Knight in Leather (5 page)

She shrugged. “Two at once will save me a trip back over here when you finish the first one in fifteen seconds.”

“I would get up and get a drink myself, you know.”

“Why waste the effort?” She cut her gaze in Dasha’s general direction and mouthed something he couldn’t quite catch.

“Huh?”

Simone rolled her eyes, and muttered, “Men.”

“I don’t—”

“So, Dasha,” the princess said as she retreated toward the kitchen. “What goes into your famous potato salad? We need sides for our impromptu cookout.”

Dasha snorted, and Ethan caught the small grin tugging up her lips on one side. “It’s not famous so much as edible.”

“That’s better than most can do.”

“Start by boiling a bunch of potatoes.”

“Already did that, and I’ve got them chilling in the fridge.”

“You want me to make it?”

“Nah. Sit tight. Sip your acid-in-a-glass. Just tell me the ingredients and let me perform a feat of culinary magic.”

“You’d be better off using real magic as far as potato salad is concerned.”

“Unfortunately, my magic is no good with food. I can open portals and passageways and, every now and then, I have a knack for inciting orgies. Beyond that…”

Dasha’s wineglass almost slipped from her fingers, but she caught the curved bottom before she could spill much more than a few drops onto her fingers. “Wait,
what
?” She pulled her fingers into her mouth and sucked away the spilled wine, and Ethan rolled his gaze up to the ceiling and sent up a prayer to any listening being.
Please end my suffering.

“It’s my grandma’s fault,” the princess said.

“Which grandma?” Dasha asked. “They both sound scary from what little you’ve told me.”

“The depressed one in the magical sleep.”

“Oh. Fergus’s wife, then. How is Fergus, anyway? I owe him a trip to thank him for all the tea.”

“Fergus sent you tea?” Ethan asked. “Fergus hates everyone.”

Dasha turned toward him and raised one shoulder in a shrug. “I think he likes people who don’t expect anything from him. Every time you fairies show up at his doorstep, you’re asking him to open up a mound tunnel or a portal something. Have you ever just
visited
with the guy? He probably gets lonely being in that cottage alone all the time with his wife conked out.”

“When’d you have a chance to visit Fergus?” Ethan hadn’t had any idea she’d been back to the realm. To the best of his knowledge, the only time she’d visited was just after Thanksgiving when Princess Simone had accidentally opened a portal that linked up to existing fairy tunnels Fergus had magically laid a millennium ago. She’d been trying to drag one of Rhiannon’s failed assassins back to the queen, and Dasha had followed, concerned about her friend’s safety, though she hadn’t really needed to be. The princess did a pretty good job of fighting her own battles when she got angry enough.

Dasha narrowed her eyes and fondled the end of her scarf. “Around Easter, I think.” She nodded decisively. “Yeah, just was a few weeks ago. Simone flew out for a quick visit. We’d been drinking, and one of us had the awesome idea to see if Simone could open a portal for us to take a little field trip. She needed the practice casting portals, so she gave it a shot.”

In the kitchen, the princess sighed. “Only took three tries. The first time, I overshot and we ended up in some dark smelly place I’m still not quite convinced was on Earth. The second time, I decided that directing my magical intent toward my grandfather might help me target it better. Similar magic always attracts. Unfortunately, that stunt put us at my mother’s doorstep.”

“Why
unfortunately
?” Ethan asked. “You and Katie are on good enough terms, last I heard.”

“Yeah, I love my mother. But the problem is, she lives with a scary, spear-wielding individual whom she insists is an absolute creampuff but who could literally make a man’s head explode with a thought. I’m sure my father is a very pleasant man once you get to know him, but there’s only so much shock I can take at a time. The guy’s intense.”

Ethan twined his fingers, and then retwined them.
Intense
. That was the same word she’d used to categorize Ethan. It wasn’t a good word in his opinion.

“They made us stay for a little while,” Dasha said with a laugh. “We were very well fed, though the parade of muscle was a little…” She smiled. “Unexpected.”

Prince Heath cleared his throat and leaned against the counter, glowering at his wife. “They’re all aware that you have a mate, aye?”

Princess Simone flicked a dishtowel in his general direction and went back to chopping celery. “Everyone knows the high prince has taken a mate by now, and also who she is. If they don’t know, they probably will as soon as they crawl out from under the rocks they’re beneath.”

“Just checking.”

“Besides, the parade of muscle was more for Dasha’s benefit than mine, I think.”

