Dark Sexy Knight (A Modern Fairytale)
Read Dark Sexy Knight (A Modern Fairytale) Online
Authors: Katy Regnery
Dark Sexy Knight
a m o d e r n f a i r y t a l e
Katy Regnery
a m o d e r n f a i r y t a l e
Loosely inspired by the legend of Camelot,
Dark Sexy Knight
tells the story of dinner theater knight Colt Lane, who meets down-on-her-luck Verity Gwynn on the worst day of her life. Evicted from their home, Verity and her special-needs brother, Ryan, must find jobs or risk being separated. Colt, who is the furthest-possible thing from a white knight in real life, comes to their unlikely rescue, quickly cementing his place in Verity’s heart.
Colt has dark, deeply buried secrets that keep his smile hidden and his eyes down, which has kept people away . . . until he meets Verity, who seems immune to his gruff manners and taciturn ways. The more time Colt spends with her, the more he longs for her sweetness in his life and yearns to be the knight in shining armor she so desperately needs. Certain he will lose her if she learns the truth about his past, he must decide if he can trust her with his yesterday in order to build a beautiful tomorrow.
Copyright
©
2016 by Katharine Gilliam Regnery
Sale of the electronic edition of this book is wholly unauthorized. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part, by any means, is forbidden without written permission from the author/publisher.
Katharine Gilliam Regnery, publisher
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover by Marianne Nowicki
Developmental Editing by Tessa Shapcott
Copy and Line Editing by First Person Editing
Formatting by CookieLynn Publishing Services
Please visit my website at www.katyregnery.com
First Edition: June 2016
Katy Regnery
Dark Sexy Knight: a novel / by Katy Regnery – 1st ed.
ISBN: 978-1-944810-03-0
For Drew.
There has never been a me without a you.
And for George.
Because some matches are truly made in heaven.
xo
Colton Lane watched them walk into the job fair together. He caught the way the girl’s eyes scanned the room from the doorway of the Marriott ballroom, checking out the various tables set up around the perimeter. She was a tiny little thing, wearing a simple, sleeveless, cream-colored dress with a black belt cinched around the waist, and her light blonde hair up in a high ponytail.
He cocked his head to the side, staring at her. She was too short and small to be model-beautiful, but she was trim and had a clean, fresh-faced look that was pretty, that made her seem vulnerable. He shifted his gaze up, to the man standing just behind her. Taller by a head and a half, and easily weighing in at three hundred pounds, her companion had loped in on her heels, his jeans pulled up too high, his prematurely graying hair slicked into submission, his eyes down, his posture slumped. They were an odd pair, for sure, but despite what he guessed to be about a decade’s age difference, she appeared to be in charge. That was the thing that had most captured Colt’s attention.
Lynette elbowed him in the side to get his attention. “Colt started with us—what now?—three years ago? Four?”
Colt shifted his attention to the woman sitting beside him at the long table set up for recruiting new “cast members.”
“Five and a half,” he muttered.
“Five and a half!” said Lynette, beaming at Colt with a bright, can-do smile before turning back to the job applicant who’d stopped by their table. “We have real employee retention at
TL’oC
. I can promise you that. Now, tell me, have you ever worked around horses . . .?”
TL’oC
was Lynette’s cheesy way of describing
TLOC
, or
The Legend of Camelot
, to prospective employees. She stressed that, unlike their competitors,
The Legend of Camelot
medieval dinner theater show was a company that treated its employees with tender
loving care. (“Heck! It’s right there in the name!” Cue eye roll.)
The muscular young man in front of the table laughed weakly at some joke Lynette made about being a knight in shining armor, and Colt gave him a wan smile.
“Is that what you do?” the kid asked.
“Am I a knight in the show?”
The kid nodded, his fingers unconsciously pinching the application that Lynette was tapping against them.
“Yep,” said Colt, running a hand through his shoulder-length blond hair. “You start off as a squire. Learn the ropes. Six to nine months later you can start working toward being a knight. Get to know the horses, study the routines.”
“I’ve seen the show,” said the kid. “It’s awesome.”
Colt nodded, as he knew he was supposed to, although truthfully it somehow got exponentially less awesome doing it night after night, year after year, holidays and weekends, to drunken revelers and screaming children.
Good luck having a life when you’re a knight at
The Legend of Camelot
, kid.
