The Viking Queen's Men

by Holley Trent

  He worried about both equally. The airmen were long overdue for ass, and the rogues would figure out what and who she was in minutes, if it took that long.

  He hopped off the stool and pushed his way through the crowd.

  “Thank fuck,” he heard Nadia mutter. Nadia was probably wearing enough weapons that she could put a good hurting on half the men in the room, but Ollie had learned that she preferred to be discreet. She probably didn’t want people remembering her face in case some bad shit ever went down.

  But, who wouldn’t remember her? Like her cousin, she was easy on the eyes, and there weren’t too many women with natural red hair who shaved off entire sides of their heads.

  “Ollie!” As always, he caught Tess under the ass when she launched herself at him. She wrapped her legs around his torso, and held herself back a bit from his face to look at him. “You didn’t call me.”

  “If he doesn’t want you, I’ll call you, baby,” some asshole in the crowd called out.

  Ollie grunted, and turned toward the dark back booth no one ever sat at. “No, I didn’t call you,” he said, as he navigated them through the tightly packed tables, squeezing her ass all the while. He suddenly understood Harvey’s frequent threats to spank her.

  What the hell was she thinking, coming to Fallon?

  She had to have known she wasn’t going to arrive to a warm reception.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “I missed you too, baby. Hell, I miss you so fucking bad I can’t stand it. I didn’t want to hear your voice because it’d just remind me that I’m here and you’re… Well, what the hell are you doing here?” He dropped her onto the C-shaped booth’s bench and folded his arms over his chest.

  “Nadia said I was pathetic and got sick of hearing me whine.”

  Nadia slipped into the booth on the adjacent side. “Yep, that’s true. I, however, did not condone this unsanctioned trip. She said I owed her for stabbing her in the neck with a needle, and I guess I agreed.” She shrugged. “I suppose I could have used a little more finesse.”

  “What were you whining about?” Ollie asked. He waved at Jeff and mouthed “menus.” It was close enough to dinnertime and with Harvey always around, Ollie never really got a chance to treat his girl.

  “I’ve been…scattered since last week,” Tess said.

  He didn’t realize her hands were shaking until she started wringing them. He took them, and squeezed. That bit of contact seemed to bolster her and steady her frayed nerves.

  “Harvey was due back yesterday, but got held up not only on his company’s business, but doing some investigation for my grandmother. She has a lot of free time on her hands now and she’s been looking into leads about some cold case stuff from during her tenure. I…I don’t want anyone else touching me.”

  Damn.

  That explained why she and Nadia were out cruising on their own. Harvey wasn’t around to stop them. The fact that it took two men to keep Tess occupied didn’t escape his thoughts. She sure was a hell of a lot of woman to be such a little slip of a thing.

  Jeff sidled over and slipped a laminated menu in front of each of them. He took his time with Nadia’s, even going so far as to massage an invisible smudge off the front with his trusty rag. “Sorry about that,” he said, and shook his head. “With the way the buffoons are around here, a guy can’t have anything nice.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Nadia held her menu in front of her face, which didn’t stop Jeff from leering in her direction.

  Yep.

  Ollie had known it from the moment he’d made Nadia’s acquaintance. She was perfect for Jeff, and he was fucking smitten.

  Good luck, man. She’s not going to make it easy.

  “What’s good?” Tess asked and she squinted at her menu, and probably couldn’t see shit due to the dimness. That table was generally reserved for folks who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves for the hour it took them to eat, drink, and get out.

  Hell, Ollie understood the compulsion. If Nadia hadn’t been there, he’d be snaking his hands up Tess’s breezy shirt and helping himself to palmfuls of her perfect tits. The way she always yipped when he clamped her nipples between his fingers made his cock dance.

  “Whatcha in the mood for, queenie?” Jeff licked his fingers and turned over a fresh sheet of his order pad.

  Tess raised an eyebrow at him. “Tell me I don’t have a reputation in Fallon.”

  “They know of you,” Ollie said, “but most wouldn’t recognize you.”

