Knight in Leather (7 page)

He tucked his phone into his pocket and reached to unlock the door. “Aye, you are. Let’s just hope Dasha will, too. I’m dying here.”

“You’ll be all right, big guy. Just remember—slow and easy. She’ll come around. I promise.”

Ethan had to believe her. He didn’t really have a choice. It wasn’t like he could trade Dasha in for a different mate. Even if he could, he wasn’t so sure he would. The one he had had already imprinted on him.

“What the hell?”

Dasha burrowed a little lower into the pile of covers she’d built up at the end of Siobhan, Caryl, and Daryn’s sofa and squinted at her phone screen. The fairy slumber party had puttered out hours ago. The three women had stumbled, tipsy and giggling, to their beds, but Dasha couldn’t sleep. She could blame her sugar high from all the cookies she’d eaten during the barbecue, or perhaps even stress. Whatever the reason, every time she closed her eyes, she received a barrage of thoughts about everything under the sun. That sort of brain activity was a far cry from being sleep-inducing, so she’d figured she’d play some games on her phone until she nodded off.

She hadn’t expected to see
that name
popping up in her
BUY, BUILD, DESTROY!
friend request list.

“EthanGotchA,” she read, and snorted. “Cute.”

She paused her finger over the accept button, pondering how he’d found her in the game. She was searchable by her social media accounts and email address, but—as far as she knew—he didn’t have knowledge of those.
Unless someone told him.

She rolled her eyes, and fired off a text to Simone.
Gonna shiv you when I see you in the morning.

Her friend probably wouldn’t see the message until whenever she got around to rolling off of Heath, but Dasha was content with the nice little note being there waiting for when Simone woke.

She hit the accept button anyway, figuring being cordial couldn’t hurt. It wasn’t like the guy was awake. He wouldn’t know whether she’d accepted or declined until the next time he opened his app.

Humming softly, she went about her business, building up houses and shops and scanning her friends’ little worlds to see who needed aid and who needed to be taken down a few pegs.

She sent a category-four hurricane to one bustling city, snatched up the building materials from the fallen skyscraper, and hid them in storage in her city. The other player would only know Dasha was responsible if he happened to check the contents of her storage. Once the materials were repurposed, the ownership labels fell off. She didn’t plan on leaving the items in storage for too long. She immediately assigned the wood and metal to be used in reinforcing her city’s walls and spent a thousand
BBD
bucks to accelerate the process. She’d be in the clear if that guy didn’t wake in the next hour.

Suddenly, an in-game message popped up on the screen, and she yipped, thinking that the guy
did
already see the carnage. His retaliations were always excessively brutal, which was why she only poked at him when she thought he was asleep. When she saw the username tagged onto the message, though, her heart rate didn’t slow any.

EthanGotchA:
How the bloody hell do you play this game? It says I have to wait eight hours to do anything else. Is that right?

Dasha let out a tittering laugh and rubbed her eyes. The correspondence was benign enough. She could handle benign.

dotdotdotdash:
That’s right. When you’re first getting started, you’re limited in how much you can get done. You either have to wait or spend game bucks to get stuff faster.

EthanGotchA:
I’ve got 1000 game bucks.

Dasha was sitting on a cool million, but she’d been playing for six weeks.

dotdotdotdash:
That’s not going to get you very far. If I were you, I’d save the bucks, and just wait the eight hours. The game will become more interactive once there’s more stuff in your village.

EthanGotchA:
What should I do before then?

Dasha clucked her tongue and tapped her chin contemplatively. She’d pondered making up a new screen name and starting the game with a fresh plot a time or two so she could test a different strategy, but was having too much fun with her current city. “Hmm. Ooh. I know.”

dotdotdotdash:
If I had to start over, I’d start building up my security perimeter before I build the first house. Income will be slower, but once you do start building up your village, you’ll have a reprieve of a few days. No one would be able to destroy your stuff until you start adding second stories.

