He gave her directions by smiling. Her eyes dropped to his mouth, white teeth behind a smug grin, and she began to feel something besides lust. She felt foolish. She felt her feet again, too, but unfortunately she was surrounded by a solid wall of women, most of whom were just a hormone surge away from jumping the railing and trampling her in the process.
The object of everyone’s attention wasn’t helping the situation any. He turned to face the fire, the back view just as impressive as the front, consisting as it did of wide shoulders, tapering down to a narrow waist and hips, his lower half clothed in buff-colored pants so tight they appeared to be painted over a really,
really
nice butt. He started working the bellows, the muscles in his back and arms flexing impressively.
The fire wasn’t the only thing whipped into a frenzy.
The crowd lunged forward, shoving the front row, including Rae, into the railing. The entire enclosure shuddered; the man spun around and scowled. The onlookers froze, then took one step back. In unison.
Rae rolled her eyes. Sure, he was drop-dead gorgeous in a medieval, man-is-the-master-race kind of way. The attitude could probably be overlooked, or at least ignored if she chose to concentrate on the form-fitting pants and bare everything else. But he was counting on that.
“Whatever he’s selling,” a woman behind Rae said, “I’m buying.”
Tall, dark, and sweaty met Rae’s eyes, just the hint of a smirk lifting the corners of his mouth.
She popped up one eyebrow and shook her head slightly, unimpressed. It was a bit more work not to get swept up in the silent conversation they seemed to be having. He saved her again by turning back to the fire. He took a red-hot piece of steel out of the flames with a set of pincers, and carried it to a crude-looking table facing the audience. Rae managed to ignore his raw sexual magnetism long enough to see that he was making something intricate, a gauntlet or maybe a chain mail hood.
He might have the body of a blacksmith, but he used the careful touch of a watchmaker, bending over a small anvil and working the steel into something that resembled a wafer-thin leaf. He quenched the leaf in water then straddled a bench, legs spread wide, apron hiking up. Everyone but Rae let out a sigh. There was so much air moving it was a wonder he wasn’t blown onto his ass in the dirt. But then, that would have ruined the show.
Two men burst through the back of the booth and added the only other ingredient that could have made the situation more irresistible to a bunch of lust-stricken women. Danger.
The men were dressed like Disney’s idea of pirates, scruffy beards, pantaloons, bad teeth and all, and they were brandishing swords. They split, coming at the blacksmith from either side. He jumped onto the bench, balancing on the thin plank of wood while both his attackers raised their swords and rushed him. They nearly chopped each other’s heads off when their target spun out from between them, tore the red-hot poker from the fire, and turned in time to face off against them.
He parried one pirate with the poker, slashing at the other with a two-foot blade he plucked from the wall, then changing up to thrust with the poker and block with the sword. The pirates traded a look and then attacked simultaneously. The blacksmith’s arms were a flurry of motion almost too fast to follow as he danced around to keep either one of the men from getting behind him.
The fight was staged, but the peril seemed so real the crowd’s reaction might as well have been choreographed, too. They swayed and flinched on cue, gasped and sighed in chorus, clutching at each other when one of the combatants made a particularly good attack or defense.
Rae had the urge for a tub of buttered popcorn and a box of Jujubes. It was just like an action flick, complete with the cut hero facing off against superior forces . . . Okay, it was only two to one, and they couldn’t compare with the armorer’s skills, but there didn’t really seem to be any contest. Yet, just when she was sure he was going to fight them off with no trouble, he faltered. His legs went wobbly, and he shook his head a couple of times, like he was trying to clear it. One of the attackers took advantage of the seeming weakness, his slashing stroke leaving a thin line of red along the armorer’s biceps.
Fake blood. Or was it? Rae leaned close. Hard to get a good look at the wound, what with the guy snapping back to full alertness, and dancing around the other two men. But she could have sworn the wound was dripping, slowly, and fake blood didn’t drip. She lifted her eyes to the armorer’s face, but there was no pain there. He didn’t acknowledge the wound in any way. If possible he moved even faster, beating the two men back by sheer force. And when he managed to return the favor by singeing the man who’d pinked him, the pirates apparently had enough. The wounded man took off, his partner hot on his heels.
