Knight in Leather

by Holley Trent

  “And because I’m human…”

  “You’re more likely to release an egg. Makes sense, right?” He rubbed his chin. “Maybe we won’t have fertility issues. Until you run out of eggs, anyway. We could have a whole bloody brood of kids.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m still trying to cope with there being two.”

  “Are you telling me you don’t want those two?”

  “Fuck, Ethan. Don’t put words into my mouth. Of course I want them. I love the idea of having your children.”

  “And I love the idea of you having them, because I love you.”

  “You do?” She smiled softly, but the grin fell away when she rubbed her sternum. She bent over again and groaned. “Ugh.”

  He ran his hand gently up and down her spine. “The queasiness will pass.”

  And then come back with a vengeance, probably. She was probably going to have a miserable month or six weeks ahead, but he didn’t want to make her more scared than she already was. Early pregnancy plus the fetuses’ budding magic made for terrible morning sickness.

  “I’m terrified because we’re not prepared for them,” she said. “With everything going on, I mean. And we haven’t even had much time together on our own.”

  “We’ll make time in the coming months.”

  “Assuming we’re back safe outside of this realm.”

  “We will be. I promise. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure we are.”

  “Easy to say…”

  “Yes, and hard to do. Obviously, I’m motivated.”

  She straightened up only to lean her back against the tree. She gulped, let her air out in a sputter of her lips, and fixed her gaze on him. “All right.”

  “All right, what?”

  “Let’s do what we have to do to get the hell out of here. When I don’t feel well, I like to be in my own bed, and I don’t know about you, but sleeping on a straw pallet for the past few weeks has been doing hurty-hurty things to my body.”

  “I did actually have a bed here once.” He shrugged. “After I left home, my parents downsized the cottage a bit.”

  “Understandable. The place is hard enough to heat as it is.” She pushed away from the tree and, listing a bit, started down the path toward the house. “Let’s see if Mielikki has come back and make sure we’re sending Ari with all the information the crew needs to know.”

  Ethan hooked his arm around hers and righted her swaying walk a bit. “Dizzy?”

  “Very. Need to lie down. I feel a migraine coming on. I haven’t had a migraine in five years.”

  “Still want to make yourself bait? I mean, given the circumstances—”

  “I believe in nipping problems in the bud. I’m not one to half-ass things.”

  “Just so you know, I’m against the idea.”

  “You were clear about that.”

  “I’m certain my parents aren’t going to be so enthusiastic about your volunteerism, either. I’m sure they love me very much, still, but they’d be more concerned about the next generation for obvious reasons.”

  “Because there aren’t many of you.”

  He grunted. “On either side.”

  “Well, we’ve all got to do our parts. If a fight breaks out, I doubt you’ll let Laurel get away with much.”

  “That’s for damned sure.”

  In fact, if Laurel harmed one hair on Dasha’s pretty head, he was going to find a massive rock to tie the fish woman to and would sink it into the deepest body of water he could find in the realm.

  “Why are you grinning like that?” Dasha asked.

  He cleared his throat and fixed his face. “No reason.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dasha squinted at Fergus in the mirror and scratched her head. “Repeat that?”

  “Guards, girlie. Rhiannon’s got guards posted at the doorway of every established portal near here. That means she’s afraid someone’s going to find a way through or she’s afraid a bunch of folks are going to find a way to get out.”

  “But we just told you what the plan was,” Ethan said. “There’s no way anyone in that part of the realm besides the parents of Prince Heath’s crew members would know they need to pack up and get ready.”

  Fergus grunted. “I can’t tell if she’s being proactive or reactive. For all we know, she’s had something insidious planned for a while and this is just one part playing out. Are ye quite certain ye don’t have anyone who could be spying for her back at The Hearth?”

  Ethan shook his head hard. “The crew is as it always was aside from the new mates, and every guest at the motel in the past four months aside from some known associates and Laurel, of course, have been human.”

