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laced all the way up his leg. I liked these boots and had seen them with and without pants. I stumbled as he drew me closer, thinking too hard about the boots and nothing else on him, and then there was the moment when I had to look up, had to see that face. He and I had been a couple on and off for five years, almost six now, and I kept waiting for a moment when I could see him and not feel like there had to be some mistake. Someone this beautiful couldn’t possibly be in love with me when he had an entire planet of people to choose from. I cleaned up well, but Jean-Claude made me feel like I’d sneaked into the Louvre and stolen a masterpiece off the wall so I could roll around on it naked.
His eyes were a midnight blue so dark that a shade more would have made them look black, but they never did. His eyes were the darkest true blue I’d ever seen, as Asher’s were the palest. The head of their bloodline, their sourdre de sang, literally “fountain of blood,” had a thing for blue eyes and had collected different colors of blue-eyed and beautiful men. She’d had centuries to find them, and I had two of her most amazing right here. She’d thrown Asher away when he was scarred, and Jean-Claude had fled from her. Now he was his own sourdre de sang, the first new master of his own bloodline to appear in a thousand years.
He leaned down and laid a gentle kiss on my lips. I kissed him back, letting my body fall in against his, and his arms encircled me and it was like breathing, as if I’d been holding my breath until we kissed.
He pulled away with my lipstick on his lips, but it was a good color for him. He smiled down at me, his eyes sparkling as if he was on the verge of laughter. “Ma petite.” That was all, just my nickname, but it seemed to hold years of I love yours.
The lights flashed. It was the signal to get to our seats before the curtain went up. J.J. was standing so that Jean-Claude could help me into the seat beside him where she’d been sitting. She smiled and said hi. I told her I was glad she could make it. “I wouldn’t have missed seeing Jason dance again,” she said, and her face lit up as she said his name. She was pretty, always, but in that moment she was beautiful. She had the same spring-blue eyes that Jason had. They both had the soft good looks that sometimes goes with blond, blue-eyed coloring. They looked enough alike to be siblings, but then they shared a common great-great-grandfather. A lot of the kids from their school looked like siblings. Apparently Great-Great-Granddad had been a busy boy.
Something made me turn and look back to Micah and Asher at the head of the aisle. Asher had tried to give Micah the same greeting he’d given me, but Micah had pulled away. Asher sat down laughing as Micah eased past Jean-Claude and me to sit on my other side by J.J. Jean-Claude patted Micah’s back, as if saying, It’s all right. In private Jean-Claude and Micah greeted each other pretty intimately, but Micah had made it clear that he wasn’t food for everyone. Asher had taken it as a challenge to see if he could seduce Micah, and when that hadn’t worked, he seemed intent on embarrassing him. I loved Asher, but he had a sadistic streak in him that I wasn’t always crazy about.
If he didn’t stop pushing, he was going to be on Micah’s shit list permanently. I wasn’t sure what to do about the rising tension between the two men, but something was going to have to be done before Asher pushed my Nimir-Raj far enough to do something unpleasant. Micah and Jean-Claude had tried to rip each other’s throats out the first time they’d met. If Jean-Claude and I couldn’t get Asher to tone it down, Micah would take care of it; we just might not like how he did it. He wasn’t homophobic, he just didn’t want to donate blood to Asher, and the other man seemed to have taken the rejection badly.
Micah was tense beside me, his face striving for neutral but showing anger if you knew where to look for it. I covered his hand