Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,127

he knelt half in the water, his graceful hands resting on either side of my hips. His face was neutral as only the older vampires could be, so that he gave me nothing to judge, or react to, just this patient waiting for me to decide if I was going to lash out in my anger or let him comfort me.

I touched one of the strands of hair that was plastered to his skin. ‘When you came through the curtain I was so happy to see you.’ I moved the strand away from his face, smoothing it back. ‘Even knowing you shouldn’t have come, that the local master would see it as a power play.’ I touched a strand on either side of his face and smoothed them back into the heavy blackness of the rest of his so-wet skin. ‘Even knowing it’s dangerous when you travel, because you’re outside the fortress that the Circus of the Damned has become.’ I pushed back the last stray lock of his hair so that his face was clean and perfect. For once I said everything I was thinking, as if I were too raw to stop myself. ‘Looking down at you like this, and I still marvel that you want me, that someone beautiful as you wants me after six years …’

His lips parted, as if he would speak, and I put my fingertip against his mouth.

‘You’ll say I’m beautiful, and I have to believe you. I have to believe the amazingly beautiful people in my life who keep saying it, but I’m saying this, that I never grow used to the beauty of you, your eyes, your face, the hair, the body, everything. I love that you came. You didn’t have to. You could have just lowered your shields, reached out to me, and felt everything I was feeling.’

He wrapped his hand around mine and moved it from his lips, laying a gentle kiss on my fingers as he did it. ‘When I saw you on the television bleeding and hurt I knew you would not die, because I could feel how hurt you were, and I knew we had power to heal you and bring you safely home to me, to us, but it wasn’t enough, ma petite.’ He pressed my hand to his chest. ‘I needed to feel this. I needed to touch your skin, kiss your lips, hold you as close as I could. I would survive your death physically, I believe there is enough power now for that, but my heart …’ He raised my hand and kissed it. ‘My heart, it beats for you, Anita Blake. If there were a way for us to marry without the other men in our lives feeling excluded, I would ask it of you.’

I felt the tears in my eyes and had to concentrate not to blink. I would not cry. My voice didn’t show it when I said, ‘Micah said almost the same thing to Nathaniel and me.’

Jean-Claude tilted his head to one side. ‘Then let us do it.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Legally you can marry only one of us, but we could have a ceremony; there is precedence for it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘A group marriage, not legally, but we could handfast, jump the broom as it was once called here in America.’

I was crying, and I hadn’t meant to. ‘How would we do it? I mean, how many of us? What about rings? I mean, do we all get rings? Do we all get engagement rings? Who would be willing to marry that many people to each other?’

He smiled, and he looked happy, just happy. ‘I do not know the answers to most of your very reasonable questions, ma petite, but that you are asking them, and did not simply say no, is more than I had hoped for.’

I started to cry harder, so that I had to swallow the lump in my throat to say, ‘Did you really think I’d say no?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If I had dreamt otherwise I would have made it the most romantic night of your life and conspired with the other men in our lives to sweep you off your feet. But as it has always been between us, ma petite, you put me at a disadvantage and throw all my romantic ideals into the air to land where they may.’ He kissed my hand and got to his feet. He kept my hand in his and touched my face with his