The mambo smiled. “Then you will truly be in the family in every way.”
“So gracious!” Henri bowed, clearly delighted. He turned to me, and I saw the flash of the shark-fin in his eye. What he was about to say was his true reason for drawing me into this conversation.
“I understand you’ve participated in a ceremony,” Mme Vulcaine said, and suddenly I knew what they were both after. “Sophie says also that there is a video recording.”
His eyes gleamed. “Indeed. Our cousin,” he flourished a bow in my direction, “officiated. Would you like a copy? It is my most treasured, ah, possession, ah ha ha!” What? Oh, he was making a joke about “possession.” Le bon Dieu save me from white guys who fancy their wit about vodou. “Perhaps our cousin would grant his permission for me to turn that recording over to you.”
The fool thought he needed my permission to give Mme Vulcaine the video! After all Jake’s secret reports on my private life! His lawyer soul wanted my formal approval. The mambo knew perfectly well I couldn’t protest.
“But of course,” I said, managing not to roll my eyes.
“You are very kind,” Mme Vulcaine purred. “We’re all so happy that this long-watched matter has ended so well. No lwa has ever been born on video before. Congratulations. The video will crown our collection, the chronicles of the most celebrated member of our house.” Her bow was ironic—wasn’t it? “Our very own jam bois.”
Looking smug, Henri spread his hand over his heart. “I am honored to have played a small part in such an illustrious apotheosis.”
The mambo raised her hand, and suddenly a dozen of my New Orleans relatives gathered around us, some as black as I, some as white as Sophie, all dressed in extremely colorful formalwear, Western, African, and Caribbean. She began introducing me to them, my fourth cousin, my great-nieces, my great-nephews, some of them quite young. Their eyes, fixed upon me, were like owl’s eyes. They shook hands with me as if they were meeting a king.
I said something polite to each one. Thank heaven for my early training as an aristocrat. Vicomte Montmorency had the correct and kind word for so many strangers. The slacker demon was completely flustered.
Apparently I was no stranger to them.
“Did you really expel cottonmouth poison by jumping into the spirit world?”
“Did you really tear down a jail by talking the ants into destroying it?”
“Did you really seduce the mayor of Houston’s wife and all three of his daughters in the same night?”
My ears were hot with blushes before Mme Vulcaine sent them away to the bar.
“Jake was a busy man,” I said grimly to her.
“If one wants to be part of a legend, it pays to write the legend one’s self,” the mambo said. “You should read his emails home when you have a chance. Sophie has them all. You will be more comfortable, when you know your history in the way history knows it.”
She patted my arm and walked off after our kinsmen, as serene as a duchess and as colorful as a lady pirate.
Speaking of pirates. “Now there is someone who was born to power,” Henri said beside me. “She is a worthy teacher.”
I looked at him, imagining the coming clashes between his stiff-necked conviction of his superiority and hers, and almost laughed. “Yes, I’m sure she is.”
“Go dance with my daughter,” Henri advised.
So I did.
SOPHIE
Veek joined the dance I was learning. I couldn’t help noticing how every woman there looked at him, especially the call girls who had come with that very badly-dressed man talking to Baz.
Turning my shoulder to them, I reached for my Veek, and he came to me with the movement of the dance.
Mine, I thought, like any savage.
He fixed his eyes on me, ignoring all the others. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket. His snowy linen shirt and black tuxedo trousers fitted exquisitely. He moved precisely as much as the dance called for and no more, not flailing like the white guys trying to learn the dance, not showing off like the call girls. I realized that, compared to him, I was flouncing like a teenager.
Veek danced as if he owned it—as if he had learned it years ago and forgotten how he knew it. His eyes never left me. It was if his every move was meant for me.
I didn’t need to flounce to be seen by him.
Thirstily, I drank up his attention.
We moved away from the group and their dance. Dimly I realized we were dancing something sexy and simple like a samba. Miraculously, we moved as one.
“How can you do that?” I murmured under the noise of the band.
