by Sarra Cannon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Prince in Leather – Hearth Motel 1
By Holley Trent
Heat rating: Erotic (spanking, MFM threesome)
Paranormal Romance
An inherited curse has kept depressed innkeeper Simone Bristol bound to a rundown beach motel for the past six years. Just when she has a chance to break free of it, some visiting guests check in and reset the curse’s clock. They may have foiled her getaway, but it turns out one of those guests could be her respite.
Heath Horan, Sídhe prince and leader of a crew of fairy, motorcycle-riding assassins, claims she’s his fated mate and her ticket out of there. Unfortunately, he also claims that her mother was a runaway from the fairy realm and that Queen Rhiannon—his mother—would love to see both women dead. It seems Simone has walked from one curse into another.
She may be able to get used to being the main squeeze of a sword-wielding prince in leather, but she’s not so sure she’s cut out to be an assassin, too. Unfortunately, if she wants to stay alive long enough to break her curse and help Heath subdue unrest in his realm caused by his mother’s antics, she might have to be.
Chapter 1
It’d been thirteen days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-five minutes since the Hearth Motel had its last guest, and owner Simone Bristol was stressed. Probably not for the same reasons a typical motel proprietor would be, though. She was used to the long gaps between paying guests, and having a checking account stretched tighter than a guitar string was nothing new. There was always just enough money to keep the lights on at the half-century-old motor lodge, and a bit on the side to pay the satellite dish company—usually late—the water bill, and sundry other unavoidable expenses.
There were newer motels on the strip of the North Carolina Outer Banks between Salvo and Rodanthe. Better motels. Simone’s hopes and dreams were pinned on their competitive amenities. Well, those and the sky-high nightly rate she charged for a one-queen bed unit. High prices usually meant the tourists stayed away. When they called to verify her online rates, and balked after she confirmed them, she always had a good excuse.
“It’s Thanksgiving. Rooms are at a premium,” she’d said to the last potential customer who’d phoned, along with a cheerful, “Supply and demand, you know.” She’d then suggested he try the big chain hotel in Nags Head. He must have, because he didn’t call back.
She loved it when they didn’t call back. All she needed was two piddly weeks without a guest, and she’d be free of the family curse once and for all. Five more minutes, and she could flee.
Bound to the motel with invisible chains, Simone couldn’t go beyond five miles of it in any direction. It was her anvil. Her albatross. Her turn. But, in five more minutes, the goddess Hestia could kiss her happy ass goodbye because Simone was going to be out like the satellite signal during a storm.
She bobbed on the hard-shell suitcase she perched on, clapping her hands with glee as car after car passed without stopping. “That’s right, folks. Nothing to see here. Keep on truckin’.”
The neon lights mounted on the motel’s Vacancy sign buzzed and crackled, and she rolled her eyes before pushing her sunglasses up her nose. There wasn’t much sun to speak of. The winter sky had been overcast for weeks, and that certainly contributed to the motel’s lack of patronage. Folks didn’t want to play on the beach when there was no sun.
A car slowed and the woman in the passenger seat craned her head out the window, squinting. Whether her narrowed gaze was directed at Simone in her faux fur short jacket and electric blue party dress straddling a suitcase as if it were a bronco, or at the run-down motel behind her, Simone couldn’t tell. She didn’t move. Didn’t wave, didn’t shake her head, didn’t peer at that car over the top of her sunglasses. She wasn’t allowed to discourage potential guests. If she did, she’d be required to restart the clock. Or rather, the curse clock would restart itself and she’d continue to wake up every morning hoping the last six years had just been one long, trippy, Technicolor dream brought on by consuming too much MSG before bed or something.
The woman in the car shook her head, and the driver accelerated down the sand-strewn road.
“Cozumel, I’m going to be in you by midnight tonight, baby,” Simone said with a shimmy. She was going to spend every penny she had on cheap tequila and a room she wouldn’t be responsible for cleaning.
The neon crackled again as if in chastisement, and this time she sighed and straightened her back.
“How am I supposed to behave after all this time, huh?” she shouted at the sign. “I’ve been stuck here for six years because of someone else’s mistake. How’s that fair?”
After several electric pops from the sign, the word vacancy’s V, the stem of the A, the N, and the second C went kaput, leaving a handful of letters that spelled out o-c-a-y.
“Ocay? Okay, you’re telling me? Okay, what? That I can go? Or are you acquiescing for once that you’re a petty bitch and this scheme has gone on way too long?” She put her hand to her ear and awaited the responding crackles. None came, but she wasn’t really expecting any. Typical Hestia. The goddess was nothing if not inscrutable.
“It has to be one o’clock now.” Simone’s phone’s touch screen read 12:57. She could almost taste her freedom, and it tasted a lot like a margarita. Soon, she could open the trunk of her woefully neglected Miata, toss in the suitcase that for six years had had only enough clothing for a three-day trip, and put the pedal to the metal, airport-bound. She had a lot of pieces to pick up of her former life. She imagined her apartment in Raleigh had been emptied and her possessions trashed by the folks in the leasing office. She’d most certainly been fired from her job at the marketing firm. Her finances were in shambles. Gods knew what all the pieces she needed to pick up were, but she’d deal with it all…after a very long vacation far away from North Carolina. Goodbye dinky motel, goodbye curse.
