Faery Godlover

“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.