The Charmer (25 page)

Jasmine picked at the quilt. “Yes, but it
doesn’t mean anything. I told him I didn’t want a ceremony, and he
was okay with that. He told me he loves me and that’s good enough
for me, for as long as it lasts.”

Rihlia peered at her in pained disbelief. “As
long as it lasts, Jas? You make love sound like the stomach
flu.”

Jasmine took a deep breath and explained as
logically as she knew how. “It’s like I told him, Ri, I’m going to
get old a lot sooner than he will. I’ll waste away, shrivel up.
Hey, for all I know, I’ll get Alzheimer’s and go senile on him. How
would that be fair?” She shook her head. “Like I said, I’ll take
what I can get for as long as it lasts.”

She glanced at her best friend and was
shocked to see a single tear track down her cheek. “Ri?” she asked,
uncertain what was wrong. She reached out to comfort her.

She shrank away from Jasmine’s touch and
stood up. “Do you know what it is for a Haunt to take a mate? Of
course you don’t,” she said, answering her own question. Her voice
was laden with heavy emotion. “You can be with only one person, if
you are a Haunt. That’s why I could only go so far with men before.
My instincts stopped me.”

She closed her eyes and fought back tears.
“Jas

you have no idea. Once I was with
Jayems, once we had been together, made love

Jas,” her voice cracked. “He was a virgin, too.”

Jasmine stared at her in shock. Jayems, a
virgin?

Rihlia found her composure. “We can mess
around all we want, touching and kissing whomever we please, but
the moment we cross that line, we can never go back. That’s why
it’s a marriage. It has to be.”

Still at sea, Jasmine said, “I don’t
understand.”

Frustrated, Rihlia searched for something
Jasmine could comprehend. Inspiration struck. “Do you remember what
you said about your first time?” she asked as she sat on the bed.
“You told me it was mildly pleasant, but you felt detached and
empty. Remember?” When Jasmine nodded, she asked, “Was it that way
with Keilor?”

Jasmine sucked in a breath. “There was no
comparison. I had feelings for him, and he clearly…. She lowered
her eyes in embarrassment. “He was clearly a better lover.”
Unbidden, the image of him as he’d been this morning, completely
focused and relaxed as he’d let her touch him, came to mind. There
had been no barriers of any kind for him. Because he assumed there
would never be anyone else?

She felt misgiving as she remembered how her
own walls had come down when he’d been killing her with pleasure.
In that moment, everything she was belonged to him and only him.
Was Rihlia trying to say they were like that with their mates
all the time?

A frantic bubble of fear rose to her throat
and lodged. How could they survive without armor and walls to hold
others at bay? She wouldn’t, couldn’t! Surely he wouldn’t expect
that of her? She wasn’t capable of that kind of sustained
vulnerability.

Something in her face must have given her
away, for Rihlia said, very gently, “You became a part of him,
connected with something deep inside him that no one has ever
touched. Something so much deeper than a loss of virginity I can
barely describe it. If you ever tried to take that away…” Words
failed her.

A little frightened and a lot shaken, Jasmine
got to her feet. This was a lot more complicated than she’d
thought. “He was a virgin?” she asked, repeating the most difficult
of the concepts to accept.

Rihlia nodded.

“A virgin,” Jasmine repeated. How could such
a confident, competent man possibly be a virgin? She’d heard men
use the word as an insult. She just couldn’t reconcile her image of
innocence and fumbling inexperience with anything about Keilor, or
the Haunt for that matter. Her eyes boggled as another thought hit
her. “Fallon is a virgin?”

Rihlia grinned. “Every unmated male is a
virgin, silly. Every woman, too.”

“Urseya?” She still remembered Urseya
standing in nothing but a thin slick of mud, boldly flirting with
Keilor.

“I never said they weren’t experienced, you
goober,” Rihlia said, giving her a friendly little push. “Sticking
it in doesn’t take brains or skill. Even amebas manage to
reproduce.” She smirked. “I take it Keilor was one hot number.”

This time, Jasmine felt her entire body
blush. She hid her face in her hands. What an understatement!

