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believes that I need to prove myself worthy of him. It’s like they’ve been raised in a culture that I don’t understand.” I divided my weapons up between Micah and Nathaniel. When I was safe, or at least weaponless, I went back to the two men.
“Are we done with the warrior stuff ?”
They looked at each other. Pride said, “If you were male we’d probably do hand-to-hand, but we outweigh you by a hundred pounds or more, and we’re at least seven inches taller. Hand to hand, you won’t win. It’s not about training. It’s about size, and you can’t help that you’re small. We won’t hold that against you.”
Again, I felt like I was missing something. “Glad to hear it, so who’s up first?”
“Up first?”
“Kiss, a kiss, who’s first?” I asked.
They looked at each other again. “When we go to the human clubs, the women are a little more eager,” Pride said.
I pointed behind me. “They’re my guys. It’s not that you aren’t cute, but when this is already waiting at home it makes a girl a little less eager to add new men.”
They did that look again. Pride nodded. “That seems reasonable.”
Reasonable, that was an interesting choice of words, but I let it go. “Fine, let’s reason together. Who kisses me first?”
“See who smells the best,” Pride said.
It was a perfectly reasonable wereanimal thing to say. Since I had no better suggestions to offer, it was as good as any other. I expected them to offer their wrists for me to smell, but they both slipped their shirts over their heads. I was suddenly looking at their bare chests from inches away. My head came to just below Pride’s pectoral muscles, and a little lower down the ribs on Mephistopheles. Either way I was suddenly staring at a lot of muscled half-nakedness. You’d think I’d get used to that sort of thing.
They both moved in closer. I put a hand on both their stomachs to keep them from sandwiching me. It was a mistake to touch them. But it was like so many mistakes; it looks harmless until you do it, and then it’s too late.
40
EACH OF THEM pressed one of my hands to his stomach. The tiger inside me looked up and growled. The other tigers all came out of the dark and sniffed the air. I’d never seen all the colors at once. The gold stood in the middle, with the other colors fanning out in a half circle. They didn’t try to trot down that long metaphysical road and become real. They didn’t do anything but stand there in a soft line and sniff the air.
I felt the men bend over me and sniff along my skin. I had to blink to clear my inner vision enough to see them and not just the tigers inside me.
“She smells of all the tigers,” Mephistopheles said.
“It’s not possible,” Pride said, but his face was against my hair. He rubbed his cheek against me, and then seemed to catch himself and straightened up. “It’s not possible,” he repeated. He stepped away from me, rubbing his arms as if he were cold, but that wasn’t it. He was rubbing at the line of goose bumps on his skin.
I stared up into Mephistopheles’ blue-hazel eyes and knew he wouldn’t move away. Hands on my shoulders turned me to find Envy at my back. She leaned over my upturned face and kissed me. She tasted of tiger and sweet lipstick. The fact that I didn’t pull away encouraged her more than I knew what to do with, and I had a moment of thinking, loudly, “Jean-Claude.”
He was there, his arms sliding around her waist, pulling her away from me and turning her to him. Auggie had asked me how I’d feel to see Jean-Claude with another woman; in that moment I felt relieved.
Mephistopheles bent over me, his arms sliding behind my back, drawing me into the warmth of him. “We’re supposed to be proof against vampire powers, but I want to touch you, and I want you to touch me. Why?”
I answered him with his mouth inches from mine. “The other tigers are looking for someone who smells like home.”
“I have a home,” he said, and his lips moved against mine as he said, “I just want to put as much of my body against as much of your body as you’ll let me.”
I tried to be reasonable. I tried to think, but in that moment it sounded like such a