Knight in Leather (12 page)

Shuddering, Dasha turned to Ethan, who was pulling trash from the sofa cushions. “Yes, or at least
I
did. I was sympathetic to their plight, but I think my brother just didn’t want Momma yelling at him. Toeing the line was the easier option for him. Personally, I didn’t like thinking that I’d disappointed her. She always tried to get us to do the right thing, even when right was hard.”

“She sounds like a nice lady.”

Dasha chuckled and grabbed the bedding. “I think she is, but I might be biased. In my opinion, she should be a saint. She’s one of those long-suffering sorts who puts up with a lot of shit silently. Obviously, I didn’t inherit that from her.”
Not even a little bit.

Dasha tossed the soiled bedding—comforter and all—into a pile and pondered vacuuming the mattress, but given the plastic cover, that would have probably been overkill. She did, however, remove the cover and Febreze the mattress top.

Ethan joined her in the room and leaned against the dresser with his arms folded across his chest. “What does she do?”

“Who? My mother?”

He nodded.

“She teaches fourth grade. She was the first person in her family to go to college, and going was hard for her, you know?”

“I can’t say I do, but I’m trying to understand.”

She furrowed her brow.
Oh, that’s right.
Fairies didn’t do college. “Um. Well…hers is a common story, I guess. She grew up in the boondocks. Three generations in one little house on her grandfather’s little plot of land that
his
grandfather used to sharecrop. They couldn’t help her with the school stuff, but she was a self-starter. She did the best she could with school and got into college on scholarship, but catching up in a more academically rigorous environment was hard for her. No one had prepared her for what how competitive the classes would be. She didn’t have the tools.”

“But she finished.”

“Yep.” Dasha opened the clean fitted sheet onto the mattress.

Ethan grabbed one corner.

“Funnily enough, she finished because of my father who wasn’t even in college.”

“What happened?”

“Honestly? He was the guy who cleaned the classrooms in her department. Of course, he didn’t think he stood a chance with her. He thought he was this spoiled rich girl.” Dasha laughed and shook her head. “He had no idea.”

Ethan tucked under his ends of the sheet and leaned his palms against the side of the bed. “How did he convince her to stick it out?”

“He told her she was being silly. She was maybe a semester and a half from graduating, and she wasn’t doing so great for the term. Her GPA plummeted when she had to pick up a job, and I guess she thought she’d failed herself and everyone else who was counting on her. He told her that half a term of mediocrity wasn’t going to be her legacy unless that was where she decided to finish. Of course, he was right.”

Dasha grabbed the soiled linens from the floor and carried them to the cart. She figured she should vacuum in the room before finishing with the bed.
There’s got to be a housekeeping checklist around here somewhere…
“Simone probably does this from memory,” she muttered to herself.

“Did she finish on time?” Ethan asked.

“Huh?”

“Your mother. Did she graduate on time?”

“Oh. Yeah. Not with the perfect GPA she’d aspired to at eighteen, but with a very respectable 3.75. I think she still gets sad about that quarter of a point sometimes, though. She’s so hard on herself.”

“Having high expectations for one’s self isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

“I agree, but sometimes you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Hey, I tried and I did the best that I could at the time.’ You’ve got to be able to accept that. I don’t think my mother accepts that she did, but I don’t know where she could have possibly done any differently. Hell, I had every advantage going for me in college, and I still only eked out a 3.50 GPA. And I have no idea why I’m telling you this. Don’t let me bore you. Simone is good at letting me know when I should shut up.”

She pushed the vacuum into the room.

“I like hearing you talk.”

“You’re full of shit, but hey.” She laughed. “Keep spreading it on thick.”

“I mean it. We’ve lived on the fringes of this world for a long time, and that’s not the same thing as actually getting to participate. There’s a lot I don’t know. We’ve never tried to integrate before now.”

“You could probably get your lessons from someone who rambles less.”

“What if I want to get them from you?”

Dasha fondled the vacuum cord and stared down at the machine’s switch for a long while. He didn’t say anything. Neither did she, but she felt like she needed to discourage him in some way. Therefore, she needed to express some mildly critical sentiment that would keep him from asking any follow-up questions or wanting to talk to her at all.

But she didn’t want to do that. She’d already talked herself into being cordial with him, and he hadn’t pushed for more than that. He hadn’t done
anything
to overwhelm her yet, even if he did have a spooky knack for always showing up where she was.