Now she understood what Keilor had been
talking about with his rantings about exchanging fluids. Armed with
the knowledge Keilor had been a
virgin
, Jasmine had several
things she urgently needed to discuss with him.

She returned to her room to avoid the flurry
surrounding Rihlia, but Keilor didn’t show up soon enough to suit
her, and pacing only fed her frustration. She decided to seek him
out. She checked in his room, but he wasn’t there. The mess hadn’t
improved since the last time she’d visited. She hesitated, looked
around. Did he ever let the maids in here?

Since he wasn’t around to tell her no, she
decided to muck out some of the refuse, starting with the nasty
blanket on his gray mattress. Using as few fingers as she could,
she drug the icky thing over to the door and started a trash
pile.

That mattress had to go, she decided as she
viewed the lumpy thing with hands on hips. It looked like it had
been slept on by a team of huskies, peed on, and left to dry out in
somebody’s driveway.

This called for manly muscles. Fortunately,
she knew just where to find some.

She threw open the door and surveyed Raziel
and Isfael, who were on duty today. Raziel glanced at her from
where he was slouched against the opposite wall, arms crossed and
one leg slack, obviously bored. His limp red sash and scarlet
insignia where the only hints of color about him today. A silver
earring dangled from one ear.

Poor Isfael just looked stoic.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out
why Keilor was wasting officers to guard her when even Rihlia only
had regular soldiers. They weren’t exactly models of discipline,
either. More than once she’d walked out and found them at a game of
dice. She shrugged it off. They were a likable pair, and they’d
gone a long way towards helping her to relax around the Haunt.

She raised her brows at them. “So, when are
you two going to get a real job?” Raziel snorted but didn’t move.
Isfael gave her a toothy and decidedly unnerving grin. Girding her
loins, she said, “Hey, I know you guys aren’t servants, but I’ve
got something heavy here I need to get rid of. Could one of you
give me a hand?”

The pair followed her into the room and she
propped her hands on her hips again with a grimace. “Can you
believe this mess?” she asked with disgust. “The man runs an entire
army and probably tortures his recruits with inspections and stuff,
but he can’t even be bothered to pick up his socks.”

“Rank has its privileges.”

Startled, Jasmine whirled around and stared.
Isfael and Raziel had shifted into human form. Isfael was uglier
than sin, and she thought with a flash of chagrin that the poor guy
looked much better covered in hair. Raziel was unremarkable in
appearance, except for his piercing blue eyes. Both of them nodded
at her with respect. “Congratulations on your new match,” Raziel
said, and she realized he was the one who had spoken. “Keilor is a
good friend of ours, and we wish his new wife every happiness,”

“Happiness and a long life,” Isfael
seconded.

Jasmine frowned lightly. “Well, I don’t know
about the long life, but I’m definitely going for happiness. Thank
you.”

Isfael unclipped a pouch from his belt,
flipped up the cover and extracted a folded belt and a black laser
gun. He presented both to her with a toothy smile. “We thought
Keilor’s wife ought to have her own gun. This way, if he gets out
of line, you can bring him to heel.”

Jasmine laughed and took the holstered
weapon. “Thank you,” she told them, and tried it on for size. It
fit very well. When she looked up again, they had shifted back. She
blinked and shivered. “You guys have got to stop doing that.”

Shaking her head, she pointed four fingers of
her right hand at the mattress, thumb folded in, and then jerked
her thumb over her shoulder, indicating that it had to go. The guys
each grabbed an end and took it with them out the door to dump it
in the hallway.

It was hard to know which of the scattered
papers lying around might be important, so she just gathered them
into one neat stack and put them on the freshly scrubbed table.
Eyeing the crusty dishes, she decided reinforcements were called
for, and summoned a maid to attend to them while she gathered up
the scattered laundry. There was too much to do all at once, so she
loaded it into the washing machine in increments.

Time passed quickly. She had the tub half
scrubbed when Keilor found her.

Chapter 21

“What are you doing?” he asked with a frown.
“The ceremony is in half an hour.” He was already dressed in black
leather armor and had his dark hair pulled back with a silver clip.
A sleeveless, midnight blue robe of velvet trimmed in silver added
an air of magnificence. It was open in front and held together with
a thick silver chain. There were sparkling blue stones at every
other link.

