Nicky’s mouth worked, putting more into the kiss than just a touching of lips. Jean-Claude responded to the eagerness, his other hand playing in the blond hair as he kissed him back. Seeing them kiss excited me, but being this close to it tensed things low in my body so hard and so tight it was a pleasure bordering on pain. It stole my breath, parted my lips as if I’d drawn a breath to blow out a candle.

   Another hand touched my face, made me turn to find Sin there. He kissed me while the two men were still kissing each other. Sin’s kiss was as eager as ever; if he was bothered by anything the others were doing it didn’t show, as he wrapped his arms around the three of us. I didn’t fight the eagerness of his mouth on mine as Jean-Claude transferred his hand from the back of my neck to wrap around Sin and draw him in tighter against the side of Nicky’s body and me. Nicky flexed his arm around my waist, almost crushing me against his chest, and the extra force was enough to draw eager noises from me that Sin licked and finally bit gently away.

   I felt Jean-Claude’s power like an early-spring wind with that edge of winter’s cold still riding it, but the promise of warmth and flowers to come. Once it would have been only the chill of the grave, but the more wereanimals I connected to, the warmer his energy had become. I drew back from Sin, and the other two men had drawn back from each other. There was a crimson dot on the edge of Nicky’s lower lip. Jean-Claude’s eyes had bled to solid shining blue.

   My voice sounded breathy as I said, “You have to be careful French-kissing vampires, Nicky.”

   He licked the fresh blood from his lip and said, “I’m not used to the fangs yet.”

   “Bloody kisses like sweet copper pennies in my mouth,” Jean-Claude said.

   “Pretty talk,” Nicky said.

   “Jean-Claude always knows just what to say. I think it’s something about being French,” I said.

   “Non, ma petite, mon lionne, I am inspired by such bounty before my eyes.”

   “You know that Nathaniel likes to bite, right?” Sin asked.

   We all looked at him.

   “I’ve seen kisses that ended with lips bleeding a lot more than this.”

   “Then we will have to do better, won’t we, Nicky?” Jean-Claude said.

   “Yeah, we wouldn’t want the kid disappointed.”

   “Don’t call me kid.”

   “Prove that you aren’t one and I’ll stop.”

   “How do I prove it?”

   Nicky smiled, a damn-near-evil smile. “I’ve got a few ideas.”

30

   NICKY TRIED, BUT in the end Sin saw it all as a sort of competitive dare, so nothing that Jean-Claude was willing to do was enough to scare him off. I think Nicky would have been willing to personally do things that would have freaked Sin out, not because he wanted to have sex with him, because I was pretty sure he didn’t, but because Nicky was just that competitive. If it was a game of chicken, Nicky was not going to be the one who flinched. Once I would have said the same of Jean-Claude, but something about Sin hit issues for him that I didn’t even know he had. Maybe the idea that his issues were part of what had kept me from being in love with Cynric was true, but if so, how the hell did we prove it, or fix it? Hell, did we want to fix it?

   All the clothes were gone, the four of us nude in the newly delivered double king-size bed with the red silk sheets from the even bigger bed tucked in and around the bed, so that we were still on top of the sheets rather than fighting to get them free. Jean-Claude’s skin was so white against the crimson sheets. Sin’s summer tan looked even darker against them. Nicky looked paler when his skin was next to Sin’s tan, but he didn’t look pale at all next to the nearly pure white of Jean-Claude’s body. Nicky’s eye seemed like an even brighter blue no matter if his face was next to Jean-Claude’s midnight blue or Sin’s blue tiger’s eyes.

   I kissed Nicky’s face, laying my lips over the scar where his other eye would have been, and he put his arms around me as I lay on top of him and took my kisses to the scars, the same as my lips touching the closed lid of his other eye. I’d convinced him a while back that to me the scar was just another texture of his body to kiss and caress.

   Someone started kissing along my back while I was kissing Nicky, and I wondered for a moment, but I didn’t have to look to know the feel of Jean-Claude’s lips against my skin. He spoke with his mouth against my lower back, his hands smoothing over my hips so that I writhed against the front of Nicky’s body. “I need you on top, Nicky.”

   “All you have to do is ask,” he said, and he rolled us over so fast that I made that high-pitched “eep” sound that was such a girl sound. I was just suddenly staring up at Nicky above me. I laughed a little nervously, because I could feel his weight above me. Muscle weighs more, and so did Nicky. We weren’t having intercourse yet, so it was just all that heaviness pressing me against the bed. I had a moment of realizing that if he wanted to trap me, I was trapped. It sped my heart, raced my pulse, and made me swallow hard. If Nicky hadn’t topped me in the bedroom, would that moment have scared me for real? I don’t know, because he did and I let that little flash of fear grow, because I knew he’d like it.

   He leaned over my face, sniffing loudly along my skin. “Fear makes the meat taste better,” he said in a voice that held an edge of growl. When he raised his face, his eye had changed to lion amber. He let a trickle of growl slide out from between his human lips. I trusted him utterly, but the game was to be afraid in that safe roller-coaster-ride way, so I didn’t fight that moment of terror that thrilled through my body. It was instinctive, hardwired into that primitive part of the brain that remembered what a growl like that meant against the skin of your throat.

   Sin crawled across the bed from the right side of us. He lowered his head and sniffed the air near me. “She’s never afraid of me like this.”

   “You don’t know how to be scary yet,” Nicky said.

   The weight was suddenly crushing and I said, “Too heavy.”

   Jean-Claude appeared over Nicky’s shoulder and I realized I was pinned under their combined weight. If Nicky hadn’t been raised just a little above my chest, they might have been heavy enough to keep me from breathing. I managed to say, “If we were fucking this would be fun, but it’s just heavy now.”

   Jean-Claude laid his head on Nicky’s shoulder, settling even more of his weight on top of the other man and on me. “Nicky, do you want to be inside her when I feed?”

   “Yes, let me make her come at least once before you feed, because once you do I won’t last.”

   “As you like,” Jean-Claude said; he smiled down at me and then slid out of sight, but I could tell by the weight that he wasn’t on top of Nicky anymore. Nicky was free to move his body enough for me to feel that he could pretend for Cynric that he was into sex with Jean-Claude, but some things couldn’t be faked. He wasn’t completely soft, but he wasn’t that eager hardness that he usually was when we got to this point. I expected him to change positions, or ask for a hand or maybe a mouth from me, but he didn’t. He moved his hips so that I had the choice of spreading my legs or him grinding himself into my pelvis. I wanted to make love to him, so I helped. By the time he’d settled himself between my legs, he was harder than he had been just seconds before, but still not hard enough. With most men, if they weren’t hard when they started, you needed to back up and do some more foreplay, but Nicky raised himself on those amazing arms, his upper body rising above me so that I caressed my hands along all that hard work in the gym carved into the body above me. I gazed down the line of his body past the ridged hardness of his stomach until I could see that part of him that he was pushing against me. Even only partially erect, the sight of it tightened my body, and I threw my head back with a small cry so that I was suddenly staring up into his face.