Knight in Leather (8 page)

No
,
Ethan responded.
Have you?

Dasha couldn’t get her hand over her mouth before the laughter came out. His question would have been completely ridiculous if he hadn’t been a fairy. There wouldn’t have been anything unusual about her saying yes. Fairies didn’t make assumptions about people’s preferences.

Siobhan poked her head out of her room and rubbed her eyes.

“Sorry,” Dasha whispered.

“What happened?”

“Just silly stuff on my phone. Go back to sleep.”

The princess let out a ragged exhalation. “Who can sleep? I’ve been staring at the ceiling for the past hour trying to figure out how I’m going to track a guy down.”

“What guy?”

Siobhan flinched, shook her head, and said, “No one important. ’Night again.” She closed the door.

“No, that’s not suspicious at all.” Dasha was getting used to fairies and their mysterious ways, though, and knew that pressing Siobhan on the issue probably wasn’t going to get her anywhere fast. Turning her attention back to the phone, Dasha texted,
No.

ETHAN GOTCH:
Good to know. The three you’re lodging with are generally trustworthy. They probably wouldn’t make a pass at you except to provoke me.

DASHA MAURICE:
I doubt they would. I’m pretty good at knowing not to forge friendships with those kind of folks. There are always signs that people aren’t who they say they are.

The problem was that people sometimes didn’t know how to interpret the signs, or in Dasha’s case, she’d ignored them even when her gut had told her not to.

She’d wanted to believe that her ex was redeemable. She’d wanted to give Ben a chance to show that he was the decent person he’d made himself out to be when they’d first met—that he was that sweet, charming guy who’d thought she was funny and creative—who’d wanted to see her climb up the executive ladder.

But talk was cheap, and he hadn’t meant a single word. She’d been a possession to him, plain and simple. Now the idea of belonging to
anyone
chafed her.

She draped her scarf over her neck to protect her skin from the chill of the nearby air conditioning vent, and hovered her thumb over the phone screen. She intended to tell Ethan
“Well, goodnight”
or
“See ya”
or something along those lines, but the letters her thumb glided over instead formed the words,
Why are you awake?

ETHAN GOTCH:
Used to erratic scheduling from when we lived on the road.

DASHA MAURICE:
You don’t sleep normal hours?

ETHAN GOTCH:
I could, but sleeping off-schedule every so often when I have to be up late doing things doesn’t hurt.

DASHA MAURICE:
What are you doing?

Ethan wasn’t one of the crew members who sometimes ran the office for Simone. Most at the guys were either too clumsy at customer service or too impatient. Mostly-human Matt seemed to do okay in the office because he got to watch television while he worked. Perry wasn’t so bad at being nice, either, but Perry was also more even-tempered than the rest of the crew. His disposition had something to do with his lineage, Simone had once insinuated, and Dasha hadn’t asked her to clarify.

Thinking about fairy lineages got Dasha wondering about Ethan’s. She couldn’t stop herself from being curious. There was no reason she couldn’t learn about him. Interest didn’t mean she had to touch him.

Just pacing the lot,
he responded.
Burning off a little energy. May go down to the beach instead.

DASHA MAURICE:
Pacing at three a.m.?

ETHAN GOTCH:
Gotta let the energy out one way or another. Can’t shift, so I may as well walk.

DASHA MAURICE:
What do you mean by shift?

Curious, Dasha sat up straight and awaited the response, but it didn’t come.

She held her phone up trying to catch a better signal, thinking that perhaps two bars wasn’t a strong enough 4G connection. But, she’d been at two bars all night.

She shrugged, tucked her phone into the sofa gap, and settled down to sleep. Seemed as good a time as any.

Ethan opened his eyes and his vision slowly focused on Princess Siobhan crouching in front of him.

She squinted at him and propped her forearms atop her knees. “The hell are you doing, Ethan?”

He rubbed his eyes and rolled his head to get the kink out of his neck. “What time is it?”

“Seven. Did you sleep out here?”

He pushed off the ground and stood, stretching his arms over his head. He had to tamp down his yawn before he could give her an acceptable response. “Not the whole night.”

