by Holley Trent
Tess, under the covers, snuggled against him as if he were her port in the storm.
That was supposed to be Harvey.
Tess wasn’t prone to letting her guard down like that, so the guy was either a masterful liar, or in two weeks, she’d grown desperate for companionship.
“Wake her up gently,” Nadia projected telepathically, “And let her wake him up. Don’t be an asshole.”
“The asshole is the one in my queen’s bed.”
“At least he’s dressed.”
Harvey would have almost preferred them to have fucked and to be sprawled out on the bed—to not touch while they slept. He could deal with the idea of two people caught up in the heat of passion only to pull apart when they were done with each other. Their chaste embrace seemed far more intimate a thing. It indicated the giving and taking of comfort, and that was something Harvey hadn’t been providing Tess with in the past couple of weeks. He’d been there with her in public, propping her up so she could be the strong queen she needed to be. But behind closed doors, he hadn’t been able to help her. She’d closed him out, choosing to suffer alone.
He set the covered tray on the right nightstand and sat on the vast expanse of empty bed next to Tess. He gave Nadia a probing look, and she shook her head and twirled the key ring around her index finger. “This is your rodeo. I’m just here to run down the day’s schedule. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.”
It was the potential “killing” that worried him. Death was a possible outcome of hólmganga.
He sighed and leaned over Tess. Pulling her hair back from her face and away from her ear, he whispered, “Rise and shine, doll.”
She let out a sleepy little groan and rolled onto her back, stretching her arms over her head. “Hmm?”
“It’s morning, princess. I brought you breakfast.”
Her forehead furrowed before she even got her eyes open. She blinked rapidly and rubbed her tired eyes with her fists. Then she looked to her right, saw the sleeping giant beside her, and then back to Harvey. She stared at him as if she didn’t know what had happened or who they were.
“You all right? Do you…” He cut his gaze to the stranger to make the reason for his query clear. “Do you need some space?”
“Fuck, I must look a fright.” She closed her eyes again and shook her head. “No, it’s okay. He’s the reason I was able to sleep so deeply. What’s that smell? What’d you bring me?”
Harvey narrowed his eyes at her.
Is she fucking kidding me?
She blinked again. “What?”
“What do you mean he’s the reason you were able to sleep? Did the big thug offer to slip a little something into your nightcap?”
She swatted at him and peered toward the nightstand. “Oh, stop. His skill set is just…” She shrugged and turned her gaze to Nadia who was still standing by the door like a coward. “It’s unique. Crowded in here, huh?”
Nadia cleared her throat and shoved the keys into her sweatshirt pocket. “I hate to roll you out of your bed like this on your first full day on the job, but we’ve got some time-sensitive business to deal with. We need to fly into Santa Fe.”
“Why?”
“There are some Afótama up there who’ve requested a meeting and, for a variety of reasons, they can’t come to us. Normally, Lora would have found someone to send in your stead, but they impressed on her the urgency of the situation and said they could only discuss it with you.”
“Who’s Lora?”
Nadia made a waffling hand motion. “She’s half secretary, half communications maven. She controls the flow of information going out of this building and fields appointment requests for people who need to meet with your staff.”
“I’m still trying to get used to having a staff.”
“Well, really, it’s Nan’s staff, and no one will be upset if you decide to clean house and choose your own. Lora’s damned good at what she does, though, so I’d suggest you at least meet with her before you fire her.”
Tess sighed and rubbed her temples. “No one’s getting fired. Not yet, anyway. Right?” She looked to Harvey with uncertainty in her eyes.
It was good to know she still needed him for something—that she hadn’t shut him out completely just yet. “Status quo makes sense for the moment. I wouldn’t advise shaking things up too fast. It would unsettle everyone and put undue tension on the psychic web.”
“Works for me.” She pushed herself upright and straightened her nightshirt. “What time do I need to be ready?” she asked Nadia.
