Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (10 page)

He slid just the very tips of his fingers inside the edge of my blue satin bra. “This is a new color for you,
ma petite
; I approve.”

“It matched the shirt,” I said, and it did, but I also knew that it was a push-up bra that mounded my breasts up like an offering. The feel of his fingertips lightly brushing back and forth just inside the bra was distracting, but not too much, not yet.

He was looking at my breasts as he said, “Such bounty deserves attention.”

“The bra matches the underwear,” I said, enjoying the almost mesmerized look on his face as he stared at my breasts; he’d only recently confessed to being a breast man. It had prompted me to buy some bras I might have avoided just so I could see this look on his face.

His eyes came up to meet mine, and his smile was almost a grin, but he worked hard to not flash fangs when he smiled, so it stayed a little less happy than he seemed to be. “Oh, then I must see them together.”

“I was hoping you would.”

He dropped, gracefully, to his knees. I’d have just knelt, but he made it almost a dancing movement, as if there should have been a soundtrack to every movement he made. He slid his hands up along each of my thighs, working the material of my skirt upward as he did it, so that he revealed the matching underwear slowly, as if there were an audience to tease. He’d be helping some of the acts onstage tonight and his mind had already settled into that more theatrical theme. I didn’t mind; it just seemed a shame to waste the show without an audience. If I’d been half the exhibitionist that Jean-Claude was, I could have made more money on stage than as a U.S. Marshal.

He worked my skirt up until it was bunched around my waist and the blue underwear gleamed in the office lights. He looked up at my breasts and back down at parts that were much closer to his face now. “They match perfectly,” he said, and his voice was a little lower, a little softer.

“I’ve learned from the master,” I said. “My master.” I said the last part with a lift of my eyebrow and couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

He leaned in toward my thigh. “Some see the fact that you will never say that and mean it as a weakness on my part.” He laid his cheek against my leg, those drowning deep blue eyes staring up at me, down the length of my body.

“Do I apologize for that?” I asked; my pulse had already sped up and he’d barely touched me.

“No,
ma petite
, I did not want a slave. I wanted a partner, and that you have given me in so many ways.”

He traced one fingertip along the edge of my panties, such a light touch, but I knew what those long, gifted fingers could do, so even that touch made me catch my breath. He played his finger along the very edge of the panties in that hollow inside my thigh, so that he was tantalizingly close to other things. He moved his fingers to the front of my thigh and slipped them just inside the blue satin, so that he traced the edge of my thigh as he’d traced my breasts just moments ago. He laid a gentle kiss on the mound of me inside my panties, then reached up and began to slowly pull them down.

My eyes were already soft focused, my breath and pulse faster, and he’d barely done anything, but it was the memory of all the other times that got him the reaction. Good sex was like money in the bank; if you made regular and sizable deposits, you earned more interest. Jean-Claude had earned a lot of interest over the years.

He pulled my panties down to my ankles, so they rode just above my high heels. I would have asked him to take them the rest of the way off, but he kissed the bare skin of me, just above the places I most wanted him to touch, and it stole my words, and damn near stole my breath. The skin really was bare now. I’d fought shaving completely for years, but it had been a request to just try it, and if I didn’t like it, it would grow back. It was as if everything was more heightened to touch and especially to oral without the hair to interfere, or maybe you could just lick and suck better with nothing between the mouth and the body. Besides, I didn’t like picking pubic hair out from between my teeth either.

He licked the edge just above that spill into even more intimate parts. He teased back and forth, tracing the edge of me without ever going deeper, until I whispered, “Please.”

He rolled those midnight-blue eyes up at me, and then rose back just enough to say, “Please, what,
ma petite
?” But he slid his fingers across the parts of me I’d been wanting him to kiss, and that stole my words away. I couldn’t think; all I could do was feel what he was doing between my legs. I fought my way back to being verbal, opened my mouth, and he plunged one finger inside me. I managed to gasp out, “Not fair.”

