Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale

by Christine Warren

  Being with Luc just felt…good. Never mind that he had popped into her life without a by-your-leave, had turned her world upside down, had given her the most amazing orgasms of her life, and had recruited her for some sort of top-secret Fae mission. The man just seemed to fit, at her side, in her apartment—even if he did hang off the end of her bed—and into her thoughts. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so comfortable with a man before. Certainly not with one who stood on the other end of a vibrating current of sexual tension that seemed to arc between them constantly. Even with the electricity of that burning up the atmosphere, she felt relaxed with Luc. He made her feel more completely herself.

  And if she thought about that too hard for too long, she was going to tie herself up in the kind of knots Boy Scouts earned merit badges for mastering.

  She thought she was doing fairly well living in the moment as they strolled down the street to the monstrously colored shop in the middle of the block. Then she yanked open the glass door and stepped into the pink hell of her foulest nightmares.

  Apparently someone had taken the shop’s name a little too seriously. The walls glowed with a high-gloss paint the same sickeningly intense shade as Pepto-Bismol. They seemed to radiate an unearthly light that even the dark, cheery red trim around the windows and doors and along the floor and ceiling couldn’t moderate. Everywhere she looked, she saw evil, and she wasn’t talking about the sex toys; she meant the decor. Pink marabou and dyed faux fur clashed hedonistically with silk, satin, velvet, and brocade in all the horrifying shades of pink, rose, red, scarlet, mauve, and the occasional purple a body could imagine, and Corinne had a damned fine imagination.

  Unfortunately, another five minutes in this place, and she’d need that imagination, because she could feel her retinas being seared off where she stood. She heard Luc’s pained inhalation beside her and hoped his own sense of taste was as offended as hers. If he suggested bringing a single drop of this virulent mess into her apartment, she was going to have to kick him. In the nuts.

  It took a second to even remember what they were doing here. The decor was that big an assault.

  Since they had decided that Corinne—as the one with a legitimate reason to be poking around and asking questions—should be the one to poke around and ask questions, she took a deep breath and mustered up the resolve to walk deeper into the abyss of bad taste. Swallowing back a surge of nausea, she blinked her watering eyes and fixed her gaze firmly on the maroon carpet, not looking left, right, or up as she made her way across the floor to the counter in the corner of the shop. Luckily, her field of vision remained broad enough that she could see the counter getting closer to her knees before she walked into it, and stopped. Bracing herself for the sensory onslaught, she looked up to meet the entirely disinterested gaze of the clerk behind the register, a young woman with black-tipped blue hair, purple lipstick, and enough shiny silver facial piercings to give an airport metal detector a heart attack.

  Sighing, Corinne fished a business card out of her pocket and slid it over the counter. “We’re here to see the owner.”

  Shiny and Bored barely looked up from her puffy pink emery board. “Yeah? Who’re you?”

  Corinne glanced down at her card and back up at Shiny. She waited a heartbeat. “We’re with the Chronicle.He knew we’d be coming by.”

  So it was a little fib. She had called and left a message. Walter Hibbish should know, if he’d checked his machine.

  “That so.” The clerk snapped her gum and went back to filing.

  Corinne resisted the urge to take out several days of frustration on Miss Unconventional and Uncooperative. Instead, she leaned over the counter and bared her teeth. It was supposed to look like a smile. Sort of. “Why don’t you go tell him we’re here. Don’t worry. We’ll wait.”

  This time, Shiny actually lifted her head and sized them up. Well, her glance slid right over Corinne and chose to invest its energy into sizing Luc up. To mentally try him on for size, judging by the way Shiny’s eyes widened and glazed over just a bit once she’d taken in his full glory. If the amount of time she lingered there was any indication, she seemed to be conjuring particularly vivid mental pictures of his crotch.

  Corinne was about to get Shiny’s attention by yanking hard on the silver ring in her eyebrow when Luc distracted her. He leaned over the counter, flashed Shiny a charming and patently insincere smile, and added his weight to Corinne’s.

