by Sarra Cannon
“I don’t…” She let the words trail off, because she noticed they weren’t alone.
Thom, still by the door, eased closer to them. He picked up his knife, held the blade beneath Heath’s nose and mouth, then Simone’s.
No fog.
“Heath?” she whispered, though whispering seemed pointless. Certainly Thom couldn’t hear them.
“We’ll slip back in. I just wanted you to see what we’d done.”
“What did we do?”
“Happens sometimes when a couple’s energy fully mingles the first time. Side effect of certain types of power colliding. We were once more spirit than man, and we often forget that.”
She reached out tentatively for his face, and drew back when her fingers breached his energy. That’s what she’d felt back in Norseston—that mingling. That…merging of essences.
“If we weren’t meant to be together, we wouldn’t blend,” he said, as if tapping into her thoughts.
“What would happen if we blended completely?”
“It’s just not done.”
“Because it’s impossible?”
“No, it just isn’t done.”
“Heath?” Thom said.
“We should return.” Heath indicated their still, waiting bodies.
“How?”
“It’s a bit like putting on a pair of snug jeans. Just take a deep breath slip back into yourself. Should work, in theory.”
“In theory, Prince?” Seemed insane, but simple enough. She closed her eyes and imagined she was on her bed and zipping herself up.
Heath’s heavy weight and the twitch of her cock made her eyelids spring up.
He kissed her forehead, her nose, her lips, and gently pulled himself from her. Grabbing his discarded shirt, he looked to Thom. “She was curious about what would happen if we merged.”
“Intentionally, you mean.”
“Aye.” Heath cleaned himself up with his shirt.
Simone reached for her rumpled pajamas.
Thom grunted. “I’m not sure anyone knows at this point. So few people are capable of it.”
“You mean, not every mated pair does that?” She should have felt at least a little uncomfortable having been fucked into a stupor with Thom watching, but…again, it just felt par for the course. Maybe it was practicality, or maybe it was just the fact there was nothing shameful about it. Thom was included, but…not.
“I imagine those who are capable of it avoid it. When you do that, obviously you’re leaving your physical body unprotected. It’s one thing if you have someone around to watch your back or if you’re well-hidden.”
“But not such a great idea when you’re out in the open.” She wriggled into her bottoms.
“Aye.”
“What purpose does doing it serve?”
Heath shrugged. “I suppose it depends on what the flavor of magic is once it’s combined. Our history says that some did it to tend to nature—heal plants and cure animals of illness, that sort of thing. Some did it to grant wishes, if they could.”
“So fairies do grant wishes?”
“There’s always a little truth in every fable. Mostly, they’d do small favors. Helped keep gardens watered and minded small children when parents turned their backs. A couple would generally pick a family or small area to assist.”
“But you don’t do that anymore.”
“Hard to now,” Thom said. “There are so few of us, and most of us live in the realm. I imagine some of the eldest amongst us will take up the habit once again once the realm no longer exists.”
Heath leaned back against the wall and rubbed the scruff on his chin. “I bet it’d be a good way to parcel off extra energy.”
Thom’s nod came slowly. “You’d just be doing what you’re doing now, but more discreetly.”
“What do you mean?” Simone asked.
“Do you remember the anemic woman in Norseston?” Heath asked.
“The one at the store?”
“Right. I could help people like her without them knowing it.”
“Haunt hospital halls and give a boost to whomever needs it?”
“That’s the idea.”
Thom settled onto his back and wove his fingers together atop his belly. “It’d be a very Sídhe thing to do, wouldn’t it?”
“Not the Sídhe we are now,” Heath said. “The Sídhe we once were, before…”
He let the words fall off, but Simone knew the gist. Before they’d been confined to their realm. Before their queens and kings got greedy. Before their gods turned their backs on them. So typical for her life to be pulled into things at the exact moment turmoil started. She knew there would be some, and she knew some of it would be because of her.
She crawled next to the wall and curled her legs up to her chest. Heath pulled her closer and laid an arm across her body.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” she whispered. A bit of Shakespeare seemed appropriate at the moment. The Bard knew drama better than anyone.
“More uneasy for some than others,” Heath returned.
“I don’t want one.”
“Neither do I, nor the job that comes with it. It’s the only thing I have that I regret having to share with you. But relax, love, it’ll be all right.”
“How can you say that? I’m not fit to serve anyone, especially not thousands of mistreated Sídhe.”
“Hestia seems to think otherwise. So do I, and the crew, as well.”
“That’s because I’m yours.”
“No, they have their own minds, and often enough, they prove it.”
Thom snorted softly.
“But why me?” she asked. There was nothing special about her beyond being born a so-called key, so why had she captured Hestia’s favor? Or the Heath’s flattering ardor?
“Why not?” Heath whispered, squeezing her tight. “You’re a princess of the Sídhe. Don’t ask why. Ask why not.”
