stay with me, but they were bodyguards. They couldn’t guard me from my sudden case of nerves, as I glanced at the jewels laid out on velvet cloths and samples of different metal wedding bands. The huge desk was covered in them as if a very proper pirate’s treasure had been given over to the accountants to catalog. A tiny, dark-haired woman stood beside it, thin hands clasped in front of her; she could have passed for an accountant, or a servant in an old movie, but the eagerness in her face was another issue. The jeweler was way too excited about all of this. I must have made an involuntary movement for the door, because Jean-Claude said, “Ma petite.” Just that, nothing more, but it made me look at him.
Jean-Claude sat behind that huge desk and that gleaming display of matrimonial treasure, but none of it was as pretty as him. His black hair curled softly past his shoulders, mingling so perfectly with the velvet of his jacket that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The shirt that peeked from the jacket was scarlet, a red that looked fabulous with the hair and that unearthly white skin of his, a perfect whiteness that no living skin could rival. He was very pale tonight, no blush of color to his face at all, which meant he hadn’t fed yet. There was a time I couldn’t have told, but I’d been studying his face and moods for years. Once I had refused to be food for any vampire, even him. Now the thought that he hadn’t fed, and that it could be part of our foreplay, tightened things low in my body so hard and suddenly that I had to reach for the edge of the desk to steady myself, and I hadn’t even gotten to his face.
I raised my head to finally look into that face, that near perfect curve of cheek, the kissable lips, and finally the coup de grace of eyes. They looked almost black in the overhead lights, but some gleam always seemed to show that swimming blue, like deep seawater where the monsters swim and there are wonders to behold. His dark eyelashes were actually double-rowed on top so they looked like he’d used mascara, but he never had to, and then the perfect arch of black eyebrow . . . He looked too beautiful, too perfect, like a work of art instead of a person. How did this man love me? But the smile on his face, the light in his eyes, said plainly that he saw something wonderful when he looked at me, too. I didn’t know whether to be flattered, amazed, or ask, Why me? Why not a thousand more traditionally beautiful women out there? He could have had movie stars, or models, but he’d chosen me. Me, too short, curvy even with my gym workout, and scarred from my job, still struggling to heal all the issues life had saddled me with, and yet he smiled at me, held his hand out to me. I went around the desk to take his hand, but I didn’t feel like the princess to his prince; I felt like a clumsy peasant to his very regal king.
“I might as well not exist when you first enter a room for each other,” the jeweler said with a voice that still held the first echoes of her homeland. It had been somewhere in what would be the Middle East today, but I think had been Mesopotamia then, yeah, as in the cradle of civilization. She gave her name as Irene; I doubted it had been her birth name, but I’d learned that it was rude to ask a vampire or human servant’s original name. Whatever name they came with was their name. I guess you can’t go through centuries being mud-dabble-wat-wat, so Irene it was.
I blushed, but Jean-Claude continued to pull me close, and said, “But isn’t our very absorption with each other part of what fascinates you?”
“Yes, my lord king.”
I wanted to say, Please stop calling him that, but Jean-Claude had made me stop correcting her or her master. First, if someone wants to call you a king, or queen, let them. Second, when I suggested president, Irene had called him, “My lord president,” which sounded totally wrong.
He stayed seated, so for once I was the one who had to lean down to kiss him. In all the thousands of