And that face… oh, that gorgeous face.
He had a set of full, luscious lips, and silky, dark locks that framed a square jaw and high cheekbones and his thick brows lifted questioningly at Jasmine’s hesitation. She longed to see what his eyes looked like, for despite being indoors, they were hidden behind a pair of curiously dark, round sunglasses. She wondered if perhaps he was eccentric.
But when she continued to stare blankly at him, he cleared his throat.
“Has a cat got your tongue, miss?” he asked, in a voice as deep and smooth as velvet.
Jasmine snapped out of her reverie with a rosy blush to her cheeks, shaking her head slightly as though to shrug off a trance. “Oh, s-sorry,” she began. “Welcome to Java Joy, what can I get started for you this morning?”
“It’s after noon,” the man corrected, with his sensual lips pulling to one side in a hint of a smirk. Jasmine bit her lip.
“Y-yes, sir. Afternoon,” she agreed, smiling sheepishly. Inwardly, she glowered at him. Great, another smartass. As if it really mattered what time of day it was anyway.
“Right. Could I trouble you for a glass of Kadupul flower nectar, shaken, with ice?” he asked, as casually as one might order a cappuccino.
Jasmine blinked dumbly at him, trying to find the lilt of a joke in his tone. But it wasn’t there. “Kad-what? Uh, I-I don’t think we carry that here,” she said, frowning at him in confusion.
He pursed his lips for a moment. “Hmm. Pity. Well, then I’ll just take a chilled moonbeam reduction with a smattering of gold flakes. And whipped cream.”
Jasmine stared at the guy openly. But he simply stood there, a mild smile on his face, awaiting her next move. Well, if he was going to play this game, she would just join in. He’d have to give up eventually and just ask for a tea or something. He looked like an organic tea guy, one of those enlightened yogi types.
“Mhmm, and would you like those gold flakes on the side or on top?” she asked brightly, tucking a loose lock of hair behind her ear.
“On top will suffice,” he replied easily, nodding.
“Would you perhaps like to add a sliver of the Hope diamond or an ancient Mesopotamian artifact to complete your order, sir?” Jasmine quipped, fluttering her eyelashes sarcastically.
“Oh no, I think that might overdo it,” the man said. “How much will that be, then? And what is the currency here—yen? Wait, no. Pesos. Oh, hold on—is it the dollar?”
Jasmine paled, unsure of how to play along with this. Maybe he really was just a weird guy from out of town. And she’d been making fun of him all along. She suddenly felt very guilty. She half-expected Cynthia to poke her head around the corner and write her up a second time for being rude to customers.
But then the guy’s impossibly handsome face split into a wide, stunning grin. His teeth were perfectly white and straight. He had to be some kind of model.
And he was pulling her leg.
“I’ll have a black coffee, plain, piping hot,” he said suddenly.
It dawned on her that he had been playing her the whole time. She wanted to smack the beautiful smile off his face. What a douchebag.
“Yes, sir,” she said, her customer service smile stiffening so that her cheeks ached. Jasmine rang it up and took his card, which was almost supernaturally sparkling, as though it were made of the essence of light itself. At first she suspected that, like his initial order, the card had to be fake. But it ran through the register without a single hiccup. She was beginning to realize that everything about this man was a gimmick of some sort. How tiresome.
“Sign the receipt, please,” she instructed, handing him the little slip of paper. He produced his own writing utensil from a pocket she somehow didn’t notice before on his shirt. Her eyebrows twitched up as he signed the receipt with a long, elaborate, glittering quill. It was adorned with the lush plumage of some exotic bird she didn’t recognize. Where the hell had this guy even come from? A magic shop? A fever dream?
At first she simply took the receipt from him and slipped it into the register without looking at it. The man gave her an admittedly charming wink and then moved on, leaving Jasmine to gawk after him as he slid down to wait in front of the barista counter. Enzo poured his coffee and slid it across the counter towards him. Enzo, clearly confused by the man’s over-the-top appearance, tossed Jasmine a questioning glance. And when they looked back, a split second later, the man was gone, as though he’d simply disappeared into thin air.