Huh.

She pushed the vacuum plug into a nearby outlet. “I…just think you could have a better teacher, is all.” She hit the vacuum switch and got to work cleaning up tiny pieces of paper and hair and glitter.

Ethan retreated into the other room, looking back over his shoulder once before he went.

He knew when to walk away.

She hadn’t paid much attention to that before, but he never made himself unwelcome. He seemed to have an uncanny knack for knowing when to back off, even if he didn’t go all that far.

She had to give him credit for trying. Him knowing when to go away put him one huge step ahead of her ex.

Actually, Ethan’s instincts put him oceans apart from Ben. She needed to stop comparing them.

Ethan hated to disrupt Dasha from her deep thinking, and with her hand paused in the air mid-swipe when she’d been cleaning the bathroom’s mirror furiously before that, she was obviously distracted. But Simone was on the phone and wanted to pull them into the meeting.

And he wanted to know what she was thinking about so intensely. Certainly, not toothpaste splatters on the glass.

He cleared his throat quietly and said, “Dasha?”

She blinked and turned to him, dark eyes wide and anticipatory. “Huh?”

“Kind of lost you there for a while. Did the glass ensorcell you somehow?”

“Don’t grin at me like that. I bet you fairies
do
have some way of doing that.”

He shrugged. “We do.”

Her cheek twitched, and he laughed.

“Don’t think too hard about it right now. There’s a lot about our magic for you to learn. Probably about as much as there is for me to learn about human stuff, but those are concerns for later.” He held up the phone. “The princess wants to know if we’re almost done. Meeting’s underway.”

“Oh. Well, you can go on upstairs.”

“She needs you in the meeting.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t ask
why
, sweeting. I never ask Princess Simone why about much of anything. I value my life too much.”

“I can’t believe you fairy brutes are afraid of her. Sweet Simone.” Dasha clucked her tongue and shook her head.

“There’s nothing wrong with healthy fear. Fear keeps you alive.”

He didn’t
really
believe the princess would do away with him if she got herself into a certain kind of mood, but he knew damn sure she was capable of hurting him if she wanted to. Perhaps she hadn’t demonstrated that sort of viciousness to anyone in the crew, but Ethan still liked to keep himself on the safe side of any contingencies. He was just a lowly servant and she was a princess with a jaw-dropping magic legacy.

Dasha held her hand out, palm-up, and wriggled her fingers. “Gimme.”

He put the phone onto her hand.

“We’re almost done,” she said into it. “Just need to spray down this bathroom, mop the floor, and get the cart put away. Do we have an ETA on Kori? I wanted to air this place out a little before she comes. Smells like chemicals and sadness in here.”

Whatever the response was, she looked to Ethan and shook her head.

“No sign of Kori?”

“Not yet.” Into the phone, she said, “Ten minutes, okay?”

Dasha handed Ethan back his phone. “If you want to get those linens into the laundry closet and stow that cart, I’ll take care of things in here.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

He attached the vacuum to the cart, opened the door to the breezeway, and pushed the whole mess outside. Cleaning that room had taken them more than half an hour. He finally understood why the princess complained about time management. The crew—especially the ladies—pitched in when they could to help out around the motel. Given they weren’t paying rent, helping out was the least they could do. But, they were on the road so much, that the majority of their contributions on-site were the things she’d held off doing—the things she
couldn’t
do for herself, such as construction chores.

She hadn’t wanted to hire anyone to do housekeeping at the motel because of all the fairy shenanigans they couldn’t completely keep under wraps, but she couldn’t keep on at the current pace, especially with the place expanding as it was.

Maybe that was the reason for the meeting—discussing the site’s building issues, as well as the fairy shit that carried over from one meeting to the next. If she really were looking to hire someone, he could think of a couple of folks who could do the job. There’d just be the minor consideration of actually getting them out of the magic realm.

He got the linens into the laundry room, the cart locked into its closet, and was about to walk around front to see who was holding down the fort in the office when the sashay of a particular viper caught in his periphery.

Retreat.

If he were lucky, Laurel hadn’t seen him.

“Ethan!”

“
Damn
,” he muttered under his breath, and stopped near the back corner of the building.

