Incubus Dreams - Laurell K. Hamilton [277]
“That smile,” he said.
“What smile?” I said.
Jean-Claude answered, “The knowing smile.”
“The one that says you’re thinking dirty thoughts, and you want to do them all with me. You’re the only woman I know that can put innocence and evil into the same look.”
“Evil,” I said. “Am I supposed to be offended?”
“I just never expected to see that smile directed at me again.” He kissed me on the forehead. “For that smile, I’d do a lot.”
“I still don’t get the idea of innocence and evil in the same smile.”
“You have the look of a fallen angel, ma petite. An angel does not stop being an angel merely because they fall from grace; their wings are not so easily taken.”
I remembered thinking almost the same thing about Richard earlier. Like a fallen angel. Should it have bothered me that Jean-Claude and I were using the same analogy? Yeah, but out loud all I said was, “I thought you were the dark angel here?” I turned so I could see his face.
He smiled and whispered, “Nothing I could have offered would have gotten him out of his pants.”
“I heard that,” Richard said.
Jean-Claude laughed. “And will you refuse her offer?”
He looked from Jean-Claude to me, then back to Jean-Claude. Richard laughed, a very masculine laugh. “No.”
I was suddenly very aware of the two of them pressed on either side of me. Enough foreplay, off with the clothes.
59
THE CLOTHES CAME off, then Richard argued with me on what position I’d be better able to deep throat him. Like I said, the three of us together have to argue about everything. Jean-Claude settled the argument by simply saying, “Let ma petite try her way, and if it does not work, we can try yours.” I began to realize that Richard and I as a couple was truly impossible, but as a threesome, if the third was our diplomat, it might work. What does it say when you need another adult in the bed to referee? Nothing I wanted to think about too deeply, not at that moment. At that moment, I let all the doubts go, all of them. I knew Richard and I too well not to suspect that we would wreck this later. But for now, right now, we had this moment. I tried to get out of my way and enjoy it, and had to trust the men to do the same.
I’d seen Richard nude, and recently, but it had been a long time since I’d seen him stretched nude on a bed, on his back, with the long length of his body spilled out in front of me. I made him spread his legs so I could lie down between them, rest my head against the muscled swell of his thigh, and gaze up the length of him. It was a form of teasing myself, almost. So close to his groin, but not touching. But it wasn’t that I just wanted to look, it was the whole package. And it wasn’t just that he was lovely to look at, it was that after I’d looked at the groin, only partially erect, and still impressive, the flat plain of his stomach with its perfect dimple of belly button, the swell of his chest with his nipples like dark brown punctuation to all that permanently tanned muscle; the swell of his shoulders, and finally his face. His face gazing down at me. The pure brown of his eyes like chocolate, the look in them already a little unfocused, when all I’d done was lay my cheek against his thigh and breathed out along his testicles. A feather of a touch, and already his face was showing the effect, as were other parts of his body.
It wasn’t just the body, it was Richard looking down at me. The weight of him in his eyes. Him staring down the line of his own body, while I lay between his thighs. I used to think that only death would take someone away from me. But I had learned that so many lesser things can steal someone away, just as completely, just as forever. They live, they breathe, but you never get to touch them, you never see them nude, you never wake to their smile, the smell of their skin on your sheets. There are things so much less dramatic than death that are just as permanent. If I never got to be here like this with Richard again, I wanted it to last. I wanted to take my time.
Where was Jean-Claude? Sitting in the far corner of the bed opposite