“Yeah. It’s a ton of fun,” he said, his voice flat as a pancake.
“You, uh, you have to work out a lot? To be a knight?”
“Uh-huh. There’s a weight room at the, uh, the castle. You can use it as much as you want.”
“Yeah, you’re in good shape,” said the kid, who wasn’t in bad shape himself.
Colt was ripped and he knew it. Whatever dissatisfaction he found in his job, he made up for in the gym. Someone he knew called it his “happy place.” As he thought of her, he flicked his eyes back toward the odd couple still standing just inside the doorway, wondering about them and wishing he didn’t care.
“It’s strenuous work,” said Colt. “Though Lynette here can tell you that the servers hauling around trays full of thirty chickens with potatoes and corncobs are no slouches either.”
“The serving wenches,” said the kid, using his hands to pantomime huge breasts and chuckling like Butt-Head. “Yeah. They’re hot. Perk of the job, huh?”
Sure. If you want to shit where you eat.
“You know it,” said Colt, but only after Lynette nudged him under the table. He turned to her. “I’m, uh, I need to hit the john.”
Lynette gave him an exasperated look.
He hadn’t been her first choice this weekend. Artie Kingston, the Head Knight, generally accompanied her to these sorts of events, pulling out his bright white, toothy grin and winking at the women who stopped by for server applications. Artie was the poster child for
The Legend of Camelot
and wore the mantle proudly. Colt, on the other hand, was there for the paycheck. And joining the head of human resources for this two-day job fair meant time and a half. When he said yes, he figured he could endure the two eight-hour sessions for a little more green, right? Wrong. He’d underestimated the mind-numbing experience of encouraging a dozen applicants an hour to take an application while answering the same questions over and over again. By now, afternoon on day two, he was fried and more than ready to go home.
Lynette looked up at the kid. “Well, why don’t you look this over and come back if you have any questions, okay?”
The prospective squire smiled and nodded before moving on to the table beside them, where
My Big Fat Greek Dinner Theater
was recruiting unwitting grooms who weren’t being told they’d get a pie in the kisser twice a day and thrice on Saturdays.
“You could
try
being a little more enthusiastic,” grumbled Lynette as Colt stood up. “I get it that you’re the”—she used air quotes—“‘bad knight,’ but I really don’t appreciate the attitude.”
Colt choked back a million sarcastic responses but opted for “Just tired” instead. The reality was that, bigger paycheck or not, he shouldn’t have agreed to come. He didn’t have the passion for
TLOC
that someone like Artie had. Point of fact, he didn’t have passion for much of anything.
Stay out of trouble and make a decent living.
He could hear his aunt Jane’s words from long ago echoing in his ears.
“One cashier position left to fill, but that’s an ADA job.” Lynette straightened out a small stack of applications and sighed. “We don’t have enough servers. If you see anyone looking for a job while you’re heading out and back, send them over, huh? And
sell
it, Colt. I mean it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, pushing his chair under the table.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she said meaningfully, eyes still sifting through applications.
“Ma’am?”
She looked at his
Legend of Camelot
costume slung carelessly over the back of his chair, then met his eyes deliberately.
“Right,” he said, pulling the faux fur cape around his shoulders and grabbing the horned Viking helmet from under his chair with a sigh before heading away from the table.
As he approached the exit, he looked up to see the girl and her companion still standing there together. Her eyes flitted anxiously around the room, landing on him and staring at his costume. She cocked her head to the side, and her eyes narrowed in puzzlement for just a moment before her lips tilted up in a small smile. As the distance between them closed, she raised her eyes to meet his. And suddenly, without warning, his feet stopped moving and he found himself standing before her.
“You’re a Viking,” she said, her voice deep and soft, a hint of wonder or amusement warming it into a purr.
For no good reason at all, the timbre of it surprised him. She was so tiny, he had expected it to be higher-pitched. Realizing that she was older than the teenager he’d originally guessed her to be, his eyes dropped to the swell of her breasts for a nanosecond. Her tits were small but full under a thin, light-colored sundress—perfect handfuls. He quickly lifted his eyes to her face again and guessed her age somewhere over twenty but no more than twenty-five.
“The Viking Knight,” he said, gesturing with a bob of his head toward the table where Lynette sat. “For
The Legend of Camelot
.”
“Viking Knight?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowing as her lips widened a touch. “I’m no expert, but I love the show
Vikings
. Weren’t Vikings and knights two separate things?”
