at least two of them with us most of the time. I had no memory of Asher ever hitting anyone he loved, and thanks to Jean-Claude that memory went back a few hundred years, but there might have been more than one reason that no one got physical with us.
Asher turned those glowing eyes to me then, and I felt the push of his power like an invisible wall was trying to move through me. Once his power would have just rolled over and through me, but that was then; this was... different. I hadn't had him try his luck against me since the Mother of All Darkness had died. Asher had nearly killed me once, by accident, because I was so vulnerable to his particular flavor of vampire wiles. Now I stood there, and his power did not move me. His beauty moved me. The memory of great sex and bondage moved me. But looking into that amazing face from feet away, with all that potential that I knew was hiding under the fancy clothes, I felt cold, as cold as the power that rolled off him and tried to cloud my mind. He was trying to calm me down, or make me not care about his bad behavior by using vampire wiles. It was so cheating.
"How many times have you used vampire wiles on me to win a fight?"
He blinked, his eyelids coming down over the fire of his eyes, so that his golden lashes were framed against the bright blue, and for a second it was like looking into the hot heart of some demonic oven with the door half closed.
"If your holy object does not glow, then I'm not harming you, isn't that what you said?"
I nodded. "I did, but maybe I was wrong, or maybe if I want to be fooled hard enough romantically, my cross just lets me do it; free will and all that."
"Are you saying your cross is intelligent enough to make judgment calls?"
"No, I'm saying the power that my cross is hooked up to, that I believe in, is intelligent enough to make judgment calls."
"Or perhaps your God sees no harm in me."
I shrugged. "Maybe."
Asher moved closer to me, so that my vision was full of all that gold hair, that heartbreaking face, and the glow of his eyes. His mouth was still the same pouting perfection that it had been when Jean-Claude first fell in love with him. The Church fathers who had used holy water to try to burn the devil out of Asher so long ago had skipped that full mouth, as if even they couldn't bear to ruin the angelic beauty of his face. The scars on his face that he was so self-conscious of actually touched only a small part of his right cheek. Only one long, white line of scar reached out toward the perfect curl of his mouth. It was as if when they'd seen what the holy water had done to his face, they hadn't been able to bear what they'd done. Sometimes when you do evil, you have a realization so bright, so harsh, that you mend your ways. I'd always wondered if the priests who tortured Asher had been converted to a better brand of Christianity, or if their faith had died as they trailed the burns down the right side of his body?
Asher took me in his arms, and the moment he touched me that much, his vampire wiles got a boost of power. Most vampire powers got a boost through touch. He held me and it was as if he were my Prince Charming. I gazed up at him and I couldn't "see" that his eyes were still glowing, or feel the cold march of his power. He was just suddenly perfectly gorgeous. There was no stop in my head, no cautionary statement, no warning. He kissed me, pressing those full, soft lips to mine. I kissed him back, falling into that kiss with my lips, mouth, tongue, and teeth, until it was more a tasting than a kiss. My hands, arms, body, entwined, pressed, wrapped - I couldn't get close enough, and when his hands started to pull my shirt out of my pants I reached under the back of his satin jacket and pulled on his shirt, too. Pressing bare skin to bare skin sounded like such a good idea. Pain, and I tasted sweet, copper pennies. It took me a second to realize I was tasting