[Anita Blake 17] - Skin Trade (22 page)

I forced myself to keep going down the muscular legs in their jeans, to the boots. I came back up to his eyes.

“You're blushing,” he said, but he was smiling.

“I was remembering that time in the bar.”

He grinned wider, obviously pleased. “Thinking about seeing me naked.”

The blush that had been fading flushed back to life. I nodded and started walking. “Happy now?” I asked.

“Very,” he said, in a voice that showed it. He glided beside me, to the stares of every woman we passed, and some of the men. I would have thought they might be looking at me, but Bernardo was a treat both coming and going. I'm used to being the plain Jane when it comes to the men in my life. If it had bothered me to be less pretty than a man, I could never have dated Jean-Claude . . . or Asher . . . or Micah . . . or Richard, or Nathaniel. Hell, Bernardo made me feel right at home.

 

 

I APOLOGIZED TO Dr. Memphis and got the name of Sherman's high priestess. She was in the phone book. We hit the heat outside, sunglasses sliding over our eyes like some sort of science fiction shield. The gesture was already automatic, and I hadn't been in town a day.

There was music playing, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was my phone. It was playing “I'm Not in Love,” by 10cc, but it was not a ring tone I'd chosen. I was really going to have to learn to do my own ring tones. Nathaniel's sense of humor was beginning to get on my nerves.

I hit the button and said, “What's with the choice of songs, Nathaniel?”

“It is not your pussycat,
ma petite
,” and just like that, I was standing in the Vegas heat talking to the Master Vampire of St. Louis and my main squeeze. He never called me when I was working with the police unless something really bad had happened.

“What's wrong?” I asked. My pulse was suddenly in my throat.

Bernardo looked at me, and I waved a hand, shaking my head, moving toward Edward and Olaf by the car.

“Why should anything be wrong,
ma petite
?” But his voice held anger, which it didn't usually do. He could say nothing was wrong, but his voice said otherwise, and since he could make his voice as empty of emotion as a blank wall, either he wanted me to know he was angry, or he was so pissed that he couldn't hide it. He was more than four hundred years old; you learned to hide a lot of emotion in that much time. So what had I done to piss him off? Or what had someone else done?

I suddenly wanted privacy for the call. So I got in the SUV and the men stood out in the heat. I offered to do it the other way around, but Edward had insisted, and when he insists there's usually a reason for it. I've learned not to argue when he insists; we all live longer.

I turned on the air-conditioning and got comfortable while the three men seemed to be talking, quietly but intensely. Hmm.

“
Ma petite
, I wake and find you far away.”

“I'm not happy about it either,” I said. I thought about him, and that was enough to see him lying in our bed, the sheets draped carelessly across his body, one long leg clear of the sheets. One hand held the phone, but the other was playing idly along Asher's back. He would be dead to the world for hours yet, but it never bothered Jean-Claude to touch another vampire when they were still “dead.” I found it disturbing. Maybe I'd been at one too many crime scenes.

He looked up into the air, as if he felt me watching him. “Would you like to see more?”

I drew my mind and attention back to the SUV, the Vegas heat pressing against the car. “I think it would distract me.”

“There are those who would give all they have to be distracted by me.”

“You're angry at me.”

“We work so hard to make the vampire community think you are truly my servant and not my master, and then you do this.”

“Do what, my job?”

He sighed, and the sound eased over the phone and down my skin like a shiver of anticipation. “Leave without my permission,” but he made the last word sound dirty, as if asking permission could have been so much fun.

“Stop that, please. I'm working, or trying to.”

“I find that not only are you gone, but you have taken no food.”

“I fed this morning.”

“But tomorrow will come,
ma petite
.”

“Crispin is here.”

“Ah, yes, your little tiger.” He didn't try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

I ignored the sarcasm. “I took your call in the middle of a murder investigation.”

“I am so grateful that you could be bothered.”

It was way too petty for Jean-Claude, but there it was, his voice, his call. What the hell was going on? But one of the good things about Jean-Claude is I didn't have to protect him from the horrors of my job. He'd seen worse, or close to it, in his centuries of life. So I told the truth. “I've just been to the morgue and seen what's left of some of the Vegas PD's finest. I don't need to fight with you, on top of that.”

He sighed. The sound shivered through my mind, down my body as if he were right there, just behind me, whispering, touching.

I threw metaphysical shields in place, though shielding from my master wasn't easy. He had the keys to my shields if he wanted to push it. Today, he let me wrap my shields and my anger around me. “What the fuck was that? I am trying to solve a multiple homicide. I do not need your mind games.”

“My apologies,
ma petite
. I think my feelings are hurt.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, voice still angry, but the rest of me was calming down. I wasn't sure he'd ever said out loud that his feelings were hurt.

“It means,
ma petite
, that I thought we had made progress in our relationship, and I find that the ground we had gained is not as secure as I had thought.”

I said the truth, again. “I have no idea what you just said. I mean, I heard it, and it was English, but I don't understand what you're talking about.” I rested my forehead on the steering wheel, closing my eyes, and trying to breathe in the coolness of the air-conditioning. “But I feel sort of vaguely like I should apologize, anyway.”

He gave that wonderful laugh. The one that made my body react as if he'd touched way too intimate a part and fed me candy at the same time. His laugh wasn't just about sex; it felt so good, it should have been fattening.

I sighed, but it was just a sigh. I couldn't do his voice tricks. “Please, stop messing with me. God, Jean-Claude, I can't work like this.”

He gave a more ordinary chuckle. “I think I needed to hear that you missed me.”

“How can you posssibly be insecure? That's
my
job.”

