by Viehl, Lynn
I don’t mean that. He looked at her dark brown hair, which she wore in a sleek twist, and then all over her face, which had been made up with sheer, neutral cosmetics but no longer sported any piercings. The only jewelry she wore, in fact, was two blue pearl studs in her ears and a short, matching strand around her throat. Why do you look like this?
She glanced down at the front of her tailored navy blue suit. “This is what I wear to work.” Her lips curved in an impersonal smile as she extracted her hand from his. “Would you like a tour of the stronghold? The suzerain has made quite a few changes since your last visit.”
Jamys had no interest in going anywhere until Chris gave him some answers. Somehow during the three years they had been apart, Lucan and his sygkenis had turned the rebellious, fiercely loyal girl he had known into this polite, cool stranger. If he had not imprinted her features so deeply in his memory, he might not even have recognized her.
“If you’d rather have someone else assigned to you, I can ask Mr. Burke who’s available,” Chris was saying, this time without the smile. “You just have to let me know what sort of girl you’d like. There’s a very pretty woman who runs our property management office downtown. She’s a blonde. We also have a redhead who manages the restaurant Lucan just bought over on Las Olas—”
“No.” He held up his hand to stop her. “You. I want you.”
He had practiced using his voice during his journey from his father’s stronghold to Alenfar, so it had improved, but now his emotions made the words sound too rough, like the growl of an animal. He wanted to touch Chris again, and this time channel his thoughts into hers, to make her understand that he had come back in order to win her. Given the force of his emotions, however, doing so would also trigger his talent, which allowed him to enter the mind of any mortals in his presence, and compel them to think, do, or say anything Jamys wished while believing it to be their own desire.
He wanted Chris in every way he could have her, and under the influence of his talent, she would give herself to him completely. For as long as they were together, she would even believe it was her idea.
Nothing had ever tempted him more than the prospect of using his talent to command Chris’s passion. Back at his father’s stronghold he had often thought on it, and in the dark corners of his heart he knew himself capable of it. He wanted her that much. But to turn this bright and beautiful girl into his personal puppet would be a horrendous transgression, one that would render meaningless everything he felt for her.
If Chris came to him, it had to be without his coercion. He wouldn’t have her any other way but willingly.
“You sound tired.” Chris reached out to him, but when he stepped aside to prevent the physical contact, she snatched her hand back. “I’m sorry, I … I should show you to your rooms now.”
Jamys maintained the space between them as he followed her to the elevator. If he had hurt her, she concealed it well; her expression had shifted back to the calm, impersonal mask she wore in front of Lucan and the other Kyn. He wanted to tell her why he had come—to explain to her everything he had planned—but he knew it had to wait until he felt more certain of her feelings and his own self-control.
On the fifth floor Christian led him through a hall interspersed with starkly designed stainless steel block columns to a zebrawood door set between two massive white and gray marble monoliths.
“This is the Winterheart Suite,” Chris murmured as she took out a plastic card and swiped it through the electronic locking mechanism. The door slowly retreated inward without a sound on its own. “No one else is staying on this floor, so you’ll have plenty of privacy.”
Accustomed as Jamys was to the medieval grandeur of Baucent, he preferred the simplicity of open space and clean lines. The design of the suite might have been plucked from his own dreams, effortlessly bringing inside the space, stillness, and stark colors of a moonlit night sky.
He admired the wide swaths of inclusions, in every color of gray, that flowed like smoke across the silver white marble walls. Low-profiled, white-upholstered black lacquer furnishings provided comfort without clutter, while narrow opaque panels shed lustrous blue light to outline the doorways to other spaces.
“I had the contractor install voice-activated lighting controls. Just say what room and the percentage of light that you want, like this: ‘living room, one hundred percent.’” As she spoke, lighting panels under the furniture and set inside the ebony wood floor began to glow, as did a frozen glacial shower of small glass spheres suspended on wires from the center of the ceiling.