“The flight’s arranged for noon, so you’ve got about ninety minutes to get yourself together. When it’s time, I’ll come get you. I need to go work out the details of our overnight accommodations just in case. The usual place Nan stays at is under renovation so we need to find someplace else that’s secure.”
“I doubt it’ll be a big deal if we stay at a plain old Marriott.”
Harvey nudged a cup of coffee into Tess’s hands and passed over the sugar dish.
She scooped two heaping spoonfuls into her mug. “You know me so well,” she said with a dopey grin. The grin hadn’t changed much since she’d been eight.
“You’re damn right, I do, sweetheart.”
“Security’s always a major concern for the queen,” came that voice Harvey had hoped he wouldn’t have to hear again.
Ollie sat up and surveyed the occupants of the room. He nodded at Nadia, and she returned the gesture.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Must be a relative. You and Tess resemble each other.”
“I’m Nadia, also known as the thorn in our queen’s side, chief confidante, main dress zipper-upper, schedule-keeper, and all-around nag.”
“You’re her aide. Wow. I’m surprised that gig still exists.”
Nadia shrugged and looked from Ollie to Harvey and back again. “It’s temporary. Just until the consort situation gets worked out. Once that gets squared away, she won’t need me.”
Tess sighed and rubbed her temples again.
“You seem to know a hell of a lot about Afótama customs for an outcast,” Harvey said. He leaned forward and looked around Tess to make good eye contact with the other man.
“If there’s something you’d like to accuse me of, please speak it aloud so I can state my offense. I don’t like fighting first thing in the morning, but if you want to battle, feel free to start.”
“Stop,” Tess whispered. “The noise is back in my head and there seems to be an extra tug of curiosity this morning.”
Nadia grunted. “People want to know about you, is all. Like I said, Lora controls the information going out of this place, so a lot of what they know about you is spoon-fed. Of course, anyone with enough curiosity and the right Internet search phrase can find out things you probably don’t want to have bandied about the mental web.”
“Don’t Google me. Just don’t.” Tess took a long sip of her coffee, and leaned her head back against the headboard. “The best I can tell with my limited Afótama web experience, everyone’s fine and not in need of anything critical at the moment. I’ll ask Nan if I’m interpreting that correctly before I leave.”
Ollie looped his fingers around her right wrist, and she offered him a wan grin. “Thanks.”
“Hardly a burden, Tess.”
Harvey ground his teeth.
“Uh, Ollie, I bet you’re starving,” Nadia said. “You want me to bring you up something?”
“He’s got two functioning legs, and he can walk himself down to the kitchen and get his own meal,” Harvey said. “Or maybe he’ll decide he wants something more familiar. Perhaps from his own kitchen.”
“Harvey,” Tess said with a scold in her voice.
“I am hungry, Nadia,” Ollie said. “I had dinner on the road last night right before I got here and haven’t had anything since. I don’t have a problem with finding the kitchen myself and pouring a bowl of cereal.”
Nadia waved a dismissive hand at him. “They�
�d never let you do it for yourself. I’ll have something sent up along with your messages, Tess.”
She stepped through the doorway without another word, and the trio on the bed sat in awkward silence.
Tess fiddled with her coffee mug. Ollie glowered at Harvey over Tess’s head. If Ollie was cowed at all by the other man, he didn’t show it, and Harvey couldn’t read a damned thing off him psychically.
He was older. He probably had Tess by about ten years. Sometimes that wasn’t a problem, but at that age, a man would have a lot of baggage. The last thing Tess needed was extra baggage. She had enough of her own.
Tess cleared her throat. “What’s on the tray?”
Harvey pulled his stare away from Ollie and reached for the nightstand. “Oh, I figured you’d want something easy this morning after all the hubbub of last night.” He settled the tray over her thighs and lifted the cloth cover. “The chef nearly laughed me out of the kitchen when I asked for that.”
“Hot damn.” She handed her coffee mug to Ollie and reached for the little carafe of milk. She poured it over her Cocoa Puffs and grabbed the accompanying spoon. “And what’s in that omelet?”
