Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [110]
I squeezed her hand and didn’t know what to say.
“I’m a private detective, and I’m thirty. If we got married we’d have to start thinking about kids right away. I’m not ready.”
“Do you want kids, ever?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I grew out of wanting two kids and a white picket fence about five years ago. I don’t think I ever really wanted it, but it’s what you’re supposed to want, you know.”
“I know.”
She looked at me with her serious, sad eyes and asked, “Do you want kids?”
“No,” I said, “my life doesn’t have that kind of room.”
“No, if you had a different job, would you want to be a mother?”
“Once upon a time I thought I’d get married and have a kid or two, but that was before.”
“Before what, Jean-Claude?”
“No, before I became a vampire executioner, and a federal marshal. Before I realized that I’m probably never going to get married. My life works for me right now, but it wouldn’t work for a child.”
“Why, because you don’t have a husband?”
“No, because people try to kill me on a semiregular basis.”
“Speaking of violence, what happened to your door?” she asked.
“Gregory broke it down because I wasn’t answering the phone and he heard screams.”
“Why did he hear screams?”
“Without mentioning vampires, I can’t tell you the story.”
She sighed. “I thought Jean-Claude was a passing thing, your one big fling. You know, he’s the bad guy that you have this great sex with, then you wise up and move on.” She looked at me, and she really looked at me, searching my face. “He’s not a fling for you, is he?”
“No,” I said.
She took in a lot of air, then let it out slowly. “I’m not saying I want or could handle all the details, but tell me enough so I know what happened to your door.”
Even edited down, the story took a while. We were just past the point where Richard dumped me royally, when Nathaniel and Gregory came into the room.
Ronnie had her face all set for massive sympathy, and was actually reaching out to offer a hug, when she saw them. Her face froze, and her arms just stopped moving, as if she was suddenly a statue in that kid’s game.
Nathaniel was nearly naked, wearing only a leather thong and a whole bunch of straps across his upper body. So many straps that for a moment it gave the illusion that he was bound in some way. He padded into the room, looking totally comfortable in his nearly nothing bondage gear. That might have been what stopped Ronnie in her tracks, or then again, it might have been Gregory. He was still in leopardman form, and still totally nude. He wasn’t happy to be nude anymore, but he was still naked except for his very natural fur coat.
From the look on her face, I wasn’t sure Ronnie had really seen that much of Louie in ratman form, or if she had, he’d been more discrete than Gregory was being. He had three straps in his clawed hands and was looking at the rivet on the end of one of them as he glided through the door.
“Hi, Ronnie,” Nathaniel said, as if she wasn’t staring at him openmouthed. “Anita, have you seen my punch?”
“Your what?” I asked.
“It’s a punch for reattaching leather rivets. I forgot that two of the straps came loose last time I wore this.”
“I don’t even know what a leather punch looks like,” I said. I sipped coffee and watched both the men, and Ronnie’s face. She was trying to recover her cool, but the effort was visible and near painful to watch.
“Sort of like a big stapler, with one of those round things on the top.” He knelt down to open up the tool drawer. This flashed the back of his body to us, and there was a lot of back to flash. The thin black stripe that was all that covered his ass didn’t exactly cover anything as much as it emphasized what was there.
If I hadn’t had Ronnie’s reaction to watch, I’d have been more distracted myself, but I was enjoying her total failure to hide what she was