He looked ready to dazzle, and very
impatient.

“Oh, no!” Jasmine popped out of the tub in
alarm. She dismissed the maid and tossed her rag in the dirty
laundry pile. She sprinted for the door, snagging her wedding gift
on the way. Keilor was forced into an undignified lope to keep up
with her. Since she was well in hand, her bodyguards followed at a
more sedate pace.

“Bath!” Jasmine ordered the moment she
stepped in the door, wishing her room came equipped with a shower.
Why was it cleaning always made the cleanee dirty? She stripped a
little self-consciously and took her frustration out on her
husband. “You could have found me sooner.”

He leaned against the armoire, unabashedly
enjoying the view. “How was I to know you would be so enticed by
your wifely duties you would forget your own wedding ceremony?”

Crouched in tub, she froze with soap in hand.
“It’s Rihlia and Jayems’ ceremony...isn’t it?”

He raised a brow. “There’s been a change of
plans. We will also take our public vows today.” His expression
brooked no defiance.

Jasmine remembered the soap and slowly began
to use it. “I don’t know anything about Haunt ceremonies. Shouldn’t
we take a little more time to…?” She trailed off at his quelling
look. The man could be spooky when he chose.

He disappeared into her wardrobe. Recalled to
the need for haste, she quickly finished up, wrung out the end of
her hair and toweled off. Keilor emerged from the closet just as
she wrapped the towel around herself, a dress she’d never seen
draped over his arm. He held it up for her inspection.

The dress itself was a simple black velvet
sheath, long enough to reach her ankles but slit to just above the
knee for ease of movement. Two silver clips held the three-quarter
inch straps to the bodice. The outer robe was a smaller replica of
his midnight velvet. Instead of the rearing stags she could now see
embroidered into the edges of his clothes, hers had silver leaves
and vines with small flowers. In place of snarling volti heads, the
chain that clasped her robe had dragonflies. The material felt
heavenly against her fingers.

Touched, she looked at him. “You had this
made for me.” And some time ago, by the craftsmanship. She wanted
to ask when he’d commissioned it, but her throat closed up.

He said nothing, but his eyes shone.

She raised up on her toes and clasped her
hands around his neck to demonstrate her thanks. His arms slid
around her, and their kiss deepened. His hand fisted on the back of
her towel and he pulled it from her, leaving her nude. Warm hands
drifted down her back and settled possessively on her derriere,
kneading and lifting. With a groan, he broke away, and she could
tell it cost him much to step back. “We have to go.” Cupping her
face, he gave her a careful kiss and handed her the gown. While she
dressed he moved to stare out the window, giving them both a chance
to cool off.

Jasmine finished, then looked around. “You
forgot the underwear.”

Her husband grinned. “It wasn’t an
oversight.”

She rolled her eyes and moved to the wardrobe
door, but he was there before her, blocking her way.

“Keilor! Move.” He didn’t budge an inch, and
her face flamed. “I am
not
wandering around in public with
no panties.”

For a moment he didn’t move, gauging the
strength of her conviction. With a disappointed sigh, he stepped
aside. “We really must do something about this shyness of yours,”
he complained as she went after her unmentionables.

Her only reply was a muffled snort.

Deciding to leave her hair down in the
interest of speed, Jasmine brushed it quickly and stashed the brush
back in the armoire.

Keilor stepped behind her as she closed the
mirrored doors. He placed a diadem of linked prismatic silver
dragonflies and blue topaz, amethyst and sea colored gems on her
brow. Her eyes widened in alarm. It was by far the most beautiful
gift anyone had ever given her, and it also had to be the most
costly. “Keilor, no! I—”

He placed one finger on her lips and
admonished, “I am your husband. I can well afford to lavish gifts
on my beloved wife. Would you deny me this pleasure?”

Tears pricked her eyes. “But—”

He flashed her a wicked smile and pulled her
against him. “Of course, I had to sell my favorite stag and
indenture myself to the jeweler to afford these lovely gems,
but—”

She poked him in the ribs, trying to hide her
smile under a pout. “It was very sweet. Please don’t do it
again.”