Princess Siobhan scratched her head and shifted her weight. “Okay, two questions, then. How much of the night? And why didn’t you sleep in your own bed?”

“Just the last couple of hours, I guess. Needed to burn off some energy, so I was running around for a while. Ended up crashing here so I didn’t miss anything. Can’t see your door from the office.”

She nodded slowly and leaned against the doorframe. “Well, hate to break the news to you, but this is
exactly
the kind of behavior that has your mate so entirely un-geeked about relationships right now.”

“But given the circumstances—”

“Right. Given the circumstances, you want to keep a closer eye on her. I get that, and I’d probably consider doing the same if I were in your shoes, but you’ve got to be a little more discreet about your movements. Scram before she gets out of the shower.”

Grunting, he stepped away from the door and dragged a hand through his messy hair. “How’d you and Prince Heath do on your hunt last night? Didn’t see you before you went to bed.”

She rolled her eyes and waved a dismissive hand at him. “We’ll get Quinton. He’s eluded us thus far, but he doesn’t have the cunning to keep up for so long. We have a good idea of where to look. We’re going to go out after breakfast to have another crack at it.”

“I should go with you.”

The princess shrugged. “Probably not a bad idea. Caryl and Daryn will be here to keep an eye on Dash.”

Ethan walked to the suite he shared with Sully and found the other man sprawled on the sofa thumbing through cell phone pictures of a certain waitress on his phone. He’d probably taken them with a close zoom. They were certainly blurry enough to lend evidence to that theory.

Shit, I hope no one thinks I’m that unbalanced.

Ethan leaned onto the back of the sofa and waited for Sully to meet his gaze.

“Aye?” Sully asked.

“Gonna tell you what Princess Siobhan might tell you,” Ethan said.

“What?”

“Don’t be weird.”

Sully let his lips sputter, a bit of a comical effect given all the piercings in his face. He looked like a frustrated bull with that ring through his septum. “I reckon the ship’s sailed on that, mate.”

Ethan shrugged, and then pulled his shirt over his head. He needed a shower, and possibly a nap after they dragged that mer-fairy off their list of problems.

“Can’t keep going on like this, E,” Sully called after him. “It’s not right.”

“You’re preaching to the choir. You think I’m doing so great?” Ethan squinted into the dirty bathroom mirror and groaned at his pallor and the heavy bags that hung beneath his eyes. He hadn’t been moving energy around well enough or
often
enough, and the magic that he needed to expend hung out in his body like waste he couldn’t excrete. He could get rid of the excess by shifting, but he hadn’t had a good reason or opportunity to lately. He could, theoretically, shift at any time, but with his various forms of inherited magic commingling within him, if he shifted, the other kinds of magic would be unavailable for a while afterward. They’d be tapped, too, and he never wanted to find himself in a situation where he needed those lesser forms of magic and couldn’t access them.

Sully crowded the bathroom doorway. “You look like you’re doing all right to me.”

“I think I’m probably just better at faking it than you are. I mean, fuckin’ hell, Sully. She’s right
there
.” Ethan pointed in the general direction of Princess Siobhan’s suite. “I feel like a damned magnet being dragged across a surface toward some metal thing, and all I can do is dig my heels into the floor and try to stay put.”

“You’ve got some of your mother’s magic—that ability to resist temptation as much as you’re able to is probably from her. If you didn’t have that, you’d be fucking deranged.”

“I think that probably has a lot to do with my restraint. Don’t know how much longer that’ll be enough, though. Even with my father, Mother relents and lets him go wild sometimes. I have both of them in me—the two parts trying to balance each other out—but the animal part is almost always going to overpower the fairy part. Fortunately, the animal part is very tolerant of the fairy part. The animal coddles the magic bits and compensates for them. But when the animal wants out, I’ve got to let him out.” He grabbed his toothbrush and squeezed some mint paste onto the bristles.

“Do your parents know?” Sully asked.

“What, about Dasha?”

“Aye.”

