Chapter 4 #2
Lovely and a bit cross. ‘Twas a potent combination, that. He also wasn’t entirely certain that the crease she had in her cheek hadn’t come from whatever leafy bower she’d been using for her most recent repose.
She also had the most beautiful pair of blue eyes he’d ever seen.
He was half tempted to tuck her hair behind her ears to have a better view of them, but she was already scowling at him, so he suspected he might do well to stow his hands safely in his pockets.
He also resisted the temptation to look behind her and check for wings, but he was nothing if not self-disciplined.
That and she was cradling a notebook to her sweet self with one hand and holding pen like a sword with the other, business end sensibly pointed in the right direction.
Knowing what he knew about faeries and how they reacted to having their homes disturbed, he had no doubt she would stab him with her writing implement if it suited her.
“I was here first,” she announced.
“So you were,” he said, making her a slight bow. “My apologies for the disturbance.”
She didn’t move. “Are you lurking or hiding?”
“A bit of both.” He paused and wondered if a bit of honesty might endear him to her. “But mostly hiding.”
“Hmmm,” she said, continuing to study him as if she were coming to some sort of conclusion about his trustworthiness.
He could understand that, given the crowd, so he attempted to look as harmless as possible and simply waited her out.
She nodded suddenly, then shifted to make room for him. “I’ll allow it.”
He wasted no time in taking advantage of the concession. He ducked behind her to take up a position against the wall only to almost take up a position fully upon his arse. She glanced at the rucksack he’d almost crushed.
“That’s everything I own,” she said. “Don’t step on it.”
He moved her backpack a bit and did the best he could within the constraints of the locale. “No suitcase?”
“It’s currently captive in the trunk of my ride’s car.”
“I understand,” he said.
“So I saw outside.”
“You did?” he asked in surprise. “And you didn’t stay to help me?”
“I needed to get in here as early as possible and stake out some prime observational real estate. Besides, you almost ran me over. That gave me license to ignore any good Samaritan impulses.”
It occurred to him with a start that she was the woman he’d almost flattened with his car.
“My apologies,” he said sincerely. “Was I impolite?”
“You delivered a very gentle honk, though you should probably pay more attention to where you’re going.” She paused. “I might need to say that again while looking in a mirror.”
He almost smiled, but decided levity at the moment might be dangerous. She was, after all, the one with the pen and he’d heard that the pen was ofttimes mightier than the sword. In her case, that might hold doubly true.
“So are you staff or guest?” she asked.
“Guest,” he said. “Of a sort.”
She shot him a look. “When I first saw you, I thought you were here auditioning for a cover model job.”
He refused to feel ridiculously chuffed. “Well,” he began modestly, “I suppose—”
“Then again, you might be trying to avoid old girlfriends.”
The saints preserve him, he had no idea.
His command of his brother’s love life was sketchy at best most likely because neither of them had much of one to start with.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t date in any given century, it was that they’d decided they likely shouldn’t date.
It had seemed like a decent idea several years earlier when they’d thought it up, but of late he’d begun to wonder if they’d lost their minds.
They were, as he would freely admit to anyone who would listen, absolute idiots most of the time.
But at the moment he wasn’t above tossing his brother to the wolves to repay him for the recent slog north, so he looked at his faery and nodded.
“I might be.”
“Then you’d better scrunch a bit more. You’ll be spotted otherwise.”
Sam wasn’t entirely sure how much more scrunching he would manage.
A very luxurious diet and a rather tall sire had left him a pair of inches over six feet whilst an intense desire not to die because he’d neglected his swordplay had left him relatively fit.
Trying to fold himself into a space better suited for a child wasn’t going to be possible.
His dainty guardian moved a branch aside with her pen, studied the group, then retreated to safety. “Dangerous people out there. You should be afraid.”
He absolutely was. He leaned back against the wall and looked up at her.
“Are you here for an audition as well?” he asked, doing his best to ignore the twinge in his lower back.
She looked at him, blinked a time or two, then laughed a little. “For a cover model job? Hardly.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “You have this Titania emerging from her bower look going that’s very convincing.”
