see his face to know the look. It was a look he'd only recently worn around me. Possessive, it said, mine, it said. I'll share, but it's mine. He usually only brought the look out when someone was behaving badly, or he didn't like them. I think we were all agreed on what we thought of Auggie. He was such bad news.
"Afraid of what, pussycat?" Auggie asked, disdain thick in his voice.
"Wanting Anita as badly as you do," Nathaniel said.
The comment made me tense, but he pressed himself even closer, and I relaxed against him. He rested his face touching mine, so we probably looked like one of those posed engagement shots. Auggie was right about one thing; Nathaniel could play games when he wanted to. He played less and less as he got more comfortable with his life, and himself, but he hadn't forgotten how to play.
"You don't like wanting anyone that much. You see it as a weakness," Nathaniel said, "and you're beginning to realize just how hard to deal with Anita can be."
I turned and looked at him, forcing him to move his head enough for us to make eye contact. "Do you find me difficult?"
He grinned. "I like being dominated."
I started to say how hard I'd worked to ensure that he wasn't dominated, then realized what the grin meant. He was teasing me. I tried to glare at him, but I wasn't serious enough for it to work.
"Do not let your unease be your undoing in this, Augustine," Jean-Claude said.
"What's that mean?" he asked.
"It means that if you continue to say and do such things to ma petite, then I will not be able to offer you the ardeur from her."
Auggie had a moment where something flashed through his eyes. For just a second I would have said it was fear. "Maybe I am being stupid, but I came to her looking for a Julianna and what I found is Belle."
Jean-Claude's face went very still. "Why would you say that?"
"I only saw you love two women in nearly six centuries, Jean-Claude. You don't choose to love Belle Morte, she chooses it for you. You chose to love Julianna. I thought, if you had finally fallen in love again, that it would be someone like her. I thought that the tough talk, and the danger, were just surface. I thought if I scratched deep enough that Anita would be more like the only other human I ever saw you love." Auggie shook his head. "You've got a physical type you like, petite brunettes, but beyond that"— he shook his head again—"Jesus, Jean-Claude, sweet Jesus, don't you ever have anything in a woman's personality that you like every time?"