“I am not a boy. I am a man, and you do not get to talk around me as if I’m not standing right in front of you.”
“Please, Nathaniel, I could not bear it if she destroyed your beauty. Please, do not go.”
“We’re going to be late for the plane,” he said, and his voice was cold with anger. He started to walk away, but Asher grabbed his hand and mine.
The bodyguards were moving in, and one was touching his ear mic, which meant backup would be coming. There were four of them and four of us; if we needed backup from Asher, then things would have gone horribly wrong. I didn’t think they’d go that pear-shaped, so I held up my free hand and waved them back. He hadn’t hurt us . . . yet. If we were this afraid of him, then no apology in the world would matter, so I waved them back and hoped I didn’t regret it later.
“Let go of me,” Nathaniel said.
“What he said.” I didn’t try to tug my hand free, because I knew better than to try to outmuscle a vampire, but I wanted to pull a little. It was just automatic.
“I love you. I love you both. I could not bear either of you being at her mercy. The thought of it sickens me.” The tears that had glittered in his eyes earlier were back, but this time they began to slide down his cheeks. The tears were tinged pink with blood like all vampire tears. The color was faint enough that if I hadn’t known to look for it I might not have seen it, but I knew to look and so there it was. It took a little of the pitiful out of him crying to know that his tears were stained with the blood of whoever he’d fed off tonight. Yeah, they’d been a willing victim, but still.
“Don’t make me use my safeword,” Nathaniel said.
Asher let go of his hand but clung to mine with both of his. “Please, Anita.”
“What Nathaniel said.”
Asher hesitated and then dropped his hands to his side, still on his knees with tears flowing faster down his face. They were leaving little pinkish trails down his skin so that I could see where every single one of them had fallen.
Jean-Claude couldn’t stand it and reached out for him. Asher took his hands in his and started speaking rapid French. Jean-Claude shook his head. “Non, mon ami, they must understand your apology. I am weak when it comes to you, so it is them that you must win back. I will not come to your bed again unless they do, for they see you more clearly than I do.”
I felt Nathaniel startle beside me. I glanced at him and he was already looking at me. The love of several lifetimes was holding Jean-Claude’s hands, but it was up to us whether they ever got back together. No pressure.
Asher kept Jean-Claude’s hands but turned to us. “I miss you both.”
“You said that already,” Nathaniel said. I realized that he was angrier than I was at Asher, which meant that the other man was, or had been, more important to him than he had been to me. I knew part of it was that I liked bondage and submission, but it wasn’t the serious need to me that it was to Nathaniel. Asher had been an almost-perfect top for him in the dungeon. Apparently, Nathaniel missed it more than I’d realized, which was probably a relationship dropped ball on my part, or Micah’s and my part?
He let go of Jean-Claude’s hands and knelt in front of us. We were left staring down into those perfectly pale eyes like winter skies are supposed to be and almost never are; his lashes were darker than his hair, as were his eyebrows, so that the eyes were framed dramatically as if he’d used makeup to emphasize them, but I knew it was just natural coloring. He and Jean-Claude were both just that gorgeous; it was what had made Belle Morte collect them in the first place.
He lifted those large, long-fingered hands, thicker than Jean-Claude’s through the fingers, and I’d thought for a while that Asher would bulk up more in the gym if he was willing to put the work into weights, but since he wasn’t it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t a weight-lifting kind of guy. He spread those pale hands upward, let all those golden waves fall back so that his whole face was visible, both the beauty of it and the scars that he thought marred it.
“I miss you bound and waiting for me to cause you pleasure and pain. I miss the sounds that Nathaniel makes when I am flogging him, the way his skin parts underneath a whip and how he heals magically from it and asks for more. I miss the sounds Anita makes when we make love to her together. I miss the feel of our bodies piercing her at the same time. I miss sharing Anita with Jean-Claude in that way that we have done for centuries. I miss the feel and smell of your skin, Nathaniel, Anita. I miss plunging my tongue between her legs, and taking you in my mouth. I love the way you want me to use my fangs at the end and bleed you so that I drink you down twice.”
I felt Nathaniel give a little shudder beside me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad shudder. My own heart was beating faster. Damn it.
“If you miss me at all, then I beg you to give me one more chance. I know I do not deserve it.”
“How are we ever going to trust you again?” Nathaniel asked, and his voice was a lot more even than the pulse in the side of his throat. I gave him points for that. I was pretty sure that my own voice would shake if I tried right now.
“I do not know.”
“How will we ever trust you to tie us up and hurt us, if we can’t trust you to value us at all?” His voice was part anger and part loss, which pretty much summed up being in a relationship with Asher.
“I do not know, but I want more than anything else in the world to win back your trust. What can I do to prove my sincerity to you both?”