She skipped around him, grinning like the cat that had gotten the cream, and wearing a beach tote slung over one shoulder. Scanning farther downward, he realized that the caftan she was wearing wasn’t legitimate clothing at all, but a bathing suit cover-up. And see-through at that. That was how he knew she had nothing else on.

Gods.

He started away again, and not because he was so susceptible to temptation, but because he didn’t want her to think that he was.

She caught up to his side. “I was going for a swim.”

“Enjoy it.” His quick scan of the suite building’s doors and windows indicated that for the moment, he wasn’t being watched. He wanted to shake Laurel off his tail—and any other part of him—before some important person stuck her head outside and saw him.

Laurel twined her arm around his and laid her head against her shoulder. “You should come with me. We’ll have fun. Just like old times.”

“I went swimming with you
once
, and if memory serves me correctly, that was forty years ago.”

“We had fun that night.”

“I seem to recall a lot of people having fun that night, and many of them had fun with you in particular.”

“I’ve always been good at sharing,” she purred.

Ethan hadn’t been.

Some Sídhe were far better at sharing partners. Prince Heath and Thom, for instance, were masterful at trading off. They were very good about negotiating limits so no one walked away angry. The fact they knew each other so well helped. For Ethan, there was rarely very much time for negotiating before good-humored fairy fun escalated into an orgy. There hadn’t been anything romantic about him rolling onto Laurel, in spite of what she’d thought. She’d been convenient, and he’d needed release. Everyone knew what orgies were about. Just not Laurel, apparently.

He patted the hand clinging to his bicep and then gently pried it off of him.

“You’ll feel so much better after a relaxing swim,” she said in that same sultry purr. Her voice might have made some other man’s cock twitch, but it made Ethan roll his eyes.

He finally understood what Prince Heath had meant when he’d said that when Ethan found his mate, he’d reflexively repel any other potential partner. Sídhe, for all of their numerous flaws, did tend to be faithful and true to their mates.

Ethan took two big steps away and put up his hands. “Honestly, Laurel, I’d feel best if you took your swim alone.”

She pouted. “I won’t drown you. Those old stories about mermaids aren’t true.”

“Of course they aren’t quite true. You wouldn’t drown me until you were sure you were pregnant, and I have no desire to get you into that condition.”

“Why not?” She sashayed forward, and he took another step back. “You unattached fairy men strive to spread your seed far and wide and hope it takes root in someone.” Her red lips curved up at the corners. “I’m fertile.”

That isn’t all you are.

He groaned.

“I don’t know how much clearer I can be about this,” he said, taking one more glance at the row of suites. The light was off in the room he and Dasha had been cleaning.
Did she walk out and see me?

Clearing his throat, he fixed his gaze on Laurel’s wide green one and did all he could to erase any hint of incitement from his. He needed to be very explicit so she understood the refusal.

“I don’t want to have sex with you,” he said. “I don’t want to be with you.”

She pouted again. “But you have to be.”

“No, I
don’t
. Find your mate. I know for certain I’m not that person, and I’m not going to be impregnating you or even trying to.”

She opened her mouth as if to make some rebuttal, but before she could speak, he added, “You know as well as I do how careful the men in my family are about protecting their legacies. I will
not
have a bastard child by some woman I don’t love and who I won’t see.”

“You’re selfish.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. I’ve heard that before. That shapeshifter magic is so alluring to some of you that you’d stop at nothing to introduce it to your family trees.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and started toward the suites. “I suggest you find someone else.”

“There is no one else.”

“That sounds like a personal problem.”

“You’ll regret turning your back on me, Ethan Gotch.”

“I don’t doubt that.” The sinking feeling in his gut confirmed his fear that Laurel wouldn’t be so difficult to put off. Desperate fairies did unpredictable things when they felt they’d been backed into corners. Laurel hadn’t been, but when she was out of her element, she probably felt that she was.

A good swim would help her clear her mind.

Ethan hoped she’d get into the water and decide not to come back, but he was a realist.

That shit wasn’t going to happen.

___

For Dasha to be not particularly concerned about Ethan’s comings and goings, the sight of that blonde touching him with such familiarity made her temper flare. Dasha had caught the exchange through the window when she was fixing the blinds, and she tried telling herself the conversation didn’t mean anything.