Ethan cracked his knuckles.
Fuckin’ opportunists.
He cleared his throat and tried to keep his voice light. “And…how did Dasha feel about this…
parade
?”

Dasha buffed her nails against her tank top and wore the tiniest of grins.

He growled quietly.

“Suffice it to say,” Simone said with a laugh, “The show was nice enough, but we were more interested in the food. Anyway, we eventually made our way to Granddad’s. He was confused and wondering what the hell we were doing there, but he let us in quickly enough. We had a nice little visit, and he gave me a much-needed lesson in directing my portals.”

“We’re trying to figure out a way to get him out of there without Rhiannon noticing,” Ethan said.

Dasha shook her head. “He won’t go without his wife, and she can’t be moved. I don’t understand why she can’t, but I do understand why he wouldn’t want to go without her.”

“Oh?”

“They’ve been together for…” she furrowed her brow. “How long, Simone?”

“A couple thousand years, at least.”

“Can you imagine the level of commitment you’d have with someone over that length of time? It’s crazy.”

“Mmm.” Ethan didn’t think the commitment was crazy at all, but he was of the Sídhe, and Sídhe committed like no others. Their mates were the most enduring, precious things they had, so of course Fergus was devoted. To say he just loved his wife probably would have been an offensive understatement.

“She can’t be moved because she’s…
trapped
,” Princess Simone said solemnly. “I asked Granddad to show her to me the last time I visited him, and he relented, thinking that maybe I could rouse her, but I wasn’t quite what she wanted. I was expecting him to take me into a bedroom to show me a sleeping lady, but instead, he walked me into his cellar.” She set down her knife and stared at the collection of vegetables on her cutting board. “He…said he keeps a light on down there, even if she can’t tell. There was no bed or platform for her to lie on, and so I was confused. There was nothing there but a lot of dirt and rock. I didn’t understand at first, but then he pulled me to the wall in the back and had me stand about five feet away. The room was dim. I needed a moment see what he was trying to show me. At first, I thought the colors on the wall were just a bit of paint that had rubbed off something, but the longer I stared, the better I could make out the shapes. The hair and…the closed eyes. The lashes and…” Princess Simone glided her fingertips across her dark eyebrows. “Perfectly arched. I could see the dress she’d worn on that day she’d decided to step into that earthen wall.”

Ethan clutched the arms of the chair, mouth dry and hearth thrashing in his chest. He’d heard of fairies doing incredibly reckless things, but the level of magic the woman must have had to have been able to meld into that wall must have been incredible.

She’d stepped into that wall because her daughter had left, and Katie couldn’t return to the realm without Rhiannon learning of her presence. If they encountered again, there’d be another devastating fight, and the last one had been so noxious, no one since had been able to farm anything in a five-kilometer radius from ground zero. She’d been living outside among a tribe that hadn’t been forced into the magical domain. Katie wouldn’t risk Rhiannon harming Fergus. She couldn’t visit without inciting another devastating battle. Not yet.

“I put my hand against hers,” Princess Simone said. “And I could feel her.
Sense
her, rather, and see a glimmer of her aura. She woke up for just a moment. Enough to say hello to me. I could tell she was sad to do it, but she went back to sleep.”

Heath pulled Simone against his chest and tucked his chin atop her head. “She didn’t go back to sleep because you weren’t enough, love. Even if she wanted to come out, her magic wouldn’t let her. She spun the spell, and she can’t change the cure now.”

Dasha sucked in some air and dragged her forearm across her misty eyes. “Why’d you cut so many damn onions, Simone?”

Princess Simone chuckled from within the prince’s embrace. “Sorry to bring down the mood in the room. But now you all know. If the realm collapses before my mother can return to the cottage, my grandmother will die there, and probably my grandfather along with her.”

Dasha set her wine glass on the coffee table and turned toward the counter. “We need to figure out a way to fix this shit. Hestia said if anyone could get folks out, you were the likely lady. So when are we going to start making plans?”

Ethan brought his beer bottle to his lips and let her words settle into his brain.
We
. She’d said
we
as if the problem was in part hers.

But of course the burden was partly hers, because she cared about her friend, and her friend was hurting. She didn’t fret over what the problem was or how hard to swallow the circumstances were. Dasha wanted to help Simone fix things.

