Dark Sexy Knight (A Modern Fairytale) (3 page)

Colt got an earful from Lynette in the hotel parking lot. She threatened to fire him and retracted the threat only when he reminded her that his big sin had been helping her fill two available positions and meet the ADA requirement she’d been lacking.

“Don’t spin this around! You had no business forcing that . . . that
half-wit
on me. And mark my words, Colton Lane, if Joe has an issue with this, I will be sending him to
you
for a full accounting of today’s bullshit. Am I clear? And furthermore . . .”

Colt stared down at her red face, wishing she’d shut the hell up and get in her car already but unwilling to make the actual suggestion. If he wanted to keep his job, he’d pushed Lynette about as far as he dared this afternoon . . . and fuck if he could figure out why.

Maybe it was because the girl—Verity—really looked like she could use a break and Colt wasn’t a stranger to being in a tough spot. Besides, she had that huge man-child of a brother following her around. Colt didn’t need to walk a mile in her shoes to know that they were probably a tight fit.

Or maybe it was because she’d immediately recognized the ludicrousness of his role as a Viking Knight, and it had made him feel a rare and immediate kinship to her.

The first year he worked at
The Legend of Camelot
, he’d tried to explain to Morgan Fayette, the production supervisor, that having a Viking Knight was historically ridiculous, but she’d just stared at him blankly before asking him to please get his costume on and get his ass up on his mount before the show started.

Or maybe it was because—and this speculation bothered Colt so much that he tried to push it out of his mind almost the second it arrived—Verity Gwynn was exactly the sort of girl that he quietly dreamed of but never attracted.

He refocused on Lynette, tuning back into her diatribe.

“. . . and if you
ever
pull a stunt like that again, I will have no problem throwing your moody ass out the . . .”

He tugged his bottom lip between his teeth, trying to look contrite as his mind efficiently produced a picture of Verity’s bright, beaming smile for his torment. Light skin. Freckles. Pink lips. Dark lashes. Blue eyes.
Deep
blue eyes looking up at him with need, with hope, with gratitude.

He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he let it go in a soft hiss.

The women that Colt attracted were nothing like Verity. They were experienced, overconfident, sexed-up huntresses who sought him out at the stables after the show to fulfill a fantasy. They were looking for a dark, sexy knight to throw them down on the hay and have his way, and sometimes—more often than not—he was happy to oblige them, playing up the character of Viking Knight with snarls and growls, flexing his muscles as he pounced on them for meaningless sex.

Afterward, in the awkward farewell that followed, he felt embarrassed by the way they looked at him—like a piece of meat they’d bought at the butcher and sampled for their fleeting pleasure. These quick assignations didn’t ring triumphant. They left him feeling resentful and brittle, used and disposable, and he hated the quiet longing deep inside that cried out for more. He ignored it. He silenced it.

Because petite, pretty, girls next door like Verity Gwynn didn’t look at boys like Colton Lane. Never had. Never would. They were looking for some goody-two-shoes college boy who worked as a banker or lawyer and had never been in any trouble. And it was probably for the best. Hell, he’d probably break her in half with his body alone, and if she somehow survived that, he’d finish off the job by breaking her heart with his taciturn, loner ways. He was better off alone. And a girl like that was definitely better off without a man like him.

“. . .
me
!
I
make the hiring decisions for
The Legend of Camelot
, not you! Do you understand? Colton! Are you
hearing
me?
Do. You. Understand
?”

Colt nodded his head. “Yes, ma’am.”

Lynette huffed angrily as she opened her car door and snatched the box of applications, pens, and flyers from his arms. “Never again!”

“No, ma’am,” he said, turning away from her car.

“Stupid muscle-head,” she muttered as she slammed the door shut.

Already several paces away, Colton stopped in his tracks, clenching his jaw with fury as she pulled out of her parking space and headed for the exit.