The rest of Jasmine’s shift carried on uneventfully. She tried to keep her mind distracted, and luckily the afternoon tea rush helped. She raced back and forth, taking and preparing orders, working in tandem with Enzo until finally it was time to clock out.
“Don’t forget to check for your tips,” Enzo remarked as Jasmine hung her apron on a hook on the inside of the break room door. She rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue at him.
“Yeah, I’m sure the two dollars I’ve earned today will really make a big difference in my lifestyle,” she quipped.
“Hey, you never know. I got a ten-dollar tip from a cougar the other day. She was pretty hot, too,” he said, shrugging.
“Mhmm, well, I don’t exactly attract wealthy suitors like you do,” Jasmine laughed.
“Just because you’re a douchebag magnet doesn’t mean you can’t potentially reel in a good guy every now and then, too. Then again, you always turn them down, don’t you?” he prodded emphatically. She knew he was referring to the five or six times she’d rejected his advances so far. He always backed off respectfully, and it had been a long time since the last incident. Nowadays he treated her like a friend rather than a potential hookup, but he still liked to make jokes about how they were actually soul mates and she was just too blind to see it.
“Well, the next time you wanna ask me out, just give me a ten dollar tip instead and see how that works for you,” Jasmine teased. Enzo laughed and gave her a gentle nudge on the shoulder.
“Okay, if you’re not going to look through your tipped receipts, I will,” he said, picking up the little stack of slips. Jasmine gave him a dubious look. “What? I’m curious!” he said defensively.
“Knock yourself out,” she replied, shaking her hair down from its messy bun. Her hair fell in thick golden-brown waves just past her shoulders and was one of the few traits she actually liked about herself. She knew she wasn’t unattractive, but overall, she had always considered herself pretty boring to look at. With green eyes that crinkled when she smiled and creamy white skin that blushed at the slightest little thing, Jasmine was often told that she had a warm, inviting appearance. She was appealing in an innocuous, girl-next-door kind of way. Not that her looks had ever really done much for her beyond attracting the very worst kinds of guys.
“Holy shit, Jaz,” Enzo said suddenly, his brown eyes going huge and round as he peered down at a receipt in his hand.
“What?”
“Oh my god. What the hell? This… is insane.”
Jasmine walked over and plucked the receipt out of his hands. In the tip line, which an unfortunate majority left blank, there was the number 500.
As in five hundred dollars.
“No,” Jasmine breathed, holding it up to the light as though it had some kind of invisible ink message that would indicate it was a prank. But it looked totally legitimate. The tip was real.
“What’d you do to get that?” Enzo asked, dumbfounded. “Who was it?”
Jasmine checked the name. All it said was Prince Duada. That could not be a real name. She couldn’t imagine to whom a moniker like that would belong. Until it hit her… the strange, hot guy with the dark glasses. It had to have been him. Nobody else stood out today in the least.
“That guy with the sunglasses. The tall one,” Jasmine answered her eyes wide.
“Oh my god, of course,” Enzo replied. “Girl, go cash that shit in immediately.”
“I don’t know… this has to be fake,” she murmured. “What if it’s a trick?”
Enzo stared at her open-mouthed, as though she were the dumbest human being on the face of the planet. “A trick? You’re not being punked, Jasmine. It’s totally real.”
“I—I don’t know what to do. I doubt we even have enough money in the till to cash this tip, Enzo. Cynthia is gonna flip.”
“Who the fuck cares? It’s your money! Hey, I have manager keys. I’ll do it myself. Come on, let’s get your money!” he said enthusiastically, dragging her over to the master till in the back office. There was just enough cash to make it happen—today had been busy. Jasmine blinked down numbly at the money in her hands. It was mostly in smaller bills, and it was a ridiculous looking stack of green.
“I need to go home and, like, take a nap or something,” Jasmine said quietly, still in utter shock. Enzo patted her on the back.