Her keenness to help was a good sign in Ethan’s opinion. She was willing to get her hands dirty and expose herself to all kinds of fairy nonsense if it meant Simone’s problem was solved. And if she were amenable to that, he figured that perhaps she’d become more amenable to other nonsense in time…like having a very “intense” fairy mate who was becoming increasingly irrational because he couldn’t touch her yet.

He took a long draw of his beer and considered the situation.

She seemed to have no problems with the idea of fairies and the turmoil of their world. Her issue was with
being
with one.

He took another sip and stared at the side of her lovely face as she chatted with the princess.

Perhaps I need to work my way close slowly so she doesn’t realize before it’s too late that she’s already with one.

Dasha curled her legs beneath her on the lounger near the waterless pool and gave the hem of Siobhan’s T-shirt a little tug. She cleared her throat, and Siobhan—who had been engaged in a rousing debate with Caryl about whether Swiss cheese melted better than Havarti—bent to listen.

“Aye?” Siobhan said.

“Maybe I’m unusually paranoid, not that anyone could blame me,” Dasha said, “but why do y’all keep looking toward the parking lot?”

They could only see a sliver of it from the courtyard. Really, just the entrance to the lot.

Siobhan batted at the ends of her matte black hair and, with her bright blue gaze flitting toward the road again, shrugged. “No reason.”

“You’re lying, Princess.”

Siobhan blew a raspberry. “Gods, really—nothing to worry about.” She took the seat beside Dasha, and Caryl crowded onto it on the other edge.

Caryl looked over at Dasha, too, and said, “We’re always on high alert, especially after what Heath and the boys did last month. They collapsed some very important tunnels Rhiannon used to access that secluded fairy colony in Australia. We’re waiting to see how Rhiannon is going to retaliate.”

“But no one with magic can get into this property, right?” Dasha asked. “Or did I hear that wrong?”

“No, you heard that right. But the thing is, not every fairy has a significant amount of magic. Most of the folks in this crew are outliers.”

Dasha squinted at Siobhan over the top of her wine glass.

“Don’t give me that look,” the princess said.

“What can you do? I’ve seen you beat up plenty of folks, but you don’t need magic for that.”

Siobhan studied her nails.

Apparently, she’d fallen into the Jamberry craze. Zenia sold the nail wraps…and also happened to be the local Mary Kay lady. Siobhan was wearing a Jamberry set printed with kitten silhouettes.

“Don’t clam up now,” Dasha said.

Caryl snorted and extended one long leg toward the pool’s stair rail to block Ethan when he approached with a plate.

He furrowed his brow and looked from Caryl to Dasha back to Caryl again.

“What do you want?” Caryl asked glibly.

He grunted.

“Use words, Sir Grunty.”

He rolled up his upper lip and exposed a bit of fang that quickly receded.

Jesus!

Dasha clutched her chest. As far as she knew, fairies didn’t have fangs.

Do they?

She looked at Siobhan, whose sneer seemed perfectly normal. No pointier than the typical human’s.

Dasha peeked at the big guy again, swallowing hard.
Maybe he didn’t either. Maybe I’m just seeing things. Looking for reasons to be afraid of him.

The girls certainly didn’t seem all that fearful of him. In fact, Siobhan was feigning a yawn.

“There was only one hamburger that didn’t burn,” he said through clenched teeth. “Sully had the damned flame stoked up too high.”

“Pass the food on down,” Siobhan said.

He thrust the plate toward the princess, and Dasha took it from Siobhan when she passed it over.

“Thank you, dear,” Siobhan told him. “Now, run along. Go babysit the guy with the lighter fluid. Perhaps tell him he doesn’t need more. He’s going to have this place smelling like the inside of a matchbook.”

With one more sidelong glance at Dasha, Ethan drifted away.

Caryl dropped her leg. “Anyhow, what were we saying?”

Dasha looked down at the veritable pile of food on her plate. There was a hamburger, a brat in a bun, a bit of steak, a huge hunk of grilled chicken, and the tiniest scoop of potato salad. “Is this how fairies eat?” Dasha muttered. She worked the plastic fork out of the mound of meat and poked at the salad.

“Just the male ones. The fairer of us do enjoy the occasional carbohydrate.”

“This is a lot of meat.”

“Well, that’s Ethan for you. Of course he’s going to give you a pile of meat. He can’t help his preferences.”

“Why is that?”

Siobhan shrugged. “Because he’s a freakin’ beast. That’s his magic. So, listen—”

“Don’t try to change the subject on me, Princess. I know the game you’re playing.” Dasha also wanted to know what that nature of
Ethan’s
magic was since Siobhan had brought the subject up.

