by Holley Trent
“I don’t want to know where you learned to do that.”
“Ask me and I’ll tell you.”
“Nope. I don’t want to imagine your little army of submissives down on their knees with their faces tilted up like baby birds waiting for scraps. I bet they were all waiting to be raided and plundered, and you begrudgingly complied again and again. Poor you.”
“Mmm. Sounds about right.”
She swatted him. “Asshole.” She let The Playground dissolve around them, and back in the real world, Harvey pressed his hands to her face and pulled her into a breath-stealing kiss that made her forget what she was angry about.
Nan cleared her throat at the gazebo opening, and Tess pulled back from Harvey, cheeks ablaze.
Harvey obviously felt no such shame, and grinned as he draped his arms over the back of the bench.
“If you’re going to neck in public,” Nan said, “you need to have guards with you.”
“I thought we were safe within Norseton,” Tess said.
“Generally,” Jody said. He and Nan took the bench across from Tess and Harvey. “But, we do have some traffic coming in and out that we can’t control one hundred percent. The delivery vehicles, for instance. We can’t have huge grocery orders dropped off at the gates.”
“Got it,” Tess said. “How’s our prodigal girl settling in? I can’t make heads or tails of her on the web. She’s so…”
“Scattered?” Nan offered.
Tess nodded. The word was more polite than what she was thinking.
“Just fine. Her parents will see to it that she and the children adjust well and get her the medical care she needs. We’ll question her later about what she knows. We’ll give her some time to calm herself first.”
“Great.”
“Where’s Mr. Gilisson?” Nan asked. “He did come back with you, didn’t he?”
“He left some things in Fallon up in the air and had to go make some calls.” She muttered a thank-you to the Viking gods, because she and Harvey had needed that talk. She’d needed to be sure he understood. “He’ll catch up with us soon.”
Nan lifted her chin and stared at something beyond Tess and Harvey. “Excellent timing. Here he comes now.”
Ollie jogged up the path, waving on approach.
Tess couldn’t help smiling at the sight of him. A man as large as him shouldn’t have moved so gracefully. He had a confident awareness of his body, and every movement hypnotized. He’d awed her the moment he stepped into her suite, and she still hadn’t recovered from the dazzlement.
He must be exquisite in battle.
“What?” he projected as he took the adjacent bench.
“Nothing. Just thinking about you…and your sword.”
“Oh, yeah? Want me to fit it in your sheath?”
“Yes, please.”
Harvey gave her knee a squeeze. “Having trouble focusing? Your grandmother asked you a question.”
“Sorry. I, uh…” There wasn’t a damned thing she could say that would keep her out of trouble, so she just cleared her throat and looked studiously in her grandmother’s direction. “Could you repeat that, please?”
“Certainly. I asked if you were ready for a heavy blow.”
Tess felt her brow furrow. “I’m sorry?”
Harvey leaned in and whispered, “Your parents, Tess.”
“Oh.” Tess could read nothing from Nan’s expression, but Jody’s was drawn. He leaned forward with his forearms over his thighs and wrung his hands. He wouldn’t look at her. That didn’t bode well.
“I didn’t want to drop too much on you at once, because I worried you’d transfer your anxiety into the web. I understand, however, that Mr. Gilisson can help you with that?”
Ollie nodded.
“Then by all means, please help her.”
Ollie closed the short distance between his bench and Tess, and sat at her right.
She looked at Harvey, who nodded grimly, and let go of his hand. She took Ollie’s. Touching them both could lead to unpredictable results. Harvey would have understood that.
“Hi, Tess!” Bubbly, smiling Erin jogged past the gazebo waving with a small dark-haired woman on her heels, whom also waved. Erin wore those bright white sneakers, a sports bra, and a pair of exercise shorts so tiny that if she bent over, they could probably see London and France.
“Hi,” Tess said through clenched teeth.
Ollie hissed and Harvey muttered, “Fuck, Tess.”
She looked down to find she’d dug her nails into Ollie’s palm and Harvey’s thigh.
“Sorry.” She gave them apologetic pats, and retook Ollie’s hand.
“You could hardly fault them for looking,” Jody said. “I mean, our girls are h-h-ho—”
His eyes rolled back in his head and his body shook violently with a seizure of some sort.
Harvey and Ollie both got to their feet, but Nan held up her hands, keeping them back.
Jody stopped shaking, and growled through his bared teeth. “Nan!”
“Gods, child, it wasn’t me. I always fire off a warning shot.”
They all turned to look at Tess.
She blinked, and then shrugged. “Did I do that?” If she had, she thought he’d totally deserved it.
Jody growled again.
“Sorry,” she said flatly. “I guess I have a new trick. I wish I’d known.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Watch your mouth, maybe.”
Ollie chuckled and took her hand once more. “You are a scary little woman.”
“Just wait until I actually know what I’m doing. Really, Jody. I am sorry, a little.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “You need to work with Nadia on keeping your emotions from coming to sudden heads like that. You have the capability to seriously hurt people without trying.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Who was the brunette of so little enthusiasm jogging with Erin?”