EthanGotchA:
I have a shovel and a pirate convict. Am I supposed to make him dig, or what?

dotdotdotdash:
Yes. Make him dig throughout the night. If you’re feeling generous in the morning, you can give him a break. He’ll be less likely to flee to your friends’ worlds.

She snorted, just imagining the little animated convict with his peg leg and ratty clothes making a break from one fake world to the next.

EthanGotchA:
This is uncivilized.

Dasha slapped a hand over her mouth before her bark of laughter could wake the fairy ladies. His words were funny because he didn’t appear to be joking. The best she’d been able to discern about Ethan, his sense of humor spanned the comedic range between gallows humor and poignant dick jokes. Which was to say he talked about his dick a lot more than people realized.

He’d obviously been behaving himself. He hadn’t let one rip in a while.

“Hope he’s not behaving himself for my sake.” She liked a good dick joke. What she didn’t like was thinking about
his
dick, specifically. She didn’t want to be hypnotized by the wonders of fairy cock. If Simone’s subtle hints about Heath’s magical member were any indication, Dasha wouldn’t want to say no once she’d had a sample. She missed good sex, but couldn’t afford to have her thoughts consumed by it. There was a reason she was avoiding Ethan, and she needed to keep reminding herself of that.

She typed,
That’s just the way the game is, Ethan. Maybe it’s cutthroat, but being a little mean makes the gameplay fun.

EthanGotchA:
Hits a bit close to home for me.

dotdotdotdash:
How so?

EthanGotchA:
Rhiannon is a tyrant. Her domain was built on the backs of decent people who lacked her ambitions. To her, everyone should be a convict with a shovel.

Dasha sat up and nudged back her slipping hair scarf. The knot was too loose and needed to be retied, but she had more pressing concerns. Apparently, she’d made the man uncomfortable over what was, in the scheme of things, a silly little game.
BBD
was all good fun for her, but she didn’t completely understand the politics of the fairy realm or how things had gotten to be the way they were. She didn’t get off on being insensitive, not even to people she’d rather avoid.

“Maybe I should ask,” she said to no one. Just hearing it aloud was giving herself permission to dig deeper into what bothered him, but not through the chat app of some silly game.

EthanGotchA:
He’s digging now. I think I made my perimeter too large. The indicator tells me he’ll be done in 24 hours.

Dasha hovered her thumbs over the screen and gnawed at the inside of her cheek as she thought. There was nothing left for him to do in the game for the time being. He’d drift away and go to bed, probably, and she’d be up and wired still. She didn’t want to be awake alone.

dotdotdotdash:
How are you with word games? You can tell me no. Simone doesn’t want to play with me anymore, either.

EthanGotchA:
Why not? Do you cheat?

dotdotdotdash:
Do you?

EthanGotchA:
I don’t cheat in games, fights, or relationships.

Dasha narrowed her eyes at the screen.

dotdotdotdash:
I thought your people don’t date much before

She stilled her thumbs, gnawed her lip.

He likely didn’t need for her to finish the thought. The implication was perfectly obvious, or at least she
hoped
so. If she had to spell out her skepticism, they’d likely end up having a discussion about things she didn’t particularly want to talk about. She certainly wasn’t going to get any sleep if the conversation devolved to that place.

EthanGotchA:
What is your phone number?

dotdotdotdash:
Why?

That had become her automatic response in the past few years when any man asked her that question. The reply was confrontational, sure, but she
wanted
them to put into words why they needed to contact her. She needed them to make their intentions clear so she could cut them off at the pass.

EthanGotchA:
This is an awkward interface. I can’t see more than a few words I’ve typed at a time.

“Oh.” He was right. The game had some issues, but the designers probably hadn’t developed the layout with chat in mind, beyond what people would need to heckle their player peers. A gamer didn’t take many words to communicate something along the lines of “Got you, sucka.”