  “Please,” he purred. “We’d appreciate it.”

  Corinne wondered how much the flirtatious Fae would appreciate a trip to the emergency room.

  Her mouth curving in what might have passed for a smile—had she been about three days past dead—Shiny nodded, slid off her stool, and gave Luc a smoldering look. “Wait while I tell him you’re here.”

  She disappeared through the door behind the counter without another word but with one last, lingering glance at the fly of Luc’s jeans. She just missed hearing the new nickname Corinne invented especially for her, but that was likely a good thing.

  Grumbling under her breath, Corinne gave the door a sour glare and slung around the backpack she used in place of a purse. She knew Luc wasn’t to blame for the walking corpse’s blatant ogling, but rationality didn’t seem to have a lot to do with the uncomfortable level of jealousy that had fallen onto Corinne’s head like a cartoon anvil. God, she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been so wrapped up in a guy that she’d managed to get irrationally jealous over him. When had that been? High school?

  To distract herself and hopefully shock herself back down to earth, she pulled out her notebook and decided to do her job for a few minutes. Might as well make use of the time it took Shiny to deliver her message to scope out the store. If she was going to write an article that would pacify Hank without compromising the security of the Others’ secrets, Corinne would need to pack in as much color as possible. She doubted there was a place on earth more colorful than this one. Frankly, if such a site existed, she prayed she’d never have to go there.

  Rummaging for a pen and wishing she could put her sunglasses back on without feeling somehow rude, she looked around the shop, this time tuning out the horrendous decor and the presence of the Fae warrior beside her. She didn’t need to notice the decorating scheme again to know it would play a prominent role in her description of the place. Some things a girl could never forget.

  In a city full of sex shops, they tended to boil down to three categories. On one end of the spectrum, you had the kind of place that flourished in Times Square during its heyday, before Giuliani and Disney got hold of the neighborhood and cleaned it up nice for the tourists. Those were the sleaze museums, the places where anyone in their right mind wore rubber gloves, a biohazard suit, an impenetrable disguise, and still thought twice about touching anything. They catered to the lowest sort of hustlers and vagrants, along with anyone with a quarter and a strong stomach who wanted a couple of minutes alone in a dirty viewing booth. Come to think of it, no one in their right mind would step foot in one of those to begin with, biohazard suit or not.

  At the opposite end of the scale, you had the upscale shops, the ones that made the papers for reasons besides their indecency arrests. They had well-lit, tastefully decorated retail spaces, with polite, well-educated, and well-informed staff who took care to be both helpful and non-intimidating. They carried quality products and catered to couples looking to add spice to their relationships, or to women who were too intimidated or embarrassed to venture into a less welcoming environment.

  Then you had places like The Pink Pillow. Somewhere between trash and good taste, it sold a huge selection of goods at reasonable prices in a neighborhood you wouldn’t be afraid to walk through under normal circumstances. The staff were iffy—clearly—but they probably didn’t have any serious criminal history and they could ring up a sale easily enough, even if they couldn’t discuss the chemical components of lube like a Nobel scholar. These shops retained just enough of the sleaze factor to g
ive the average conservative a thrill, but not enough to scare him or her away. In fact, if she hadn’t been so off balance, Corinne might have had some fun browsing. While she appreciated the Toys-in-Babeland-type places of the world, her pocketbook appreciated the Pink Pillows.

  In reality, aside from all the…pink…there really wasn’t anything wrong with the shop, or its merchandise. Looking around, Corinne spotted half a dozen brands she recognized, from the maker of flavored massage oils on a small multi-tiered shelving unit, to the silicone dildo manufacturer occupying a prominent place against the wall. She wondered briefly if that much familiarity with the world of sex toys said something about her character, but shrugged it off. Everybody had to have a hobby.

  “Are you going to ignore me for the rest of the day?” Luc spoke from right behind her, apparently bent on following her through her tour.

  Corinne jumped. “I’m not ignoring you.”

