Anita Blake 15 - The Harlequin (26 page)

He turned and looked over his shoulder at me. "Jean-Claude was with her and Gabriel; it was the price she demanded from him. You know she made Jason a werewolf?"

"Yeah." I'd actually shared that memory with Jason. She'd tied him to a bed and cut him up while she fucked him. She hadn't cared whether he lived or died. I'd been inside her head on the memory, and she hadn't cared. She really was serial-killer material, because her pleasure had meant more to her than Jason's life.

I got a whisper through my head. "Think harder, Anita."

I shivered, and that made my lower body hurt. "Go, Richard, go, okay?"

"What's wrong?"

"I think I need not to think about her so hard."

"She talked to you?"

I nodded.

"You think you have her under control, and maybe you do, but you might just think on this. Jean-Claude, me, Jason, Nathaniel, all of us were hers first. Maybe there's a reason you're attracted to her old lovers." With that very unsettling thought, he left, closing the door behind him. I was happy that Richard was doing therapy; it was helping, honest. The trouble was, he seemed to want me to do therapy with him, and that I wasn't ready for.

I DID A quick cleanup, and then realized I had no clothes in the bathroom. My robe was lying in a heap beside the bed. Great. I wrapped the towel more securely around my hair, then wrapped one of the bigger towels around my body. One of the good things about being short was that the towel covered me from armpits to ankles. The funny thing was that almost no matter who was in the other room, they'd probably seen me nude at least once. I should have just walked out and gotten my clothes out of the armoire and ignored everybody. But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. I wasn't that comfortable around my own nudity. There were days when I was pretty sure I'd never be that comfortable.

Worse yet, my gun was outside in the bedroom. My clothes I could live without, but that I'd left my gun in the other room said just how much Richard affected me. He made me forget myself, even the parts of me that almost no one else could drive from my mind. For some reason I just couldn't go out there unarmed, I don't know why. I just couldn't do it. I was still aching all the way up to almost my belly button. The cramping had mostly stopped, but I was feeling stupid and vulnerable. I wanted a gun. It would make me feel better. There, that was the truth. I'd started hiding guns in the places where I spent a lot of time. They were for emergencies. This wasn't an emergency, but… hell with it, it was my gun. If I felt the need, screw it.

I knelt down by the sink and opened the cabinet doors. I had to reach back and up into the plumbing to find it, but there was my Firestar duct-taped among the pipes. There'd been a couple of times when I'd been separated from my carry guns and needed a gun. So I'd given into my paranoia and hidden a few around. The Firestar wasn't my main backup gun anymore, so it lived here as the ultimate hideaway. I brought the gun out into the light and laughed. There was writing on the tape. It read, "Anita's gun," in Nathaniel's handwriting. He'd been with me the day I did it. Apparently he'd added his own little touch when I wasn't looking. He'd handed me the pieces of tape. Had he written on it then, and I just hadn't noticed, or had he come back later? I'd ask him.

It left me smiling and shaking my head as I took the tape off the gun. I'd have put it in my pocket, if I'd had one. The gun was very visible against the white towel. I tried the grip in my hand, squeezed it a little. A tightness in the center of my body eased. What does it say about your life when a gun makes you feel this much safer?

I checked to make sure the gun was still loaded, because any time a gun has been out of your sight, you damn well better check. Never trust anyone else that a gun is either loaded or unloaded; check it yourself. Gun safety 101.

Towel tucked tight under my arms, and gun in hand, I opened the door. I thought for a moment the bedroom was empty, but then Clay and Graham stood up near the fireplace. They'd been sitting in the room's only chairs.

"Clay, shouldn't you be in bed somewhere? You just got off work at Guilty Pleasures." I looked at the bed and found it stripped down to the slightly singed mattress. My gun had been there somewhere.

As if he read my mind, Clay said, "Your gun is in the bedside table."

I didn't check to make sure he was telling the truth. One, I trusted Clay; two, I had a gun in one hand and the other hand helped hold the towel in place. I was armed and out of hands. "Thanks, but why aren't you in bed?"

"After they found the bugs in all the businesses, Jean-Claude asked us to do double shifts." He ran his hand through his short blond curls. Early twenties looked better on no sleep, but he still looked tired.

"Don't I even get a hello?" Graham asked. I looked at him and couldn't fight a frown. He was about the same size as Clay: six feet tall, but his shoulders were much broader. Graham was muscled in a way that only serious weight lifting would give you. His black hair was so long on top that his dark eyes peered out from the hair. The bottom of his hair was freshly shaved, very short, so that it looked like two different haircuts put together. He wasn't wearing the black T-shirt that was standard bodyguard wear. He was wearing red. The red shirt was a new addition to the bodyguard uniform. Most of them were still in black, some with the appropriate club name and "Security" written on them, or just plain black. Red meant the guard was okay with being emergency food for the
ardeur
. It had been Remus's idea originally. He'd come up with it after I'd nearly killed Damian, Nathaniel, and myself from not feeding the
ardeur
enough. I thought the red shirt idea was a joke until the first guard showed up wearing one.

