“We are supposed to be getting ready to sleep, pussycat. If I feed on you, it will not make me want to sleep.”
Nathaniel smiled down at him. “I’ll be good.”
“Of that, I have no doubt,” Jean-Claude said.
Nathaniel lowered his face just enough to kiss Jean-Claude. It was a chaste kiss compared to the one that he and I had just done, but there was something very erotic about them doing it with Nathaniel’s body held just above the other man’s. Jean-Claude raised a hand to caress the line of Nathaniel’s bare back, tracing the muscles that kept him so still above him. Nathaniel rolled over to one side of the bed to lay his head against Jean-Claude’s chest. The vampire did the natural movement that went with that, which was to put his arm around Nathaniel’s shoulders and hold him. He cuddled closer to Jean-Claude, snuggling into the hug. I wasn’t sure what had gotten into Nathaniel tonight. He was in a good mood, but it was mercurial, so that even I didn’t know what was coming next.
“As I said, before I was so delightfully interrupted, I can wear more to bed if it will help your comfort level.”
“If the king wants to wear nothing to bed, then that is the king’s pleasure,” Damian said, but he was uncomfortable with the pair of them cuddled up in the bed. It showed in the way he held his shoulders and how he didn’t stare too long at them. Was Nathaniel trying to make our so-heterosexual vampire more uncomfortable? That didn’t seem like something Nathaniel would do to Damian, unless I’d missed the redheaded vampire making Nathaniel uncomfortable elsewhere. Nathaniel was usually one of the nicest people you’d ever meet, but occasionally if something hit him wrong, his payback was very tit for tat. You do this to me and I will do it to you in spades. What had Damian done to make Nathaniel want to pull on this issue so hard?
“I do have pajamas if it would make you more comfortable tonight,” Jean-Claude said, still holding Nathaniel in the crook of his arm.
“You said you were sleeping on the other side of Anita.”
“I am.”
“Then what you wear, or don’t, isn’t as . . . pressing,” he said at last.
“They will be too long for him, but I could lend Nathaniel a pair of pajama bottoms,” Jean-Claude said.
“I usually sleep nude,” Nathaniel said, rubbing his cheek against Jean-Claude’s bare chest like a cat scent-marking its person.
“We both do,” I said.
“Show him what you are wearing, ma petite. Perhaps that will make our crimson-haired guest more willing to come to bed.”
I didn’t hesitate about it, because the way Damian was standing said in every line from shoulder to feet that he was debating leaving. I gave Damian all the eye contact I could as I dropped my robe beside Jean-Claude’s and revealed a lacy blue camisole and boy shorts that were the same royal blue as the robe.
“Beautiful,” Nathaniel said.
“Very nice,” Damian said.
“Thanks. Jean-Claude picked it out,” I said.
“I chose the color, but it is your body that turns a bit of silk and lace into something extraordinary,” Jean-Claude said.
I turned and started walking toward the bed, and maybe I put a little extra sway to my hips in the lacy boy shorts. I wanted Damian to want to come to bed. The men were being strangely uncooperative about it, or seemed to want to feed his straight-guy nervousness about sharing a bed with extra men. I wanted to appeal to the part of him that wanted to crawl into bed beside me, regardless of what the men were doing.
I looked back at Damian and did my best to put the smile he wanted to see on my face. He looked stricken, as if I’d slapped him instead of just walked away in lacy pajamas. Apparently, I looked even better in the outfit than I’d thought, or at least my ass did. I grabbed hold of one of the bedposts to help me climb up on the tall mattress. I very deliberately crawled the long way across the bed toward the other two men so that Damian got a good view.
“Come to bed, Damian,” I said, and turned to look over my shoulder at him, and the look on his face was everything I’d wanted it to be. Was it unfair since we weren’t going to have sex? Maybe, but if we were going to see if sleeping between Nathaniel and me could fix the whole sweating-blood-and-nightmares thing, Damian needed to get in bed with us and sleep.
Damian took off his robe last, laying it at the far foot of the bed, where we’d never accidentally touch it unless we grew several feet taller. When I say it’s an orgy-size bed, I’m not joking.
Damian was wearing pajama bottoms that looked as silky as my robe, but they were a deep red and made his upper body look almost translucently pale, as if you should have been able to see his bones move as he walked, or as if the red brought out a shine to his skin that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Nice color on you—the red, I mean.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Come up on the bed so we can get some sleep,” I said.
“I hope I don’t sleep. I hope I just die at dawn,” he said. I had a moment of wanting to ask if he meant die at dawn to wake the next night, or just die. He’d talked about it in his office, and that was never a good thing for a person to begin to speculate about. But I didn’t ask, because some things you do not ask before bedtime, and you certainly don’t ask about death and suicide when you’re about to curl up between two walking corpses that may die with the rising of the sun.
Damian climbed tentatively onto the other side of the bed from us. He had to crawl a ways to reach us, and then we had another awkward moment as he stared at the three of us. The men were still cuddled up, but I was leaning against them almost like they were the back to a lounge.