“Do what?” He held my gaze, turned me away from him, pulled me back. My skin burned where he looked at me.
“This dance!” I couldn’t talk and hold his attention at the same time. I thought I might stumble. Almost, I did. But his hand was there to support mine before I had fallen an inch. “That! As if you—know what I will—do next.”
He brought me up to his chest and held me there, swaying. His eyes smoldered down into mine. “I am in you, Sophie.”
Oh, I felt that! We dipped, swung, turned, and swayed together. It was magical. I wanted to ask more, but the movement was like a drug, like sex, and I had yearned to be near him for weeks now, and here he was, reassuring my lacerated heart.
He pulled me to his chest again.
“Heal now, Sophie. I’ve hurt you and now I must mend you. Take the medicine and talk later.”
So I shut my eyes and lost myself in his touch, in the music, in our mirrored movements, perfectly matched.
YONI
It’s true what they say about wedding nights.
I was thrilled, horny, and quaking with stage fright.
Baz was his usual urbane self. In fact, he was smug. This was because he’d talked me into spending the night at the Lair. He was renting it out immediately, he said, and since he would never get to stay there again he wanted to say goodbye to it.
His tux looked wildly out of place in that hellhole.
“Besides, you get to stay in five-star hotels all the time,” he said consolingly as we clanked up the metal stairway toward the sex demons’ sleeping quarters.
“Uh-huh.” I hated to walk on those awful stairs in my white satin pumps.
At the top of the stairs he stopped and took a big deep sniff. “Ahh! Home, sweet home!”
I sniffed cautiously. It didn’t smell any better than last time. A man-lair scents-o-rama wafted out of each room as we passed: moldy bathroom, stale beer (ex-roommate Lido, Baz informed me), hot candle wax (Veek’s room), incense (ex-roommate Kamadeva’s room), dried jizz and sweat socks (ex-roommate Archie’s room), bacon and sweaty leather furniture (the kitchen-slash-TV-slash-game room) and Baz’s bedroom at last.
I decided I would love the smell of his room. It was my wedding night, the last time we’d ever sleep here.
“Who’s buying the place so soon?”
“Renting. My old supervisor in the Regional Office has a team of succubi coming in. I get the idea it’ll be a training facility.”
“I don’t like the idea of girl sex demons living where I’m having my wedding night.”
In his room, the piles of sweat socks were gone, but the fur coverlet was still there. And, yes, candles. While he lit candles, he said, “You’re thinking of this all backwards, O my goddess.” He smirked. “What do you say we fuck up their program?”
“How?”
“Bless the joint.” He gestured grandly. “Your way.”
“Bless it?”
“Send them love, whether they want it or not.”
I started a long, slow smile, imagining how I might do that. “Come here, will you?”
We kissed. It was just as good as the first time. The smell of the candles and lingering sweatsockiness just made it realer to me. I unbuttoned his tux jacket and slid it off his shoulders. “I want you naked so bad.”
“Slow down,” he complained.
“Okay, one kiss, one
garment each.”
“One kiss, one garment for one.” He bit my neck. “Next kiss, one garment for the other.”
We stood still and looked at one another in the candlelight. His big white bony face seemed lit from within, like a candy skull in love.
I reached both hands to the zipper in the back of my dress. The zipper went down a long, long way. I stepped out of it, absolutely naked except for my shoes.
He sucked in a long breath. “Cheater.”
Then I made him play his own game. He kissed me, completely hands off, slowly and thoroughly.
I took off his tie. “Now you can touch me, but only where you’re naked, too.”
“But I’m not naked anywhere yet!” he protested.
“Them’s the rules.”
He kissed me again, starting at my mouth and working around under my chin, behind my ear, over my temple to each eye. That got me hotter, especially behind the ear.
I took off his cummerbund.
“You’re mean,” he said, giving me a dark look. “This is war.”