Jamys appreciated the impressive technology, but he wanted to talk to her, not the room.
“You can whisper if you need to,” she told him. “The suite is soundproofed, and the controls are very sensitive.” She moved across the room. “This is a gas fireplace. I chose this model because it’s cleaner and more efficient than one that burns wood.” She demonstrated the device that fed and regulated the flames in the hearth, which occupied a glossy cube of black granite encased in a broad column of brushed steel.
From there Chris led him into a small kitchen. “I thought a refrigerator would be a waste of space, so stores of wine and blood are kept under the counters here.” She pulled out a drawer to reveal the refrigerated interior filled with a variety of bottles. “Unless you hang the Do Not Disturb sign on your door, our household staff will come in just before sunset daily to clean and restock. Also, if you’re planning to entertain someone who isn’t Kyn, just dial nine on the house phone and let our chef know what you’d like prepared for your guest.”
She had offered him his pick of females to replace her, and now presumed he would be bringing mortals to his suite, all with such bland indifference he might have been a complete stranger to her. Jamys couldn’t understand it. When last they had been together, she had been warm and giving, and—for a time—his only real friend in this place. She had given him her blood and offered him her body. She had more than liked him, he’d been convinced of it.
How could she have stopped caring for him? Was it possible that she had regretted their time together? Had she given him no thought at all in the three years since?
“Is there anything else you need, my lord?” Chris asked politely.
She truly wanted to leave him. He could hear the strain in her voice; he could see the tension in her hands and shoulders. She wouldn’t even look at him directly.
A dull anger rose inside him. He would not let her run out of here, no matter how much she wished to escape him. Not until he knew what had changed her feelings for him.
As if she could hear his thoughts, Chris looked up at him, her eyes guarded. “If you don’t care for the suite, we have other, more traditional accommodations available.”
Suddenly what she had been saying to him took on new meaning. I had the contractor install … I chose this model … I thought …
“This is yours.” He encompassed the room with a sweep of his hand. “You made this.”
“I designed and furnished it, but I don’t live here. When Sam moved in with Lucan, she gave me her old apartment.” She hugged her waist with her arms and looked away. “Sometimes, when I’m too tired to drive home, I sleep up here.”
“Alone?” he couldn’t help asking.
Her eyes glittered. “No, I usually invite the entire garrison up to cuddle with me. Unless the guys want to play Strip Scrabble or Naked Twister. Then we go to the rec room down the hall.” She stalked out of the kitchen.
She wasn’t indifferent to him, Jamys thought; she was furious. Dismay and exhilaration sent him after her, but when he emerged from the kitchen, he found her turned around and walking back to him.
Chris folded her hands in front of her and looked past his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way, my lord,” she said in a voice devoid of emotion. “I apologize. It’s been a very long night.”
Jamys reached out to touch her cheek, but she flinched away. “Christian?”
&nbs
p; When she turned around, the face she presented was all distant politeness again. “What more can I do for you, my lord?”
Jamys could think of several thousand replies, but chose the one that would immediately prevent her escape. “Show me the bedchamber.”
*
The heat rising from the collar of Chris’s work blouse set her in motion; she would not let him see her all flustered and red-faced. “Of course. I’m sorry I forgot. This way.”
Why he wanted to see it when he obviously hated her suite—his suite, she corrected herself—made no difference. He wanted to see the bedroom; she would show it to him. If he wanted her to stand on her head and sing Lady Gaga tunes she’d do that, too. She’d be such a perfect tresora that he’d forget about her idiot outburst in the kitchen.
Focus on the task at hand, Mr. Burke would say. Our masters are not interested in our feelings, only in the efficiency of our performance.
The master bedroom was the only part of the suite that could be closed off by a door panel that slid behind the shoji lighting screen, which Chris demonstrated for Jamys before she passed over the threshold.