  “Because it’s not my fault that woman was staring at me.”

  She forced a laugh. “I’m really not upset about someone leering at you. Sheesh, do I look like I have time to even notice every time a woman gives you the eye? I have a day job, remember.”

  Luc raised a brow, but he let it go, for which Corinne felt grateful. How was she supposed to explain to him that she wasn’t upset by the ogling, only by her own reaction to it? She wasn’t sure it made sense even in herhead.

  She scribbled down notes as she walked through the shop, which turned out to be a good deal bigger than the average Manhattan storefront, or at least the average storefront in the East Village. There seemed to be plenty of room for attractive displays and for the half a dozen other customers to avoid one another as they browsed. In fact, if it weren’t for the god-awful pink everywhere, Corinne might have made it a point to come back, but she couldn’t think of a good reason to risk permanent vision impairment when she already had Blowfish bookmarked on her web browser.

  She raised an amused eyebrow at the life-size blow-up boyfriend who stood propped up next to a colorful display of condoms, but her attention really caught on the far side of the shop and the table stacked high with edible goodies. She had a deep weakness for the combination of sex and chocolate. But oddly enough, she’d never experimented with chocolate pudding. With or without the ceremonial gourds.

  The body paint got a cursory glance—she preferred to go with real chocolate syrup, since it tasted so much better—but she lingered for a moment on the raspberry bindi set. Then her eyes widened and her hand shot out to snag a long, thin box with an intriguing cover illustration.

  “Ooh,” she murmured to herself as her mouth slid into a grin, “chocolate tattoos!”

  She dropped her notebook on the table and flipped the box over to scan the information on the back, trying to block out the mental picture of stenciling her name in chocolate on some choice body parts of the Fae warrior who still trailed after her with his hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face. Maybe she could add the word mine across his ass in those gothic-looking chocolate capital letters.

  “You know, at some point we’re going to talk about what’s going on here.”

  Corinne looked up from the chocolate. “You mean aside from crimes against the sighted community?”

  “Not what’s going on in this store. What’s going on between us.”

  She shook her head and hoped she hadn’t just gone visibly pale. “I told you, I’m not upset about the ogling, and I wasn’t ignoring you.”

  “But you are upset about something.”

  “No, I’m just working.”

  “Corinne, you need to feel comfortable sharing things with me. We’re in this together.”

  She played it deliberately stupid. “Believe me, if I see or smell or think of anything that will help us find Seoc, I will absolutely let you know. Now relax.”

  He didn’t budge. “You know that’s not what I’m talking about. You keep trying to act as if there’s nothing between us, as if you don’t have the right to be jealous if a woman makes a pass at me. We need to talk about us.”

  “I wouldn’t have called a few leers and the sad lack of a poker face a ‘pass’ necessarily—”

  “Corinne.” He snapped out her name, sharply enough to force her to look up at him.

  She abandoned stupid and tried for dismissive. “Look, I really don’t think that’s going to be necessary.”

  “You don’t? Hm, then I imagine you might find it a little awkward when the first baby comes along.”

  The box of tattoos clattered to the floor with the impact of a Howitzer shell.

  “When THE WHATdoes WHAT?”

  Luc couldn’t quite decide if he found the expression on his heartmate’s face more insulting or amusing. She looked as if someone had just explained to her that her regular coffee had secretly been replaced with dehydrated, powdered babies’ fingers.

  “When the baby comes,” he repeated—whether to punish her or to force the issue of their relationship out into the open, he wasn’t sure. “Darling, don’t tell me you don’t want children.”

  She stared at him for a minute, narrowed eyes assessing his intent before she unclenched her fists and drew in a hissing breath. “You’re a bastard, you know that?”

  “I think that all depends on point of view, really. In your eyes I’m a bastard for talking about the future,” he explained calmly. “In my eyes, I’m simply refusing to let you avoid the subject of our relationship like the proverbial grasshopper to my ant.”

  “If you were an ant, I’d so step on you right now.”