  “Are they going to be pissed if they find out I’m here?”

  “Well, not pissed,” Jeff said. He twirled his stubby little pencil between his fingers and rolled his gaze up to the ceiling. “Suspicious, maybe. I don’t know how many people know you’ve sunk your claws into Ollie.”

  The table shook, and the epicenter of the rumble appeared to be from the blade of the Bowie knife protruding from the wood. The handle happened to be right in front of Jeff’s crotch. Nadia had pulled that weapon out of gods-knew-where, and being so sharp, it sunk into the wood like a hot knife through butter.

  Jeff didn’t even flinch. “Can’t have nothing nice, just like I said.”

  “You just insulted my cousin.”

  He blinked. “I did?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Nadia,” Tess piped up, “It’s o—”

  Ollie squeezed her knee beneath the table. “Let them work it out. He’s out of practice with women like you two, and needs to be put through his paces.”

  “Nadia’s not exactly a beginner’s level kind of girl.”

  “Nope.” Ollie grinned. That, she wasn’t. That would serve Jeff right for all the talk about Ollie being pussy-whipped like the Afótama men. Obviously, Jeff had never met an Afótama woman before.

  Nadia cocked her head to the side so her bluntly cut hair fell over her shoulder. “You said something about her claws.”

  “It was just an expression,” Jeff said. “Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with the state of my panties. If they’re bunched up, that’s my business. The only time you should ever be worried about my underwear is if they’ve been wadded up and shoved into your mouth as a gag. I keep losing my gags.”

  Jeff’s relaxed expression gave way to a pulled one. His nostrils flared, lips flattened into a tight line, and jaw twitched.

  Nadia drummed her fingers atop the menu. “Are you ready to apologize, or should I carve what I think of you into this nice tabletop?”

  Jeff turned slowly to Tess, and given his deathly pallor, it was a wonder he was still upright. Ollie didn’t want to think about where all the blood from his friend’s head had gone.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dahl,” Jeff said. “I didn’t mean anything by what I said. Ollie’s very lucky.”

  “Thank you,” Tess said cheerily.

  Nadia pulled her knife from the wood and made it disappear beneath the table. “Are you ready to take my order now? I’m starving. The staff cook back in Norseton is trying to push some kind of macrobiotic diet on us, and I need some fucking animal fat soon or I’m going to cry.”

  “That would make you cry?” Jeff asked, deadpan.

  “I’d like a bacon cheeseburger, medium rare, with the works. Don’t be stingy with the avocado, but don’t bother if it’s not properly ripe. On the side, I want onion rings with the…” She drummed her blood red nails against the menu and clucked her tongue. “Hmm, let me have the whiskey barbecue dipping sauce, and not just a squirt. Give me a whole cup, got it? And… house salad on the side.”

  “It’s just lettuce, honey. No one ever orders it, so I don’t buy anything else.”

  “Thank you for being honest, but if you call me honey again, I’ll see that you wake up naked and facedown in a sticky pool of it.”

  “Shit.”

  “Water to drink, thanks.”

  Jeff turned to Ollie. “I’m in love.”

  Ollie groaned. “Get me the usual, and a pitcher
of decent beer with glasses.”

  “What’s your usual?” Tess asked.

  “Enough food for a man my size. I won’t bore you with the specifics. What do you want?”

  “Just fries, I guess. I’ve been so agitated that my appetite is more or less fucked. I’m just grazing.”

  Jeff walked away to put the order in.

  Ollie draped his arm over Tess’s shoulders. “Baby, we’re going to have to find ways to minimize your stress when you’re at home alone. Back in the day when the men went out raiding, they’d leave their women at home for weeks at a time.”

  “Those women weren’t the queen,” Nadia said. She scratched at the edges of the table’s new scar with a fingernail. “Our grandfather stayed near Nan for the first three years after they decided to pair off. She’s not ashamed to admit she was a very needy queen early on. Tess will be twice as needy because she’s absorbed your group’s web, such as it is, along with ours.”

  Shit.