Ethan grunted and said around the toothbrush, “Haven’t told them. I don’t want anyone in the realm to know that I have a mate until I’m certain I can keep her safe if she happens to leave this warded area. Besides, I haven’t seen them in a while.”

“I told my parents before easy access to the realm got squashed. About Zenia, I mean.”

“And what’d they say?”

“About what you’d expect. They’d like to meet her, of course, and they’re wondering with her being human if there’s a greater chance of me having more than one child.”

Ethan spit, then scoffed. “Your folks don’t pull their punches, huh?”

“What do you expect of farmers? Have you ever met any that didn’t have a house full of kids, or who weren’t doing everything they could to
conceive
one?”

“Your parents only managed to have the one.”

“Not for lack of trying. I’m certain they’re still trying. They’re young enough.”

Ethan grunted again, and then rinsed his mouth. Sully’s parents were younger than most parents of the crew members, but that wasn’t saying much given that Sully’s “young” mother was over five hundred. “You should probably feel Zenia out and see what she thinks of being perpetually pregnant.”

“Oh, I see. You
want
her to refuse me, then. Cruel of you. I thought we were better pals than that.”

Grinning, Ethan cranked on the water in the shower and turned set the temperature to cool. He was hoping a bit of cold water to certain body parts would make him stand down for the day. “Do you actually want a dozen kids?”

“Of course.”

Ethan looked over his shoulder at the guy to see if he were speaking in jest, but Sully’s expression was as inscrutable and neutral as always. “Sull.”

“What?”

“You pulling my leg?”

“No.”

“
Gods
.” Ethan pushed him out of the doorway and went on about the business of showering.

Ethan thought he had a long row to hoe with Dasha, but at least he wasn’t going to spring the threat of unceasing pregnancy on her. He had enough strikes against him already.

___

Dasha carried her laptop into the motel office and plopped the open computer atop the desk in front of Simone.

Simone was apparently on hold with her commercial detergent distributor, yet again, trying to find out what the hold up with her laundry soap order was. She set the phone on the cradle and rolled her eyes. “Ugh, I’ll call them back. I swear, they’re
trying
to drive me nuts. Mine is a recurring order and they charge me automatically every month. You’d think they’d have far fewer issues with actually delivering the stuff.”

“You want me to call them? I’m good at talking people into things.”

Simone put her slipper-covered feet up onto the desk and giggled. “Yeah, you are, but nah. If push comes to shove I’ll send them a sternly-worded email or something.” She indicated the computer. “What are you showing me?”

“The wave of the future, honey.”

“What?”

“I’m kidding. I just always wanted to say that.” Before Dasha could cue up her Hearth Motel slideshow, the door creaked open behind her and the bells mounted onto the hydraulic arm jingled.

Simone seemed to stiffen, then relax at the intrusion, and that made Dasha turn to look.

Siobhan was in the doorway, and there were a couple of other supernatural bodies waiting on the other side of the door, too. Male bodies, including a particular blond one.

Dasha fixed her gaze on her computer screen. She dug deep into her inner well of self-restraint so she wouldn’t stare, no matter how much she wanted to. She could accept on a theoretical level that the man was supposed to be hers, but she couldn’t yet accept the pairing on a practical one.

What the hell am I supposed to do with him?

She couldn’t keep running. At some point, she’d have to let him off hook. Put him out of his misery, as the saying went.

Not yet, though.

“You’re back in leather,” Simone said to Siobhan. “Is that a good sign?”

Siobhan cleared her throat and cut her gaze toward the corner, where Hestia had quietly popped in when they weren’t looking.

Hestia wiggled her fingers at them and then rolled her hand in a
oh, don’t mind me—please continue as you were
sort of way.

Siobhan scraped her black hair back from her face and sighed. “Going out for a while. Hopefully we’ll be back by dinner. Will you be okay here? We’re thinking of taking Matt, so you’ll be truly stuck.”

“So, who’s left?”

Siobhan furrowed her brow and counted off on her fingers. “Caryl went to talk to some contractors about cleaning up the gas station lot, so that leaves Daryn, Sully, Gareth, and Perry.”