“You make me insecure,
ma petite
, only you.”

I didn't know what to say to that, but I tried. “I'm sorry.”

“I know you mean that, and it does help.”

How did I get off the phone without hurting his feelings again? I had no clue. Shit. It wasn't like him to call when I was off with the police. I hoped, desperately, that it didn't become a habit.

I realized I was hunching over the steering wheel. I made myself sit up straight and avoid looking in Edward's direction.

Jean-Claude's voice, when it came again, was almost neutral. “When I woke and heard where you had gone, I was not idle. There is a swanmane in Las Vegas. The Swan King, Donovan Reece, has already offered him to be at your disposal for feeding if the need arises.”

“Thank Donovan for me, and I do appreicate that you're willing to share me with yet one more man. I know we've talked about not adding any more.”

“It's not the feeding,
ma petite
, it's that you seem incapable of sex without emotion. If you could fuck and feed, then I would have no problem with a hundred lovers. Feed, then never see them again, but you collect men,
ma petite
. You can fuck a dozen men, but you cannot date them all.”

“I'm sort of aware of that,” I said.

“Are you?” There was that edge of anger again.

“I'm just not good at casual sex. I'm sorry.”

“No, you are not,” and the anger was a little more.

I didn't know what to do with his anger, or this fight, so I ignored it. Men will let you do that sometimes in a relationship because they're not girls. “I may need something not feline that is one of the beasts I carry inside me. I don't carry swan.”

“I tell you that I am tired of sharing you with other men, and that you collect them, and you ask for more?”

He was going to be the girl. Great. Fucking great. “I promise when I get back to St. Louis, we can have this fight. I swear. But right now, help me survive this case.”

“And how may I do that?”

“The weretigers are a little too much sometimes because of how many different flavors I've got inside me.” I'd been attacked by one tiger, but carried five different metaphysical colors of them. No one had been able to explain how that had happened. “Did you happen to find any wolves I could borrow while I'm here?”

“No wolves; the local pack seems to fear that you will be a disrupting influence on them,
ma petite
.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the news has gotten out that sex with you can be like a vampire's bite. One taste and they belong to you.”

“That's not true,” I said, but my pulse had sped.

“You lie to yourself,
ma petite
.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“You have not asked me to give up your pet name in many years.”

“It's the way you're saying it, like you're angry and trying not to show it.”

“I am angry, because I am afraid for you. Vittorio was vicious in St. Louis, and it has been all over the news that three of their SWAT have been killed. They are not easily killed, your SWAT.”

What did I say to that? He was right. “I'm sorry I had to leave without talking to you first.”

“I hear true regret in that phrase. What would you have told me, if I had said it was too dangerous? What would you have done if I had said, do not go?”

I thought about that, then finally said, “I would have come anyway.”

“You see, you are not my servant. You will never be a servant.”

“I thought the idea was to make the vampire community
think
I was a good little human servant. I didn't know you still thought I'd toe the line for you.” I had a little heat in my words, again. It was a trickle of anger to warm me. Of course, it was warm enough that anger might not be what I needed.

“That is not what I meant.”

“It's what you said.”

He made a soft, exasperated sound. “Perhaps I am still fool enough to believe that you will truly be mine.”

“And what the hell does that mean?”

He was quiet for so long that it was unnerving. Vampires didn't have to breathe on the phone, and only years of practice made me sure he was still there. I waited, and finally he spoke. “You need some of our people with you. You need your own leopard, and wolf, or lion.”

“I don't have a lion of my own, yet.”

“Our local Rex would be yours if you would allow it.”

“Yeah, and his Regina would hunt me down and kill me. I've met her. She's pissed I'm sleeping with him. If I make him my lion to call, she'll see that as a challenge. I'm good, Jean-Claude, but I'm not good enough to win a fair fight with a werelion of her power.”

“Then do not fight fair,” he said.

“If I cheat, then by lion law others can gang up on me and kill me for that. I've studied up on it since I met the new Regina of the St. Louis clan. Trust me, Jean-Claude, I have thought about this.”

“Do you truly believe she would kill you if you had a stronger claim on her king?”

“Yep,” I said, “because she told me that she would share him. That I could be his mistress but not his wife. She was his wife.”

“You did not mention this to me.”

“It's lions, not wolves. My animal, not yours.”

He sighed, and it wasn't his teasing sigh, just tired. “
Ma petite, ma petite
, when will you learn that what is yours is mine. Any danger to you, I need to know.”

“I'll tell you all my secrets when you tell me all yours,” I said.

“Touché,
ma petite
, a fine deep cut that one.” He was back to being angry.

“Why are you angry with me?” I asked.

“You are right, I am being childish, but I don't know how to help you. I don't know how to keep you safe in Vegas. Do you understand that,
ma petite
? I do not know how to keep you safe from Max and his queen. I cannot help you from hundreds of miles away. I cannot send you our guards because you have a badge, and the police will not let our guards guard you. What do you want me to do,
ma petite
? What the hell do you want me to do?” He was yelling now. He almost never yelled. His losing his temper helped me keep mine. I'd never heard him use the word
hell
before. In fact, hearing him that out of control let me know just how scared he was for me. That scared me.

“It's okay, Jean-Claude, I'll think of something. I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what, Anita?” He never used my name; it was a very bad sign.

“I'm sorry that you're afraid for me. I'm sorry that I've made you feel helpless. I'm sorry that I'm here, and you're right, I can't be a marshal and your human servant at the same time. I have to choose, and once the police are involved it means I have to choose the badge. Which may be exactly what Vittorio planned. I'm sorry that Edward may be right, and this is like the ultimate trap for me.”