Cerulean Sins   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

"Not without passing out afterwards, non. " I frowned. "Did I just say, non, instead of no?"

"Yep," he said.

"Shit," I said.

"Yeah," he said. He sat on the edge of the huge black marble tub, balancing me in his lap while he turned on the water. The water spilled out of a silver swan's mouth, which I'd always thought was ostentatious, but hey, it wasn't my bathroom.

The nausea had passed, the dizziness was waning. "Down, put me down."

"The marble is cold," he said.

I sighed. "I need to find out how well my body's working."

"Just try sitting up in my lap without me holding you. If you're okay, I'll fetch towels and you can sit on them, but trust me you don't want to sit naked on this marble."

"Practical," I said.

"Don't tell anyone I actually made sense, it'll ruin my image."

I smiled. "Secret's safe with me." I tried sitting up, while Jason fidgeted with the water, trying to get the right temperature. I could sit up. Great. I tried to stand, and only Jason's arm around my waist kept me from falling on the marble steps leading down from the tub.

He tucked me safely back in his lap. "Don't try and do so much so fast, Anita."

I leaned back against him, his arm like a safety belt around my waist. "Why I am so weak?"

"How can you have been around vampires this long and ask me that?"

"I don't let them feed," I said.

"I do, and trust me, when you've donated this much, it takes a little while to recover." He seemed satisfied with the water temperature at last. He turned the faucets on harder and had to talk louder over the sound of the water. "We'll get you cleaned up and see how you feel."

I could feel myself frowning, and I wasn't sure why. I felt like I should be angry. I should be something, and I wasn't. Now that I wasn't trapped between Jean-Claude and Asher anymore, I was strangely calm. No, not just calm, I felt good, and I shouldn't have.

I frowned harder, trying to chase this wonderful lassitude away. It was like trying to wake from a bad dream when it didn't want to let you go. Except instead of fighting to wake from a nightmare, I was fighting to destroy a good dream. That seemed wrong, too. Everything seemed wrong. I felt, vaguely, like I'd missed something important, but for the life of me, I couldn't place it.

I felt out of sorts and wonderful at the same time. It was as if my natural grumpiness was fighting some warm happy thought. The warm happy thought was winning, but I wasn't sure that that was necessarily a good thing.