Siobhan sputtered her lips. “Fine. You want to know about my magic? All I can say is mine isn’t much different than Heath’s. Like him, I manipulate energy, just a bit differently.”

“That’s what you inherited from your mother. What’d you get from your father?”

Siobhan studied the kittens on her nails again.

“Really? You’re gonna clam up like Heath? He won’t talk about your father’s power, either.”

Siobhan dropped her hand and glanced toward the parking lot. “Suffice it to say, my father’s abilities are not commonly known.”

“Are you merely tightlipped or is the secret due to his potential being some terrible thing?”

Siobhan grimaced.

Not a good sign.
“Does anyone in the crew know besides you and Heath?”

“Well, at this point, Simone knows, but telling her was somewhat necessary since she and Heath swap power on occasion.”

“If I asked her, I suspect she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Eh.” The princess cringed. “Probably not.”

Dasha wasn’t one to push on subjects she perceived to be delicate, but damned if she wasn’t curious. She let the topic go for the moment, though. There was already too much going on in the pool area—too many sounds, too many things to look at.

Someone—Matt, if Dasha had to venture a guess—had put on some music that Dasha couldn’t identify much less categorize. She couldn’t find the beat or even discern if the song had one. The bass booms and cymbal crashes were unpredictable, the lead guitar’s “melody” was spasmodic, and the whispering vocalist was hissing more than singing. The noise was hurting Dasha’s brain, but not distracting her enough to ignore the people around her.

Simone and Heath were standing on the opposite side of the empty pool, both looking very perplexed in their deep conversation, but that was typical for them. There was no such thing as a “petty concern” as far as the two of them were concerned. A few fairies, including Daryn, milled about in the shaded courtyard playing some card game that had looked like a supernatural
Cards Against Humanity
to Dasha when she’d walked past. Oblivious motel guests, still in their beach clothes, lingered around, sipping complementary booze and waiting on Sully’s charred meat.

Ethan had apparently taken the admonition to babysit his fellow fairy to heart, because he leaned against a pergola support pole and glowered at the grill grates.

Dasha snorted and picked up her hamburger.

She found that being amused by the man was so much easier when he kept his distance. And just
looking
at him was easier from where she was. Looking certainly wasn’t a hardship. She could find a man attractive without wanting to be with him. And he
was
attractive, but they all were—the fairies. Alluring and magnetic, a good deal of their magic seemed to be tied up in their abilities to make people stare. She wanted desperately to resist the pull, but couldn’t fight the urge to look. She figured thirty seconds of ogling couldn’t hurt, seeing as how he wasn’t looking back.

He was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked strong, but without all the big, bulky muscle that came from serious weightlifting.

What kind of exercise do fairies get, anyway?

Blond men generally didn’t do much for her libido, but most of the men she worked with in her department were clean-cut conservative types. They certainly didn’t wear their hair in dense knots held in place by rubber bands they’d yanked from around bouquets of broccoli. Dasha had seen him filch the elastic at Simone and Heath’s. Ethan had gotten frustrated by his hair and took the band off the produce.

At least he’s industrious
.

And that was more than she could say for her ex. Ben hadn’t had a creative bone in his body. He didn’t know how to make due or to problem-solve. All that fell to Dasha. She was plenty creative, but he’d never wanted her to use that gift for anyone but him. He was so jealous of everything. He didn’t like her thinking too much apart from him, so naturally she got to the point where she didn’t want to think about him at all.

After a pathetic sigh, Dasha forced herself to take a bite of the hamburger. She didn’t want to think about Ben anymore. Getting him to back off had taken a lot of effort and legal paperwork, and there was no good reason to dredge up memories. He couldn’t follow her to North Carolina. He wasn’t going to ruin her life any more than he already had. He still had a couple of years left on a federal prison sentence. She’d hoped to have herself emotionally squared away before his release, if not physically. She didn’t know if the odds were looking so good.

Simone departed from Heath and went to work the crowd. Heath, wearing a starkly neutral expression Dasha rarely saw on the charismatic prince, moved with his hands in his pockets toward the courtyard. His gaze wasn’t on Simone, where it generally was by default, but on the parking lot.

Dasha set down her plate and, letting out an exasperated breath, put her feet on the ground. “Okay,
what
is going on up there?”

“Nothing.” Siobhan plucked the bratwurst off Dasha’s abandoned plate and took a bite.