Women grabbed on those fairy men like that all the time. Dasha witnessed the groping during every visit with Simone. Heath and Thom were extremely blunt when asking people not to touch them. The rest of the crew seemed split about half and half with how they dealt with the attention. The younger guys didn’t mind. The older ones could take it or leave it, but they were generally kinder about shooing people than the prince and his second-in-command.

She knew the grabbing happened and that they didn’t invite the touching, but that didn’t stop her from being pissed.

Caryl and Daryn cleared a space between the two of them when Dasha stepped into the suite.

“Grab a plate first,” Caryl said. “We had to fight these assholes to get them to leave anything for you.”

“What happened to my other plate?”

Matt looked away guiltily.

“Ugh. I’ll deal with you later, kid.” Dasha sighed and stepped to the counter to see what was left.

The suite door closed, and Dasha tossed a glance over her shoulder to see Ethan stepping inside. Pausing near the window, he lifted one bare foot and stared at the sole. He’d probably stepped on something while traversing the lot.

And that’s why people wear flip-flops
.

He probably didn’t own a pair. She’d only ever seen him in boots.

He probably doesn’t even shop. I should take him shopping.

Simone bumped Dasha with her hip. “You’re squinting and making that kill-murder-kill face.”

“No I’m not.” Dasha picked up the serving spoon and scraped the last of the spaghetti out of the aluminum pan.

“Yes you are. I know that expression better than anyone. The very first time I saw you making it was when our English II instructor assigned four hundred pages of reading over fall break.”

Dasha scoffed and jammed her fists onto her hips. “Well, I didn’t want to kill him, just…discuss the error of his ways, you know?”

“And I seem to recall you doing that in front of the entire class.”

“I’m very convincing when I want to be.”

Simone nodded sardonically. “Yes, I haven’t forgotten that.”

“You should thank me for getting him to slash that assignment in half.”

“I’m pretty sure I did thank you ten years ago, but I’ll thank you again.” From behind her back, she produced a foil-wrapped sandwich and handed it to Dasha with a grin.

“What’s that?”

“The last roast beef sandwich. I had to fight Perry for it. Do you know how bad I feel for taking food from that guy? I may as well have stolen the wings off a little orphaned angel.”

Dasha quickly unwrapped the slightly warm sandwich and took a big bite. She was starving.

So fuckin’ good
.

“I’m probably going to hell anyway,” she said weakly. “If I go soon, at least I’ll be going on a full stomach.”

“That’s why we’re friends. We understand each other.”

Ethan sidled behind them, lifted a few foil lids, and then growled. “The fuck?”

Simone shrugged. “You’re probably going to have to go out to get something afterward, if you don’t mind the ride.”

“I’ll go with you,” Perry called from across the room. “I’m still hungry.”

Dasha looked down at her half-consumed sandwich and her heart went pitter-patter. She wanted to eat so badly, but there was still crusty spaghetti and a hard chunk of Italian bread left.
I’ll survive
.

She handed the sandwich half to Ethan, who made no pretense that he was going to let her keep it.

“Thank you, sweeting.” He walked to Sully, who’d called out to him.

Simone gave Dasha’s shoulder a pat. “There, there. You’ll learn the art of self-preservation soon enough. Next time, eat the sandwich in front of him and don’t feel bad about it.”

“That’s cruel.”

Simone grunted. “Maybe a little. It’s dog-eat-dog around here with food. Fairy metabolisms are too damned aggressive. They could obliterate a fully-stocked seafood buffet in fifteen minutes.”

“Must be nice.” Dasha groaned. If she so much as
looked
at a seafood buffet, she’d sprout an extra chin.

“Let’s get this meeting rolling again, aye?” Heath called out.

Simone gave Dasha one more bump to the hip and then joined her husband by the stepladder he sat on.

Dasha took the seat between the twins and expressed a melancholy sigh at the pitiful offerings on her paper plate.

“I think we should recap what’s going on with The Hearth and how the activities affect its full-time occupants,” Simone said.

Dasha perked up an ear as she wound cold spaghetti around her plastic fork.

“We’re hoping to get the old gas station building razed by Independence Day, and then have some preliminary improvements done to the lot before winter. The land needs to be leveled, to start, and the contractor wants to go ahead and pour the foundation slab for the new building and try to get some of the ground floor construction done before the weather turns really cold and windy for the winter. All of this is pending permit approval, however.”