  He hadn’t thought about it that way. He occasionally tapped into her anxiety, but it was so fleeting, he could never be sure if he’d imagined it. If she was blocking him out that well, she was more powerful than he’d thought.

  Damn.

  She couldn’t keep that up, though. The stress would eat her alive.

  Sitting next to him, her energy, that he’d started to read as a bit electric, neutralized a bit. She’d entered the bar with high coloring—a red flush bloomed on her usually pale skin. The longer she sat near him, the more of her natural coloring emerged. She was wound tight, and that was half his fault for letting her get that way.

  How the hell cam I going to fill her gaps if she won’t let me in to find them?

  He squeezed her hand. “Hey. Once I tie up loose ends here and get the boys squared away, you’ll have more of me than you’ll know what to do with.”

  “I’m at a loss when you and Harvey are gone at the same time. You two keep me grounded. Without you, the web tries to drown me. I didn’t realize until you were gone that you two are kind of like rocks blocking a strong current.”

  “How so?”

  She closed her eyes tightly and shook her head. “I can’t explain it.”

  “That’s okay.” He stroked the backs of her hands. “We’re going to have to figure it out. You’re going to get used to only having one rock, though. We’ll figure it all out.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes opened, and she locked her gaze on the cardboard coaster in front of her.

  There it was again. Some floodgate on her mind opened up and her anxiety beat at him. He felt unusually cold, but it’d been so hot in the bar.

  He chafed his hand up and down her back. “It’s all right, honey. You’re here now.”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat in a companionable silence for a few minutes. Tess calmed enough to check messages on her phone. Nadia divided her attention between the baseball game and the doofus manning the bar.

  Nadia was interested. Ollie would have bet his bike on it.

  Tess set her phone down and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “What’s wrong? And don’t tell me nothing. You’re trying to block me, but I can feel something.”

  “It’s for me to worry about. A bit of stress in the web. All the questioning we did with Fiona this past week didn’t net us any new leads, so we’re trying to make sense of what we have now, and it’s not much.”

  Right.

  He doubted it was just that, but wouldn’t push. “How many are still missing?”

  “We believe around fifteen. Some of those might have been runaways and not abductions, so it’s hard to determine an accurate figure. Fifteen is still a lot given the size of our group. Their families are clamoring for me to find them, or at least tell them what happened to them.”

  “Whether they’re dead or alive, you mean.”

  She nodded against his shoulder.

  “I’ll help you all I can. Maybe I can help you feel them out while you tug on the web. Maybe someone will pop their head up so we can triangulate them.”

  “I’ll try anything.”

  Kelly, the waitress who’d been providing surly, yet efficient, customer service in the Longship for the past two years thunked the pitcher of beer onto the table and let the glass mugs down with a clatter.

  Nadia gave her a malevolent head-to-toe once-over, but said nothing.

  Tess sat more upright and reached for a mug.

  “Who’s your friend, Ollie?” Kelly asked. She popped her gum loudly, and focused her sour expression on Tess.

  Shit. Don’t start this.

  “This is Contessa,” he said, enunciating each syllable of her name clearly. A nickname wouldn’t do. Ollie wanted to make her importance to him known without overt posturing.

  Kelly smacked her gum some more. “Don’t know her.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said. “Thanks for the beer. I guess our food will be out soon?”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t look. So, where’s she from?”

  “Why don’t you ask her directly?” Nadia asked. “She’s neither deaf nor mute, and she might just deign to answer you.”

  Kelly didn’t even look at her. She was still looking at Tess.

  He gave Tess’s knee a reassuring squeeze beneath the table. “You don’t have to answer her, baby.”

  “Of course I do. I’m bred to be a politician, remember? Wouldn’t do for me to clam up if she asks a simple question.”

  Ollie closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  He should have expected Kelly to be a little shit. She was Kristy’s cousin, after all. Pettiness ran in the family, and he wondered why he hadn’t seen it all along.

  “How do you know Ollie?” Kelly asked her.