“Aren’t you glad I made you look at your tips?” Enzo laughed as she walked out of the cafe and toward the back parking lot in a trancelike state. Her mind was racing, utterly caught up in how fantastic and bizarre this was. Who in the world tipped five hundred bucks on a two-dollar cup of coffee?
“Greetings!” chimed a bright, silken voice. Jasmine snapped back to reality to see a man stretched out across the hood of her car.
It was the guy from earlier—the big tipper.
“What are you doing on my car? Were you waiting for me all this time?” Jasmine began. Then she went pale, panic filling her veins. What if he was waiting to take back the money? Maybe he’d accidentally written 500 instead of five. Her heart sank and her shoulders slumped a little. Of course it was too good to be true.
“Has it really been that long?” the mysterious guy mused aloud, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I always have had trouble getting used to mortal chronology.”
Jasmine’s eyebrows shot up. This guy had to be straight-up nuts.
“Mmortal what?” she asked, holding her purse close.
He chuckled and waved his hand dismissively, sitting up. “Oh, never mind. Anyway, I just thought I’d introduce myself now that you’re not surrounded by all those other humans. I’m here to change your life! Or at least your love life, that is. What is the term your people use? Oh yes, faery godmother. Except, as you can probably tell, I’m nobody’s mother.”
There was a long silence while Jasmine simply stared at him. His bright enthusiasm didn’t appear to wane in the least during this pause.
“Um… okay. You’re either a serial killer or a crazy person, so I’m just gonna go,” Jasmine said finally.
The guy tilted his head to one side quizzically. “Go? Without even hearing my pitch?”
“Just assume that whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.”
“Oh no, it doesn’t work like that. See, you don’t have a choice, and neither do I. You’re my assignment. My, ahh, homework, if you will. I’ve got my orders and I’m here to carry them out whether you like it or not. But I promise you will like it,” he said, winking at her.
“Look, I don’t know what kind of toxic mold you’ve been breathing, but I want no part in… whatever this is,” Jasmine said.
“Just let me work my magic, human!” he said, almost impetuously.
“There’s no such thing,” she retorted, striding quickly past him.
Out of nowhere, a high wind picked up and began to spin around her, and a shrill howl filled her ears. It sounded like she was caught in the eye of a hurricane—the world surrounding her merely a distant backdrop as she was encircled by this cold, floral-scented cyclone. A hail of white and purple flower petals wafted down from the heavens, falling in a circular pattern to land gently on Jasmine’s face and hair. She stood stock-still, not daring to move, completely bewildered by this sudden, inexplicable force of nature. She began to feel utterly weightless, her toes lifting off the ground as her body drifted slowly, gracefully upward.
She was floating about five inches off the ground.
Her heart raced and her eyes darted around wildly trying to make sense of what was happening to her. Was she hallucinating? She couldn’t see much beyond the tight circumference of this flower petal tornado she was cocooned inside, and she shut her eyes tightly, feeling a little nauseous. What the hell was going on?
Then, just as suddenly as it began, the cyclone stopped. Jasmine’s feet connected gently with the ground again and she struggled to regain her balance, feeling as though her entire universe had just been tipped upside down and shaken like a snowglobe.
When she opened her eyes again, the man was standing in front of her, his dark glasses pushed back into his dark hair to reveal a pair of faintly luminous amethyst-colored eyes.
“What the hell was that? And who the hell are you?” Jasmine breathed, her voice weak.
The man grinned and held out his hand for her to shake.
“That, my cynical little mortal, was magic. And I am Prince Duada of the Summerland Court, at your service.”
Three
“You’ve got to at least meet the man I have selected for you,” Duada pressed, a plaintive note to his voice. He was awkwardly squeezed into the backseat of Jasmine’s little red Ford Taurus as she drove home. She had refused to let him sit in the front beside her, afraid that someone might see them together. In this part of town, everybody knew each other. Which, of course, meant that the rumor mill was in constant circulation. Eyes were everywhere.
Nobody could be trusted.
