I touched one of the strands of hair that was plastered to his skin. 'When you came through the curtain I was so happy to see you.' I moved the strand away from his face, smoothing it back. 'Even knowing you shouldn't have come, that the local master would see it as a power play.' I touched a strand on either side of his face and smoothed them back into the heavy blackness of the rest of his so-wet skin. 'Even knowing it's dangerous when you travel, because you're outside the fortress that the Circus of the Damned has become.' I pushed back the last stray lock of his hair so that his face was clean and perfect. For once I said everything I was thinking, as if I were too raw to stop myself. 'Looking down at you like this, and I still marvel that you want me, that someone beautiful as you wants me after six years ...'

His lips parted, as if he would speak, and I put my fingertip against his mouth.

'You'll say I'm beautiful, and I have to believe you. I have to believe the amazingly beautiful people in my life who keep saying it, but I'm saying this, that I never grow used to the beauty of you, your eyes, your face, the hair, the body, everything. I love that you came. You didn't have to. You could have just lowered your shields, reached out to me, and felt everything I was feeling.'

He wrapped his hand around mine and moved it from his lips, laying a gentle kiss on my fingers as he did it. 'When I saw you on the television bleeding and hurt I knew you would not die, because I could feel how hurt you were, and I knew we had power to heal you and bring you safely home to me, to us, but it wasn't enough, ma petite.' He pressed my hand to his chest. 'I needed to feel this. I needed to touch your skin, kiss your lips, hold you as close as I could. I would survive your death physically, I believe there is enough power now for that, but my heart ...' He raised my hand and kissed it. 'My heart, it beats for you, Anita Blake. If there were a way for us to marry without the other men in our lives feeling excluded, I would ask it of you.'

I felt the tears in my eyes and had to concentrate not to blink. I would not cry. My voice didn't show it when I said, 'Micah said almost the same thing to Nathaniel and me.'

Jean-Claude tilted his head to one side. 'Then let us do it.'

'What?' I asked.

'Legally you can marry only one of us, but we could have a ceremony; there is precedence for it.'

'What do you mean?' I asked.

'A group marriage, not legally, but we could handfast, jump the broom as it was once called here in America.'

I was crying, and I hadn't meant to. 'How would we do it? I mean, how many of us? What about rings? I mean, do we all get rings? Do we all get engagement rings? Who would be willing to marry that many people to each other?'

He smiled, and he looked happy, just happy. 'I do not know the answers to most of your very reasonable questions, ma petite, but that you are asking them, and did not simply say no, is more than I had hoped for.'

I started to cry harder, so that I had to swallow the lump in my throat to say, 'Did you really think I'd say no?'

'Yes,' he said. 'If I had dreamt otherwise I would have made it the most romantic night of your life and conspired with the other men in our lives to sweep you off your feet. But as it has always been between us, ma petite, you put me at a disadvantage and throw all my romantic ideals into the air to land where they may.' He kissed my hand and got to his feet. He kept my hand in his and touched my face with his fingertips, ever so lightly. He studied my face as if he would memorize it. The tears slowed, and I looked up into that most beautiful of faces.

'Anita Blake, will you do me the honor' he dropped to one knee in the shower 'the honor and wonder of marrying me?'

I started to cry again, damn it! I nodded and finally found my voice. 'Yes, yes, I will.'

He smiled up at me, his face alight, not with vampire powers or psychic gifts of any kind, but with joy. After nearly six hundred years he was still just a man kneeling in front of a woman, relieved that she'd said yes and happier because of it. And me, for once I let myself be the girl, and I cried, and I let him hold me as I did it. I cried because I was happy and sometimes you get so happy your heart fills up and spills out your eyes, but I cried for Ares, too. I cried for what I'd had to do, and I cried because if I had to do it over again, if I'd known what would happen, the only thing I would have changed is I would have killed him sooner. I wouldn't have risked the officers on the helicopter, and somehow I felt their deaths were on me, even though I knew I couldn't have guessed what would happen. Logically I knew that, but guilt isn't about logic, and neither is love.

Somewhere in all the crying and touching, the kissing grew from gentle to something with force and need. We celebrated my yes on the floor of the shower. We started with him on top so I could see all that amazing beauty above me, his body thrusting in and out of mine, but the shower kept spraying around his body and it was a race to see if I'd feed the ardeur or drown first. We moved me to my knees, laughing, until he entered me from behind and stole the laughter and the breath from my throat for a moment, with the sheer pleasure of him inside me.