“Might even get laid.” A genuine smile pulled at her cheeks for the first time in days. She missed sex…as well as having someone convenient to have sex with. Salvo wasn’t exactly a population center on the barrier island, and most of the full-time resident males were either already boo’d up or didn’t pass Simone’s basic prequalification test. Item number one: has not yet qualified for AARP card. Item number two: …
Well. There was no item number two. No one ever passed number one.
She perked up at the sound of sickly-sounding rumbling approaching from the north. Louder and louder it became. Couldn’t just be one truck sounding like that. The longer she stared, the less sure she was it was a truck at all.
“What the hell?” She stood, stuffing her cold hands into her jacket pockets. Staring at the bend in the road, she counted the headlights. Not in pairs, like on a car or truck. Singles, and a lot of them. In all her years bound to the motel, she couldn’t recall there being a crew touring the coast in winter. Sure—sometimes there’d be guys with their old ladies going out for coastal rides on unseasonably warm days, but not an entire processional like she was seeing.
As did all the other vehicles, they slowed upon approach and turned their heads toward the motel. Their dark visors gave no hints of their opinions, and that was probably for the best. Fortunately for Simone, she had no particular pride for the motel. Maybe if she’d been there by her own choice, she would have felt differently. Maybe she’d even try to fix it up and make it nice and welcoming instead of resenting it.
The biker in the lea
d made some arm gesture to the crew behind him, and one by one, they filed into Hearth Motel’s pockmarked asphalt parking lot.
“No,” she whispered. “Please just want directions to the Holiday Inn.”
The lead biker parked his motorcycle very near the office door, and she noticed that a second man, attached to the rider by a strap at the waist, leaned heavily onto his back. Two of the other men—or at least, she assumed they were men giving their obscene heights and broad shoulders—hurried over to them, quickly untied the apparently unconscious man from his driver, and propped him up between the two of them.
The man who’d been leading the little gang walked up to her and crooked his thumb toward the office door. “Anyone in there?” His voice was a deep, resonant rumble inside his helmet. She made a mental note to add a number two to her prequalification list down in Cozumel: Sound like that guy.
She cleared her throat and stole a glance at her phone. 12:58. “No one’s in there.”
He turned from her to the three men behind him. Someone had pulled the helmet off the leather-clad man in the middle, and his head hung forward. A fall of dark, wavy hair obscured his features.
Is he drunk? She leaned a bit sideways for a better view of his face, but his greasy hair was too dense.
“Do you know when they’re coming back?” the big guy with the bass voice asked.
She righted herself and thought, “Hopefully never,” but obviously, she couldn’t say that aloud. She had to be pleasant and hospitable, but there was no rule against being direct. “I’m the proprietor of this dump. You know, it looks like what you really need is a hospital.”
There. Oblique, and Hestia wouldn’t treat Simone to one of her karmic bitch-smacks.
“No hospitals.” He shucked off his helmet and paced in front of her, scraping long fingers through sweat-sodden brown hair.
She pushed up an eyebrow. He was definitely not of the typical biker ilk. Sure, the crew wore enough leather between them to cover three rows of seats in a Ford Expedition, but this guy was too pretty. Not Ken doll pretty by any means with all that grease and scruff, but definitely biker calendar model pretty. She could imagine him sitting astride his bike in nothing but his boots and a smile.
She guffawed at the thought, and covered her mouth. Shit, she was hard up.
He bent down to meet her gaze, his…gold?…eyes narrowed.
Had to be contact lenses. They were getting fancier and fancier, just based on what she’d seen on YouTube. That was her life. Motel laundry and YouTube.
“Did you hear me, dear?”
Nice accent. Indistinguishable. Irish? Scottish? Welsh? Hell, didn’t matter. She swallowed and cut her gaze to the slumping man behind him. He seemed to be muttering in his intoxicated state.
“Hmm?” she asked.
“I said no hospitals, no cops. He’ll be fine; he just needs to sleep it off.”
She glanced at her phone again. 12:59. Was time standing still?
She licked her dry lips. Swallowed. Stared at the slicks of cherry red toenail polish through the gaps in her peep-toe pumps before looking up at the slumping man again.
Narrow hips. Big hands.
Her gaze tracked down to his motorcycle boots.
Big feet.
She resisted the urge to reach out and nudge that fall of hair from his face by clasping her hands behind her back. She didn’t know why she wanted to touch, just that she needed to, which made no sense. She’d never been casual with her touch.
“All you all right, dear?”
“Um.” What was the question? “Three hundred per room per night are the currently advertised rates.” She pushed her lips into the same rehearsed smile she’d been wearing for customers for six years, and knew that this time, she wasn’t convincing anyone as to its sincerity—not with the way the corners of her mouth twitched. Her mind was a battleground where hopefulness and curiosity fought to the death. She wanted freedom, but at the same time, was compelled to render aid to the lush in leather. Somehow, she knew it wasn’t because of the curse.
