Dead Ice

“You didn’t have to text Micah. It could have waited until we got home,” I said.

“You gave me your word that you’d look at more tigers, including females; did you mean it?”

“Yes, I meant it,” I grumped at him.

He smiled. “Then why not tell Micah?”

I couldn’t think of a response that didn’t include me whining that now that Micah knew, I couldn’t back out of my newfound willingness to shop for more tigers, but to say that would have meant admitting I hadn’t meant it, and I did mean it. If I really wanted Cynric to go off somewhere and have a life without us, then I needed another tiger to take his place, or join our domestic arrangement as well as he had. Either way, I needed more tigers.

“Nicky is walking this way,” Nathaniel said.

“He’s probably coming for a covert kiss; we made an agreement, no kissing and stuff in front of the clients.”

“No kissing and stuff, really, and here I am and here he comes, and you can’t kiss either one of us.” He grinned suddenly, far beyond his usual come-hither smile.

“You are not going to tease from a distance and mess with my concentration.”

“I’m not,” he said, but he made it a question with uplift in his voice at the end of it, so that the statement was all question. His eyes might look gray by moonlight, but the shine of humor was clear enough.

I frowned at him. “You’ve been hanging around Jason too much. He’s usually the one who can’t leave well enough alone.”

“He’s my best friend, we’re supposed to hang out, but he would never be able to distract you from a distance as well as I can.” He crossed his arms over his chest, flexing just a little, so that I wondered for a second if the fitted T-shirt would hold. It did, of course, but he’d had to stop lifting so much in the gym, because genetically he bulked more than his dancer’s body needed. He’d started to lose some of his flexibility, and he had enough muscles for dancing onstage without trading away some of that amazing mobility. He was double-jointed, among other things.

He gave a small and very masculine laugh, and I realized I’d just been staring at him with the one hiking boot in my hand. Crap, he hadn’t even begun to try to distract me, not really. I went back to concentrating on putting on my boot, but by that time Nicky came around the corner of the car, and I was suddenly sitting with one of them on either side of me. That shouldn’t have been a problem, but Nicky bent his nearly six feet of muscled hunkitude toward me. His shoulders almost didn’t fit inside the open hatch area, because he was just that big. His blond hair was cut short except for the triangular fall that covered most of the left side of his face. I put a hand on his chest as he leaned in; he wrapped one arm around me, drawing me in tight to all that hard, muscled upper body. If I’d thought Nathaniel was a threat to his shirt seams, it was always miraculous to me that Nicky didn’t split his shirts every time he tried to pick up a bottle. I had taller men in my bed, but no one was as massive as Nicky. He was flexible where he needed to be for sex, and hand-to-hand fighting, but the rest was just muscle. He lifted to be stronger, he lifted because he liked it, and genetics made him bulk, but he didn’t have a job where he needed to avoid it, so he didn’t. All that muscle made him seem bigger than men who were actually taller, but height isn’t everything when it comes to size. Men, and some women, seem to think it is, but just as obsession about length in other areas doesn’t take into account what width can do for you, the same could be said for Nicky’s upper body, and his thighs. He had to buy bigger jeans and then have them tailored through the narrowness of his waist, or he had to wear shorts and split the legs wider.

He kissed me firmly, but not with a lot of lip movement, because he knew I’d be mad if he sent me to the clients with my lipstick smeared like clown makeup. That one long fall of hair brushed the side of my face as we kissed. His mouth stayed firm but almost chaste against mine, but he breathed out against my skin, opening his lips just enough to let a long, low growl slide out against my mouth. I opened for it as if I could drink in the sound of him. It made me shiver in his arms, and I dropped the hiking boot and just wrapped my arms around his neck.

He put an arm under my ass and lifted me up, crawling into the back of the car with me half in his arms. I fought free of the kiss, and said, “Work, work, work, I’m at work, damn it.”

He spoke with his face just above mine, the weight of him half pinning me. “It’s dark and they’re human, they can’t see what we’re doing.”

I felt the car rock slightly as Nathaniel crawled into the back with us. He was on all fours on the other side of me, and I had a moment of staring up at both of them in the small, dark space of the car. The possibilities of the three of us together caught my breath in my throat and tightened things low in my body. They’d smell that I wanted them, but I couldn’t help that. I pushed my way to sitting and said, “No, absolutely no.”

“Absolutely no, what?” Nathaniel said, his smile faint in the darkness of the car.

I rolled my eyes at him and then began to crawl out of the car. It was actually a little hard to crawl past Nicky’s shoulders. He fixed that by lifting me up and sitting me gently on the edge of the open hatch area, where I’d started. He even got out and picked up the boot I’d dropped.

I took it from him, frowning, and not looking at his face much. I was going to ignore him as much as possible. I was going to ignore them both, damn it. “Work,” I repeated, and yes, I did know it was a case of the lady protesting too much. Throwing caution to the wind and having fun in the car like a flashback to high school sounded a lot more fun than raising the dead right now, but then if the men in my life weren’t more fun than work, I guess they wouldn’t be in my life.