Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #28) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,25

never been one of those people who let myself get carried away, until Jean-Claude and these two walked into my life and stayed. Micah was my height, the only man I’d ever dated who was as short as me. Nathaniel was taller at five foot nine. He’d grown three inches taller and suitably broader through the shoulders since I met him. His auburn hair had also been down to his ankles; now it fell just past his shoulders, shining and perfectly straight. Micah’s hair was the same length, but his dark brown hair was so curly that it was inches longer when it was wet. I didn’t usually think of Micah as the more delicate of the two men, maybe because I was usually beside them and didn’t see them together from a distance that often.

Micah was built like a swimmer with that upside-down V of shoulders down to narrow waist and hips. He could spend as much time as Nathaniel did in the weight room, but he didn’t muscle up like our shared man did. They were both strong, but in T-shirt, jeans, and boots Micah could hide it, Nathaniel couldn’t. Nathaniel was the male equivalent of an old-fashioned pinup, lush and masculine, but with a face that was closer to beautiful; before he’d filled out with more muscle and extra growth, he’d been beautifully androgynous, and now he was still beautiful, but even from the back with the long hair he was finally and completely male. Micah on the other hand still treaded that androgynous line, and he sort of hated it. We were both over thirty, so there wasn’t going to be a growth spurt for him or me.

Rafael squeezed my hand, which made me look at him. I had a second of wondering if I’d dropped a polyamorous ball by ogling my men this way, but he smiled. “Go to them. It does my heart good to see all of you so happy together, gives me hope that I’ll find my own crazy happy someday.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I left him with Benito and Claudia and almost ran toward them. We’d been together five years now, and I still wanted to be as close as possible to them every time I saw them. I didn’t run to them, but I might have power-walked, and I was in their arms, because it was their arms. We’d been a threesome from the beginning, never just a couple. We put our faces together before we kissed, forehead to forehead for Micah and me, and Nathaniel bending over us so that we touched, our arms interlocked in a circle of just us. Then Micah kissed my cheek, which made me move so that he could kiss me on the mouth. It was a good kiss, soft and complete but still okay for public consumption. We could have kissed like that standing on the sidewalk and not offended anyone. I drew back from the kiss to stare into his chartreuse eyes, green and gold at the same time the way a cat’s could be, because they were the eyes of his leopard trapped forever in his human face. Too long in animal form and sometimes you don’t come back all the way. It was why he needed glasses, because leopards don’t see distance that well; if it’s too far to hunt or attack, then it’s far more important to see up-close movement. The sunglasses he still wore to hide his eyes in public were prescription, and I’d never known. It had explained why he’d worn them inside so often.

I looked at him almost eye to eye, though my boots were more combat/police, so his club boots gave him a couple of extra inches of height. He didn’t wear them to be taller, he wore them because Nathaniel had picked them out for him. Left to his own devices Micah was running shoes and nice dress shoes. We both had things in our closets that our third had bought for us.

Nathaniel used our joined hands to turn me toward him as if there was music in his head I couldn’t hear, and it was the beginning of a dance. Micah let go of both of us and stepped back to give him room to do what he was going to do, because just that one dancelike move said he had something planned that was less tame than Micah’s kiss.

From a distance Nathaniel’s eyes looked deep violet blue, but up