That got a smile from me, and I didn't want to smile. I didn't want to be enjoying watching him all soapy and wet. I wanted to be afraid of him, and I was, but I also wanted him. Wanted to run my hands down his wet flesh, wanted to touch what lay under those bubbles. I didn't want intercourse. I couldn't imagine that with him, but I wanted to do a little exploring. I hated that. He was a corpse; surely what I'd seen tonight convinced me of that.
"You're frowning, ma petite; why?"
"I asked you if the two rotting vampires were illusion, you said no. I asked if your form was real, you said yes. Both forms are real, you said."
"That is true," he said.
"Are you a rotting corpse?"
He settled lower in the warm, soapy water, drawing his arms into it, until only his head showed above the surface of the water. "That is not one of my forms."
"That isn't an answer."
He raised a pale hand from the water, a handful of bubbles cupped like a snowball. "There are different vampiric abilities, ma petite; you know that."
"What's that have to do with it?"
He raised his other hand and began to play with the bubbles, trailing them from hand to hand. "Janos and his two female companions are a different type of vampire than I am. Than most of us are. They are much rarer. If you ever see me as a rotted corpse, I will be well and truly dead. They can rot and reform, and it makes them much harder to kill. The only true surety is fire."
"Volunteering an awful lot of information, aren't you?"
He lowered his hands in the water, washing the soap away. He sat up a little straighter; suds clung to his body. "Perhaps I am afraid you will think that what happened with Jason would happen with us."
"We will never test that theory," I said.
"You sound so sure of that," he said. "Your lust perfumes the air, and yet you truly believe that we will never make love. How can you want me almost as much as I want you, yet be sure we will never know each other's bodies?"
I wasn't sure I had an answer for that one. I slid down the wall and sat with my knees drawn up to my chest. The pocket with the gun in it clunked against the wall. I moved the gun to a better position and said, "We just won't, Jean-Claude, not ever. I just can't." A part of me regretted that, but only part.
"Why, ma petite?"
"Sex is about trust. I'd have to trust someone implicitly to have sex with them. I don't trust you."
He stared at me with his blue, blue eyes, looking all scrumptious and wet. "You mean that, don't you?"
I nodded. "Yeah, I do."
"I do not understand you, ma petite. I try, but still I do not."
"You're pretty much a riddle to me, too. If that's any comfort."
"It isn't. If you were a woman who had casual lusts, we would have been in bed long ago." He sighed and sat up even straighter in the water so it hit him just above the waist. "Of course, if you were a woman of casual appetites, I don't think I would love you."
"You enjoy the chase, the challenge," I said.
"True, but it is more than that with you, if only you would believe me." He leaned forward, drawing his knees to his na**d chest, rounding his shoulders to hug himself. White scars dribbled down his back from his shoulders to vanish into the water, not a lot of them, but enough.
"What made the scars on your back? Unless it was a holy item, you should have been able to heal them."
He laid his cheek on his knees so he could look at me. He looked younger, more human, vulnerable suddenly. "Not if the injury occurred before I died."
"Who whipped you?"
"I was the whipping boy for an aristocrat's son."
I stared at him. "You're telling me the truth, aren't you?"
"Yes."