Chapter 22
Simone cringed at yet another booming thud from the backlot where the construction crew was digging out the footprint of the new Fairy Dream House. That’s what she’d started thinking of it as. Siobhan described it in such flowery terms, Simone wondered if the woman had missed out on playing with dolls as a child. The structure she described sound more like Barbie’s big pink townhouse—with working elevator—than a discreet lodging for a crew of transient biker fairies. Actually, Simone had vetoed the suggestion of pink. “It’ll stand out!” Siobhan had said.
“Exactly what we don’t want,” Heath had called out from the office closet where he and Thom were installing a gun safe. There’d definitely be no more midnight fucks in that little room. There was no longer space for it, not that there was any time for fucking, anyway.
The past week had been a whirlwind of construction and fairies coming-and-going. Oddly, Heath and Thom hadn’t left, though everyone else in the crew had at various points. Every time Simone thought about calling them on their sudden shifts toward domesticity, she was distracted by one more thing—a guest checking in, or the contractor needing approval for some change, or laundry. Lots and lots of it. Heath may have been the Prince in Leather, but obviously Simone was the Princess in the Laundry Room. It wasn’t like she could hire help. The last thing they needed was more people caught up in the mess.
Heath was only managing to keep Sully away from Zenia with use of some colorful threats, and Dasha had flown back to San Francisco with a warning that she’d be back at some unspecified point in the near future. If Thom hadn’t been keeping Ethan busy with mini missions, Ethan might have followed her across the country. Simone saw the fire and hunger in his eyes and knew he was craving, but Simone refused to put one more person into the mess until she was sure doing so was safe. She knew for a fact Dasha fought like a girl, and not in the good way.
Heath set a cordless drill on the counter and hooked his chin over her shoulder. His hands skimmed up her belly, and his cock ground against her spine.
“Heath.”
She gave a halfhearted wriggle away from him.
“No one’s here but Thom. Obviously, he doesn’t care.”
“There are contractors coming in and out of this office something like once every twenty minutes.”
“We could lock the door. Pull down the shade. They’ll probably think you’re grabbing a nap or something.”
“You could put up a Back in Twenty sign,” Thom said from the closet.
“Enabler,” she muttered.
“That I am, Princess.”
“It’s only been a week,” she said to Heath. “You’ll survive a bit longer without being topped off.”
“I’m a sexual creature, love. You have no idea how excellent my behavior is under the circumstances.”
“Yes, you’re very respectful, lech.” She nodded sardonically.
He gave her a little swat to the ass, groaned, and peeled himself off her. “Your lech. Admit it.”
She shrugged and picked up the phone receiver to call the sign shop. The neon in the Hearth sign had burned out on one side. “Fine. My lech.” She could admit that much. She was tired of protesting it, even if she was afraid of what it meant.
“Heard that, Thom? My wife accepts me as her own personal lech.”
“It’s about time.”
Simone rolled her eyes and grinned as the sign shop clerk came onto the line. “Hi, this is Simone Bristol—”
“Horan,” Heath and Thom said in unison.
She covered the mouthpiece, hissed, “Go back into the closet,” and waved them away.
They went, but made her wait before they did it. She sighed before turning her attention back to the clerk. While explaining what had gone wrong with the sign, that goddamned hobo cab pulled into the lot and parked next to the office door.
If it were another guest, the fairies would be sleeping in even closer quarters. The motel was very nearly at capacity for the number of functional rooms at the moment.
She hung up the phone just as the cabbie pulled in three large suitcases and an overnight bag.
Dasha tottered in on sky-high heels after him, pushing her sunglasses up her nose. “Do you have cash to pay him? I never have cash. You’d think after last time, I would have thought to stop at the ATM before leaving the airport.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I told you I’d be back.”
“I thought later. Like, much later.” Like, after some of the dust settled in the motel and in Simone’s life, too.
The cabbie cleared his throat.
Thom walked out of the closet, billfold at the ready. “How much?”
“Airport to here is a hundred bucks.”
Dasha’s jaw dropped. “That’s extortion. You only charged fifty last time, and you said you were coming this way anyway.”
He shrugged. “And I was. I could make more driving around the airport all day then driving back toward home. Gonna take me a couple of hours just to get back up there.”
“Oh, curse you, you little—”
“Enough of that.” Thom dropped some bills onto the cabbie’s palm and gestured toward the door. “The next time you need to bring a fare here, make sure you quote them the rate before they get in.”
“Eh, I know how to run my business.”
“Then you should know we probably won’t be referring any more guests to you,” Simone said. “But that’s okay. I’m sure the concierges at the chain motels throw plenty of business at you.”
They actually probably didn’t. They tended to prefer the drivers who, at the very least, vacuumed the petrified French fries out of their cars on occasion. Or whose cars didn’t reek of the morning’s catch. Grouper, usually.
He backed toward the door, looking back and forth between the hundred bucks in twenties in his hand and Simone. “Uh, how’s eighty sound?”
“Bye.” Dasha held the door open for him and shooed him out. Turning back to the counter, she plopped her hands on her hips and grinned. “All right. Entertain me.”
Simone pushed up an eyebrow. “What?”
“Agency is closed for a few weeks over the holidays, and I took an extra week off for decompression time. Let’s go do stuff. I’m sure the motel can run itself for a few hours.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting away from the construction noise for a while.” Simone looked to Heath, who looked to Thom.