The armorer stood there for a moment, his impressive chest heaving as he watched his attackers disappear into the crowd. Then he turned, and his eyes met Rae’s again, piercing blue, primed for violence. Or maybe sex because he vaulted over the low rail directly in front of her, slipped one arm around her waist, and took her mouth.
She should have protested, her brain was instructing her to take issue with this . . . assault. She even raised her hands, intending to shove him off. Instead, her fingers flexed into rock-hard muscle, and she sank into the kiss. Her breath oozed out with a little sigh, her tongue tangled with his, and she lost track of her body aside from the fact that it was pressed tightly to his and tingling from head to toe. Then he let her go, so quickly she stumbled before she found her feet again.
He bowed to the audience and stalked off, leaving the fire to tend itself—the one inside the enclosure and the one outside, most of which seemed to have moved up into Rae’s face.
Shutting out the giggles and whispers of the crowd, Rae turned on the heel of one Italian leather pump and strode off in the opposite direction, to find her parents. She needed to solve whatever problem they were having and get back to work, in that order. But it was going to be hell concentrating on numbers.
chapter 2
IT TOOK ANOTHER HOUR AND A LOT OF AIMLESS
wandering, but Rae finally spied her father working at his loom in the shade of a huge, spreading oak next to a small wooden building crammed with wench dresses and jester tights.
“That’s different,” she said, bending to take a closer look at the cloth on his loom, so finely woven she couldn’t see the individual threads.
Nelson Bliss shot to his feet and gathered her close, laughing slightly as he rocked her from side to side, so happy to see her it brought tears to her eyes. She’d never intended to leave her parents behind when she’d run away from the lifestyle. She had, though, and it was moments like this when she understood the price she’d paid for her so-called normalcy.
They broke the hug, Nelson looking down while Rae blinked furiously, both of them avoiding the emotion. Rae might have inherited her mother’s looks, but she’d ended up with her father’s reserve. The nomad gene had bypassed her completely.
“The color’s amazing, Dad,” she said, using the stiff cloth as a tension breaker, then taking a closer look when it really caught her eye, the off-white covered in places by shimmering copper swirls that transformed to a pretty spring green depending on the angle. The colors had been applied more than dyed, she saw before Nelson flipped a piece of rough linen over the loom. “What are you going to make out of it?” she asked him.
“Um . . . It’s a surprise for your mother. Don’t say anything, you know how these people love to gossip.”
“Sure. Is everything okay? You look tired.” He looked more than tired. He looked . . . sick, was her first reaction, followed by a thumping heart and an urge to dial 9-1-1.
He waved her off and turned away. “I’m fine.”
He clearly wasn’t, but when she got past that instant of panic that her father, one of the pillars of her life no matter how far apart they were, was ill, she could tell it wasn’t physical. Something was preying on him, though. New lines of stress wrinkled his forehead and bracketed his mouth, and he looked unhappy and closed off—more than usual.
“Something’s wrong,” Rae said.
Nelson took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his way of calming his nerves. Those nerves wouldn’t have anything to do with her mother. Rae had never known two people so like-minded and so devoted to one another that nothing short of death . . .
Her heart thumped again. “Mom—”
“Your mother’s fine, too. C’mon.” He nipped next door and asked the woman at the dragon candle shop to watch his place, then led Rae a little way down a narrow path running behind the maze of stalls, to a small gate leading back to the twenty-first century, or as close as it got for the hard-core re-enacters and craftspeople who followed the faires from one town to another.
Civilization consisted of a labyrinth of potholed dirt lanes along which RVs, pop-up trailers, campers towed by an assortment of aging vehicles, and various other so-called living quarters rubbed shoulders with each other in an amicable mishmash of a mobile neighborhood. Rae followed her father along the road, picking her way carefully around puddles and large rocks, finally giving up any attempt to spare herself when he went cross-country, taking her through knee-high weeds between a state-of-the-art RV and something resembling a wigwam.