“The bed is an oversize king Savoir, and the sheets are silk.” Black silk, in fact, that she’d ordered because the sample had reminded her of his hair. “Bedroom lights, eighty percent.”
LED floods set to reflect off the marble walls gradually blended with the glow from the crystalline base of the center bed installation. Chris had found a Canadian artist who created large-scale sculptures in Lucite and steel, and had commissioned him to create the elongated rectangular platform. He had faithfully captured her vision of disheveled stacks of clear, palm-size cubes encasing polished obsidian spheres inlaid with ribbons of silver. Larger, identical spheres flanked the low headboard panel of silver-framed Lucite, although these had been sheared off at the top to provide the flat surfaces necessary to hold the house phone and device-recharging station.
Chris walked over to a rectangle of lights set into the floor, one of which sent a solid beam of light to a sensor in the ceiling.
“The master bath is here.” She passed her hand through the beam, breaking the light, and a wide rectangle of onyx stone began to rise from the floor. Water flooded the interior tub, which she had designed to comfortably fit two, and streamed over the sides to fall into the mesh-bottomed catch channel surrounding the stone. “The temperature default is one hundred ten degrees, but you can adjust that and the speed of the whirlpool jets on the control panel.” She nodded toward the opaque shoji screens to one side of the bed. “If you or your guests want more privacy, there’s another, full bath through there. That’s also where all the linens are stored.”
Jamys walked over to one of the walls to examine one of the framed manuscript pages. “Poetry.”
Chris had personally framed and hung the pages of poetry purchased from the rare-document auctions she followed; she had carefully selected verses penned by such masters as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings. Knowing how much Samantha loved poetry, Lucan had thought it a charming touch. Chris hadn’t bothered to tell him that each poem she’d framed contained some word or phrase that reminded her of Jamys Durand.
Everything in the suite had been chosen for the same reason. She’d designed it for herself, but it was all about him, dreaming of him, waiting for him. The rooms contained everything she couldn’t say, every hope locked inside her heart.
He bent to touch the gleaming base of the bed, and then straightened, turning around slowly. “No glass.”
“The suite is too close to the penthouse,” she said, moving to discreetly straighten a fold of the pleated black chiffon duvet. “It’s a safety precaution. When Lord Vader—I mean, the suzerain—loses his temper, all the glass within a hundred yards shatters.”
He watched her face. “Why ‘Winterheart’?”
“The climate here is tropical, and most visiting Kyn aren’t accustomed to the heat,” she said, choosing her words carefully so that nothing she said would be an outright lie. “I thought this would provide a sanctuary from the outside world.”
Her sanctuary, where she could hide for an hour and vent some of her frustrations without worrying Sam or Burke. In the beginning of her training she had come here almost every day to scream into a pillow until her throat burned, or curl up on the bed and count the sparkling mica flakes embedded in the ceiling’s snowy stucco. Over time she’d finally taught herself how to squelch her aggravation and conduct herself with the composure expected of a tresora.
Chris still came to the suite occasionally, but only when she was lonely, when her heart ached, and when she didn’t think she could bear spending one more night by herself.
Not that she had to, she thought as she watched Jamys disappear into the adjoining bath. The guys in the garrison were big, strong, beautiful men; she’d watched them treat the mortal females they brought to the stronghold with gentleness and respect. Every woman who spent a night in the garrison’s quarters left the next morning with a big, dreamy smile on her face.
As protective as Lucan and Sam were of her—and Chris was pretty sure the suzerain had warned his men not to lay one immortal finger on her without her consent—nearly all of the stronghold’s warriors had made it clear they found her attractive. All she’d have to do was bat an eyelash in the right direction and she’d never sleep alone again.
Yet as gorgeous as the jardin’s warriors were, none of them had big dark eyes, or black hair as fine as a silk fringe, or hands that moved like water flowed. She admired them, she liked them—a couple had become like surrogate big brothers—but no man among the garrison had ever touched her heart.