“Oh. Daryn’s here. We’re okay, then.”

“Yeah, she knows the score. She’ll…keep an eye on the guests.”

“What score?” Dasha asked.

Siobhan’s gaze flitted toward the door. She hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her tight leather pants and cleared her throat again.

“You know, when you all don’t answer simple questions, I start wondering if maybe I should fly my risk-averse ass on home.”

“Everything’s
fine
,” Siobhan said. “Fairy stuff. Nothing to fret about. So…you have plenty to do today, aye?”

“I can find some ways to entertain myself, if that’s what you’re asking. Maybe I’ll go visit Fergus or something.”

“Hey, he’d like that,” Simone said. “And the thing about you visiting the realm is that no one would sense you there.”

“Heh heh,” came Hestia’s low titter from the corner.

“I don’t like that sound,” Dasha said. “It’s shady as hell, and makes me think you’re up to something.”

Hestia did that hand wave again. “Don’t mind me.”

Yeah, right.

“Listen,” Siobhan said. “We’ll call if we get held up, but I don’t anticipate that being a problem. This should be a fast run, given the collective skill set of the four of us.”

“Get moving, then,” Simone said. “There’s rain in the forecast. I know how much you hate riding in precipitation.”

“Ugh. Makes my hair frizz.”

“Just stop straightening. I know your hair is curly beneath all that serum.”

Siobhan gave her sister-in-law a slow blink. “You’re
guessing
.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m right. Heath’s is curly enough that I suspect your father’s is, too, and curly is almost always dominant over straight.”

“Not Dad. Mum. She’s got the curly hair. Straightened by her fairy hairdresser with magic.”

“That sounds handy,” Dasha muttered as she fondled the end of her hair scarf.

She didn’t do
anything
with her hair. She kept it short and covered because she simply didn’t have the patience to do anything more than that. The last time she’d had long enough hair to scrape into a ponytail, she’d been a sophomore in college. Her hair was so damned thick and the curl pattern was tight as pen springs. Not having much hair saved her a heap of primping time. If she grew her coils out an inch more, she wouldn’t even be able to fit on her favorite fedora.

“Personally, I think having all that magic directed at her head has softened her brain, but you didn’t hear that from me,” Siobhan said. “Anyway, you should be all right, but if you need anything—”

“We’ll be
fine
,” Simone said. “Besides, if necessary, I could always lock up and cast a portal to where Thom is. I can drop one into Norseton without missing, I think. I’m pretty sure he’d come dig us out of any trouble.”

“Aye, he would. Wouldn’t hurt to send him a text and let him know the score in case you have to, though.”

Simone gave her a lazy salute. “Doing it now.”

Siobhan nodded and took her leave.

Dasha waited until the door had closed to ask, “Are your going-away conversations generally so long and drawn-out?”

Simone chuckled and grabbed the piece of paper that was coming out of the laser printer. “Nah. I think she’s being more careful than normal because you’re here. If I were on my own, most fairies would think twice about harassing me. Apparently the bruises I give last long.” She slid the paper across the counter and rolled her eyes. “Check out that reservation. Exactly the kind of shit that would have me going gray if I aged like humans did.”

Dasha squinted at the info grid as Hestia moved in her periphery.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Simone asked the goddess.

Dasha read. The reservation was for a party of nine asking for two rooms. The booker had paid the deposit, but hadn’t checked the box that said that he or she were over the age of twenty-one. She cringed
. If that’s not a group of college kids, I’ll eat my shoe.

Hestia folded her arms atop the counter and let out a melodic sigh. “I had an idea.”

Simone hung her head and shook it. “Oh, boy.”

“Well, I could certainly keep my good ideas to myself and leave you to settle your fairy problems on your own.”

“I’d say you’re to blame for probably twenty-five percent of my fairy problems.”

Hestia wagged a finger at her. “Unintentionally. You inheriting the curse was merely a happy coincidence. I’m here to talk about relocating the Sídhe. You know, there
are
some magic folk who are already integrated in this realm.”