Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Colletion_ Books 11-15 - Laurell K. Hamilton [384]
His voice floated through the darkened room. “Who will taste my kiss?” Taste, left a sweetness on my tongue, as if I’d licked a piece of candy. Kiss, gave a ghost of lips brushing my cheek. “Who will embrace me?” Embrace made me feel faintly warm, as if I’d been given a really good hug by someone I cared about.
Jean-Claude’s voice had always been good, but not this good. Not this good. With my partial immunity, I probably wasn’t getting all of it. I had no idea how much more the audience was getting. It took a force of will to look away from him in that shining circle of light. I made myself look out at the audience. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark, but when I could see, nearly every face was turned to him. They gazed up at him in the dark as if he were the rising sun and they had never seen anything so bright before. Only a handful of faces weren’t turned toward the stage. A few women were shaking their heads and looking confused. A little psychic talent of the right kind or with the right practice helped. Marianne had proven to me that you didn’t have to be a necromancer to have some immunity to vampire mind tricks.
One of the few men was standing up, and the woman with him was tugging on his arm, trying to get him to sit back down. He was shaking his head, adamantly. No, no, he wouldn’t sit in the dark and let that voice wash over him. He didn’t understand that it wasn’t a matter of sexual orientation. It was Jean-Claude. His power was seduction, and it had nothing and everything to do with sex.
Two of the waiters were escorting a woman up on stage. She was tall and almost anorexically thin. She’d apparently been waving more money than anybody else, because Jean-Claude preferred more curves on his women. As he’d pointed out to me, the beauties of his day in the French courts were today’s size twenty. Most of the old vamps liked short women with curves. Most of us were living in so the wrong century.
The lights around the stage had been growing brighter so gradually that if you’d been gazing at the stage the entire time, you might not have noticed. The light was just barely bright enough so the audience could see more of their bodies. From the waist up, you could see his pale hands sliding over her body. Nothing déclassé, but he got more out of simply touching a woman’s back, shoulder, or waist, than some men got out of touching breasts and groin. Sometimes it’s not what you touch but how you touch it.
He pressed her against the front of his body so there was no space between them, so that her thin frame seemed almost to mold itself to his body. He lifted her face up to meet his, using one pale hand to cradle her face so that he would control the kiss. His arm slid around her waist, and tightened. Tightened enough to bow her neck and make her mouth open in a surprised little O. One of the women before this one had groped him, so he’d made sure there wasn’t enough space between the front of their bodies for anyone’s hands to wander too far. The women seemed to take the closer frontal contact as a sign of favor. I knew it wasn’t. It was a sign of control and damn near displeasure.
But when he bowed his head to her mouth and locked their lips together in a kiss, there was no displeasure. He kissed her as if he were trying to breathe her down through his mouth. He fed from her lips almost as if he were feeding from her neck. And in a way, he was, feeding at least.
He fed from their mouths in a way that the Dragon’s presence in