He picked up my hand and laid it over his face, letting his eyes close as I touched them. He sniffed my hand—smelled each fingertip—the palm—the wrist—ran his nose up my wrist into my palm and back down again until it tickled. I whimpered. Then he put his tongue on my wrist.
My crotch went wet. “Fuck me,” I said faintly.
“Nuh-uh.” With just the tip of his tongue he licked up and down my wrist, across my palm, between each finger, tickling, sending a trickle of hot fire down into my body. Then he made eye contact again. Holding my gaze, he bit the fleshy place at the base of my thumb.
My knees started to give.
“This,” he said, making his lips buzz against my palm and sending shivers all over me, “is called the mound of Venus.”
My turn. I took the studs out of his white tux shirt and pushed the shirt down over his arms, trapping them at the elbow, exposing his shoulders, his collarbone, the tops of his pecs. He had a white tank on under it. Damn.
I leaned forward as if to kiss him.
He sputtered, “Dammit, it’s only half off! That doesn’t count!”
“How about two garments, half off?”
“Oh, no. I know just what you’ll do, and that isn’t fair at all.”
“No, you don’t,” I said sweetly, and yanked the tank straps down over his shirt. Now his wrists were behind his back, tangled up in the shirt and tank straps.
I took my time over his lovely, lovely muscles. They weren’t smooth and pretty like bodybuilder muscles. They looked as if he’d done something real with them for years. I kissed him front and back, making sure every bit of skin got some love.
“Not the nipples,” he groaned.
“Oh, really?” I gave one a lick. It perked right up. He stiffened and sucked air. “Nice. What’s your problem? They obviously like the attention.”
“My problem is,” he said in a tight voice, “I’m gonna spunk in my tux pants.”
I smiled. “I think I’ll make you come like this. It’ll be a feather in my coochie.” My crotch was slippery and hot already.
His eyes closed and he groaned, tipping his head back in surrender.
That made his nipples stick out even farther.
I went to work on them, licking and blowing on them to keep them perky, then grabbing each one in my teeth and pulling gently—just a little friction, just to make him groan. For extras, I rubbed my hair against them. My hair looked all smooth and wedding-shiny, but the texture was rough enough to get a gasp out of him.
“If you cheat,” he said between his teeth, “better lay back and spread ’em, ’cuz I’m comin’ in.”
“Promises, promises.” I unbuttoned his tux trousers and let them drop to his ankles.
“Knew you would,” he muttered. He wriggled his shoulders and the shirt slipped down past his elbows.
“Save your breath. And hold still.”
I wanted his bone, but rules were rules. I hadn’t had a chance to really get to know his thighs or his knees. I tried kissing behind his knee, and he almost fell over. I moved to the front, kissing as close to his briefs as I dared. He shuddered nicely.
Finally I was unable to ignore the big bulge in his briefs.
It certainly smelled good, sticking up through the white cotton. I leaned closer, sniffing.
My nose bumped him.
Oops.
His hands grabbed my shoulders, and the next moment he had thrown me on my back on the lynx-pelt coverlet. I watched him shuck the rest of his clothes. His shoes wouldn’t kick off, and his trousers got stuck on them, and he hopped on one foot, swearing and thrashing, and his bone waggled, and I giggled myself hysterical.
“That’s it,” he said.
The next instant I had a Baz blanket, and he was shoving my leg aside and prodding me in the crotch with that thing.
He hoisted my knees into the air.
Then he found his way in.
And still he wouldn’t bang me.
In he slid, thicker and harder than I remembered, but slowly, so slowly. “Beg me,” he panted, sliding in and out just an inch or two, making embarrassing squishy sounds. “C’mon.”
“Please,” I squeezed out. “Please fuck me, Baz. Don’t wait.”
“Aw, that’s not enough. After you just messed with me so bad?” He lay down over my torso and hooked his hands under my knees and pulled, making my trembly legs stretch, making muscles in my crotch stretch, and my back stretched under me and I arched upward, trying to get at that thing, trying to jam myself onto it.
