Rafael (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #28) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,26

close you realized they were just violet. He had to put blue on his driver’s license because purple wasn’t a choice. His normal color was a paler lavender; the eye color alone let me know his mood was up. He put one hand at the small of my back and the other in my hand and he literally started to waltz. I had a moment of awkwardness that I almost always did when I danced, but I stopped trying to shield so hard at the connection between us and suddenly I could dance, because Nathaniel could dance.

We danced in the hallway with him smiling down at me, his eyes shining with happiness, and along with the dancing skills came his mood. I laughed out loud from the joy that was bubbling through him. I wondered exactly what had made him this happy. He used his hand at the small of my back to press us closer together, so I could feel that there were other things up besides just his mood. The feel of him pressed so hard against the front of me made me miss a step; I got a string of visuals from the afternoon he and Micah had shared that made my knees so weak I would have fallen if he hadn’t caught me. I loved being in the middle of the two of them for sex, but as their own wedding approached, our mostly heterosexual Micah was trying to work on issues he was having with two men and no girl in sight.

I managed to say in a voice gone hoarse with just the memory feedback, “Sorry I missed it.”

“Next time,” Nathaniel said, and then he picked me up off the floor and spun me around, laughing.

“This is not just the shorthand of a couple, you shared what you are feeling and thinking,” Rafael said.

Nathaniel set me down, but kept his arms around me, and I kept hold of him. My knees weren’t weak anymore, but we hadn’t kissed yet. He’d wanted to share his delight, but he wasn’t done.

“Yes,” Nathaniel answered him, but kept looking at me. He leaned in to kiss me and I went up on tiptoe to help.

My eyes were closed, but I still knew that Micah had crossed behind me toward the wererats. He wasn’t bound to me like Nathaniel was, but he was still my Nimir-raj and that was its own magic. Then Nathaniel was kissing me, and I forgot about everything else.

It was like a continuous feedback loop of his mouth on mine, mine on his, his hands so strong on my back, and my smaller hands on the smooth muscles of his back, his hands having to find their way around the shoulder holster with the Springfield EMP nine-millimeter and the big knife in a sheath along my spine, the extra ammo on the right side of my gun belt, the inner pants holster of the Sig Sauer .380. Nathaniel even got the thought in there that I still felt like I was cheating on my old Browning BDM by carrying the Springfield nine-millimeter for every day, and the Springfield .45 when I was on duty as a marshal. I got that he missed my body under his hands without all the straps and weapons. There was a moment when I wasn’t sure whose thought, hands, mouth, body was whose. I was trying to climb back into control or something when I felt Damian wake for the night. Suddenly it was three of us and I felt that first gasp as he woke like a swimmer who had almost drowned and was fighting back to life.

Then we were looking down at him; the brightest green eyes I’d ever seen in a human being stared up at us, set in the milk-white skin of a natural redhead who had spent a thousand years in the dark. It meant his hair had no gold highlights like most redheads, so it looked darker, a true red instead of the orangey color it might have been.

Rafael said, “What is that?”

Micah said, “Damian’s awake,” as Nathaniel and I broke from the kiss and looked at each other. Nathaniel’s eyes were green, and because I could still see/feel through him, I knew mine were, too. I had a moment to be truly creeped out by it, and Damian shut down the link and we were left alone in our bodies in the hallway, knowing that the vampire third of our triumvirate of power had