“Don’t tell me
nothing
. There’s definitely something happening. When Heath isn’t smirking, there’s something going on.”

“Stop worrying,” the princess said through a mouthful of food. “Ooh!” Her eyes went round, and she pointed at Dasha as she chewed.

“What?”

Siobhan swallowed. “You said you had motel ideas. Tell me about them. Are they going to affect the next phase of construction? I’ve been trying to buy the neighboring lots so we could have a privacy buffer. We’d like to be able to separate the housing from the guest areas.”

“I don’t think my ideas would affect that one way or another. And what’d you do? Did you track down the owners of the lots?”

“Yep. Both of them,” Caryl said. “The one on that side”—she pointed to the right—“hadn’t done anything with that old gas station in twenty-five years. I guess he kept telling himself that one day he’d fix the place up, or whatever. I actually tracked him down after I’d seen that the city had gone by and slapped a condemned sticker on the shop door.”

“I bet you snapped the property up for a steal.”

“Nope.” Siobhan scowled. “That weaselly bastard nickel-and-dimed me. I guess he could tell how badly I wanted to take the lot off his hands. The property sure as shit wasn’t worth what he was asking, but Heath told me to just give him the damned check before the guy decided to jack the price up again. He accepted the offer. Just waiting for him to confirm the closing date.”

“What about over there?” Dasha canted her head toward the left. On the other side of the motel was an empty one-acre lot, which was
huge
for land that close to the beach. There wasn’t even a real estate company sign staked near the road, and Dasha had never seen anyone tending the land. It was overgrown and littered with garbage folks had tossed out of their car windows or that had blown on from the beach. She’d believed the county owned the space.

“That was trickier,” Siobhan said. “I had to look up the county records and trace the owner, just like with the place on the other side, but the owner on record was dead. Apparently, there was some delay with the execution of his will, and for a long time the family couldn’t work out who the property belonged to. The record was updated recently. I reached out to the new guy, but I haven’t heard back yet. I really hope he doesn’t want to build anything there. That’d suck. We need the space.”

“Especially if some of your fairy peers who’ll depart the realm end up joining you here, huh?”

Ethan sidled up close before Caryl could put her foot up on the railing. He dropped another piece of steak onto Dasha’s plate. “Medium-rare, I think. Sully can’t tell the difference.”

Dasha looked down at the tender fillet. “Um. Thank you, but…there’s no way I can eat all this.”

“You don’t like steak?”

“My lack of enthusiasm doesn’t have to do with me not
liking
what’s on my plate. I’m simply pondering where I’m going to put all this food. I don’t have a fairy appetite.” She looked up to find him furrowing his brow.

Her very normal appetite seemed to perplex him.

“Ethan, honey,” Siobhan scolded. “If sourcing food for her means that much to you, carry on. I’m sure she’ll let you scavenge off her plate when she’s done picking things off.”

“I can make a new one if that one’s not right.”

Dasha tightened her grip on the edge of the plate. She wasn’t giving up her food, and she had a strong hunch that if Ethan were to attempt a round two, the second offering would have an even more startling pile of meat. “This is fine,” she said in a voice she
hoped
was soothing. “It’s just a lot of protein for a girl like me.”

He grunted, then walked away scratching his head.

“You can’t fault him for the way he is.” Caryl reached over and speared Dasha’s grilled chicken. She plopped the breast atop the small triangle of salad on her own plate. “He’s going to do what he can to take care of you, even if all the fussing drives you nuts.”

He returned a moment later and thrust salad in a bowl at her. “I don’t know why anyone would want to eat that, but…I guess there are some nutritional benefits or whatever.”

“Um. Yeah. Green stuff is an important component of the human diet. Also…you know. Starches?”

That factoid seemed to bewilder him, which made Dasha wonder how the man had survived as long as he had. The pile on her plate was a harbinger of a heart attack.

Or perhaps fairies simply have more forgiving constitutions for this kind of food.

After all, Ethan didn’t seem to be suffering for his dietary decisions at all. Quite the opposite. There wasn’t anything spare about him—not a pinch of fat anywhere to be found, at least as far as Dasha could see. As always, he was mostly covered. Leather was a good friend to him. It did wonderful things to his backside. His front side, too, if she were being honest with herself. She found keeping her gaze fixed at a respectable point to be difficult when his crotch was at her eye level. She didn’t think all that bulge was zipper.