Page 27 of Blood and Roses

"Why? Because there's been a Wylt around forever and ever to clean up after the Vanes?" Rosa choked on her wine. "Ah, sorry."

"Don't be." He shrugged. "You're right. Eli likes to live vicariously through the Wylts. He will never have grandchildren, but he sees them live and grow and die and that seems enough." Saul swore softly. "Damn, I forgot they haven't told you yet. If Eli finds out I was the one who let it slip, he will flay me." He put a hand over hers and said calmly, "Rosa, you are to forget what I said about Eli and his fascination with the Wylt family. Understand?"

"Yes, Lord Saul," she said quickly.

"Lord Saul, what a joke," he laughed before he lifted his hand and touched her hair. "You really are beautiful when you let yourself be, Rosa."

"When I let myself be?" Rosa scoffed. "That is so self-help. My qualities lie elsewhere."

"I don't want to argue against your other qualities. You have been the first person to get my steak right in years, but you're still beautiful. You don't seem to know it either, which makes you more so. Why do you think Pearl is so bitchy whenever you are near? She can't handle the competition and hates that Balthasar likes you. The only attention she could ever get from him was the negative kind."

"She's not going to have to be jealous anymore, not after today." Rosa drank some more wine. "I've never seen someone that angry before."

"I wouldn't worry about it too much. Balthasar will calm down, realize what an asshole he's been, and that you never intentionally invaded his Fortress of Solitude. He will come and apologize to you. He can be a right haughty twat when he wants to be, but he knows when he has messed up. I think it's good you are here, Rosa Wylt, and that you went up there. Tin Man needs his cage rattled occasionally to remind him he still has a heart."

"Doesn't he go out and date or anything?" Rosa asked, her head feeling lighter and her tongue looser by the minute. "He's agorgeous guy, so I'm surprised he doesn't have a trophy wife or three."

"I'm not certain he's over the last one yet," Saul said, picking thoughtfully at the label on the wine bottle.

"Bad breakup?"

"You could say that. It was before I was turned... Damn. Oh, what does it matter? I can command you to forget later anyway. You're a Wylt, so you are meant to know about our kind. As I was saying, Bal was in love, the proper kind, with a girl called Jane. Everyone was in love with her the way Lily tells it. Bal wanted to marry her and to turn her, but Eli wasn't convinced that she could handle it. Bal never got the chance to finish convincing him."

"What happened to her?"

"Jane went swimming in the lake and drowned. The swimsuits back then weren't exactly streamlined. They found her caught up in the weeds, and Bal went crazy. I was turned about forty years later in Russia, so I've never seen Bal interested in a girl. According to Lily, when he falls, it's hard and completely. He has no middle ground. I don't think Bal has even been with a girl since Jane."

"Maybe she's haunting him in a very tragic, gothic love story manner," Rosa joked. She expected Saul to laugh, but he looked curiously pensive.

"Maybe she is. I know Harold used to see ghosts from time to time. You're a Wylt. Aren't you guys meant to inherit some kind of witchy-woo abilities?"

Rosa snorted. "Not that I have been told." Her mind drifted to the girl she had seen walking the grounds on her first night, then again on the roof. She felt the wine twist her stomach, and she shivered.

Saul shrugged off his coat and draped it over her shoulders.

"Thanks. Okay, enough about Bal and his ghost women. What about you? You seem too nice to be such a player."

"I really like women! I'm not like Bal. I have never been swept off my feet by some great and tragic love. I would like to be one day. God knows I'm old enough."

"You aren't that old."

"I was twenty-seven when I was turned in 1856 in Russia, but I have been looking to get jilted by love ever since."

"So you are Russian? You don't even have an accent."

"I haven't lived there since 1856, that's why. I'm quite certain there is still a warrant out for my arrest."

"What did you do?" Rosa laughed.

"Guess?"

"Seduced a princess?"

"How did you know?" he demanded suspiciously.

"Maybe it's my witchy-woo powers. Which princess?"

"Argh...Olga Nikolaevna? Alex was pissed about it, but seriously, no matter how much she loved Charlie, Charlie was gay, and women have needs. Eli came to the rescue. We had become acquainted because he had traveled to Russia to check up on Bal who was fighting in the Crimean War. Alex tried to have me killed off, and Eli saved my skin."

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