Free Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

WANTED him. With everything that was happening and about to happen, all I could think of was sex, sex with Jean-Claude.
    He glided towards me, and I held out a hand so he wouldn’t touch me. If he laid so much as a finger on me, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
    He looked puzzled, and I heard his voice in my head, “What is wrong, ma petite ?”
    I still didn’t have the trick of talking mind-to-mind down pat, so I didn’t try. I just held up my left hand and pointed at my watch. It was ten to midnight.
    Like Cinderella, I needed to be home by midnight every night. I’d told my coworkers that it was a lunch break, and it was, sometimes I even got food. But what I had to feed every twelve hours didn’t have much to do with my stomach. No, lower places, definitely lower places.
    Jean-Claude’s eyes went wide. In my head, he said, “ Ma petite , please tell me you have fed the ardeur already.”
    I shrugged. “Twelve hours ago.” I didn’t bother to whisper; the vampires behind the curtains would hear it, so I used a normal tone of voice. It wasn’t like I was going to be able to hide the ardeur from them anyway. The ardeur was one of the side effects of being Jean-Claude’s human servant. In another age, Jean-Claude would have been considered an incubus, because he could feed on lust. Not just feed upon it, but cause others to lust after him. It was a way of making more of what you needed. In an emergency, he could feed off of lust and forgo blood for a few days. It was very rare for a vampire to have a secondary power like this. Damian’s master had been able to feed off of fear. She’d been what they call a night hag, or mora.
    Belle Morte, of course, held the ardeur . She had used it for centuries to manipulate kings and emperors. Jean-Claude was one of the few of her bloodline to inherit this particular power. And I was, to my knowledge, the only human servant to ever inherit it from anyone.
    When the ardeur first awoke in a vamp, it controlled them just like the blood lust, then gradually they learned to control it. Or that was the plan. Since I’d had it, I’d fought like hell so that I only had to feed every twelve hours or so. The feeling didn’t have to involve intercourse, but there did have to be sexual contact. All those old stories about succubi and incubi killing people by loving them to death were true. I could not feed off the same person every time. Micah let me feed off him. Jean-Claude had been waiting to share the ardeur with me for years, though he’d thought it would be him doing the feeding, not me. I’d been forced to make Nathaniel, one of my wereleopards, into my own version of a pomme de sang . Embarrassing as hell, but it beat the heck out of molesting strangers, which was entirely possible if you fought the ardeur . It was a hard taskmistress just like Belle Morte.
    The plan for tonight had been to go to my house and meet with Micah, but instead I was here at the Circus. That wasn’t bad in itself, becauseJean-Claude was always willing. Unfortunately, we had big bad vampires in the next room, and I didn’t think they’d wait while we had hot monkey sex. Call it a hunch, but I suspected Musette would be sympathetic.
    The trouble was, the ardeur wasn’t sympathetic either.
    The men were all standing around with that, oh, my god , silence thick on the ground. We were all looking at Jean-Claude to solve this. “What do we do?” I asked.
    He looked lost for a moment, then he laughed, that touchable, caressable laugh. It made me shudder, and only Damian grabbing me kept me from falling. I waited for the ardeur to spread to him like the contagious disease it could be, but it didn’t. The moment he touched me, the ardeur receded like the ocean pulling back from the shore. I felt light and clean, clear-headed. I could think again. I clutched Damian’s arm like it was the last piece of wood