Anita Blake 20bis - Beauty: An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Outtake by Laurell K. Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

burn scar sat on one side of his pectoral, somewhere between the nipple and his heart. Some centuries ago a vampire hunter had shoved a glowing cross into his chest. I knew that Jean-Claude had killed the person who did it, just like I’d killed the people who branded me with my own cross-shaped burn scar on my arm. Mine was a brand, not a holy object reacting to vampire skin, but they looked the same. The vampire wannabes that branded me had thought it was funny to mark me up like a vampire; they’d thought it was funny right up until they died. So who was I to throw stones that Jean-Claude had killed the person who branded him? Fair is fair.
    I finally let myself look at that face, and I felt like I had from almost the first moment I’d seen him: that he was simply one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen. The black curls touched the edge of his face, as if bringing attention to the curve of his mouth, the line of his cheek, and those eyes. They always looked blue, but they were so dark. Midnight blue with their double edge of black eyelashes like dark lace to frame the deepest blue I’d ever seen in anyone’s eyes. His eyes were a blue like deep ocean water, where it runs cold and will eventually spill down into something warm and mysterious, where creatures the light has never seen live and thrive. Those gorgeous eyes looked at me, and there was love in them, but the second he saw me in the doorway, walking toward him, there was lust, desire, and just a heat that brought a blush to my face and an answering heat to my own eyes. Six years after we’d first started dating I was still a little amazed that this most lovely of men still wanted me so badly. They talked about burning for each other, and we still did. I never seemed to get over the surprise of turning around and seeing him there. You’d think I’d get used to seeing such a beautiful man and knowing he was mine, but it never grew old, as if his beauty and the fact that he was mine, and I was his, would forever surprise me.
    I walked toward him like I had a purpose, because I did. I smiled, and because the mirror was behind him I could see it, and it was a confident, possessive smile. The look on my face echoed his with its sheer lust, wanting, desire—I wanted him and he wanted me; still. I found that amazing, too, as if I’d thought we’d grow bored of each other, or he’d grow bored of me. If I was honest with myself, that was it. How could small-town, middle-class me keep the interest of this man, this centuries-old vampire, who had seduced his way across Europe and at least half of America? And yet, I had.
    I heard his voice in my mind, like a breath. “How can you doubt your beauty even now?”
    I looked at him in the tub, and frowned. I had to raise my voice over the still-spilling water. “You shouldn’t be able to read my mind without me lowering my shields, or at least knowing you’re in my head.”
    “I did not read your mind,
ma petite
. I read your face, your body language. I saw that shadow of doubt cross over you.”
    I stopped moving forward and looked at him, one hand going to my hip by habit. I’d found when I was nude I still had to do something with my hands. The gun took care of only one of them.
    He laughed, and it was that touchable, hold it in your hand and let it melt into your skin sound that made me shiver. “So cheating,” I said.
    “It would only be cheating if I was using it to seduce you. You want to be here with me. I do not have to use tricks.”
    It was hard to argue, though part of me wanted to out of habit. I finally let it go, shook my head, and smiled. “Fine, yes, you don’t have to seduce me anymore, I’m pretty much as seduced as I can get.”
    “That cynical expression, even now, it is very you,
ma petite
.”
    I glanced up in the mirrors and saw that cynical look staring back at me. It made me smile, hand on hip, gun in hand, naked. I looked like the proverbial tough girl from some naughty