It was not a look I'd ever thought to see on Richard's face. It didn't seem very much like him. "How much of this is you, Richard, and how much of it is him?"
He lay flat on the silk and rolled over onto his back in a movement that was doglike and catlike at the same time. Or maybe I'm just prejudiced that dogs don't move with that same liquid grace when they writhe on their backs. He stretched his arms over his head, stretched his whole, long body out from toes to fingertips, stretched until his body shook with the effort, then he relaxed against the bed. He laid his hands across his stomach and smiled at me with that same mix of innocent sin.
"I'm not sure," he said in a voice that was thicker than it should have been this early in.
"Doesn't that scare you?" I asked, and my voice was breathy for a different reason now.
Richard frowned, just a little between those dark, dark brown eyes. Then he shook his head. "I'm not scared, in fact I feel calmer than I've felt in days."
I looked past him to Jean-Claude, who had laid back against the mound of pillows so that the crimson of the sheets framed his black curls perfectly.
"Oh, stop being so damned picturesque. You're messing with his mind."
"Not really."
"What does 'not really' mean?"
"I mean that I did not mean to do it. I am still adapting to this new power level, too, ma petite. I was worried for you earlier today. I was afraid what would happen with Nathaniel and Damian. I thought, I wish she was not so afraid of Nathaniel and what he wants from her. I swear to you that is all I thought, nothing more, but today I find that you have crossed several lines with him that you swore never to cross."
"Are you saying you made me do it?"
" Non, ma petite. I am saying I wished you to be less afraid of what you wanted, and you were. I did not realize that it could possibly have had an effect upon you, until just moments ago, when I simply thought, I wish Richard was not so afraid of what he wants, and now he is not."
"Did you hear all that, Richard? He's using vamp powers on you."
Richard gave me a lazy smile. "I feel calmer, less afraid, less conflicted. I hadn't realized how bad I was still feeling until now."
"Fine, I'm afraid enough for both of us, if you really did mess with me earlier today, then why am I about to walk out of this room?"
"I thought merely that I wished you would be less afraid of what you wanted from Nathaniel, and what Nathaniel wanted from you. I was not so specific with our Richard."
"You wondered if it worked the first time, so you tried it again, and voilà, you have your empirical evidence, because it worked twice."
"Perhaps, or perhaps it is merely coincidence. It will take us weeks, or months, to decipher what is true power and what is simply all of us coming to terms with ourselves."
I didn't like the sound of that, at all. "I can't do this."
"Why ever not?" Jean-Claude asked.
"Because, once I would have given nearly anything to have you both like this. I need to know what this means."
Richard sat up enough to prop himself on his elbows. "You said it yourself, Anita, you're already dating Jean-Claude and Asher, and living with Micah and Nathaniel. You said that the thought of a man on either side of you 'just flat does it' for you. What's one more pair?"
I glared at Jean-Claude. "Do you have like some metaphysical fist up his ass, like he's some kind of ventriloquist dummy, because that doesn't sound like him. That sounds like you."
"Don't talk to him, when you want to talk to me," Richard said. He sat up, and the sleepy smile was gone. "Does it bother me that you're with Micah and Nathaniel and Jean-Claude and Asher? Hell, yes. Does it bother you that I'm with Clair and half a dozen women in my pack?" He looked at me when he said it. I looked back. He finally said, "That was a question, Anita, can I have an answer?"
"Yeah, it bothered me to see Clair, and to meet your girlfriend for the first time, while I was nude. Yes, that was a special treat. I try to know as little about your personal life with the ladies of your pack as possible, so the rest, I didn't know about."
"I felt how much you wanted me earlier at your house, and you know how I felt about you. So let's not pretend anymore about that."
I hadn't known we were pretending, but I didn't say it out loud. "I don't know what you mean by that, Richard."
"It means we both want to be able to touch each other again. You fucked Byron for God's sake. Why are you okay with doing him, and not about this—us?" He motioned as if taking in the whole bed. I didn't think the "us" meant him and me. For the first time from Richard, I was pretty sure that he was talking about him and Jean-Claude.
