I got a glimpse of Dev as he strode through the curtains on the other side, going toward the bedrooms, the kitchen, everything else. Apparently, he was leaving the fight to us, or maybe he was simply too angry to trust himself, or maybe too puzzled. I knew that Asher confused me more than any other lover in my bed, and that included Cynric. At least with him I knew what my issues and his were, but with Asher... I knew some of his issues, and Jean-Claude knew others, but honestly, he was like an emotional minefield; you never knew when you'd step in it again, or how much of your relationships it would blow up. I realized as the first real anger stirred in my gut that I was tired of it.
He turned around, his hair flaring around his shoulders and face in a foam of golden waves. It spilled over one half of his face, leaving one perfectly beautiful half bare to the light, so that only one of his ice-blue eyes showed. He was angry, but not so angry he had forgotten to use his hair to hide the scars on one half of his face. When he was happy, sometimes he forgot to hide the scars, but most of the time I saw his face through a veil of his hair, like a golden cobweb between him and the world. His jacket was a pale blue that brought out the color of his eyes, and was cut at the waist so that it emphasized the broad shoulders narrowing down to slender waist, and the curve of his h*ps in a pair of painted-on satin pants that matched the jacket. The shirt that showed in a line at his waist was white, and probably silk. He was still dressed in the clothes he'd worn as ringmaster in the Circus above us. There would be a matching top hat around here somewhere, all blue satin and white ribbon band. He didn't always wear the same outfit, but I'd seen him perform in this one, so I knew it was for work, not just because he looked yummy in it, but he still looked yummy in it.
Was it shallow to say that some of my anger vanished because he came through the curtains looking heart-stoppingly beautiful, or just true? Even as I thought it, I felt Jean-Claude in my head, and knew it wasn't just my seeing him as lovely that made me patient, that unmanned me in front of his beauty. It was Jean-Claude who loved him more than I did, and had for centuries. They didn't always get along, and they'd been estranged for more than a hundred years at one point, but Jean-Claude was almost helpless before the beauty of the man in front of me.
Asher's eyes bled to pale blue fire, the hidden one gleaming like iced flame through the waves of his hair. His power rode down my skin like a cold chill.
Nicky and Claudia were at my back, the curtains closing behind them. I heard my bags hit the floor as they dropped them to have their hands free. Asher and I never came to blows, but I wasn't the only one tired of his shit, and neither of the guards was getting sex out of him, or had Jean-Claude's happy memories. It made them crankier than I was, made them sort of ache to smack some of the shit out of him.
I felt rather than saw other movement farther into the room, blocked by Asher's tall figure, and Nicky looming up at my side. But I knew the movement was Jean-Claude's bodyguards. We both had at least two of them with us most of the time. I had no memory of Asher ever hitting anyone he loved, and thanks to Jean-Claude that memory went back a few hundred years, but there might have been more than one reason that no one got physical with us.
Asher turned those glowing eyes to me then, and I felt the push of his power like an invisible wall was trying to move through me. Once his power would have just rolled over and through me, but that was then; this was... different. I hadn't had him try his luck against me since the Mother of All Darkness had died. Asher had nearly killed me once, by accident, because I was so vulnerable to his particular flavor of vampire wiles. Now I stood there, and his power did not move me. His beauty moved me. The memory of great sex and bondage moved me. But looking into that amazing face from feet away, with all that potential that I knew was hiding under the fancy clothes, I felt cold, as cold as the power that rolled off him and tried to cloud my mind. He was trying to calm me down, or make me not care about his bad behavior by using vampire wiles. It was so cheating.
"How many times have you used vampire wiles on me to win a fight?"
He blinked, his eyelids coming down over the fire of his eyes, so that his golden lashes were framed against the bright blue, and for a second it was like looking into the hot heart of some demonic oven with the door half closed.
"If your holy object does not glow, then I'm not harming you, isn't that what you said?"
I nodded. "I did, but maybe I was wrong, or maybe if I want to be fooled hard enough romantically, my cross just lets me do it; free will and all that."