  “Temper, temper.”

  “Okay, you really want to do this here?” She planted her fists on her hips, a pose he supposed he preferred to having those fists swung at his face, and glared up at him. “You really want to talk about our relationship—which so far consists of nothing more than about three hours of admittedly fine sex, by the way—here. In a god-awful-tacky sex shop, in front of a handful of strangers, with the kindly gaze of—” She read a nearby label. “—Inflatable Amy, Your Go-to Good-Time Girl! looking on? Frankly, I think the romance factor may be a little shaky.”

  He grabbed her around the waist and boosted her up to sit on a display table, bringing her face at least a few inches closer to his. He imagined his expression when he leaned in might have intimidated a lesser woman. “You might be telling yourself that the only thing between us is sex, Corinne, but I know you don’t believe it. You’re not stupid, and you’re not blind, and to dismiss what’s happening would require you to be both.”

  “I don’t knowwhat’s happening between us,” she ground out, her eyes meeting his in a way that spoke of both defiance and discomfort. He could read the confusion in the brown depths. “Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t even know you existed. Now, in the space of less than a day, I’ve had to deal with the worst story assignment in the last millennium, a meeting with the Council of Others, the discovery that the Queen of Faerie’s idiot nephew is currently gallivanting through Manhattan and threatening the safety of some people I love like family, and the fact that I’ve just met a man who makes my knees quiver every time he gets within three feet of me. I’ve got a lot on my plate, so cut me a little slack, okay?”

  “No.”

  Her eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “No?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not cutting you a damned thing. You’re not the only one in this situation, and you’re sure as hell not the only one in this relationship. You seem to keep forgetting that I’ve known you for exactly as long as you’ve known me. Do you think this hasn’t caught me by surprise? Sometimes that’s just the way these things work. Sometimes you stumble over the things you need most while you’re busy looking for the ones you don’t even want.”

  “You don’t want to find the Queen’s idiot nephew?”

  “If it were up to me, the little menace would have suffered a fatal accident shortly after birth. The point is, it’s not up to me. And neither is this thing between us. We’re both just goi
ng to have to get over it and deal.”

  “Because you’re not leaving until this is finished.” She sounded tired and worn out. “Right. I get it. So let’s get the hell on with it.”

  Damn it, she just wouldn’t understand until he laid it all on the line, would she?

  “No,” he said, catching her chin in his hand, and holding her gaze with his. “You have to get used to it because I’m staying whether this gets finished or not. I’m just staying. Because you and I are together from now on.”

  He watched as his words registered with her and enjoyed the parade of expressions across her face. Excitement, lust, shock, confusion, and terror all made an appearance as she studied him. His brain told him he should gloss over it—pretend that it hadn’t happened or that he’d been joking. When his heart and other assorted parts encouraged him to just rephrase it from You and I are togetherto You’re mine and I’m going to spend the rest of our lives keeping you so busy you won’t have time to argue with me,he thought his words made a good compromise. Because his other parts offered a really good argument in favor of option number two.

  She pursed her lips, and he banished the thought of what he’d like her to purse them around. “You certainly work fast,” she said, slowly, almost visibly fighting the desire to panic.

  He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m decisive.”

  “And you’ve decided this?”

  I’ve decided lots of things, including that the best way to keep you from fighting with me is to keep you so distracted that you can’t remember what you wanted to fight about in the first place.

  “Fate has decided it. I’m just along for the ride.” Tact, he reminded himself. Tact. “I’m as shocked by it as you are.”

  She barked out a laugh that didn’t sound at all amused. “Somehow, I doubt that.”

  “You should have a little more faith. Look at this from my point of view—I came to Ithirto find an annoying royal brat with the common sense of garden moss, and instead I found you. I think gobsmackedis an appropriate estimation of my current frame of mind.” He saw her hesitate and tried an engaging smile. The captain of the Queen’s Guard rarely bothered with engaging smiles, but maybe she wouldn’t notice if his looked rusty.