Slowly, she typed in the number, trying to dissuade herself from giving it up between every digit. She couldn’t think of a good enough reason to deny him. Even if she wasn’t on board with the fated mate thing, he was in tight with Simone and Heath. They trusted him, so there was no reason Dasha shouldn’t.

“It’s just a phone number,” she told herself.

She hit send.

A moment later, her text-messaging app popped to the forefront with a comment from a number she didn’t recognize.

As I was saying…

“Ethan,” she mused. She added him to her contacts and pondered what country code his phone number had and whether texting him would get her slapped with a stroke-inducing phone bill.

She scoffed. “If I do, he’s paying it. He probably has the money.”

Maybe he didn’t fall into the Filthy Stinking Rich category like Heath and Siobhan, but he’d certainly been alive long enough to acquire some wealth or to have inherited some. She had to assume. There was no tact way of getting that information beyond asking, and she’d been so careful not to ask any questions about him. It wouldn’t do for people to know she was actually curious.

ETHAN GOTCH:
No, Sídhe don’t tend to do relationships before we take mates, at least in the way you think of them. We do frequently make arrangements, however.

Arrangements. What does that mean?
she asked.

ETHAN GOTCH:
Hard to explain without knowing what you know.

Dasha let her eyes cross.

How much has Simone told you about our…openness?
he asked.

DASHA MAURICE:
She discusses pretty much everything about y’all in vague terms. I get the impression that you’re all equal-opportunity players.

They’d fuck anyone who suited them, more or less. That certainly opened up the dating pool, not that the fairy dating pool was all that large to start with. There were probably twenty thousand of them, at the most. That was Heath’s last estimate of all the Sídhe inside the realm and those living in secluded communities like Simone’s father’s tribe. Heath didn’t trust his mother’s figures. She had a tendency to exaggerate her influence.

ETHAN GOTCH:
That’s about right. Anyhow, that makes the potential for jealousy twice as high. We’re very protective of our mates, that’s true, but very rarely do we want to share our lovers with people we don’t like.

DASHA MAURICE:
Oh, I understand. You don’t want to do a booty call with someone who you know is fucking some guy you’ve beat the shit out of before.

ETHAN GOTCH:
Basically. We’re very practical about getting our needs met. Sex certainly qualifies as a need to most fairies, but we have to be careful about who we source it from. Otherwise we’d all be fighting all the bloody time.

DASHA MAURICE:
So you make agreements to…what? Not fuck anyone else? You’re not dating, but just exclusively screwing?

ETHAN GOTCH:
Seems crass when put into those terms, but that’s the gist.

DASHA MAURICE:
Sorry. I’ve always had a tendency to not beat around the bush. Simone would tell you that.

ETHAN GOTCH:
I’m not saying that tendency is a bad one. Determining how much I can say so I don’t get in trouble is hard.

DASHA MAURICE:
In trouble with whom?

ETHAN GOTCH:
Princess Simone. Prince Heath.

Dasha was about to ask why his candor would land him in hot water, but before she could tap out the question, he texted,
You.

She furrowed her brow.
Me? Why?

ETHAN GOTCH:
We’re not like normal people. Sídhe, I mean.

“That’s for damn sure.” She settled lower in her burrow of covers and slowly texted one-handed,
You’re practical, you say. What does that mean when you’re in a crew like yours?

ETHAN GOTCH:
I’m not sure what you’re asking.

She had said she wasn’t going to beat around the bush, so she figured she should spit out the words. Electronically, at least.
Have you been with any of the ladies in the crew in the past?

If Siobhan, Caryl, or Daryn had been with Ethan at some point, Dasha certainly couldn’t tell. All the crew members had a sibling-like camaraderie, but she wasn’t so naive to think that good friends couldn’t have gotten down and dirty long ago. Sometimes, good friends fucked and were able to remain friends afterward, though that had never been her experience. Her guy friends didn’t like being pushed back into the friend zone, so she’d stopped turning to them for intimate comfort. Strangers were easier to get rid of, and they rarely showed any hard feelings when she asked them to go home.