“Everything you like, sweetheart. Three kinds of cheese, jalapeño peppers, tomato, and a bit of sausage.”
“What kind of sausage?”
“Hot, of course.”
The grin she gave him was more than enough payment for enduring Chef’s haranguing about the cereal. He’d had to run home and dip into his kid’s stash or something because Muriel didn’t eat the stuff. The hassle had been worth it. Harvey loved seeing her smile and knew how rare it was.
He did that.
“You always did take care of me,” she said, and shoveled a spoonful of chocolate cereal into her mouth.
“Better than anyone.” He cut his gaze over to Ollie again and, as expected, the other man fixed a death glare on him.
“Knowing her belly isn’t the same thing as knowing her heart,” Ollie projected.
“Did you get that nugget of wisdom from the inside of a fortune cookie?”
“The gods have ordained this match. You’d save yourself a lot of energy and embarrassment by letting her go. But don’t worry.” Ollie twirled a length of Tess’s hair around his fingers. “Eventually, the heartache will dull and you’ll find fulfillment in other things.”
“Thanks for the advice, but you’re mistaken if you believe I’m going anywhere.”
“If you want her to be happy, you would.”
“She was happy before you got here.”
“Oh?”
They let the topic drop, because a young staffer stood in the doorway and rapped on the frame. “Sorry to interrupt,” the girl said. Her eyes were wide as she studied the scene. It wasn’t as bad as it looked, but he wasn’t going to bother saying so. In fact, he preferred to test the staff and see whose loose lips needed dealing with. For as long as Harvey had known Muriel, she’d prided herself on her efficient and discreet senior staff. This girl was new, though.
Why didn’t Chef come up himself?
“I’ve got breakfast for Mr. Gilisson,” she said, and she shifted her weight from one pristine white sneaker to the other. Nervous. She couldn’t have been on the job very long.
“Come in, please,” Tess said. “What’s your name?”
“Erin, ma’am.” She bowed ever so slightly, careful not to drop the tray.
“Please stop doing that. If you ever see me sitting on a throne and twirling a scepter, bow all you want, but if you haven’t noticed, I’m not that kind of queen. I’m just a conduit.”
Erin shook her head so violently the contents of the mug on the tray splashed. “Oh, no, ma’am. You’re more than that. So much more.”
“Oh, jeez.” Idly, Tess put a hand on Harvey’s wrist, and he felt a surge up his arm and through his torso that felt like he’d touched an exposed live wire. He couldn’t pull away. Couldn’t move at all.
Briefly, the room around them disappeared along with Erin leaving nothing but a white void in all directions.
Then they were back.
Tess pulled her hand away and looked at him with terror, and obviously Ollie had saw and felt whatever it was, too, because he pulled his hand away from Tess and rubbed the palm as if it had been burned.
“Everybody’s so much more optimistic,” Erin said, oblivious to their distress. “At least the young folks are. We tend not to pair off when there’s too much stress on the network, and now that you’re here, it feels…” Erin rolled her gaze up to the ceiling and chewed on her bottom lip. “Just feels fresh.”
Tess tentatively returned her hand to Harvey’s wrist. When nothing unusual happened, she projected, “What the hell was that?”
“No idea. We’ll talk about it in a moment.”
“Right.” Tess waved Erin over.
Ollie grabbed the tray from her and eyed her warily.
Harvey couldn’t blame the guy.
“How long have you worked here, Erin?” Tess asked as the girl backed toward the door.
Erin giggled. “Oh, I don’t work here. Chef’s my dad. Kitchen was a bit of a mess because of the banquet last night, so I came to help him out. There are a lot of extra guests here right now, and I guess you don’t really want to hire out to a temp agency or anything like that. They’d be too nosy.”
“How large is the staff?” Tess projected to Harvey.
“Full-time, oh, I’d say less than twenty in this building. Usually, twenty is just right, but you may need to increase the staff soon. I’ll look into it for you.”
“You spoil me.”
“Happy to try, sweetheart.” He looked over Tess’s head at Ollie once again.
