Mad, Bad & Dangerous

Kett dealt Bael a filthy look and threw the damaged collar at the worktable on the far side of the room. On the other side, backed against the barn, was a forge, its fire billowing out heat into the stone room. “Someone distracted me,” she said. “Didn’t get all the chains down, she spooked, broke the collar.”

He frowned. “Fira spooked?”

“Yes,” Kett said, glaring at Bael again. She strode over to the trough of water by the forge, stripped off her gloves and plunged her hands in. There was a sizzling sound and something like relief came over her face. “She’s out now, though. Got the needle in.”

Jarven inclined his head. “I’ll do her wing now.”

“Let me fix her collar first. She’s dosed, but I’d rather not take the chance.”

Jarven nodded and Kett stuck her gloves back on and walked to the door. Bael started to follow her but without even looking back, she barked, “Stay.”

Meekly, he obeyed. Right now, he had the feeling badgering her would be suicidal.

The door slammed and he was left in the welcome heat of the forge with the tall, muscular man she’d called Jarven. Jealousy flared madly in Bael. She was his mate! What was she doing living with another man?

Come to think of it-was she sleeping with him? Did that mean she wasn’t his mate? He ought to be relieved. Especially since that meant she’d been cheating on Jarven in Nihon. Which meant she wasn’t the sort of woman he wanted for a mate.

He swallowed. He’d never allowed himself to think about what sort of woman he did want for a mate, but in the last few days he’d reconciled himself to it being Kett-and had weirdly rather welcomed the idea. She might be an angry, scarred, twisted, bitter lunatic, but she had fire and passion and when her eyes sparkled with silver, he lost his breath and forgot how to finish a sentence.

She was the sort of woman he wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his life being surprised by.

He glanced over at Jarven, who’d picked up the broken collar and was examining it.

“So, er,” Bael said, and Jarven glanced up but didn’t give any other hint he’d heard. “You’re…” Kett’s lover. Her husband? Oh hell!

“Jarven Tenvale,” came the reply. He went over to the forge and started pumping up the fire.

“Baelvar,” Bael said, scrutinizing the other man. His straight dark hair was graying slightly at the temples and there were deep lines in his face. Frown lines, not the brackets around the eyes and mouth that came from smiling. He had a slightly grim look to him, although he didn’t seem to be the sort of man who showed much emotion. Or, apparently, the sort who talked.

“You’re, uh…” Boinking my woman. No. “I didn’t know Kett, er…” Was shagging someone else. No! “We met in Asiatica,” he finished lamely.

Jarven grunted.

“About a, uh, month ago.” Chained to the ceiling, naked, her hot body rubbing all over mine, those lean thighs and firm breasts and hard nipples…

And then he felt it. A twitch in his pants. He was getting hard over Kett. Thinking about Kett! Kett was making him hard!

Bael would have sung a hymn of joy there and then that his penis was working once more, were it not for the fact that Jarven might perform an exorcism on him for it. Also, there was the small matter of him living with Kett.

“How long have you known her?” he asked.

Jarven scratched his whiskered jaw. “Thirty years.”

Bael’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow. So you must know her pretty well?”

Jarven shrugged.

This was like getting blood from a stone. Bael gritted his teeth and debated whether or not to be honest about it.

Better not. Honesty always got him into trouble.

“What-um. She never told me what she was doing in Asiatica.”

“Didn’t she?”

Bael waited for more, but didn’t get it. Okay. No more leading questions.

“Did she tell you how we met?”

“Nope.” Jarven sounded like he didn’t care, and a thought occurred to Bael.

“Did she tell you that we had met?”

Jarven sighed. He waved his hand over the forge as if to test the heat. “No.”

“Right, then. Well, the truth is we were both sort of captured. I don’t know who by. They seemed to want us for some sort of ritual. There was blood and silver chains…”

Jarven was heating up some sort of poker in the forge and didn’t seem to be listening.

“Anyway, we escaped. Ran into a friend of Kett’s. Miho? Little Xinjiangese woman, lives in Nihon?”

Jarven gave another grunt.

“And, uh. Her cousin was there. Kett’s cousin, I mean. Chance. Do you know her?”

Jarven gave a shrug that implied he might.

Bael swallowed a little nervously. Here he was, about to explain to a big man with a piece of hot metal in his hands that he’d shagged the woman who was quite possibly his wife. And that he intended to carry on shagging her.

He didn’t want to. Tell Jarven, that was-he definitely wanted to shag Kett again-but he couldn’t think of another way to get around the subject.

“I slept with Kett,” he said, and immediately afterward it occurred to him that he could have just asked Jarven if they were involved. Fuck it. Well, he knew he wasn’t very bright. Albhar was always telling him that his inability to think first, speak second was going to be the death of him.

He watched Jarven carefully, anxiously. The other man was concentrating on the poker thing he was heating up in the fire. Had he not heard?

“I said, er-”

“I heard,” Jarven said. Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, “Makes no never mind to me.”

Bael blinked. “It doesn’t?”

“Nope. Who she sleeps with is her business.”

“So you’re not…er…”

What looked like the faintest smile crossed Jarven’s face as he turned back to glance at Bael. “Nope.”

He sagged against the ladder. “Oh, thank gods.”

Jarven snorted.

Crisis averted, Bael glanced around the small room for somewhere to sit. As far as he could tell, it was a working room and nothing else. There was the big forge, a large tub of water and an anvil, and a table or two holding various items that all looked like torture instruments. There were no chairs.

Did Kett live here, he wondered, or somewhere else? Maybe in the village. Maybe this was just a workplace.

Maybe he’d live here with her. Let Albhar run his other lands and estates, buy a house up here. He frowned as he thought of the tiny, gloomy stone cottages he’d passed on the way to the forge, then grimaced. Maybe build a place here. Nice house with large rooms, big fires lit all the time to keep the chill off, because he strongly suspected without the heat of the forge, this tiny, dark cottage would be as freezing as the outside temperature.

He was just opening his mouth to ask where Kett lived when a buzzing sound caught his attention. It also caught Jarven’s, which Bael figured was a minor miracle.

Jarven put down the hot metal he’d been messing with and reached for something hanging on a leather strap from a peg on the wall. A hemisphere of rock, the flat, polished surface of which seemed to be glowing red.

Well, that was interesting.

Even more interesting was that when Jarven picked it up and looked at the flat surface, it stopped glowing and Kett’s voice came out of it.

Bael started. Now that wasn’t normal.