“Beg!”
“Plee-ee-ee-ease!” I whined. He slid deeper. “Please!” He hit the back wall, his pubic bone bumping me just where I wanted it. “Oh! Please!”
“That’s,” he said, bump!
Yes! “Please!”
“More,” he said, bump!
Fireworks! “Please!”
“Like it,” he said, bump!
—Here came the beginning of the end—
“Beg, Yoni!”
So I begged and begged, and he banged and banged, until we both forgot the game and laughed and plunged and rolled on the fur coverlet.
When we were sweating and gasping for breath, I remembered about blessing this place. It ought to be blessed. I’d had such fun here.
And I remembered something I had thought of last time we were here, but I hadn’t had the energy for it.
“Baz?”
BAZ
I sniffed deeply behind her ear and then made a friendly-horsey snort. She squirmed. “Mmm.” The horsey thing seemed to work well. I tried lipping the edge of her ear.
She whispered, “I’m feeling pretty cocky—oo!—since I fixed your tattoo.” She giggled and shivered all down her body.
“Yuhm?” How about a little bite on the earlobe?
She gasped. “Baz, pay attention.”
I took her chin in my fingers and turned her face toward mine. “I thought you’d be tired after a day like this.”
“So you’re all over me like white on brown rice?”
I snatched a kiss. I could swear her tongue gave mine a zap.
She gave me a solemn look. “This is important. I want to try something.”
“Music to my ears.”
She smacked me upside the head, and I grinned at her. Then she grabbed my dick. Suddenly every bone in my body stiffened and a shiver ran up my side into my ear and my skin prickled and my brain faded and I’d probably just jizzed again.
Looking in her eyes, I saw the take-no-shit goddessness that kept her family in line and made the press play nice most of the time and—she squeezed—I groaned with pleasure—and was probably going to run my life for the foreseeable.
Insight number forty-two. I love being pussy-whipped.
“I thought you liked letting go of control,” I said, trying not to whimper.
“Sometimes.” She looked sneaky, as if she had a plan and wasn’t gonna tell me.
Fine
. She wanted to play control games.
I slid my hand into the small of her back and pulled her to me, lifting her off the fur coverlet so she’d feel the stretch—yep, I got the purr—and holding the back of her neck so she would feel supported. Then I let her head rock back. Her eyes closed and she sighed.
I bundled the fur coverlet up under the small of her back—not high enough—grabbed my pillow, and my other pillow, and stuffed them under her, until she lay wide open, her bellybutton winking at the ceiling, her arms spread out welcoming on either side.
I was ready for protests, but I didn’t get any.
This next position could have been a pain without levitation on my side.
I floated over her, stroking her from throat to ankles, wrists to crotch, making her aware of her meridians, where the channels of energy flowed in her body. I pushed her legs apart. I lifted her at the small of her back again and rearranged the pillows, then pressed her back down. Little noises told me she liked that.
Draped over the coverlet and pillows, she made an arch of glorious female flesh on the bed. I wanted to eat her up.
Carefully I one-eightied in the air over her. Now I faced her hot, wet, fragrant ladyparts, and she faced me at my most vulnerable. The idea was to keep her stretched out, feeling exposed, yet keep her warm, feeling safe.
But I was exposed like this, too.
She touched with her hand. I shuddered.
Take control.
I sank down over her, covering her furnace-hot skin with mine. I put my hands on her knees and parted her thighs a little more. She arched. I could feel her face on my dick and balls now, her lips so close. My nerves stuck a foot out of my body. What would she do? I dipped my head into her scented wetness and began licking.
Her hands came up and slapped onto my butt, grabbing.
Ah. Now I was in control.
I floated my hips off her. She grabbed my butt harder.
With care, I slipped my dick into her open mouth.
The idea wasn’t to fuck her face, but to make her feel my strength, make her think, holy crap, his dick is big, and get her to surrender to all the sensations I was piling on her.
Walking on Sunshine Page 35