Jamys emerged and made another circuit of the room, this time inspecting the windows and their black vertical blinds.
Chris had hidden from everyone her feelings for Jamys, but to cope with the loneliness she’d been forced to put her dreams and desires on ice. Now she wanted to throw herself at him, and cling to him, and tell him how hard it had been to train and wait and hope. She wanted him to know it was all for him. Everything.
And the moment she did that, he would gently set her aside, call for Burke, and have the blonde from downtown or the redhead from the restaurant take her place.
She had to get out of the suite and away from him, now, before she made a complete ninny out of herself. What hadn’t she told him about the rooms? “The blinds are on a timer, and close automatically thirty minutes before sunrise. They don’t open again until thirty minutes after sunset.” She squared her shoulders and walked over to show him the manual pulls hidden inside the end panels. “The windows on this floor are sealed, but the transoms open if you want some fresh air. The doors also lock automatically, so you’ll need to carry this access card with you.”
She reached into her jacket to retrieve the one she’d programmed for him. Pain made her hiss as the shard of broken glass in her pocket sliced across her fingertips.
“Excuse me.” She kept her hand in her pocket and hurried into the adjoining bathroom.
Chris held her bleeding hand over the frost-blue bowl of glass that served as the sink, and winced as cold water from the automatic tap washed over the open cuts. Because the Kyn healed spontaneously, she hadn’t thought to stock the suite with a first-aid kit; she’d have to wrap some tissue around her hand until she could get back downstairs.
“You’re wounded.”
The caress of his breath across the bare back of her neck made her close her eyes briefly. Jamys knew she was hurt because he smelled the fresh blood; the Kyn were almost like sharks that way.
“I cut myself on a piece of glass I had in my pocket.” She reached for the box of tissues, but Jamys had her bleeding hand in his and was examining the small wounds. “It’s nothing.”
His eyes shifted to hers, and she saw a thin ring of glowing amber encircling his pupils, which had begun to contract to thin vertical slivers. “Why hide it from me? Do you think I will feed on you?”
“No, I was em
barrassed because I was clumsy.” From the look he gave her it was clear that he didn’t believe her. “I’ve been assigned to you, my lord, and I’m trained to take care of your needs. If you want the blood, I’ll go get a glass.”
Jamys kept his eyes on hers as he slowly lifted her injured hand to his mouth. His dents acérées flashed for a moment before he sank them into heel of his own hand.
Chris caught her breath as he raised his head. Two drops of blood beaded in the small puncture wounds that were already beginning to close. “What are you doing?”
“Healing you.” Jamys guided one of her hurt fingers to his palm, and gently pressed the cut into the blood. Chris caught her breath as she felt the cool mingling of his blood with hers, and then her cut went numb. He repeated the act again with her other finger, and then used a tissue to blot the blood away.
Chris saw both of her cuts had closed, just as fast as the punctures in his palm. “Why did you bother?”
“You are not my food, Christian, or my servant. You are my friend, and I do not want you hurt.” He put his hand to the back of her head, holding it as he pressed a kiss to her brow. “Do you understand?”
“Sure. Friendship works for me.” No, it didn’t, but he wasn’t asking for someone else. At least he still liked her. “Your eyes are doing the cat thing, though, and I know that means you haven’t fed for a while. Or you want to have wild monkey sex. Or both.” Had she actually said that out loud? God, she had. “I’ll, um, go make a glass of bloodwine for you.”
“I do not want sex with a wild monkey.” Jamys removed the long comb holding her hair back and placed it on the counter. As the twist slumped against her nape, he worked his hand through it, releasing the wavy mass. “Your hair was scarlet when I saw you last.”
“Mud brown is what I was born with.” She knew with it down she looked about sixteen, too. “I stopped dyeing it after you left.”
His fingers stilled as he found the one hairpin she wore to keep her silver streak out of sight.
“That’s not dyed, either,” she admitted. “I started going gray like an old lady back in high school.”
