Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,31

have to leave in about forty-five minutes. I can’t leave clients waiting for long.”

He laughed. “They get nervous if you leave them alone in graveyards, I know.”

“Cemeteries are actually damned peaceful. They just spook themselves,” I said.

“I know that, too.”

“Do you want us to come to you?”

“I just came up all those damned stairs, so no. I’ll come to you. I love you, Anita.”

“I love you more.”

“I love you most.”

“I love you mostest.”

We hung up and I turned to find Jean-Claude out of the bathroom shirtless, but with his leather pants fastened. He was as dressed as he could get until he was sure it was safe to put the white shirt back on or he got a second, darker shirt.

“I really do like you in the blue; thank you for not getting dressed yet. Which of our cats was on the phone, for that is your endearment only to the two of them,” he said.

I ignored the compliment, because saying that it had been accidental rather than undressing for him on purpose seemed the wrong thing to say, so I said, “Glad you like it, and it was Micah; apparently he told Lisandro to alert him if we had any free time to talk.”

“Talk?” Jean-Claude said. “About what?”

“He didn’t say, but he’s already up the like bajillion steps from the underground apartments, so he’ll be here in minutes and you can ask him.”

“The steps were designed to discourage intruders, ma petite.”

I laughed. “Seriously, how many steps are there, has anyone ever counted?”

I would say he sat down on the couch, but that doesn’t really cover it. He draped himself artfully on the couch, long pale arms stretched along the back of it, so that the leather of the couch acted like a frame for his body. He rested one booted ankle on his opposite knee so that he managed to look both like a tough from some Old West movie and suggestive.

“Do you do that on purpose or are you just naturally that decorative?” I asked, leaning my butt against the desk.

“I did have a natural flair for being, as you say, decorative, but centuries of practice do, indeed, make perfect.” He smiled, obviously pleased with himself, and it made me smile, because once he’d hidden from me just how much he liked himself. I didn’t blame him, because I had so many issues with my own physicality that I’d been uncomfortable with how very comfortable he was in his own skin and with his own beauty.

He held one hand out toward me, and I went to him, because when someone you love holds out their hand to you, that’s what you’re supposed to do. I curled up beside him in my new blue undies and he drew me in against his body, holding me close with one arm.

“You may distract our leopard king dressed like this.”

“I don’t have time to talk and distract him,” I said, laughing, and started to get up, but he pulled me back down, and then there was a knock on the door.

“Just a minute,” I called out.

Lisandro said through the door, “It’s Micah.”

“I’m not exactly dressed,” I said, “so him, but not you.”

Lisandro laughed. “I’m going home to my wife at the end of shift, I won’t peek.” The door opened with a glimpse of Lisandro’s dark figure turned away so he couldn’t see into the room and Micah could walk past him.

Micah came through the door like he came through every door, as if the room were his room, or at the very least he was thinking of purchasing it. It was a surety and security in himself that he’d had since I’d met him. He was wearing blue jeans and a deep green T-shirt fitted to his lean runner’s body, because he was exactly my height, and when a man is that short he needs fitted clothes, or he always looks like he’s borrowing someone else’s. His dark brown hair was back in a braid, or something so tight that you could barely tell that it curled. Loose, it fell past his shoulders. He almost always kept it back, and if I hadn’t threatened to cut my hair short if he cut his, he’d have cut it boy-short, but I loved his hair, and he loved me.

He smiled when he saw us, his delicate triangular face alight with some inner joy; the sunglasses that hid his eyes stopped us from seeing that happy thought fill his eyes, but as if he