Strangely, since the red shirt policy went into effect, I'd gained a much better control over the
ardeur
. Let's hear it for fear, embarrassment, and sheer stubbornness. Graham had been trying to get into my pants for months, so no big surprise that he volunteered. What creeped me out was some of the other guards who'd done it. Men I hadn't known thought of me in a sexual way. I mean, it's one thing to suspect a man lusts after you, but absolute confirmation, well, that made me uncomfortable.

"Hey, Graham, nice shirt," I said, and I was happy that it sounded hostile.

"Why are you mad at me? It's not my rule. Be mad at Remus, or Claudia, or Jean-Claude. It's their rule that you are not to be alone in a room unless accompanied by a man willing to feed the
ardeur
."

"Since when?" I asked.

"Since this mysterious bad guy came to town. No one's giving details, but apparently the people who give us orders are worried that the bad guys will use magic to make the
ardeur
go out of control. So you have to have food at all times." He didn't sound happy about it. Maybe my being pissy was finally rubbing off on Graham. Good.

"We're short of red shirts today, Anita," Clay said.

"Why?"

"Because the guard is doubled around all of Jean-Claude's businesses. He's having to renegotiate with Rafael and Narcissus for more people."

"I guess we pay more money, we get more men," I said.

The two men exchanged a look. "Maybe," Clay said.

I was getting cold standing there in nothing but a towel, so I went to the armoire for clothes. "What else could they be negotiating for except money?" I said. I stared at the double door of the armoire, because the towel was slipping, and I had a gun in the other hand. I'd never been good at getting a towel to stay fastened. It wasn't like both of the men hadn't seen me naked. But… damn it.

"Power," Clay said. "Everyone wants a closer tie to Jean-Claude now that he's his own vampire bloodline. And Narcissus is seriously freaked that Asher's new animal to call is hyena."

"Freaked how?" I asked. I tucked the arm with the gun tight on the towel and tugged on the door of the armoire. It stuck.

"We're wolves, not hyenas, so this is all secondhand," Clay said. "Narcissus wants guarantees that Asher won't try to run his clan."

I finally got the door opened; yea for me. "Asher isn't powerful enough to do that."

"Maybe," Clay said, "but Narcissus is worried about it. He wants to negotiate now before it's an issue."

I had black jeans in hand, but I really needed the second hand to get the other clothes.

"Oh, for God's sake," Graham said. He stalked toward me. He was angry enough that as he got closer I got little bits of it, like embers from a fire hitting my skin. He grabbed the edge of the jeans in my hand. I held on. We glared at each other. "I'll just hold the clothes for you, Anita. That's it, okay?"

It was a reasonable idea. It was helpful. So why didn't I want to do it? Because Graham seriously bugged me. His persistent pursuit of sex with me, with no pretense of emotion, let alone love, really hit my buttons wrong. Of course, if he'd lied about me being the love of his life, that would have pissed me off more. God. I let go of the jeans. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, "Thank you."

Graham blinked down at me as if I'd never said
thank you
to him before. Maybe I hadn't. Shame on me then. He put his life on the line to keep me safe. So he was a lech; at least he was an honest lech.

I looked up at him. This close I could see the slight uptilt of his brown eyes. His mother was Japanese, which got him the hair and eyes. The rest of him looked like his blond and blue-eyed father had cloned himself. Meeting his parents by accident one night hadn't made me like him better. In fact it had made it worse. His parents seemed like good people. Would they be ashamed to know how much of a horndog their only child was? It seemed likely.

I shook my head and turned back to the armoire. I'd concentrate on getting dressed. That would help me feel better. I always felt better with clothes on. Grandma Blake's influence. There was a woman who thought naked meant bad.

I was getting low on shirts here. My choices were black or red. Black made me look like one of the bodyguards, and red, well, red looked like all the red shirts were my people, like a special Anita Blake uniform. I picked up one of the black shirts, put it back, picked up a red shirt, put it back.

"Anita, just pick a shirt," Graham said.

"I hadn't realized until this moment that my normal off-duty clothes are the same as the uniform for you guys."

"Why is that a problem?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said, and that was the truth.

"Then pick red. I promise that just because we're dressed like we match, it's not a date, okay?" He finally sounded angry.

I sighed. "I'm sorry that it bugs me that the red shirts mean that people want to fuck me. It does bug me. It really does."

"The color of my shirt didn't change anything about how I interact with you," Graham said. "I've been honest from the beginning about what I'd like to do."

I nodded. "You know, Graham, I was just thinking that. You've been honest. I say I like honest, but I guess I don't like honest past a certain point." I grabbed the red shirt. I needed to grow up about this issue and buy some different-colored clothes. I added jogging socks and black jogging shoes to the pile in Graham's arms. I did the mental list and finally realized I didn't have any underwear in the pile. I opened the bottom drawer in the armoire. Strangely, there was plenty of lingerie. Jean-Claude had gotten me to the point where I didn't own any simple underwear. Everything had lace, or fishnet, or something on it. I had learned to buy two to three pairs of the panties to one matching bra. You could wear bras longer than underwear.