“That would be your secretary Lora.”
Oh.
She probably should have known that. Suddenly, though, she realized something off about her supposed secretary.
She furrowed her brow. “Wait, Lora’s not—”
“Afótama? No.”
“Thank you, but what I was actually going to say was lily white. It’s extra-white here, y’all. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Nan sighed. “I’m certain Lora has. She was one of many children who were adopted during the time you were gone.”
“That ought to help keep the gene pool fresh. How do people avoid hooking up with their relatives?”
“Careful record-keeping, which is one of the jobs of the matriarch. Hopefully, I’ll have many years ahead to teach you your next role. Back to the matter at hand, however. Around twenty years ago, your brother Keith set out on a mission of exploration, if you will. Like all of us, he was enamored of the sea. He and some of his friends chartered a boat, and they hopped from island to island in the Caribbean, visited the South American coast, and I’m certain they even made it to Hawaii once or twice. One day, he came home and he had this harebrained scheme to find us all a new place to settle. Somewhere by the sea, he said. We all laughed it off at the time, because where could we go and thrive where men don’t already live? He made it his mission to look anyway. We received a letter from him when he’d just turned twenty, and he told us there was a small island a gentleman would consider letting us lease. Of course I said no outright, and then we didn’t hear from him again. Your parents set out to track him, and that was the last time we saw them alive. The Cuban government was kind enough to send them back to us for burial.”
Whoa.
Tess’s life and history really was sounding more and more like the plot of a graphic novel. “But, you said you believed Keith was alive.”
She nodded. “Yes, Keith is alive. He’s on the web. You wouldn’t recognize him.”
Obviously.
With some practice, she’d been able to easily hone in on J
ody, but just Jody. She didn’t feel anyone else on the web with the same relationship.
“And there’s something’s wrong with him,” Jody said. “His thoughts are wild. He doesn’t seem to have any awareness of us any longer. He’s lost in his own head.”
Tess really didn’t want to ask the question she had in mind, but didn’t see where she had a choice. She wrung her hands. “Do you…think he was somehow responsible for our parents’ deaths?”
Jody nodded, but Nan shook her head.
Shit. If they didn’t agree, how the hell was she supposed to know what to do? She didn’t want to believe her own brother would purposefully lead their parents to harm, but if he had, what was she willing to do about it? She could convene the Thing—their assembly—and let the Afótama hash out a suitable punishment for him, but Keith was a family problem. She and Nan could deal with him quietly.
“It’s not high priority at the moment, Tess,” Nan said, “but tying off bleeding arteries is one of the queen’s jobs. I couldn’t find him, but you must try. You need to ensure our secrets aren’t being spread around, and that if one of us harms another, appropriate measures are taken to discourage others who would do the same.”
She got up and gave Tess’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “It’s a lot to take in all at once, but you were born to be queen, and that means you’re equipped to endure the trials. Don’t forget to check in with Lora. You should know the staff, at least by their faces.”
Nan stepped down from the gazebo and headed toward home.
Jody stood next. He pulled his beanie hat down more snugly and shifted his weight. “When it’s time to look, Tess, I’ll go with you. We need to get you better at tracking first. It’s in the Afótama skill set, but you should be best at it.”
“I can’t even find my way out of a crowded parking lot,” she said softly.
Harvey wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “I’ll help you. You’re too hardheaded for anyone else.”
“Ha ha.” She sighed and laid her forehead against his chest. “Thanks for being here,” she projected as Jody left them.
“I’d do anything for you.”
There was another set of footsteps retreating down the path, and Tess knew without looking that it was Ollie.
Shit. How must they have looked to him? He probably thought Tess had totally shut him out in favor of Harvey. The truth was, neither man was ever far from her mind. Just because her attention wasn’t on one didn’t mean she wasn’t concerned about the other.
In the web, the two of them were closest to her in the middle. She could hardly check in on the clan without having to mentally climb over them, and that connection was getting stickier with time. If she lost one man, his absence would leave a hole not just in her heart, but also at the very center of the web. She wanted them both. Needed them both.
“He’ll have to figure out how to take you when he wants you, Tess,” Harvey said softly, apparently tapping into the cause of her stress. “You know I’m not going to leave gaps for him to fit in. He’s going to have to make his own.”
“I know,” she whispered.
But what if he doesn’t want to?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“There you are.” Two days later, Tess found Ollie in the mansion’s private library, bent over a large book.
He looked up and smiled. “Yeah, here I am.”
She sidled up to the table he’d claimed and peered at the ancient text. “What are you reading?”
“It’s an accounting of some of the battles our group engaged in before we sailed to the Americas.”
“Before we split, you mean.”
“Yes. It’s interesting stuff. It’s hard to tell how much is hyperbole and how much is factual, but there’s a lot of good warfare strategy in there.” He picked up the left-side pages and carefully shut the book. After belting it and returning it to its glass case, he pulled off the white cotton gloves provided for manuscript handling and bunched them together. Nan must have really trusted him to give him free rein of such valuable documents. “Did you need something?”