“Oh, I think it is very fair,” he said, smiling, his eyes full of that dark light that has nothing to do with vampire powers and everything to do with being male. He used his free hand to lean me so hard against the desk I was almost sitting on it. He moved his finger back to playing with the intimate bits that weren’t inside, and lowered his mouth back to me, so that he was licking just in front of where his fingers caressed. That delicious pressure began to build where he was licking and touching. I breathed his name like a prayer. He started licking faster, over and over on that one sweet spot, while his fingers played lower, and I was suddenly over the edge and screaming my orgasm before I’d had time to think about whether I wanted to be quiet here in the office.

He kept licking, drawing out the orgasm, and slipped his finger inside me, making it go in and out of me fast, reaching for that spot just inside, so that while I was still writhing from the first orgasm he brought me with the second kind, and I stopped screaming, because I was too lost to sensations. It was almost as if my body couldn’t decide which orgasm to follow. As if he understood that, he stopped licking and just used his fingers, driving them in and out of me fast and solid until I screamed a new orgasm for him. I felt his lips on the inside of my thigh, his free hand gripping the outside of it, but his other hand kept going in and out of me, like juggling multiple balls. I stared down my body at his dark hair, his face buried against me. I felt his hand on my thigh tense, a moment of hesitation from his other hand, and then he bit me, and a second later I felt the fangs pierce me, but it was lost in the orgasm so that the feel of his teeth, his mouth locking on my skin and sucking hard and tight was just part of the pleasure until I wasn’t sure which was making me orgasm: his fingers, or his bite. Then he was standing, pushing me back onto the desk with my legs dangling over the side. My panties were lost on the floor somewhere as he pulled himself free of the leather pants, so I had a moment of seeing him long and hard and ready, before he pushed himself inside me. His voice came out strained. “So wet, so tight, so sweet,
ma petite
.”

I rose up just enough, like a version of an ab crunch, so I could watch him slide in and out of me, but as his rhythm sped I had to spill back along the desk and just let my body ride the sensations of him inside me. I looked up into that face, and he stared down at me so that we were drowning in each other’s eyes as he fucked me on the desk, my body moving with the push and pull of him, his hands tight on my hips to keep me on the edge of the desk. That deeper pleasure began to build like a weight of anticipation in a part of my body that he couldn’t actually touch, but it felt as if every deep thrust, every pull-out over that one spot just inside, touched things that no light would ever see, no hand could ever touch, but he could; Jean-Claude could find all the dark happy places inside me.

His eyes bled to vampire glow, as if a night sky could blaze with its own light and let you know that even in the darkest hour the sky is still blue. The press of pleasure built and built as he conjured it closer and closer to the surface, and then from one moment to the next, one stroke of his body to the next, he brought me screaming, my hands scrambling across the smooth empty surface of the desk.

He held on to his rhythm until he’d brought me multiple times and I was almost boneless on the desk, my body half-conscious from the pleasure of it all. Only then did he let himself speed his thrusts for himself without aiming at the sweet spots inside me, and finally let go of all that control. I watched his face through half-closed eyes as his head came forward, all that hair spilling around him, hiding his face, and then his spine bowed backward, taking his head with it so that he was curved above me, face slack with his own pleasure.

His breathing was ragged, and I could see his pulse against the side of his neck. The sex brought him to “life” more than almost anything else. I loved watching his body react like any man’s with a light dew of sweat on that pale, muscled chest. There was a faint pink shine to the dew of sweat on his chest from the blood he’d drunk from me. He might not be able to wear a white shirt to work tonight. I was okay with that, and I was pretty sure so was he.

J
EAN-CLAUDE AND I
cleaned up in the half bath that was in the back of the office. Ever the gentleman, he let me clean up first, but also because he’d take longer in the bathroom than I would, and he knew patience wasn’t my greatest virtue. The compromise was that I came out of the bathroom in my bra and undies and would dress out in the office, so he could fuss in the bathroom longer. I checked my phone before I put on anything else, but there was no message from Manny, no missed call. Screw it. I called Manny again. My first phone message had been simply, “Call me.” This one needed more details.