Ollie wasn’t playing the one-upmanship game anymore. He was still giving Erin a curious look.
Is he catching something I’m not?
Harvey had no idea what those big apes out in Fallon were capable of. What he’d somehow just learned during the psychic whiteout, though, much to his chagrin, was that the big ape on the bed didn’t mean Tess any harm. Harvey had felt his guiltlessness when they were connected in that brief moment. He’d felt it, not heard it. The Afótama link didn’t work that way. Someone would need to explain what had just happened, and soon.
Erin took her leave and shut the door behind her.
“They’re really not pairing off?” Ollie asked quietly.
Tess shrugged. “That’s not one of the issues that has been brought to my attention, but it does seem that’s the case. Neither my brother nor Nadia have taken mates and they’re both past quarter-life. Why?”
“We’ve got a problem like that in Fallon. The same, but different.” He pulled the napkin off his hearty meal of bacon, eggs, fruit, and toast and reached for the fork. “Matches aren’t taking. The link’s not right or something. People are treating relationships far more casually than they used to. The reverence is gone.”
Harvey was going to make an acidulous retort about Ollie’s lack of reverence for Harvey and Tess’s relationship, but he held his tongue. The information was important to all of them, and he knew how to be professional, even when his emotions were high.
“I wonder if it’s all related,” Tess said.
“How could it be?” Harvey asked. “Up until you touched Ollie last night, the two groups had a tenuous association at best. There was no strong link between the two. Yeah, there are folks on the fringes of each group who openly associate, but it’s a weak tie.”
Tess scoffed and picked up her cereal spoon yet again. “Was a weak tie. They’re all in my head now, but I get a different kind of buzz from them than I do from Afótama.”
“You feel all of them?” Ollie asked, and the color seeped from his face.
Why does that appall him?
That particular skill of the queen should have been common knowledge.
“I think so,” Tess said. “But it’s hard to discern because unlike with our group, I don’t know how many there are. It feels…whole, thou
gh. The group. Like I’m getting all of it and not just bits and pieces. I’m not sure if it’s a two-way connection and if they can feel me too, or if I have a finger on their collective pulse without them knowing it.”
“Fuck,” Ollie whispered. He dragged a hand through his short hair and slumped against the headboard. “Something’s up. I shouldn’t be able to communicate telepathically with Mr. Lang since he’s a stranger, and yet I can. I thought it was because he was just wide open. A weak psychic. I don’t think it’s that, though.”
As if by some sort of reflexive response, Tess, reached for him. She hugged his left arm and leaned her chin against his bicep. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, baby, you did everything right.” He brushed her hair back from her eyes in such a tender way that Harvey found hating him somewhat harder. Ollie meant it, this affection. He wasn’t just trying to win her for a prize because she was queen, but because he truly wanted her.
Just like Harvey.
“I just worry that if word about that gets out, there’ll be a lot of confusion for all of us. Some would believe it to mean that the gods have granted you sovereignty over us outcasts.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?” Harvey asked.
Ollie stared at him for a few moments, but there was no hostility in his gaze. Just open curiosity. Finally, he said, “With me as her consort? No, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. They’d accept it because she’s my true mate, and harming her—even in small ways—would disturb me as well. They would know she wouldn’t try to uproot or upend us. She’d keep things more or less the same. With you as her consort?” He picked up one of his thick bacon strips and folded it in half. “Well, you probably wouldn’t survive the riots, pretty-boy.”
“Hear that, Tess?” Harvey asked flatly. “Paul Bunyan said I’m pretty.”
“Know what?” Ollie cracked the knuckles of his right hand one by one. “I can easily fix that.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“For fuck’s sake, quit it.” Tess scrambled over Ollie and crawled to the edge of the bed. She shook her head as she walked to the bathroom. “I swear, being around you two is like being in fifth grade around the little jerk kid who wouldn’t stop picking on some girl because he had a crush on her. Put a stopper in the testosterone leak, would you?”