Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set (9 page)

I ran into Rebecca in line. Literally.

“Ouch!” she cried when I rammed right into her and
stepped on her foot.

“Oh! Sorry, Rebecca! I wasn’t watching where I was
going,” I said. “I’m—ahhhh, a little preoccupied right now.”

An understatement.

“Jasmine! I’m so glad you made it in!” Rebecca gave
me a hug. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“Why?”

Rebecca bit her lip. “I wasn’t sure if you would
come back to work after meeting with Rodney Doyle, is all.”

I took a moment to ponder this. “What makes you say
such a thing?”

Rebecca shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Mr. Doyle just
has a certain reputation, is all. And if things didn’t work out—you
know, with him helping the senator and all—I didn’t know if you’d
be up to doing your job anymore.”

I ordered an Egg McMuffin Value Meal and stifled a
shudder. If Rebecca only knew what was really going on! I knew that
by keeping my true working arrangements with Rodney Doyle a secret,
I was betraying Senator Grayle. I could live with that. But I
wasn’t at all sure if I could live with betraying Rebecca. I’d
gotten to be good friends with her over the years, and now she was
caught up in something big and serious and didn’t even know it. I
felt a lump of guilt forming in the pit of my stomach.

“I’ll always up to doing this job, Rebecca,” I lied.
“Public relations is my life.”

Rebecca gave me a hug. “I knew you’d come through,”
she said—which just made me feel even more guilty. “Things are
pretty crazy upstairs, as you might imagine.” She lowered her
voice. “And Senator Grayle’s back in the office. Somebody bailed
him out of jail.”

“What?” I yelped. I wasn’t ready to face Senator
Grayle yet. Not by a long shot. “Who bailed him out?”

“Nobody knows. Even Senator Grayle doesn’t know.
Whoever paid the bond asked to remain anonymous.”

A terrible possibility formed in my mind. Had Rodney
Doyle bailed out my boss just so I could start snooping around on
him that much sooner? It seemed likely. But I couldn’t exactly tell
Rebecca that.

“Hmm,” I said, sipping my coffee. “That’s odd. I’m
sure it’ll be all over the news this morning, too.”

Rebecca grabbed her own breakfast order from the
counter and headed for the door. “You know, you’d think so. But
I’ve been watching the headlines all morning, and so far there’s
been no mention of it.” Then I
knew
it had to have been
Doyle who bailed Grayle out. Only Rodney Doyle could get away with
something like that and then manage to keep it out of the media.
Things were getting more and more complicated by the second.

And I was getting more and more turned on by the
second. I struggled to keep up with Rebecca’s quick pace as we
headed upstairs to Senator Grayle’s office, because the Chinese
balls knocked together inside me with every step I took.

Just before we made it to the office, Rebecca
stopped short in the hallway. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“That ringing. Don’t you hear chimes ringing?”
Rebecca looked around, her expression puzzled. “Where is it coming
from?

“I don’t hear anything.”

Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe I’m hearing things.” She
headed for the office front door, and I followed. Then she stopped
short again. “There it is again. Don’t you hear it?”

This time, I
did
hear it. To my shock, I
realized that the tiny chimes inside the Chinese balls were
ringing. They were ringing
inside
my vag, and the sound
could be heard
outside
my vag.

How the hell was I supposed to get through the day
like this?

“I don’t hear anything at all,” I lied, desperate.
“Maybe your ears are ringing. You shouldn’t listen to your iPod so
much, it’s bad for the hearing.”

This seemed plausible to Rebecca. “I’m sure you’re
right,” she said. “Senator Grayle wanted me to tell you he wants to
see you as soon as you come in. He’s in his office. And he’s not in
a very good mood, either.”

“I’m sure that goes without saying.” I needed to
stall for time somehow. I had to get those Chinese balls under
control before I did anything. I couldn’t exactly march into
Senator Grayle’s office with chimes ringing out of my cunt.

“Tell Senator Grayle I’ll be right in,” I said. “I
just need to make a pit stop first.”

“No problem. Take your time.”
Rebecca went inside the office, while I headed down the hall to the
bathroom. I supposed

I could eat my McMuffin in there while I figured out
what to do next.