Besides, he wouldn’t stop fiddling with everything, and the last thing Jasmine needed at the moment was for his meddling fingers to cause an accident. And there were fewer buttons for him to mess with in the backseat. She was already feeling nervous about having him in the car, period, much less sitting beside her where he could do something crazy like take the wheel or yank the emergency brake. There was no telling what he would do, and since he clearly had a fairly loose grasp of human-made mechanics, she wasn’t taking any chances. Jasmine was slowly coming to terms with the fact that the man in her backseat wasn’t just such an absurdly handsome raving lunatic—he was a genuine, glamour-wielding fae.
Even in her head, it sounded outlandish. But after his little magic show back in the parking lot, she had forced herself to shelve her sanity and embrace the weirdness that had blown into her life like a hurricane.
A hurricane named Duada.
“You know, that’s a ridiculous name, right? Duada?” Jasmine blurted out, glancing at him in her rearview mirror.
He scoffed, looking slightly offended.
“And you’re named after a flower,” he shot back. Then he leaned forward, his face poking out over the center console. “Anyway, you have got to meet this man.”
“So what is this, then? Some kind of magical version of The Bachelorette and you’re the host?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow dubiously.
“The Bachelorette?’ His brows arched for a second. He waved his hand off, dismissing his question. “Whatever helps you understand this better. It’s fairly straightforward, Jasmine,” the fae said, rolling his eyes at her as though she were a small child failing to understand basic math or something. “I’m here to help you find a mate. I was sent by the Queen herself to make you a match.”
“The Queen? As in the Queen of—where? England?” Jasmine snickered
“The Faery Queen, of course. The only one that matters,” Duada replied, his voice and face completely serious.
“What? You’re saying my love life is so supernaturally abysmal that the queen of the faeries has chosen to intervene and fix it for me?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Jasmine sobered up instantly. “Oh.”
“Just consider it a form of, ah, reparation for the romantic misfortunes the universe has handed you thus far,” he went on. “Is this really such a shock to you?”
“I mean, yeah, I’ve had pretty bad luck so far. But I didn’t know magical intervention was really an option,” Jasmine explained, dumbfounded by the words coming out of her mouth.
This was insane.
&
nbsp; Impossible.
“Could you at least deign to look at his picture?” The fae sighed, clearly getting antsy being cooped up in the backseat.
“You’re telling me you’ve been carrying around a photo of some random guy?” she questioned, actually turning to look at him for a moment. His beautiful face looked serious.
“A photo? No. How pedestrian. Here, let me show you…”
And with a flourish of his hands, a gleaming orb approximately the size of a small microwave appeared in front of Jasmine’s face. She screamed and jerked the steering wheel, nearly swerving the car into the adjacent lane in the process.
“What are you doing? What is that?” She leaned around it to see the road. “I’m trying to drive here! Could you not?”
“My stars, would you calm down?” Duada waved his hand slightly to move the glowing circle aside so that it no longer blocked Jasmine’s line of sight. “It’s only a picture of the man I’ve chosen for you. Would you look at it?”
“At this red light, yes. I will look. But you can’t just throw blinding light in front of my face while we’re in the car.” She groaned, gently bringing the car to a halt at the intersection. She dutifully glanced over and did a double take. She could see now that the orb contained a moving, animated portrait of a very, very attractive man with a stern expression. She had to admit that he did look tempting.
“Where did you find this guy?” she asked, a little breathlessly.
Duada shrugged and gave her a brilliant grin.
“I cannot reveal all of my secrets,” he answered cryptically. “What do you think?”
“He’s good-looking, I’ll give you that.”
“Will you meet with him?”
Jasmine’s stomach flip-flopped. “When? Tonight?”
“Well, yes, of course. I expect the Queen would like these orders carried out immediately,” Duada reasoned, as though it were obvious.
“B-But I’ve never even met him before. And besides, what makes you think a guy like that would ever go on a date with me?” she asked, biting her lip. She usually tried to keep her insecurities safely filed away in a mental box marked FRAGILE - DO NOT TOUCH, but here she was.
Faery Godlover: BBW Paranormal Romance Page 3