The sharp tone took her aback. He’d just smiled at her. She realized it must have been forced.
Crossing her arms, she leaned against the table edge and cleared her throat. “Not really. I wondered if you were hiding from me.”
He rubbed his thumbs over the glove fabric somewhat meditatively, and stared at her for a long while.
She didn’t think he was going to answer, and she couldn’t make sense of the emotions coiling around him.
“Of course not,” he said finally. “If I were going to hide, I’d go back to Fallon.” He dropped the gloves, and sank onto the seat at the end of the table. He patted his lap, and Tess sat sideways across it. She sighed as she nestled her face against his chest.
Being near him felt so good, and he’d been scarce since leaving the gazebo. She’d worried he’d walked off to stew and plot his challenge, and it’d been a hard two days without his soothing touch. The inside of her head was as loud as a rock and roll concert. The buzz had gotten worse instead of better thanks to some out-of-control tutoring sessions with Nan. Nan could tell Tess in very practical terms how to manipulate the Afótama web to get the information she needed out of it, but to Nan, it was simple. Tess’s gift was unpredictable because of whom her father had been. The last of their kind born of a warrior had been Ótama’s daughter Sævör.
Tess drummed her fingertips on the sides of Ollie’s arms. Maybe she was looking to the wrong person for a tutor. Who better to educate her on her gifts than the woman whom they stemmed from?
She had a thought.
“Ótama told me that before he died, my father made sure that our match was ordained.”
“I remember reading that off you in your playground.”
“It didn’t make sense why he would do that until now.”
“Explain.”
“Well, we’ve had centuries of Afótama queens with Afótama consorts. All of their powers manifested in more or less the same way.”
“And your father wasn’t Afótama. Hmm. I think I see where you’re going.” His rough fingertips traced the curves of her jaw and chin.
She sighed indulgently and closed her eyes. “Exactly. I’ve got all the queenly shit, but not the same control of it because no one here knows what the other half comes with.”
“But, I do.”
“Mm-hmm. You can help me map out what’s what, maybe work with Harvey to figure out how to counterbalance the two sides.”
Ollie grunted and tipped her off his lap as he stood.
She slapped her feet to the floor before her ass could hit it. “What’d you do that for?”
“Sorry.” He walked to an open bookcase and peered at the spines. “Look, I’ll help you all I can.” He didn’t sound particularly enthused.
She ground the heels of her palms against her eyes and gritted her teeth. She would have thought that of the two of them, Harvey would have been the more difficult one to convince they should give the ménage arrangement a shot. Ollie was far more laidback, so she was surprised at he hadn’t considered the compromise on his own.
All right. Soothe the beast.
She moved around the desk and stepped behind him at the bookcase. “Why don’t you seek me out?” She slipped her hands inside the back of his black shirt and pressed them at the base of his spine. He was so warm, so strong. She loved every hard inch of his body, and all the soft ones, too. His rough edges had been hewn by years of hard work and persistence. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d give up on anything, and she was going to make sure he stuck it out with her, too.
Come what may.
“Why don’t you seek me out? Come looking for me?” She traced around the top of his waistband with a feather-light touch that made him suck in a breath.
“I figured you were busy.”
“I’m never too busy for you and Harvey.”
She ignored the deep rumble from his chest
and fluttered her fingers over the silky trail of hair beneath his bellybutton. She felt his pulse thundering in that place as his blood headed south.
“Besides, Harvey had to fly to Charlotte to tie up some business issues. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Harvey could have done some of what he had to do remotely, but they’d both agreed Ollie needed placating. Harvey had hoped he’d only be gone for a few days, but while he was there, he’d get all his ducks in a row. He didn’t want to have to leave Tess again—not when she really needed him.
“How long has he been gone?”
“Two days.”
She dipped her hands inside his waistband and he grabbed her wrists as her fingertips skimmed his coarse curls.
“You’re just lonely,” he said. “I feel it.”
“You’re right that I’m lonely, but being lonely doesn’t make me desperate. I was by myself for a very long time, and celibate for most of it. If I’m touching you, it’s because it makes me happy to do so. I assure you that’s a rare thing. To be Afótama, I value my personal space far too much to give it up casually.”
“I believe you.”
“Good. Let go of my wrists.”
He hesitated. “Is that an order from the queen or merely a request?”
She canted her head, staring at him. She felt nothing from him. Either he didn’t feel any particular way, or he was able to lock his emotions down the same way she did her thoughts.
Does he not want me to touch him?
“I don’t want to order you, Ollie. I just want to touch you. Please let me.”
She begged. She’d never been a woman who’d beg.
He let go.
She rested her chin against his back and closed her eyes. “Are you going to make things hard for me?” she whispered. It was a rhetorical question she expected no response to.
He gave none.
“Harvey told me that he’s been online since he was a kid.”
Ollie tensed against her, but didn’t move away.
“He caught bits and pieces of psychic activity from the time he was very young, and never told anyone because he didn’t want to get into trouble.”