She looked down at her phone once more. Still 12:59. She glanced at the neon sign for an answer, and it seemed to crackle teasingly at her. She didn’t think giving it the finger would make her feel any better, so she kept her hands clasped. If she could drag out the interaction until after one o’clock, she could squash her curiosity about these men, put them up for the night, and take off as soon as they left. Otherwise, the clock would start yet again and she’d have two more weeks of hoping.
Please, she pled to the leader with her eyes. All I want is freedom.
The slumping man murmured something in a tongue that wasn’t English or anything remotely close, as far as she could tell. For all she knew, he could have been cursing her long-absent mother.
“All right, give me every room you got,” the leader said. “May be here for a week or more. Hope you’re not waiting on any other reservations.”
Fuck. She dropped her chin to her chest and turned on the stacked heel of her pump to flick away a tear before anyone could see. Stuck for another three weeks, at the very least.
The electric clock behind the office desk—synchronized to her phone’s clock—ticked over to one o’clock as she stepped into the dark room. She held open the door for the lead biker. “Eight rooms for a week. Yes, sir,” she said in that phony chipper voice she’d practiced for so long. She pushed the registration card pile toward the man and stabbed a button to wake the office computer up from its long sleep.
“Cash all right?” he asked.
That was a lot of cash, and she didn’t even want to ponder how he’d come by it. Guessing would only agitate her. It wasn’t like she could refuse him if she didn’t like his answer. She pushed a pen across the counter, too.
He took it and quickly filled out the first card, thrusting it toward her. “That’s the first one. Can I get that key? Guy needs to lie down. I’ll come back and fill out cards for the rest of them.”
She eased the slip of paper back toward her with the tips of her fingers and studied the spidery script. It was so elegant that it looked almost like calligraphy. So…old-timey. She raised an eyebrow at the man.
He raised one right back. Smug jerk.
She read the card.
Registrant: Heath Horan
Occupants in room: 1
Address: None
Smoking or Non: Non
“No address?”
“We live on the road.”
“Sure, you do.” Again, she couldn’t refuse him, so she didn’t press.
She grabbed a key for a one-bed unit from the rack behind her and tossed it at the guy.
He caught it handily. His molten gold irises were stunning as his eyes tracked the arc of the key. No contact lens edges, just pure color that seemed to glow a bit brighter following each blink. Something was off about him, and it wasn’t just his eyes. His whole vibe was weird, and that wasn’t a feeling she got often. Was he like Hestia? Some forgotten godling whose purpose was to make the lives of mundanes a living hell? The goddess of hearth and home had a mean streak few people seemed to know about. Seemed appropriate the motel bore the name of her domain.
He winked at her as he backed toward the door.
“What are you?” she asked, the false mirth from before now absent from her voice.
If he was startled by the question, he didn’t show it. He flashed a dazzling white display of teeth before turning. “Harmless.”
“My ass, you are,” she mumbled, plucking the remaining seven keys off the rack.
“Don’t go betting your pretty arse, dearie. Someone might take you up on it one day.”
“You let me worry about my ass. You worry about where you’re going to store all those bikes. Just so you know, the Hearth Motel will not be responsible for any damage done to your vehicles while they’re on this premises. The disclaimer is on the cards.”
“No one will touch them. They’ll get a hell of a shock if they do.” He pul
led the door open and walked through it. Electric energy crackled in his wake and made the hairs on her arms stand on end.
For some reason, she didn’t think he was being metaphoric.
What the hell was he? Were his friends weird, too? Thanks to Hestia, Simone knew there were all sorts of supernatural oddities walking around, masquerading as plain-old humans, but she’d been so sheltered during the six years since she was thrown into their world that she didn’t know how to identify the types. Or even what all the types were.
She watched through the window as two of the big men walked the one called Heath into Room One.
He was walking on his own, but barely. He was slow. Trudging. Zombie-like.
She watched the closing door and shook her head at the thought.
Sluggish as he was, he was definitely alive. And she didn’t know why, but she had a sudden inkling to make sure he stayed that way. Groaning, she returned to the back of the desk and pulled the rest of the keys. Had to be Hestia messing with her head again. There was no other explanation for it. People had stopped caring about Simone six years ago, and after a few years on her own, she’d started reciprocating.
It made no sense that she would start caring again now.
Chapter 2
Furious mumbling greeted Heath when he finally swam up out of the murk of unconsciousness. He tested his extremities—toes, fingers—wriggled his eyebrows, and noted the soft cushioning beneath his head and body.
He was hot. Why was he so goddamned hot?
Opening one bleary eye, he verified he was still clad in the motorcycle leather he’d started the trip down the coast in, sans boots. Leather wasn’t exactly the most breathable material a man could fall asleep in. Further, there was a goose-down comforter pulled up to his chin. The boys always tucked him in as if he’d freeze to death without their attention, but he’d been born in a cold, wet place. He was generally unbothered by what counted as winter in certain temperate climates. He didn’t shake off the cover, though. He just lifted his head slightly and watched the emitter of all that mumbling fiddle with the curtain rod. There seemed to be some hooks missing, so the heavy fabric sagged in the middle. He would have told her not to bother—that he liked the dark and not to worry about opening the things—but he was enjoying the view too much.