  “And I don’t believe the elves could be working against you. They’ve never been particularly eager to interact with Rhiannon. We must be missing something.”

  “Fergus,” Dasha started, “is there any way to disrupt the magic that enables her to keep count of who’s in the realm?”

  “I have no idea, dearie. Not my bailiwick. I know portals and tunnels, and that’s about it.”

  Ethan Senior gave the kitchen table a pound with his fist. “Damn it. I’d bet a pile of gold she’s moving now because Lach got out.”

  Fergus grunted. “Could be, especially given who his associates are. They’re not ones to wait around to act.”

  Dasha gave Ethan’s sleeve a tug. “Explain.”

  He raked a hand through his messy hair and let out a breath. “The Afótama, right? Lach’s mate is their progenitor. Her descendant, Contessa, is the clan’s queen. Contessa is married to Matt’s father Oliver, who’s a half-Sídhe.”

  “And…”

  “And Oliver is Rhiannon’s great-nephew, or some such thing. His mother didn’t leave the realm on superb terms, and so now Oliver is persona non grata.”

  “Ah.” She groaned. The fairy soap opera was nothing if not complicated. “And Oliver is aligned with his cousin Heath, and since Heath told his mother to go fuck herself, Rhiannon holds a grudge against the Afótama in addition to your crew. Am I understanding all the nuances here?”

  Moira guffawed. “Rhiannon and Ótama weren’t exactly the best of friends even a millennium ago. Don’t blame the current generation for the problems. You’re just the newest layer of the muddle.”

  “This is so messy.”

  “That be an understatement if I’ve ever heard one,” Fergus said.

  “Suffice it to say,” Ethan said, rubbing Dasha’s knotted shoulder, “no one is on particularly good terms with Rhiannon except for the people who are currently doing her favors.”

  “Well. Now ye know the score,” Fergus said. “I can spread the word the best I can, but if I’m being watched…”

  “Right,” Ethan Senior said. “There’ll be a skirmish before they can even get to the portal.”

  “As long as I can get them into the portal, I can help Mielikki slam it shut the moment the last in line enters.”

  “So, you just need to get them through the gauntlet,” Moira said.

  Fergus nodded.

  “I may be able to help with that. How many guards have you counted?”

  Fergus let out a long breath and scratched his head. “Gods, fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “That might be too many…” she said low. “Especially if they’re spread out. I’m not as stealthy as I might have been had I been completely well.”

  “Any help would be better than no help, lass,” Fergus said.

  Dasha elbowed Ethan’s ribs. “Hear that?”

  “I hear just fine, sweeting. My brain’s working pretty well, too. I think Fergus would amend his statement if Princess Simone were pregnant.”

  Both of the keyman’s busy eyebrows flew up. “Ye’re with child? Oh, no, no, no. Go find a seat somewhere, girlie. Ye’ll be sitting this one out, for sure.”

  Dasha growled. “I’m pregnant, allegedly, not useless.”

  Fergus nodded sardonically. “Yes, yes. Ye’ve many skills
, although I’d imagine no one in that house cares besides ye, at the moment.”

  “I care,” Colin muttered from the corner. Apparently, Moira had grown weary of his particular brand of lechery and put him in time-out.

  Dasha rolled her eyes and backed away from the table. “Y’all plot all you want to. I’m still dealing with Laurel, and soon. I’m nipping this shit in the bud.”

  “Yeah?” Ethan scoffed. “How on earth are you going to do that? Got a plan you’d like to share?”

  “Oh, I’m just to appeal to her Fatal Attraction brand of insanity a bit. If we had the right stuff here, I’d decorate the front of the house with pink and blue baby celebrations decorations and send her over the deep end. Can’t do that, though, so I’ll just make myself really, really accessible.”

  She kicked off her shoes and put her earrings and bracelets into her purse.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going to the water.”

  Colin chuckled. “Gonna sit right on the edge and dangle your feet in, hoping she’ll swim up and snatch you down?”

  “Yep.” Dasha took off her hair scarf and gave her compacted hair a fluff.

