chest felt tight at the sight of him. I started to fall into his eyes again like I was iron and he was a magnet that I could not resist. When we’d first met I’d driven my fingernails into my hand so the pain would help me resist his charms, but I had other options now. I shoved power into that beautiful face, against that irresistible force, and Jean-Claude lashed back as if I’d tried to slice him with a blade and he’d had to use his own blade to keep me from drawing blood. I think it caught us both off guard and we just reacted. We both lashed out with near pure power. Jean-Claude cut our link so we couldn’t hurt each other anymore, but the rush was so powerful I damn near convulsed with Dolph’s hand on my arm. The movement was sudden enough that I jerked free of Dolph, then started to fall. Jean-Claude had tried to protect us both by shutting down the link, but it was McKinnon and Dolph who kept me from falling into the burned remains of our victim.

“What the hell was that?” McKinnon asked.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Dolph said.

I stayed on all fours with my gloves and booties the only thing touching the crime scene’s carpet.