I’d barely made it into the bathroom when my cell
phone rang. “Hello?”

“Greetings and salutations, Jasmine Rand.” It was
Rodney Doyle. “How are things?”

“Not good,” I growled through a mouthful of
McMuffin. “No thanks to you.”

“Funny, I thought we had a good time last
night.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, last night
was
fun,
but today is different. These Chinese balls of yours are driving me
nuts.”

“That’s odd. I thought most women tended to enjoy
having orgasms all day long.”

I sighed; the man was really too much. “Ordinarily I
would, Rodney. But it’s sort of interfering with my day. Do you
know how hard it is to keep a straight face when your entire lower
half is on fire? And I have
bells
ringing from inside my
vag. People can
hear
them, and I’m running out of
explanations for it.”

“You need to hold your muscles more firmly in
that—ahem—area. That should put a damper on things. Exercise some
control.”

“How the hell am I supposed to exercise
control
down there with Senator Grayle back in the office?”
I shot back. “I know you’re the one who bailed him out. By the way,
your timing sucks. I needed at least one more day on my own to get
things settled down.”

“Jasmine, I thought you and I agreed that you would
begin your undercover work
today
,” Rodney said. “The whole
reason I bailed Grayle out was so you could do that.”

I ground my teeth. “You could have at least given me
a full day to get used to having these
things
shoved up
where the sun doesn’t shine.” I shifted from one foot to the other,
searching for a position where I couldn’t feel the Chinese balls
rolling around inside me. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t one.
“You know, I’m just about ready to yank them out.”

“Jasmine, you can do whatever you like. I’m not
forcing you to do this work, you know.”

I polished off the McMuffin and started in on the
hash browns. “I know you aren’t. But I
want
to do it. I
really do. It’s just that—well, I’m sort of nervous.”

Rodney laughed. “Is that all that’s bothering
you?”

I almost choked on my hash browns. “To tell you the
truth, I’m a
lot
nervous. I’m terrified, in fact.”

“Jasmine, it’s perfectly normal to be scared about
trying something new,” Rodney said, his tone softening a bit. “But
I guarantee I wouldn’t have offered you this job in the first place
if I didn’t think you were perfect for it. My advice to you is just
to jump in with both feet and enjoy the ride.”

I thought it over for a moment while I licked grease
from my fingers. “I guess I can try it for a little while,” I said.
“The only problem is, I’m not sure exactly what it is I’m supposed
to be doing.”

“Right now, all you need to do is get control of
those Chinese Enlightened Pathway Balls,” Rodney explained. “It’s a
kind of physical and mental conditioning that will prepare you for
what’s ahead. While you’re doing that, just go about your business
as usual today. I’ll give you a call again this afternoon to see
how you’re doing.”

“But—“

Before I could get another word out, Rodney hung
up.

This was really irritating. Here I was, potentially
putting my entire career on the line for a crazy undercover job
working for a man I only knew because I had out-of-this-world sex
with him last night—and I didn’t even know what that crazy
undercover job entailed. I had priceless Chinese antiques shoved up
my genitals, and I was fighting to control myself while those
priceless Chinese antiques sent my body out into the far reaches of
the sexual solar system. My surely very angry boss had just been
busted out of jail by a sleazy tabloid publisher and was probably
waiting in his office to kill me with his bare hands.

And to top it all off, I wasn’t wearing any
underwear.

Had I completely lost my mind?

Chapter
8

Senator Grayle sat across from me behind his massive
teak desk, his bushy gray brows knitting. “I don’t suppose you got
any bright ideas that might get the goddamn media off my back,
Jasmine. I swear, I think I’m up shit creek with this one.”

I coughed to keep from laughing. “It is a
very—difficult situation, sir.”

Senator Grayle took a glass paperweight shaped like
a stalk of wheat off his desk and tossed it from hand to hand. “I
hope you don’t think I’m some kind of pervert after what’s
happened, Jasmine. Because I ain’t. I’m still a decent, stand-up
North Dakota fella.”

“Of course you are, sir.” I crossed my legs, and
chimes rang out.

Senator Grayle looked up, startled. “What the hell
was that? Where’s that ringing noise coming from?”