I clutched the cold towel and tried to say out loud something that made sense. "I'm not"—change that—"Byron was emergency food. Once upon a time, I thought you and I were going to be it for each other. When you dumped me, it broke me up. Touching you is still not like touching other people for me."
"I feel the same way. You know I do," he said.
"I know you want me, but I also know that you'll be ashamed later. When Jean-Claude isn't there to calm your fears, you'll start to drown in them again." I laughed. "God, for the first time I understand what Asher was saying about me and the ardeur. I don't want this to be a good time now, then we go back to cutting each other up. I couldn't bear it." There, that was the truth. I had a glimmer for the first time why some people do casual sex with people they don't care about. If you don't care, and it goes horribly wrong, it's not that important.
"I don't want us to keep cutting each other up, either, Anita. I really don't." He rolled to the edge of the bed and stood up. The dozen or more candles painted his upper body in shadow and light. I missed the thick fall of his hair around his shoulders, but it was still Richard. Still the man who had come closest to making me try for the picket fence, and the two-point-five kids. "You still need at least one more daytime feed."
The topic change was too quick for me. I pressed myself against the door, so that the doorknob was in reach. If I had to run for it, I wanted to hit the door, not the wall. "Yes, though I found out that I can feed on human form, then feed again on the animal form, and it's like two different feeds."
Jean-Claude crawled closer to the end of the bed, the robe more framing his body like lingerie than hiding anything. "So in effect, you now have four daytime feeds, yes?"
"Sort of, right now Nathaniel and I are estimating I need to feed the ardeur about every six hours, or I start draining Damian's life energy. Since I can't feed on the same person every day, that still leaves me short."
"It may leave us, as you say, short, at night even. You'd fought to push your feedings to every twelve hours."
"I don't know, Jean-Claude, but I seem to need to feed more often."
"You are the energy for your new triumvirate. It takes energy to maintain it."
Richard turned and looked at the other man. "Are you saying that Anita and I drain energy from you?" He turned back to me before he got his answer, and the look on his face said he wasn't happy with the show Jean-Claude was putting on.
"Not precisely, but in a way, oui. All power comes with a price, Richard, and that price can be high."
"I think until I understand how to distribute the power among the three of us, that it's every six hours. I hadn't thought about the fact that only you and Asher feed me at night. Shit." I said the last with feeling.
"You have Damian now," Richard said. "Won't three be enough?"
I looked at him, tried to see jealousy, or anger, but he seemed to have offered it as simply a fact. "I don't know, maybe."
"I trust ma petite to control what she can," Jean-Claude said, nearly from the end of the bed, the robe sliding over his upper body until almost everything above the still-tied sash was naked to light. There was something about the way his body caught the flames, shining and pale, almost unreal, as if he were some kind of living work of art, that you would touch and he would fade, too beautiful to be real.
Richar
d snapped his fingers, and the sharp noise brought my attention back to him. He was frowning. "Are you actually turning me down?"
This was too hard a question for me. I closed my eyes so I couldn't see either of them. "Not exactly, but I need to know what to expect, Richard. I need to know what this changes."
"Every third day or so, I come to your house, and you feed the ardeur. "
I opened my eyes then. "Just a little sex, and that's it."
"What do you want from me, Anita?"
I pushed away from the door, because now I was getting angry. "Not dating, just fuck-buddies, is that it?"
"You're living with two men now, I don't think there's room for me in your life."
What I wanted to say was, if you can just fuck me and nothing else, then we were never really in love. What I said out loud was, "It's not just the sex I miss, Richard. I miss weekend movie marathons. I miss going places with you. I miss you, not just your body, Richard." I almost kept the next part to myself, but I had to know. It was time. "Do you miss me, Richard, or just my body?"
I managed to make it neutral, very neutral. Brownie points for me.
