by Kate Pearce
“So, when are you going back?” Jeff asked.
Ollie righted his water bottle and unscrewed the cap. “As soon as I can. Being an adult means I’ve got to handle business properly. I’ve got bikes waiting to be fixed and the boys to take care of. Missed them when I was gone.” Lyman seemed to be out of the loop, and not really understanding where Ollie had been, but Matt had been nothing but cynical since Ollie had come home.
Ollie couldn’t really blame him. His father had gone off to claim the hand of some woman whose sovereignty their lot didn’t accept. But, Matt didn’t know what it felt like to have someone hand-picked for him and to not be happy until he knew that person was his.
“You got time to fix my bike?” Jeff asked.
Ollie shook his head. “Sorry, man. I’m going to have to take a rain check. Why don’t you just replace it? The cost of repairs at this point are higher than the value of the bike.”
“Come on, that was my daddy’s bike.”
Ollie gave him the long blink treatment.
Jeff sighed. “All right, the muffler came off Pop’s bike, but me and that muffler have been through thick and thin, you know?”
“Buy a new bike,” Ollie said slowly, putting extra emphasis on the word new.
Jeff mouthed fuck and swirled his rag over the bar top. He polished the polyurethaned surface meditatively for a moment, and his forehead furrowed with what appeared to be consternation.
“What happened now? Forgot to put in the alcohol order again?”
“This is just curiosity talking here, but pardon it ’cause I’ve never been great at recognizing folks from pictures. Does your queen ever go out unescorted?”
“She’s not supposed to, but no one can really stop her, especially since she doesn’t have formal guards right now.” Harvey had pulled them, and Ollie had kept his mouth shut. He would have done the same had he the authority.
“Oh, okay.” Jeff nodded and swirled his rag some more.
“For fuck’s sake, man, why?”
“Uh, I dunno. There’s a woman by the door wearing a belt buckle that looks like yours. There ain’t too many people rocking sterling silver longship buckles. Just sayin’.”
Ollie turned around on his stool and immediately caught sight of Tess and Nadia standing by the door. She must not have seen him yet, because they’d gotten swarmed the moment they walked in. He didn’t think it was because she was the Afótama queen. Common sense told him that it was because she and Nadia were two of very few women in a room of hard-up airmen and Viking-descended rogues.
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. Knowing Nadia, she was probably wearing enough weapons that she could put a good hurting on half the men in the room, but 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 must 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 around, he never really got a chance to treat his girl.
“I’ve been disjointed since last week.”
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 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 sank your claws into Ollie.”
The table shook, and the epicenter of the rumble appeared to be from the blade of the Bowie knife now 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 now.
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 with that 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. She was just so strong. She never let on that she was dealing with. 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. It’d eat her alive.
Now he saw what he couldn’t feel. 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.
Shit. How was he going to fill her gaps if she wouldn’t let him 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 in real life. 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.
Shit, there it was. Suddenly, her anxiety beat at him, and he felt unusually cold. 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.
She 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 put a figure on it. Fifteen is a fucking lot given the size of the 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 on 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 asked a simple question.”
Of course this shit would have to happen to him. She was Kristy’s little cousin, after all. Naturally, she’d be a little brat. It 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. That life insurance policy you collected on still earning you dividends on the stock market, Ollie?”
He tented his fingers, twirled his thumbs. He’d heard it all before. She pulled that 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.