“Oh, why didn’t you say so?” Dev said, and he held out his hand to me, smiling.
Micah kissed me on the cheek. “Go on.”
I went to the other men and let Dev and Nathaniel draw me in between them. Nathaniel picked me up around the waist and lifted me so I could kiss Dev, while he nuzzled his face across my breasts, still covered by all my clothes, but it was still almost too much for this much crowd.
“Is there a way for a straight guy to get in here somewhere?” Sin asked.
“If we had another girl or two, we’d have a hell of a daisy chain going,” Dev said.
There was movement among the guards. I turned, still held between Dev and Nathaniel, to find three of the Harlequin guards dropping to one knee near us. Echo bowed her short black hair, Fortune with her short blue curls beside her. They didn’t surprise me, because they’d shown up to the tiger get-together as lovers earlier, but Magda the werelion took a knee, too. That, I hadn’t seen coming.
Echo spoke, “If it meets with your approval, mistress, we would gladly try to help fill out your chain of daisies.” She raised her face so I got the full force of those deep blue eyes framed by all that pale skin and black hair. Her face was a delicate oval, and she wasn’t much bigger than me, but something about her coloring evoked Jean-Claude; it was probably just the hair-eyes-skin combo, but still . . . it wasn’t a bad thing.
“I don’t know what to say, I mean, gentlemen?”
“None of us are going to say anything until you do,” Micah said. The other men nodded.
I sighed. I was the girl and the one most likely to not want more women. I had Nathaniel and Dev put me down, so I was at least standing on something solid.
Domino stepped forward and said, “Sorry, but do you need to talk to Jade about adding more women?”
“I told her weeks ago that I was looking for women who liked both men and women, that it didn’t work for me to be with someone who dislikes men.” I had; I just hadn’t expected to have so many potential choices this soon.
Fortune looked up at me with a smile almost visible on her broad mouth. Her blue-on-blue eyes were shining as if she knew a joke that I didn’t. Echo watched me out of those dark blue eyes. I looked at Magda with her thick blond hair cut just above her shoulders. She so needed a new hairdresser, but if we took her into our bed then Jean-Claude would help her, like he’d helped me. She stared up at me with those gray-blue eyes. They were almost completely gray against the unrelieved black of the guard’s typical clothes.
“Okay, with Echo and Fortune I guess we can do what I did when the tigers first came to town.”
“Kiss them,” Dev said.
“Unless you have a better idea,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Magda, before we even get that far, I need to know why the hell you’re beating up Kelly, when it gains you nothing.”
“I have stopped challenging her. She can retain her place in the pride.”
I frowned, and asked, “Why the change of heart?”
“I was doing it in hopes that she would ask you to intervene.”
“You wanted me to do what? Punish you, fight you, what?”
“Pay attention to me; I had done my job flawlessly, worked at practice to the best of my ability, but you had not noticed.”
“I noticed, you’re great in the gym.”
“I could not tell that you had noticed.”
“Sorry, I should have given you an ‘atta girl.’ Next time you need something from me, just ask, don’t beat the shit out of anyone trying to get my attention, okay?”
“Once I was able to sleep beside you and help heal you, then I knew you had noticed me.”
I didn’t know what to say; she seemed to think I’d requested her to sleep with me, and not that Lillian had just offered her name out of a hat, so to speak. Kelly was safe and that’s what counted. I turned to Nicky. “You okay with this? You’re Rex.”
“I’m not sleeping with her, so her sex life is her business.”
“Okay, cool.” I turned back to Magda and the others. I motioned them to stand and then had the weird moment of having three women in front of me and having to decide how to decide if I wanted to include them not just with me, but with the other men in my life. Weird did not cover it, and only one of them was a tiger, so it didn’t even help much with the whole commitment thing.
I turned to Jean-Claude. “Some help here.”
“What would you have of me, ma petite?”
“I think they need to kiss everybody, not just me, to see if there’s a spark, because I do not want to have another woman in my life who doesn’t work with the men in my life.”
“But you must kiss them first, because I do not want another woman in my life who doesn’t want to sleep with you. Envy was enough of a lesson.”
“Okay.” I turned to the women and thought, where to start?
“We could do it by height,” Fortune said, smiling, “shortest to tallest, or the reverse.”
“I know you’re kidding, but I don’t have a better idea.” I moved down to Echo, who was only a couple of inches taller than me. I stared in her face and again there was that jolt of recognition, as if I should know her face from somewhere, but it was more one of those memories that makes me think that past-life memories aren’t just silliness.
I moved in closer to her and felt incredibly awkward. I touched her face and moved in for a kiss. She moved toward me, and our lips touched. It was a soft brush of lips, and I thought what I usually thought about kissing women, what small mouths they had. I drew back from her, not sure what to think. It wasn’t a bad kiss, but I’d learned I was a lot pickier about women than I was about men when it came to sex.