“Oh. Over there.” She pointed. “Wait here.”

“You will cease attempting to give me orders, wench.” He tried Voice on her again, thinking perchance something in their earlier environment had conflicted with his use of magyck.

“You will cease ordering me to cease giving you orders,” she said exasperatedly. “I’m just trying to help.”

“The day I need help seeing to the needs of a woman is the day I may as well be dead.”

She gave him a measuring look. “Actually, it’d be nice if more men felt that way. Of course, you still need to lose that whole me-Tarzan, you-Jane thing.”

He had no idea what she was havering about, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the getting of a room.

He escorted her where she’d pointed, GUEST CHECK-IN, and propped the mirror carefully against the short wooden wall.

A trim, auburn-haired, fortyish man with a bristly mustache came over, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else at this hour.

“You will give us a room. Now. And stop looking at me.”

Beside him, Jessica said hastily, “You’ll have to excuse him. He can be a bit heavy-ha—oh, for heaven’s sake!” She changed both sentence and direction of her gaze midstream, frowning up at him when the desk clerk obediently, and without protest whatsoever, averted his eyes and began processing the paperwork for a room. “People keep obeying you like you’re some kind of . . . of . . . well, god . . . or something.”

“Imagine that.” In my day, lass, I was.

“I can’t.”

“I’m excruciatingly aware of that,” he said dryly.

“Well, why do they keep doing it?”

“Mayhap, woman, they recognize a Man among men.” He couldn’t resist provoking her. “That would be Man with a capital ‘M.’ ”

She rolled her eyes, as he’d known she would.

He bit back a smile. There was no point in explaining to her about Voice. She wouldn’t understand; the wench was infuriatingly immune. Impossibly immune. His amusement faded. He narrowed his eyes, studying her for the hundredth time, trying to discern something—anything—different about her that might explain her condition.

He couldn’t discern a blethering thing. Of all the wenches the Fates might have appointed to serve as his reluctant savior, the humorless bitches had sent him the only woman he’d ever encountered that he couldn’t control.

“I’ll just need a credit card,” the man behind the counter was saying.

Cian opened his mouth to use Voice again, but Jessica was already handing the man something. He had no idea what it was. He shrugged. He didn’t mind letting her feel useful. He knew women liked to feel important too. ’Twas but that he preferred to make them feel important in other ways.

Like as women. In his bed. While he was inside them.

And this one, och, this one did something strange to him. A subtler version of that electrifying jolt he’d felt the first time she’d touched him had been happening each time he touched her. It made it nigh impossible to keep his hands off her. The entire time she’d been over his shoulder he’d felt a gentle current sizzling through the length and breadth of his body. Wherever their bodies were touching, he felt as if heat lightning crackled just beneath his skin.

And he knew, though she pretended otherwise, that she felt it too. When he’d put his hand so blatantly on her woman’s mound, he’d been prepared for indignation, outrage, a fierce tongue-lashing. He’d deserved it. He’d never treated a woman in such a possessive fashion—at least not until after they’d become lovers—bypassing any pretense of civility or seduction entirely. And yet somehow, at the same time, he’d known she wouldn’t lambaste him.

It was as if his hand simply belonged there on her. And she knew it too.

You’re getting fanciful, Keltar. Next you’ll be thinking she’s your one true mate.

According to Keltar legend, each Druid born into the clan was destined for a soul mate, a perfect match in heart and mind, as well as body, coming together with an explosive, incendiary passion that could not be denied. If the Keltar male exchanged the sacred Druid binding vows with his true love, and his mate willingly returned them, they could bind their souls together for all eternity, in this life and forever beyond. The vows linked them inextricably. ’Twas said if a Keltar gave the vows and they were not returned, he would be forever incomplete, missing a part of his heart, aching for the love of a woman he could never have, eternally bound to her, through this life and all his future existence, whether in the cycle of rebirth, heaven, hell, or even an eternal Unseelie prison. If aught must be lost . . . the legendary vows began, ’twill be my life for yours. . . .