Her comment surprised him. His role was one of the little inanities about his job that he especially hated, because she was right—Vikings were Germanic Norse seafarers, while knights were European mounted soldiers. But
The Legend of Camelot
wasn’t exactly concerned with historical accuracy, which he was about to share with her when his attention was diverted by the man standing behind her.
“The sword in the stone, the sword in the stone,” he whispered, his head bent down, his body swaying in a gentle rhythm.
She looked up at the man, still smiling, her satiny voice deep and kind. “That’s right, Ryan. Camelot. Just like in
The Sword in the Stone
.” Turning back to Colt, her little shoulders bunched up as she shrugged. “He loves Disney movies.”
Colt nodded, his gaze resting on Ryan for a moment. The man appeared to be in his thirties, but he was childlike in the way he spoke and in the way he rocked back and forth with quiet excitement. Certainly he wasn’t your average thirtysomething, and while disabled people didn’t make Colt uncomfortable, he wasn’t sure what to say. And frankly these two reeked of neediness, and Colt wasn’t in the habit of helping strays. He had enough on his plate.
“Yeah,” he finally said, moving past her, determined to leave her and her companion behind. “Great, uh, great movies.”
He hadn’t gotten more than three paces when she called “Viking Knight! Wait!” from behind him. When he spun around, she was so close to him that his furry cape whipped her in the face. She stumbled backward, but his hand snaked out to steady her just before she fell. As his fingers curled around the bare skin of her upper arm, his eyes slammed into hers, and close-up, he realized that she was a lot prettier than he’d originally thought. Fresh and freckled in a girl-next-door sort of way, her hair was an almost white-blonde, but her eyelashes were long, dark, and curled, framing a pair of sweet, cornflower-blue eyes. His heart sped up, battering recklessly against his ribs.
“Are they hiring?”
“What?” he asked, blinking at her in annoyance. “Who?”
Her grin deepened, showcasing two peekaboo dimples that made her eyes dance. “
The Legend of Camelot.
Are they hiring?”
He shrugged, dropping his hand as he sized her up as a potential cast member.
Despite his reassessment, she still wasn’t quite pretty enough (or tall enough) to play the princess, nor did she look anywhere near strong enough to be a serving wench, and Colt knew that Lynette wasn’t looking for bartenders or gift shop cashiers. But when she blinked at him with those pretty eyes, the word
no
didn’t come.
“What do you do?” he asked, his voice gruffer than he intended.
“I’m a waitress,” she said, unruffled by his tone or perusal. She rolled her lips between her teeth, looking up at the man, who was still whispering “The sword in the stone, Camelot” over and over under his breath. “And my brother, Ryan, is a great janitor.
Really
great. Comes in on time. Does everything he’s told. He’s really strong too. Doesn’t bother anyone. Just—you know, he’s a good worker. Solid.”
Her brother.
Of course.
She and her brother were looking for work together, and from the way she’d just been selling him, he guessed that it wasn’t an easy feat.
Colt knew what he needed to do. He needed to give her a look that said “I’m sorry” and shrug his shoulders to let her know he couldn’t help her. He needed to say no and walk away from her big, blue, pleading eyes and mumbling man-child of a brother. Because Colton Lane
wasn’t
really a knight. In fact, he was the furthest-possible thing from a knight. He was just a guy who dressed up like a historically inaccurate Viking Knight and rode a horse in a dinner show—a job that had grown stale five and a quarter years ago. He had no business getting tangled up with these two. They’d be trouble. He could feel it. And he didn’t need any trouble.
“Please?” she whispered so softly, he almost thought he’d imagined it.
“What’s your name?” he asked, every instinct still warning him not to get involved with them, even as the words escaped his lips.
“Verity.”
Of course it was. Colt groaned inwardly.
Verity. Truth. Her name was as sweet and earnest as her freckled face, which looked like it had seen more sunny days in the country than hot nights in the city. He searched her pretty eyes, feeling his resistance weaken under their hope.
“Colton,” he said, holding out his hand.
She didn’t look down. Her gaze held him captive as she reached out, sliding her small, cool hand against his until their palms were flush. And
something
—something indefinable and unexpected and very, very inconvenient—passed between them as she pressed her hand intimately against his. He felt it in his gut. He knew it in his head. And his heart beat a primal rhythm that it had apparently always known yet never shared.