  “Uh, no,” Ethan said. “Over my dead body.”

  “We’re all going to be dead if we get trapped in this realm, sweetie pie. So, how about we not sit around waiting for things to happen, mm-kay? Let her grab me. Colin won’t let me drown, will you Colin?”

  “Hmm?” Colin pulled his gaze up from her cleavage.

  She sighed. “I said you’re not going to let me drown, are you?”

  “Oh, no. Of course not. Wouldn’t do to have the prince’s mate’s best friend going belly-up on my watch. He doesn’t seem to have much of a temper, but trust me, he does.” Colin shuddered.

  Dasha gestured toward the door. “Then let’s go. She grabs me. You grab her. Then y’all can squeeze all the information out of her that you can. Maybe she’ll even slip up and tell you what Rhiannon’s up to.”

  “I think her idea is sound,” Ethan Senior said.

  “Father,” Ethan scolded.

  “You have a better idea, then?”

  “Are you forgetting about your grandchildren?”

  “No. I’m not that old that I’d forget so quickly, but you’ve got to admit she’s right, son. If we don’t do something, shit’s gonna get worse, and we’ll have waited around too long for the right circumstances to act, and those are never going to come. Let’s be proactive instead of reactive for a change.”

  Ethan ground the heels of his palms against his eyes and let out a ragged breath. “Just so we have my objection on record—I don’t agree with this.”

  “Duly noted,” Dasha said, already moving to the door. “You stay here and keep strategizing with Fergus. I’ll go splash a little water.”

  “You can’t seriously expect—”

  “I do, and you will.”

  Ethan harrumphed and slouched in his chair.

  Perhaps he’s in need of another time-out himself.

  “Hey,” she said, sound far more cheerful than she felt. “Just consider this the real-life equivalent of me gifting you some in-game resources so you can build up your village wall. I’m giving you materials you can do something with—giving you a boost up to the next level.”

  “I’m pretty sure that was English, but I didn’t understand a single bloody word of it,” Ethan Senior said.

  “I’ll explain later,” Ethan said flatly. He followed Dasha to the doorway and pulled her into his arms. “If anything happens to you…”

  “Hush. My wellbeing won’t matter if we can’t find a way out of here.”

  “Your wellbeing does matter. Don’t you dare think I wouldn’t value every second with you, and even more if I knew I’d only have a few. I’d like more than a few.”

  Her cheeks burned, and she cast her gaze downward. She was pretty sure that she’d blushed more in the past month than she had throughout her entire puberty. “So would I. I want to see you on your hands and knees planting greenberry bushes with my father. That’s why I have to do this.” She pushed up onto her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his.

  He threaded his fingers through her hair and sighed against her mouth before kissing her back. “When we get home, I’m putting an end to your adventuring days.”

  “I’d like that. I’d prefer to do all my adventuring vicariously through characters on the other side of a television screen.”

  “That sounds nice. A television screen in a nice little house somewhere near The Hearth. Footsteps from the beach. A short walk away from fried fish.”

  “You’re always thinking about food, aren’t ya?”

  He put his lips against her ear and whispered, “Food or sex. More of the latter than the former lately, though you certainly smell good enough to eat.”

  “It’s all the greenberries, probably.” The thought of them made her stomach lurch and headache thud.

  “No, just you, sweeting. You smell like you’re mine and that’s a delicious scent, indeed.” He gave her earlobe a nip and dug his fingers into her ass.

  Face tingling, she tittered nervously and patted his chest.

  Having him grope her and whisper sweet nothings into her ear when no one but Sully was watching was one thing, but Ethan’s parents were in the room, as well as a lecherous demigod she was going to have to smack some common decency into as soon as they were back in North Carolina.

  “Hopefully, this won’t take long,” she said.

  “If it does, I’m coming out there whether you’re done or not.”

  “I wouldn’t expect otherwise from you.”

  “So you’re fine with me stalking you, then?”

  “You’re the only one who gets to. Lucky you.”

