I kissed him back, because what else could I do? Hell, what else did I want to do? I wasn’t angry enough not to run my hand around his bare waist and caress him as our lips met.
He rose and I smiled up at him, damn near stupid-faced with the kiss, and the memory of earlier, and all the days before. We’d been living together for three years and it just got better.
“That,” Envy said, “that’s what I want. I want someone to look at me the way you two look at each other, or the way that Jason and J.J. look at each other. I want gentleness and love.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Jason said, as he carried her tea to the table.
“No. Anita says she likes Richard being a brute, but she has Nathaniel, and Micah, and Jean-Claude. She has her gentle, and her love.”
“You have Jean-Claude,” I said.
“No, I have sex with Jean-Claude, I’m his lover, but he doesn’t love me.”
Nathaniel turned to her, one hand still in mine. “Are you in love with him?”
I stiffened, my hand tensing in his. “Nathaniel!”
“No, Anita, we need to know how we all really feel about each other. If we’re not honest it all falls apart.”
“He’s right,” Jason said. He sat down at the table at the end so he could see all of us easily.
I glared at him.
“Don’t give me that look,” he said, laughing. “You know it’s true.”
I tried to keep frowning at him, but started smiling in spite of myself. Jason had had that effect on me from almost the beginning when I met him. It was one of the reasons that we were friends and that I hadn’t killed him when I first met him; so glad I hadn’t.
I finally gave in to the smile, but did my best to smother it in my coffee cup, though since I was still holding hands with Nathaniel, the tough-as-nails attitude was a little compromised.
Nathaniel pressed the back of my hand against his bare stomach and I suddenly had more trouble thinking. I looked up at him. “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?”
“Doing what?” he asked, violet eyes wide. If it had been Jason I’d have known he was being disingenuous, but with Nathaniel just liked touching so much sometimes he did it without thinking.
“Nothing,” I said.
Jason grinned at me from the other end of the table. I started to try to glare at him again, but finally said, “Fuck it, what’s wrong, or what’s up?”
Nathaniel raised my hand up so he could kiss it, and rub his cheek against it, like a cat scent-marking—mine. I liked it, because we were each other’s mine; the fact that the word didn’t include an exclusivity clause didn’t make the possessive mine any less real, a point I just couldn’t seem to explain to my monogamous friends.
“I’ll get breakfast started while we wait for Domino. He’s still in the shower.”
Domino was one of our bodyguards, and one of my lovers, but he didn’t sleep at this house much either. We were still organizing our guard rotation since we lost Ares, and I had been willing to believe that Domino was going to be more at the house because of that, but realizing he was going to be in on the talk this morning let me know it hadn’t been a coincidence that the weretiger had slept over and shared a bed with Nathaniel and me. Our third, Micah Callahan, was traveling on business again, so the big bed had room for a guest.
“Tigers like water, a lot,” I said, and sipped at my coffee.
“I’m not overly fond of it,” Envy said, “but that may be because you can never take a shower without a man thinking you want sex.”
Nathaniel moved toward the oven, laughing softly. Jason started to laugh, too. I coughed and nearly aspirated coffee.
She gave me the full weight of those exotic blue eyes. “It must be true for you, too. Richard loves shower sex.”
Jason laughed harder.
“What’s so funny?” Envy asked, looking from one to the other of us.
Jason looked at me with sparkling eyes. This time I managed to glare at him, while I blushed. I’d almost stopped doing that—almost.
“Anita likes water,” he said in a voice that was shiny with laughter.