I gave him a blank look. “What ringing noise, sir?”
I uncrossed my legs, and the chimes rang again.

“
That
ringing noise. You didn’t hear that?”
Senator Grayle picked a paperclip out of a tray on his desk, and
began to unfold it.

“No sir, I didn’t hear anything.” I clamped down on
my vaginal muscles with a vengeance.I couldn’t have any Chinese
funny business going on in Senator Grayle’s office. No way.

“My ears must be ringing,” the senator drawled. “I
swear, the noise going on in that jail was so loud last night, it
near to split my eardrums. People were yelling and carrying on in
there like it was some kind of madhouse.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” I said. “But you’re
out of jail now, so it’s time to start damage control with the
press. I’ve already written up a list of talking points—“

Senator Grayle cut me off. “I don’t want to hear
about any phoney-baloney talking points right now. First things
first. Jasmine,
I am not gay.”

I coughed again. “I never said you were, sir.”

“Maybe not, but everyone in the goddamn media is
saying that I am. My wife even ran out on me because of it. We need
to do something about that, pronto.”

“You do realize, sir, that you were caught in a
rather—ahem—
unsavory
position in Rock Creek Park the other
night. Some people were bound to draw certain. . .conclusions.”

Senator Grayle pursed his lips and looked at the
floor.He tugged on his tie, which was printed with tiny drawings of
bison and wheat stalks—two symbols of North Dakota. The lines on
his face had deepened since I’d seen him last; it seemed he had
aged ten years in the past two days. “My career’s over, Jasmine.
You know it, I know it. Let’s just try to bow out gracefully, shall
we?”

My heart sank. I knew this was the inevitable
conclusion of Senator Grayle’s latest gaffe, but I hadn’t expected
that admission to come direct from him. Maybe that meant I wouldn’t
have to betray him—or Rebecca—after all. “If that’s really what you
want, sir. Does that mean you’ll be dropping out of the
election?”

Senator Grayle picked at his cuticles. “Naw.
Election’s only a month away, we’ve got way too much invested in it
to drop out now. We’ll just lose, is all. That’ll be it.”

My boss looked sad and defeated. He picked up his
coffee cup, swirled around the dregs inside it, set it back down.
He didn’t seem much in the mood for work at all, let alone a futile
attempt to revive his political career. “I don’t suppose you wanted
to respond to any of the allegations that are swirling in the press
personally?” I asked, timid. “The
Post
says you’ve been
charged with solicitation and public indecency.”

“That’s right,” Grayle sighed. “My lawyers told me
to plead no contest. They said that would be the fastest way to
make everything go away. I’ll get off with a fine and time
served.”

“The people of North Dakota have been very loyal to
you over the years,” I offered. “And they don’t like Democrats,
either. You might still win re-election despite all of this.”

Senator Grayle laughed despite himself. “Now don’t
be jetting yourself off to fairyland, Jasmine. We both know that
ain’t gonna happen.”

“We can always hope,” I said, though I knew it was
hopeless. “You do have several requests for interviews with all the
major media. My cell phone has been ringing off the hook with them
since yesterday afternoon.”

“I’m not doing any more interviews, Jasmine,” Grayle
snapped. “You’ll just have to handle the press yourself. From here
on out, I’m a lame duck, and I’m going on vacation.” He stood up
and took his coat from a hook on the wall. I noticed he had a
suitcase already packed, too. “I’ll be staying on the ranch back
home until the end of the year. And I won’t be taking calls while
I’m gone, either.”

My eyes flew wide. “But—but you can’t just leave in
the middle of your term!” I stammered. “You’re due on the Senate
floor in twenty minutes for a vote!”

“Only place I’m due to be right now is on a plane
the hell out of Washington,” Grayle retorted, and stormed out.

I slumped in my chair, stunned. What was I supposed
to do now? My career as a PR staffer was over before I’d even had a
chance to do any undercover work for Rodney Doyle. So much for my
future as an investigative reporter. I figured I might as well hop
on the same flight Senator Grayle was taking back to North Dakota
and call it a day.

Rebecca rushed in, her face a pale white slate from
shock. “What happened? Senator Grayle just left and he wouldn’t
tell me where he was going!”