I laughed and walked past him, clicking my nails down his shirt. It was solid and hard as a beetle's carapace. "Is that as uncomfortable as it looks?"
He fell into step beside me. "It's not uncomfortable. The ladies at Danse Macabre liked it a lot."
I glanced at him. "I bet they did."
"I like flirting."
"No joke."
He laughed. "For someone who doesn't flirt, you have a lot of guys after you."
"Maybe because I don't flirt," I said.
Jason was quiet as we walked to the bend in the stairs. "You mean because you're a challenge, they keep coming around?"
"Something like that."
I couldn't see around the bend of the stairs. I hated not being able to see around corners. But this time I was invited; I hadn't come to kill anybody. The vamps tended to be a lot friendlier when you weren't trying to kill them.
"Is Richard here yet?"
"Not yet." He glanced back at me. "Do you think it's a good idea to have them both here at the same time?"
"No," I said, "absolutely not."
"Well, at least we all agree it's a bad idea," he said.
The door at the bottom of the stairs was iron bound, made of a heavy, dark wood. It looked like a portal to another time--a time when dungeons were in vogue, and knights rescued ladies fair or slaughtered a few peasants and no one minded, except maybe the peasants.
Jason drew a key out of his pants pocket. He unlocked the door and pushed. It opened on well-oiled hinges.
"Since when did you get a key?" I asked.
"I live here now."
"What about college?"
He shrugged. "It doesn't seem very important anymore."
"You plan on being Jean-Claude's lap-wolf forever?"
"I'm having a good time," he said.
I shook my head. "I fight like hell to stay free of him, and you just give in. I don't understand that at all."
"You have a college degree, right?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"I don't. But here we both are, ending up in the same place."
He had me there.
Jason motioned me through the door with a low flourish that had imitation Jean-Claude written all over it. Jean-Claude made it seem courtly and real. Jason meant it for a joke.
The door led into Jean-Claude's living room. The ceiling stretched up into darkness, but silken drapes hung in black and white folds that formed cloth walls on three sides. The fourth side was bare stone, painted white. A white stone fireplace looked original, which I knew it wasn't. The mantlepiece was black-veined white marble. A silver fireplace screen hid the hearth. There were four chairs in black and silver grouped around a wood and glass coffee table. A black vase sat on the table filled with white tulips. My high heels sank into the thick, black carpet.
There was one other addition to the room that stopped me in my tracks. A painting hung above the fireplace. Three people dressed in the style of the 1600s. The woman wore white and silver with a square bodice showing quite a bit of decolletage, her brown hair styled in careful ringlets. She held a red rose loosely in one hand. A man stood behind her, tall and slender, with dark gold hair in ringlets over his shoulders. He had a mustache and a Vandyke beard, so dark gold they were almost brown. He wore one of those floppy hats with feathers and was dressed in white and gold. But it was the other man who made me walk towards the painting.