It went straight to voice mail, so he was on the phone. Damn it. “Manny, this is Anita again. I really need to talk to you about a case. I need your input.” I stopped short of mentioning Dominga Salvador for two reasons. One, I tried not to share any information about ongoing federal investigations that I didn’t have to, and two, his wife, Rosita, checked his phone regularly. She knew he and Dominga had been lovers once. She’d never forgiven him for sleeping with any women besides herself, even those who were years before she and Manny met. I didn’t really understand jealousy to that degree, but I didn’t want to make his life hard if I could avoid it. But if he didn’t call me back soon, I was going to have to mention the name, because I knew that would make him call. She was dead, but it was like talking too much about the devil; you always wondered if they heard you. In Dominga’s case, hearing us from hell seemed totally reasonable. Yes, she had been that kind of evil scary.

I sat there staring at the phone and thought about texting him, but Manny was like a lot of people over fifty. He had a smart phone, but he treated it like it was still just a portable phone. He never returned texts. I wasn’t even sure he read them.

My phone rang, but I knew it wasn’t Manny, because it was Micah Callahan’s ring tone: “Lovefool” by the Cardigans. “Hey, short, dark, and handsome,” I said, and was smiling as I said it.

“Hey, beautiful.” And I could hear the smile in his voice, too. “I heard that the jewelry appointment was cut short.”

“Wow, that’s fast gossip.”

“I told Lisandro I needed to talk to Jean-Claude and you if there was a free moment, so he told me.”

“Okay, but I will have to leave in about forty-five minutes. I can’t leave clients waiting for long.”

He laughed. “They get nervous if you leave them alone in graveyards, I know.”

“Cemeteries are actually damned peaceful. They just spook themselves,” I said.

“I know that, too.”

“Do you want us to come to you?”

“I just came up all those damned stairs, so no. I’ll come to you. I love you, Anita.”

“I love you more.”

“I love you most.”

“I love you mostest.”

We hung up and I turned to find Jean-Claude out of the bathroom shirtless, but with his leather pants fastened. He was as dressed as he could get until he was sure it was safe to put the white shirt back on or he got a second, darker shirt.

“I really do like you in the blue; thank you for not getting dressed yet. Which of our cats was on the phone, for that is your endearment only to the two of them,” he said.

I ignored the compliment, because saying that it had been accidental rather than undressing for him on purpose seemed the wrong thing to say, so I said, “Glad you like it, and it was Micah; apparently he told Lisandro to alert him if we had any free time to talk.”

“Talk?” Jean-Claude said. “About what?”

“He didn’t say, but he’s already up the like bajillion steps from the underground apartments, so he’ll be here in minutes and you can ask him.”

“The steps were designed to discourage intruders,
ma petite
.”

I laughed. “Seriously, how many steps are there, has anyone ever counted?”

I would say he sat down on the couch, but that doesn’t really cover it. He draped himself artfully on the couch, long pale arms stretched along the back of it, so that the leather of the couch acted like a frame for his body. He rested one booted ankle on his opposite knee so that he managed to look both like a tough from some Old West movie and suggestive.

“Do you do that on purpose or are you just naturally that decorative?” I asked, leaning my butt against the desk.

“I did have a natural flair for being, as you say, decorative, but centuries of practice do, indeed, make perfect.” He smiled, obviously pleased with himself, and it made me smile, because once he’d hidden from me just how much he liked himself. I didn’t blame him, because I had so many issues with my own physicality that I’d been uncomfortable with how very comfortable he was in his own skin and with his own beauty.

He held one hand out toward me, and I went to him, because when someone you love holds out their hand to you, that’s what you’re supposed to do. I curled up beside him in my new blue undies and he drew me in against his body, holding me close with one arm.

“You may distract our leopard king dressed like this.”

“I don’t have time to talk and distract him,” I said, laughing, and started to get up, but he pulled me back down, and then there was a knock on the door.