He spread my legs farther apart, his hands controlling my body, keeping me still so he could glide over that spot inside my body over and over again in long, slow, full strokes. The sensation of it was extraordinary.

'Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude.' I said his name in time to his body, so that it became part of the rhythm.

My breathing sped, and I could feel the building pleasure, so close. 'Oh, my God, close, so close.'

His rhythm hesitated for just a moment, and then he went back to that long, sinuous stroke of his body inside mine. I could hear him breathe now, and that he was fighting to keep it even, steady, as the rest of his body. Control your breath and you control so much.

Between one stroke and the next, the pleasure spilled over me, through me, so that my body pulsed and beat with it. I screamed my pleasure into the floor, and it echoed back at me, deafening. He held his rhythm, though I could feel his fingers tight against my ass, as he fought to keep me as still as he could, and with every stroke he brought me again, so that it was orgasm after orgasm, or maybe just one long, rolling line of pleasure.

His voice came strained, 'Ma petite, feed, feed for I will not last, loose the ardeur and feed.'

It was there, just below everything, waiting. With less than a thought it was roaring to life, spilling up through me like another pleasure to ride on the orgasm and thrust itself into the man inside me, so that he cried out. I felt his body spasm one more time, and the next thrust was deep and solid, and it brought me again, screaming, my nails scrambling at the wet tile trying to find something to hold on to, to sink into, to anchor myself in the midst of all that pleasure.

I fed on the joy of him inside me, the foolishness of our love, on the memory of his face as he looked up at me, and even the tears I'd shed. It was a good, thorough feeding, because I didn't feed just on our lust, but on our love.

I collapsed onto the tile with him still inside me. I fought to keep my face above the tile, and he fought to keep his upper body from pinning me to the floor and the water underneath us. Our arms trembled in an echo of exertion and pleasure.

'I love you, ma petite,' he said, in a shaky voice.

'Je t'aime, Jean-Claude,' I said, and my voice trembled as I said it, but that was just great sex, and I was as certain of what I'd just said as anything I'd ever said in my life.

CHAPTER 39

Once we cleaned up, I told Jean-Claude about the rotting vampires, the flesh-eating zombies, and the mystery master vampire that was making and possessing the vampires. Somewhere in the telling of it, I realized something.

'The only reason we didn't try to cure Ares the way that Asher and Damian cured Nathaniel in Tennessee was that we didn't have a vampire with us, but you're here now. You could heal Micah's dad!'

We were dressed and Jean-Claude was fussing with my hair, using those long, graceful fingers of his to get the curls to lie just right. I stepped away from him enough to see his face. His expression was not comforting.

'Why can't you?' I asked.

'If it were fresh, I could have tried, but it is days old, ma petite. The doctors have cut away the initial wound and the corruption has spread to other places that have no wound to show.'

'How do you know all that?'

'Nicky reported to me on the plane as I traveled to your side. He is a very thorough and dispassionate observer without you awake and aware to feed him your emotions.'

'So you knew everything I just told you about the vampires,' I said.

He moved close enough to pick up another of my curls and begin to wind it around his finger. 'I did, but you gave details that Nicky could not. He has no real psychic ability, or magic, except for being a werelion. It makes his reporting very physical. You add the metaphysical and I need to know that as well. I can ask you questions that he could not answer.'

'Such as?' I asked.

'The Lover of Death is supposed to be dead, killed by other hands, but the Mother of All Darkness was supposed to be dead once before, and she was not. Was this he? Is this the Lover of Death come back from the dead, so to speak?'

I started to just say no, but then I stopped and made myself really think about the question.

Jean-Claude focused on entwining my hair around his fingers, serious as a small child. I let him do it, because my hair would look great, but it was also something that relaxed him. He usually only fussed with my hair as much as he fussed with his own when he was nervous or we were going to be out at some public event.

'I've felt the Lover of Death's energy when he was combined with Mommie Darkest. This didn't feel the same. The vampire didn't do that nifty trick that the council did, kind of appearing in vision above our heads, or in our heads. This one had to use the vampire he'd made as his puppet to talk to us.'

'But you felt his energy, ma petite; was it the same?'

'I didn't feel the presence of this one and think, Oh, it's the Lover of Death, if that's what you mean.'

'Yes, that is what I mean. So it is not him.'

'No.' I thought about it as I said it. Something was nagging at me, as if I'd forgotten something important.