  “Aye, I am lucky.” He let her go with a sigh.

  She tugged Colin out the door with her. “Behave yourself.”

  He sputtered his lips.

  “I’m not playing with you, letch. Get your rear end moving.”

  They started down the path and she let go of his shirt.

  “You might have been able to get away with that kind of behavior in the past, but I’m here to tell you the way you act is unacceptable and your mate isn’t going to stand for it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I know Daryn. Just because she’s a fairy and has probably guessed that you’re her mate doesn’t mean she’s going to be easy for you to snare. She’s been living among humans long enough to expect a little courtship. She’s not going to put up with bullshit from you.”

  “Ugh, courtship. Who needs courtship when you have a big dick?”

  Dasha turned around and plucked his forehead hard.

  “Ow!” Growling, he rubbed his dome and narrowed his inky eyes at her.

  “You deserved that pain. You’re disgusting.”

  “By whose standards?”

  “Any reasonable person’s.”

  “Well, there you have it. I’m not a person, as you’d think of one. My father’s a god and my mother was a siren. Adjust your expectations accordingly.”

  “No. You’re in the presence of a woman who tries, most of the time, to be a lady, so act like a gentleman. You adjust your behavior, and I won’t put another knot in your forehead. How about that?”

  “Are all modern women so cruel?”

  “No. I am the way I am because men are the way they are. Doesn’t matter the century. You’re always going to encounter a few dipshits who think their wishes and wants trump other people’s needs for common courtesy and respect.”

  “Did you just call me a dipshit?”

  “I’ll call you worse than that if you don’t straighten up, dude. I’m giving you some really good advice here. If I didn’t like Daryn so much, I wouldn’t bother. Honestly, I feel sorry for her.”

  Colin clutched his chest, looking genuinely aggrieved at the slight. “Sorry for her? Do you think she’s going to do very much better than me?”

  Dasha shrugg
ed. “Who can say? But if I were her, I’d probably be wishing I could do better.”

  “And what’s so bloody wrong with me that would have her begging for more?”

  “The fact that you even have to ask that tells me you have a hard row to hoe. Bleh.” She swallowed down the saliva pooling in her mouth and took a few deep breaths to quell her nausea. “Ugh, let’s get this over with. I want to be at home in my own bed.” She turned and took up a brisk pace toward the water.

  “You mean in Ethan’s bed, don’t you? Or has your great love affair cooled so quickly?”

  “Fuck you very much, dude. Whose bed I’m in doesn’t matter as long as I’m in one that isn’t in this realm, and I guarantee you that Ethan will be cozied up next to me.”

  “And you’ll be making all those delightful noises, I’m sure.”

  Dasha turned yet again and gave him a harder pluck to the forehead. “Behave yourself.”

  “Ow! Quit fuckin’ doing that.”

  “Quit being a douche.”

  “What the hell does that even mean? Douche makes no sense in that context.”

  She snapped her fingers and nodded. “Consult Urban Dictionary when we get out of here. And I was wrong—douches at least get to be inside a vagina. At the rate you’re going, you’re not even going to be in staring distance of one for at least a year.”

  “She won’t be able to resist me that long.”

  Dasha snorted and started working again. “I think you underestimate the fairy ability to hold a grudge. I’m human and even I know that about them. Your big dick won’t be enough.”

  “Used to be enough.”

  “In what century?”

  “All of them.”

  Dasha rolled her eyes and cut through the trees toward the dry, flat embankment. “You can’t just go through life swinging your dick around and shouting, ‘Here, kitty kitty.’ Some people need a bit more substance to their relationships.”

  “And what makes yours and Ethan’s so substantial?”

  She hiked up her skirt and sat at the very edge of the water. She put her feet in and stirred them around.

  Colin stayed back by the trees out of sight, for the most part, but she could see his face at the moment. He seemed genuinely curious, so she figured she’d answer, though she had to think about what to say first. She hadn’t really tried to gather her thoughts on the subject of Ethan.