“You mean I lost my brush.”
He smiled. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t not say it, either,” she said with a snort, then she shrugged. “I’m just here for the conference like everyone else.”
“Then why are you hiding back here?”
She looked thoroughly uncomfortable, far past where a faery might after having been interrupted during her late afternoon repose.
“I like to assess the field of battle before I step onto it,” she admitted, shooting him a quick look as if she wanted to see how he might react to that. “Preparation is the key to victory, you know.”
What he thought was that he might just have fallen a little in love. “I’ve heard that’s true,” he agreed. “So what does your battle plan entail?”
“I’m still working on it. My list of dangerous things to avoid in the wilds of England is trapped in my missing suitcase, so you see me in reduced circumstances at the moment.”
“I could help you make a new list,” he offered.
“You’re English?”
“Born and bred,” he said, nodding. If he neglected to elaborate on any of the particulars, perhaps that was understandable.
“Then you might have opinions on the dangers to be found in your bucolic villages.”
“I might,” he managed, though he suspected he wasn’t going to be offering opinions on anything past the fare at the local pub in the current century. “Had you come to the conference to add to your list?”
She studied him a bit longer, as if she felt the need to judge how her words might be received.
He suspected that, given her location, the thought of mingling with the terrifying merchants of misrule out there in the ballroom was just as terrifying to her as it was to him.
Because he understood that, he attempted to look as if a dodgy thought had never once occurred to him.
And in general that was true, his recent unkind thoughts about his brother aside.
“I’m actually here to observe a writer.”
Sam dragged himself away from thoughts of his sibling’s well-deserved future discomfort and nodded. His companion had certainly picked the right gaggle of souls for that sort of thing,
“And if all goes well with the surveillance, I might ask for writing tips. But nothing too murderous,” she added quickly. “I’m not a fan of blood and gore.”
He considered that for a moment or two. Perhaps Theo could find her a doting granny to take her under her literary wing, lightly edit her prose, and show her the less grisly ropes of genteel mysterious fiction.
And on the off chance she wanted something with a bit more drama, say over-spiced cakes at a village fête or a bookstore where books had been reshelved out of their proper order, his brother could surely find her that sort of mentor as well.
Though the thought of his brother taking over the care and safeguarding of that lovely faery there left him feeling slightly cross.
“Low blood sugar?”
He pulled himself away from renewed thoughts of fratricide and nodded. “We’ll lay siege to the buffet the moment they open it,” he promised. “Why don’t you distract me by telling me who you’re here to see.”
She looked at him seriously. “Can you keep a secret?”
“I am,” he vowed, “a vault.”
She seemed to be steeling herself for the revelation of something truly dire, so he kept very still and waited for her to gather her courage.
“I am here to observe …”
Sam continued to remain motionless so as not to prevent her from sharing her most cherished concerns with him.
She took a deep breath. “You’re sure you won’t say anything?”
He crossed his heart.
“Then … TD Piaget.”
Sam stopped just short of choking because he was a bloody knight of the realm and knew well how to keep his countenance. He permitted himself a small clearing of his throat, though, and tried to decide if his day had radically improved or just gone down the loo.
“Have you heard of him?”
“In passing,” Sam managed.
“Have you read his books?”
Read them, lived them, was there really any difference? What he did know for certain was that Theo could bloody well go to the back of the queue when it came to that gel there. He’d found her first and a man didn’t give up the company of a delicate, charming faery without a fight—
“Do you not like them?”
Sam opened his mouth to speak, then shut it before he said something he might regret. He was there to impersonate his brother, not fall for a woman he’d just met—especially a woman who’d come to meet that same brother. But that surely didn’t mean he had to be overly enthusiastic, did it?
“They’re decent,” he conceded. “A bit on the thin side when it comes to romance, but I don’t think he has a clue what to do when a beautiful woman crosses his path. And I understand his hygiene isn’t top shelf.” He shrugged. “You might want to observe him from a distance.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, frowning thoughtfully.