He looked down, and emotions fought across his face. His power flared like a warm wind, then died down. When he looked at me, there was pain and anger in his eyes. "You're the one who said it first, Anita. We don't work as each other's one and only. I'm working hard to accept my life as it is, but I can't live like you do. I still want one woman to be my forever person. I still want marriage, and maybe kids. I want a life, Anita. I know now that I can't have what I want with you." He reached out toward me, then his hands curled into fists. "But I miss you. Not just the sex. I miss the smell of you on my pillow, on my skin. I owe you an apology. When everything happened in Tennessee, I blamed my beast first, then I blamed you. It took six weeks of therapy to get me to see that I was pissed at you for saving my mother and brother when I couldn't do it."
"You would have given your life to save them," I said.
"Yes, but then we'd all be dead." It wasn't just pain in his eyes, it was anguish. The kind of emotion that eats you up and spits you back out. "You did horrible things, Anita, horrible things to find out where they were in time. You tortured a man, cut him up to get the information. I couldn't have done that. I wouldn't have let anyone do it in front of me. It wasn't just that you saved them and I didn't, it was when I heard all that happened, I realized that even if I'd been there with you, they would have died. My mother and Daniel would have died because I wouldn't have let you do what was necessary to save them."
I just looked at him, because I couldn't think of anything good to say. I wasn't proud of what I'd done in Tennessee, not all of it anyway, but I didn't regret any of it, because to save Charlotte and Daniel, I would have done worse. My only true regret had been that I didn't get there before they were raped and tortured. I would go to my grave regretting that part, because I'd seen Charlotte break into tears in her kitchen. She would say, "I don't know why I'm crying. So silly." It wasn't silly, and I'd recommended a good therapist I knew. The one I usually recommended to people wanting to join the Church of Eternal life, as a forever member.
"You're the Bolverk for my pack. The evildoer, the one who does what the Ulfric won't, or can't do. Raina was Bolverk for Marcus."
"Yeah," I said. See, I could still talk, but I still didn't have anything good to say.
"I want the white picket fence, Anita, and I know you don't."
"It's not that I don't want it, Richard, it's that it's too late for me. My life won't fit in that picture."
He nodded. "I know, and maybe mine won't either, but I still want to try. There are Ulfrics that have a wife and family separate from the pack. I've been trying to find a new lupa for the pack, and no one measures up. No one is you."
I was back to not knowing what to say, so I said nothing. I rarely got in trouble keeping my mouth shut.
"I think the reason your beast got out of control today is that you've been spending too much time with just one animal. I think if you have personal contact with something besides leopards that your beast will go back to being just amorphous, more metaphysics than physical. I want your permission to send some of the wolves over to bunk with you."
"Richard—"
"I don't mean fuck them, but sleep with them. Or take some wererats home, pick an animal, but if your power only touches leopards, it's going to think it's a leopard."
"And you're one of the wolves that will be stopping by?" I couldn't keep the irony and the unhappiness out of my voice.
"I don't mean it to be casual, Anita. I mean, be our lupa. Bring the leopards with you, and they can hunt with us on the full moon."
"I'll be your lupa, which means, what? What changes?"
"We're a couple within the lycanthrope community. You'll have more contact with my wolves outside of just crisis situations. Micah has really been working his tail off helping everybody out. We need at least one other person full time on the hotline. He's running himself ragged."
"I didn't know you were keeping track."
"I'm trying to pay attention, Anita. I'm trying to see what's there, not what I want to be there. I couldn't share you the way Micah shares you with Nathaniel, not every day, every night. I don't think I could tolerate you dating Jean-Claude and Asher. I certainly wouldn't be able to play blood donor on as regular a basis as Micah and Nathaniel do."
I just blinked at him, because this was a talk I never thought I'd have with Richard. It was way too logical. "I agree with everything you said in that last bit. But it doesn't change anything, does it?"
"I felt the power of your triumvirate with Damian and Nathaniel. Damian's not a master, and Nathaniel is no Nimir-Raj, but the three of you together are an amazing amount of power. What would we be, the three of us, if we did this right? If we did this the way it was meant to be done?"
