Free Kiss of the Phantom: Sexy Paranormal (Book 3, Phantom Series) by Julie Leto Page A

the forest of Valoren, nor did I request that you take me away from the man who seemed to know what Rogan’s marker was really about.”
    “Those blokes were trying to kill me,”
    “I mean the man you shot at in Valoren.”
    “Ben?” she said with a laugh that was neither flippant nor funny. “He was bluffing.”
    Rafe turned to face her as fully as he could, restrained as he was by the straps she insisted would assure his safety. “And how, precisely, do you hold to that judgment? He warned you that the stone was cursed by black magic. On this point, he was entirely correct.”
    She scoffed at him, waving away his assessment. “I know Ben,” she insisted. “Intimately. Every so often, he makes a good guess. That’s all that happened.”
    Rafe arched a brow. “You were married to him?” he asked.
    She grimaced. “Crikey, no. But I wasted several years thinking he might pony up at some point. Suffice it to say I do know him well, and he was after the rock for profit and for profit only. His ramblings about black magic were meant only to scare me.”
    Rafe focused again on the sky outside. Streaks of red and purple shot up from the horizon in the east, lightening the blackness to a dusky gray. Though sunrises remained constant, the world had truly changed more than he imagined if a woman could confess relations with a man outside of marriage with no shame. Even if she were not herself Romani, the conventions of his era precluded a woman speaking of such intimacies. Although the female servants in his father’s British household did not hold to such lofty ideals, coupling regularly with whatever soldiers had been sent to man the small garrison outside the valley, Rafe followed the customs of his mother and her Romani kin.
    In the village of Umgeben, marriages were arranged by the elders and blessed by the puri or the Chovihano , as Rafe’s had been. His father, who had taken a Gypsy wife long after he’d been made a widower by Rafe’s brothers’ British mother, had tacitly approved. John Forsyth, Earl of Hereford, was a great many things that Rafe had not approved of, but he’d never been a hypocrite.
    Nor was Rafe. He’d made love to only one woman in his lifetime, and she had been his Irika. And yet, the idea that Mariah had experienced the pleasures of lovemaking freely and without disgrace spawned an interest he had no right to feel.
    “Did I shock you?” she asked, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
    “Yes,” he admitted.
    “Then our next discussion needs to be about the society’s changed attitudes toward sex.”
    Rafe had no idea whether he was prepared for what he was about to learn, but he knew without a doubt that if Mariah Hunter had decided to impart this knowledge, he would not have a choice but to listen.
    That was, until a bright light broke through the windows to his right. He had only a moment to recognize the full sunrise before his world went dark. The last thing he heard was Mariah shouting his name.

7
     
    “This doesn’t look good,” Cat said, eyeing the destruction that had once been Mariah Hunter’s hotel room. When they’d lost her in Europe, Ben had insisted they travel to Texas, where he’d guessed—correctly—that she’d pick up a getaway car she kept stashed near the airport and then would register in a hotel under an assumed name, paying with cash. They’d been calling around to low-cost car-rental companies when the police scanner had given them their first solid, albeit disturbing lead—an assault of some sort in a hotel room rented to a woman using one of Mariah’s noms de plume.
    Again, Ben had anticipated his ex’s actions to the letter. Either Mariah Hunter was a terrible creature of habit, or Ben had seriously underrated the intimacy of an affair that ended a decade ago. Either way, Cat found herself inexplicably miffed. She was too self-confident to be jealous, but she copped to annoyance, which wasn’t lessened by the concerned look on