  Tess laced her fingers atop the table and cleared her throat. “Well, that’s difficult to explain, but suffice it to say he holds a very important position out in Norseton.”

  Kelly’s nose crinkled. “Norseton. You’re from there?”

  Tess nodded. “Mm-hmm. Sure am.”

  Kelly huffed. “Well, Ollie, I guess you weren’t a real man after all if you had to go trawling for women there. That would explain a lot, though. Makes sense why Kristy did what she did. You can’t handle our girls, can you? Got too much spunk?”

  “Ollie?”

  Spunk was the very least of their issues. He squeezed Tess’s knee once more. “Don’t respond. She wants a fight.”

  “Yes, honey, I get that.”

  Ollie didn’t know why, but suddenly, there was a perfect calmness about Tess. Serenity, even. It was as if she’d traveled into some placid place in her mind and displaced herself from the confrontation in front of her. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one.

  “Kelly, order up!” Jeff called from the bar.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m getting it,” she yelled back. She sashayed away, chuckling. “Got distracted by the trollops at table fourteen. They’re from Norseton, you guys. Real deal Afótama. We should show them a proper welcome, right?”

  Voices of assent chimed up in the room around her, and Ollie made a mental note of all the ones he recognized. Some surprised him.

  “Kelly, stop fucking around and telling other people’s business,” Jeff shouted. “Get the order, or get out.”

  “All right,” she sang. “I’m getting it. I wonder who’s paying the tab. Is that life insurance policy you collected on still earning you dividends on the stock market, Ollie?”

  He tented his fingers, then twirled his thumbs. He’d heard it all before. She pulled the same shit around Matt and Lyman, constantly trying to humiliate and emasculate him, but Ollie wouldn’t take the bait. He had to be bigger than that. That’s why he always asked the gods to gift him with restraint, and not more physical strength. One was easier to come by than the other.

  Nadia turned her head slowly toward Tess, who was still projecting that sweet serenity. Tess nodded, and Nadia slipped off the bench. Tess scooted around after her.
/>   “Where are you going?” Ollie asked. It wasn’t a great time to powder her nose. He wouldn’t put it past Kelly to corner her in the bathroom and start some shit, and Ollie had no qualms about going in after her.

  “Not far. Not far at all.”

  Nadia slipped back into her seat, but kept her body turned toward the bar.

  Tess tapped Kelly on her shoulder, and the younger woman turned around. “What?”

  “I don’t know who you are, and I’d certainly like to correct that, but before I do, I’d just like to make one thing clear,” Tess said, and her voice was as sweet as a songbird.

  “What’s about to happen?” Ollie asked Nadia, because she obviously knew, whether she wanted to spill the details or not. She was grinning too fucking hard.

  “Oh, just another day on the job. I believe your queen is putting a peasant in her place.”

  “If Kelly touches my—”

  Kelly’s crazed laughter filled the room. She found what Tess had to say highly amusing, apparently.

  Nadia grabbed his wrist when he started to stand. “Sit. Don’t forget who Tess is.”

  “I haven’t forgotten, and I haven’t forgotten who I am, either. You’ve gotta know I’m wired to keep my woman out of trouble. I can’t just fucking sit here and watch.”

  “Oh, you’ll sit. Watch. Learn a little about your woman, why doncha?” Nadia’s wide grin was patently malevolent.

  Holy shit.

  “Ollie is my mate,” Tess said. “And, yes, I’m Afótama. If you read last month’s newsletter from our office, you may even recognize my face.” Tess framed it with her hands and grinned. “Wasn’t my official portrait fantastic? I know, I know.” She threw her hands up. “Photoshop is such a miracle piece of technology, right? I’m so much prettier in my pictures, but anyhow.” She beamed. “Why don’t we go ahead and make one thing perfectly clear.”

  “Uh, Kelly? You might want to back up,” someone in the room warned.

  “Shut up,” Jeff called from the counter. “You goaded her on, and this what happens when Vikings can’t hold their fucking tongues. Justice. We don’t need to convene at the Allthing to mete it out. Ain’t that right, queenie?”