“Here we are,” he said, turning in time to see her holding up the sides of her skirt, surveying the wet, muddy mess of her own bare legs and once pristine shoes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching into his pocket, she thought for a handkerchief. He pulled out a phone instead and flipped it open.
“You have an iPhone? And you know how to text?”
“Things have changed,” he said, looking sheepish. “I’ll give you my number. And your mother’s.”
Too late to keep her from wasting a couple of hours looking for them, not to mention the embarrassment of being accosted by a complete stranger. Except embarrassment wasn’t exactly the residual impression, Rae thought, remembering those warm, hard muscles, and that hot, talented mouth and how strong and broad he’d felt under her hands, how she’d lost her breath and grown dizzy as she fell into him, the sexual spell he cast so overwhelming she forgot where she was, what she was doing, and what kind of kook she was doing it with . . . And then he’d let her go and walked away like she’d been just another woman in the crowd. Which was exactly what she’d been. Her brain got it, flashing back to the snickers and the whispers and the humiliation. Her body held out hope.
She fell into step with her father as he started down the road, trying to eject the armorer from her mind—and any other body parts that were currently re-experiencing that kiss, not to mention all that . . . manhood plastered against her.
She was grateful when her parents’ familiar old Airstream travel trailer, with its lifetime of distracting memories, came into sight. To some it would be vintage, with its shiny aluminum skin and the rounded corners that came straight off a sixties’ drawing board. To her parents it was home, as lovingly cared for as any brick or frame house on a square of suburban lawn. To Rae, it represented the past, okay to visit as long as she didn’t have to stay too long.
“Air-conditioning?” she asked when her father opened the door and coolness flooded out.
“Your mother insisted,” Nelson said. “Something about power surges. I tried to ask her how using more electricity, which only adds to global warming, could possibly be a remedy for power surges. I mean, we only live in this little trailer, but driving it from place to place, using all that fossil fuel, is a big enough carbon footprint, if you ask me, and we use just as much water as anyone else so—”
“Dad.”
The tirade cut off abruptly, Nelson Bliss blinked owlishly at his daughter for a second or two before he remembered where the conversation had started. “You don’t know what she meant, do you?”
Rae almost chuckled, her father was so endearingly clueless. “She was probably talking about hot flashes.”
“Oh,” he said looking relieved. And then the mysterious-female-drama angle hit him, not to mention the fact that he was discussing it with his daughter, and his face turned red. “Ahh . . .”
“The air-conditioning feels good,” she said, putting the conversation back on comfortable ground for them both.
“Just between you and me, it’s kind of nice to come into all this cool after a long day in the heat and the crowds and the dust. Speaking of which, why don’t you clean up while we’re waiting.”
Rae did just that, but she left the bathroom door open. “What’s with all the mystery?” she called out over the sound of running water. Her skirt could be dry-cleaned, but her shoes were a dead loss, waterlogged and mud-stained. She gave up on them and settled for washing the dirt off her legs. “Is Mom okay? Aside from the wonky internal thermostat?”
“Mom is fine, wonky thermostat and all” came an unmistakable voice, the one from all her worst memories. And her best.
Rae poked her head out the bathroom door and there was Annie Bliss, a circlet of flowers on her head, her hair falling in wild curls to her waist, the copper mixed liberally with white strands so shiny it looked more like highlights than gray. She wore a cream-colored peasant blouse under a bright green, ankle-length tunic dress, the hem wet almost to her knees, her bare feet muddy in hemp shoes.
Rae’s suit and leather pumps cost more than her parents made in a week. And she would have given a year’s salary to carry herself with the same confidence, the same disinterest in anyone else’s opinion, as her slim, beautiful mother.
“Sunshine!” Annie Bliss exclaimed, arms out, crowding into the tiny bathroom to hug her only child.
The embrace was just as tight and just as long as her father’s, and Rae felt just as nostalgic, but there was a different dynamic with her mother, a history of conflict that had Rae pulling away sooner.