“What’s the silence conference about?” Dasha asked. “I just meant we’d go get some dinner and haunt a bar for a little while.”
“The Shell Shack has a pretty well-stocked bar,” Simone said. “And it’s a weeknight, so that means no holy rollers there to look down their noses at us.”
Dasha shrugged. “That’ll do.”
— —
Simone sat at the short side of the bar and squinted through the window at the couple of fairies on bikes parked on the edge of the lot. She knew they were quite capable of being discreet when they wanted to be, but apparently, it wasn’t one of those times. Dasha hadn’t seemed to notice them yet, and Simone didn’t want to draw her attention to them. She didn’t know what they were up to, and the last thing she needed was Dasha thinking Simone’s husband was weird. Well…weirder. Simone still couldn’t tell most of the bikes apart, but was pretty sure the one with the red tank belonged to Ethan. If he took his helmet off, she’d be able to tell for sure. He was the blondest of all the men.
Zenia stepped through the kitchen doors holding a tray, and a broad grin spanned her face. “Yay, I thought I was deluded in thinking we were actually friends, but here you are, and it’s only been, what, ten days?”
“Ha ha,” Simone said.
“Be right back. Let me deliver this slop.”
They put in an order for a pitcher of margaritas while waiting.
Dasha drummed her nails against her water glass. “Do you remember how your mom took us out to celebrate after college graduation?”
Simone groaned. They’d been having a great time, but they always did when they went out with her mother. Simone had gotten so drunk that night, she could barely remember getting home. “What made you think about that?”
“We were at a bar kind of like this one, and Thom reminded me of something she’d said.”
“Thom did?”
“Mm-hmm.” Dasha paused to pour margarita slush into her glass. “I’d said something about how surprised I was at having to managed to finish school in four years because it seemed my luck was so bad that I had to be cursed.”
“I remember that.”
“Yeah, and your mother said I should never say that word because I’d draw attention to myself. I didn’t think anything of it at the time because your mother was always oddly superstitious.”
Simone cringed. In retrospect, superstitious may have been putting it mildly. Even for a fairy, she suspected her mother may have been kookier than most Sídhe. Having met Fergus, though, all made sense.
“When Thom cut me off back at the motel when I joked about cursing that cabbie, it reminded me of her. I didn’t realize that was one of those things people really got superstitious about.”
“Most don’t.”
“How is your mother, anyway?”
“She’s…fine, I guess.”
“You guess? Don’t tell me you’ve had a falling out. She was the mom everyone wanted. She was so cool, if a little clueless.”
Simone stared down into her margarita and watched the little floes bob around. “No, we didn’t fall out. She’s just off the grid right now. I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
“What’d she do, enter a hippie commune or something? That’d be right up her alley.”
“Something like that.”
Zenia stepped up to the bar between them and flipped open her order pad. “We’ve got fresh scallops. They’re amazing.”
“Bring ’em.”
“Know what else I’ve got?” Zenia’s voice was a conspiratorial whisper.
“What?”
“A date.”
Shit.
“With who?”
“Super hot guy came into the restaurant after you left on Sunday.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sully’s gonna shit a brick. “Tell us about him.”
“Super tall, just the way I like them. Amazing green eyes and killer smile. Said he works in law enforcement. Cops usually aren’t my flavor, but he had a rebel vibe about him. We’re going out tonight after I get off.”
“Where’s he from?” Simone asked, trying to sound cavalier, but her voice came out in a high-pitched tremble. She already knew the guy wasn’t a keeper. Sully had been very clear when he said Zenia was it—no interference in their relationship from a third party. While it was possible for Zenia to have a mate aside from Sully, Sully said it’d be very unlikely for that to be the case, given that she was human.
Zenia shrugged. “I dunno. He said he was just passing through.”
Given the relative inconvenience of accessing their location and the low population during the off-season, Simone doubted that. Perhaps Heath’s hunter instincts were rubbing off on her, or may be her skeptical fairy half was finally waking up. She grinned at Zenia, not wanting to dash her enthusiasm…yet. “Where are you going for your date?”
Heath might have warned Sully in no uncertain terms to keep his distance, but she doubted even the prince would stand idly by while one of his crew member’s mates engaged in what could turn out to be a reckless affair.
“Not sure. I think we’re just going to play things by ear.”
Simone palmed her phone in her purse, wondering if she should dash off a quick text message to Heath. Or was she in a situation where she was supposed to utilize royal autonomy? Probably overthinking this. She let go of the phone.
“What comes with the scallops?” Dasha asked.
Zenia got out her pad. “Rice and a veggie. What kind do you want?”
“Surprise me,” Simone said.
“Ditto,” Dasha said.
Zenia went to put the order in, and Dasha excused herself for the bathroom, saying she hadn’t pissed since San Francisco.
Simone sat there sipping her margarita, squinting at the mirror behind the bar. Something just wasn’t right, and she hated that generalized feeling of ill where her body and intuition knew something was wrong, but her brain couldn’t discern what. Most people would call that paranoia.