"That so doesn't sound like you," I said.
"Tell me you haven't thought about it since you did the other triumvirate?"
I couldn't in all honesty, so I didn't try. "I felt what Jean-Claude and I could do at his club when Primo got out of control. I felt what Jean-Claude could do when I let him feed the ardeur in a way that was closer to a full feeding with other women. So, yeah, I thought about it, sort of."
"You said it yourself, Anita, we don't have enough soldiers. We need to look strong and not just for the vampires that might want this territory. Our pack has a bad rep, thanks to me, and Raina and Marcus before me. My reputation is shit among the other Ulfrics. They think I'm weak, and I've had some scouts from other territories that have too many dominants and not enough land. So far our pack is so screwed up that they leave without a challenge. No one wants the mess I've made of it. But as I get a better handle on my wolves, that may change. If we all joined together the way you and Jean-Claude did last night, if we were really a triumvirate of power, no one would touch us, Anita, no one would dare."
It was almost a direct quote from something I'd thought earlier. I looked past him to Jean-Claude. "We're parroting what you've been thinking for months, aren't we?"
He shrugged those lovely bare shoulders. " Oui, but I did not put the thoughts there, ma petite. I believe that both of you have come to the same conclusion at the same time. Is that so hard to believe?"
"I don't know," I said, and I was tired. Tired of the games, tired of hurting, tired of being scared.
Richard lay back on the bed, one knee up, the other down, so that he looked winsome as hell against the red sheets. "I'm scared again, Anita. I don't want everything we're building to go down in flames, because we're mad at each other. Let Jean-Claude take the edge off my fear. It felt great."
I looked past him to the vampire who was still draped against the pillows. "Did you pull back from his mind?"
" Non, ma petite, he simply fought, a little, and I was cast out. Both of you have the power to thwart me if you wish to."
"I don't wish to," Richard said, and that smile came back. It was la
zy, and sleepy, and filled his eyes with that knowledgeable innocence again. I realized in that moment that it wasn't Jean-Claude's look, it was Richard if he wasn't afraid, or angry, or conflicted. It was what he might be if he didn't get in his own way all the time.
" Ma petite. " Jean-Claude raised his hand toward me. "Join us."
I was shaking my head.
Richard reached out toward me, too. "You want to, you know you want to."
"My life is as close to working as it ever has been, I don't want that to go to wrack and ruin, either."
"I'm not offering to go back to what we had, Anita. I understand that that won't work for us. You are harder and more ruthless than I will ever be, and I can let you be that, but not if you're my only sweetie. I need a little distance from the worst of it, so I can pretend a little. Not much, but just enough so I don't lose my mind." He snuggled back until his head was resting against Jean-Claude's side. Jean-Claude was all black fur and velvet against white skin. His hair spilled around his naked upper body like a dark dream. He turned his head so he could look at Richard lying there. Richard was all tan and jeans, and seemed to burn with how very alive he was. They looked like they'd stepped out of two very different porno movies.
Jean-Claude looked up at me, and there was a pleading in his eyes. Without a word, he asked, "Please, ma petite, please do not spoil this."
"No fourth mark," I said.
"Agreed," Jean-Claude said.
"For now," Richard said.
I looked at him.
"Right now a lot of things seem like a good idea. No, don't frown, Anita, if a little vampire magic can take the edge off my anxiety, I'm all for it. It works better than the pills the doctor gave me."
"Lycanthropes' bodies work too fast for most medicines to stay in the body long enough to help," I said.
"I know," Richard said, and he raised his head up just enough that he was resting directly on Jean-Claude's bare back. It was probably just as well that he couldn't see Jean-Claude's face when that thick hair touched his skin. He probably wouldn't have liked any man looking like that because of him.
"Come, ma petite, let us be a true triumvirate at last. Be lupa in more than just name for Richard and his pack. Keep your living arrangements as they are, but allow Richard to visit."
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