"Are you saying your cross is intelligent enough to make judgment calls?"
"No, I'm saying the power that my cross is hooked up to, that I believe in, is intelligent enough to make judgment calls."
"Or perhaps your God sees no harm in me."
I shrugged. "Maybe."
Asher moved closer to me, so that my vision was full of all that gold hair, that heartbreaking face, and the glow of his eyes. His mouth was still the same pouting perfection that it had been when Jean-Claude first fell in love with him. The Church fathers who had used holy water to try to burn the devil out of Asher so long ago had skipped that full mouth, as if even they couldn't bear to ruin the angelic beauty of his face. The scars on his face that he was so self-conscious of actually touched only a small part of his right cheek. Only one long, white line of scar reached out toward the perfect curl of his mouth. It was as if when they'd seen what the holy water had done to his face, they hadn't been able to bear what they'd done. Sometimes when you do evil, you have a realization so bright, so harsh, that you mend your ways. I'd always wondered if the priests who tortured Asher had been converted to a better brand of Christianity, or if their faith had died as they trailed the burns down the right side of his body?
Asher took me in his arms, and the moment he touched me that much, his vampire wiles got a boost of power. Most vampire powers got a boost through touch. He held me and it was as if he were my Prince Charming. I gazed up at him and I couldn't "see" that his eyes were still glowing, or feel the cold march of his power. He was just suddenly perfectly gorgeous. There was no stop in my head, no cautionary statement, no warning. He kissed me, pressing those full, soft lips to mine. I kissed him back, falling into that kiss with my lips, mouth, tongue, and teeth, until it was more a tasting than a kiss. My hands, arms, body, entwined, pressed, wrapped - I couldn't get close enough, and when his hands started to pull my shirt out of my pants I reached under the back of his satin jacket and pulled on his shirt, too. Pressing bare skin to bare skin sounded like such a good idea. Pain, and I tasted sweet, copper pennies. It took me a second to realize I was tasting blood, but once I knew what I was tasting I started swimming up through the mind games.
I pushed at Asher, trying to stop the kiss, but the blood that had made me want to stop had him pulling me tighter, his mouth locked on mine, as he kissed me deeply, thoroughly. If his fangs hadn't been bleeding me, it would have been a great kiss.
I pushed harder, trying to pull away from his painful, sensuous kiss, trying to unlock his arms from behind me. I was making protest noises as if his mouth were a gag, keeping me from telling him, Stop, don't. One of the reasons I didn't like gags during bondage sex was that it stole your safe word away. You couldn't tell whoever was topping you, No. A gag meant you trusted the person to behave themselves, or, you wanted your no taken away. You wanted to leap off the cliff and let the dominant do whatever they wanted to you. Nathaniel found that relaxing somehow; I didn't.
If he'd been human I could have struggled free without hurting him. I was more than human-strong, but if he'd been only human, there wouldn't have been dainty fangs to cut my mouth. If he'd been human I wouldn't have loved him, because he wouldn't have been Asher.
He was holding me too close, too tight, so the only options I had to get away were things that would injure him permanently, or injure parts of him that I might want to play with afterward. He tightened his arm against my back and moved one hand to the back of my head, grabbing my curls tight. In the right head space, the right moment, it was enough to switch me to a submissive mind-set, but this wasn't the right anything. Asher deepened his kiss and drove those dainty fangs into my lips again. I made a pain sound, yelling against the tender gag of his mouth on mine. I stopped trying to push farther away from him, and pushed my body closer to him. He seemed to think that meant I was enjoying myself, because his hands loosened on me, not so much trapping me as holding me. I put my leg behind his, hooked his knees, and drove him toward the floor, but he didn't let go, so we both fell, but if I was falling, and he was going to keep kissing, I should have made sure my knee went into parts of him he wouldn't enjoy, but I liked those parts of him. I didn't want to hurt Asher. It's hard to get away from someone who's stronger than you are, if you don't want to hurt them. Shit!