“
Fuck you
!” he bellowed as she turned out of the parking lot and onto a busy main street. Pulling the asinine helmet from his head, he chucked it across the lot and watched it bounce over the tops of cars before finally falling to the ground with a clatter. He ripped the fur cape from his throat, hurling it into a puddle of greasy water on the asphalt, where he left it, soiled and abandoned.

Fuck her
, he thought again, as he yanked his keys from the pocket of his jeans and strode toward his car. Who the fuck was she anyway? A recruiter for a shitty, knock-off dinner theater. A dried-up old hag who checked out his body like a slavering bitch in heat, then dressed him down for helping a young girl at the end of her rope.

Scowling as he found his car, he unlocked the door and slipped inside the veritable oven with an angry grunt.

June in Atlanta was relentlessly hot, and it did nothing to soothe his temper. But the thing is? He wasn’t just angry at Lynette. He was furious with himself too.

The last thing he needed was to be on someone’s shit list. His only aim in life was to keep his head down, make money, and live quietly, and he’d just fucked that up, putting himself on Lynette’s short list of people to can. Why? For a pair of pretty fucking eyes? Well, screw that. Miss Down-On-Her-Luck and her googly-eyed sidekick could fend for themselves from here on out. He was finished playing the Good Samaritan.

“Don’t stick your neck out, stupid,” he said, shaking his head as he turned the key in the ignition.

He opened the windows to let out the heat and turned the air-conditioning on full blast, feeling beads of sweat slip down the sides of his face as he put the car in reverse and edged out of the parking space. Rolling up the windows, he headed for the exit, but his eyes were pulled to the left as the light turned red. There, at the bus stop, in the blaring late-afternoon sun, Verity and Ryan Gwynn stood side by side in the sweltering heat, waiting for a bus. And because it was a Sunday, Colt knew they could be there for a while.

“Eyes forward. Don’t even think about it,” he muttered aloud. He stared at the red light through the windshield, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently as he willed it to change.

His lips twitched when his eyes slid to the left again as if they had a mind of their own. And damn it if Verity Gwynn didn’t choose that
exact
moment to look over, her pretty face splitting into a grin of recognition as she waved at him. And fuck if his hand didn’t lift from the steering wheel and wave the fuck back.

That’s all it took for her to sprint over to his window, standing beside his car with a heat-reddened face and sparkling blue eyes as she practically pressed her nose against the glass.

He flicked a look into the rearview mirror as the light turned green, but no one was in line behind him, so he didn’t have an excuse not to roll down the window and see what she wanted.

“Hi again!” she said.

“Hey.”

“I’m so glad I ran into you! I’ve been thinking about you nonstop since . . .” She dropped his eyes for a moment. Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth, and if that, coupled with her words, wasn’t the sexiest thing he’d seen in a million fucking years, he wasn’t sure what was.

She shrugged, her face a little bashful when she looked up again. “I just mean . . . thank you. That’s what I wanted to say. Thank you so much.”

Her words were warm and earnest, but it was her eyes that did all the talking. Soft and profoundly sweet, they scanned his face as if it were handsome, as if it were somehow precious, and he desperately fought the urge to lean closer to her.

“No problem,” he said. “She needed someone to fill the, uh, the ADA job. So . . .” He gestured lamely with one hand. “Worked out.”

“It sure did. All because of you.”

Her words made him uncomfortable, and yet he felt an unexpected measure of relief when the light turned red again, trapping him in place just as a car pulled up behind him.

“Well . . .,” he said, looking back at the light for a second before raising his eyebrows at her.

She leaned away a little. “Oh. Yeah. You have to go. I just wanted to say thank you. You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met, Colton. I feel so lucky that you were here today.”

She looked down, smiling at her small white hands on the windowsill for a second before raising her head and smiling directly at him. It was the sort of smile that started in someone’s heart and took over her face, and though he didn’t smile back, he felt something give way. As though her smile was the key to unhinging his defenses, he felt them drop as his mouth opened to speak.

“You need a ride somewhere?”

WHAT. THE. FUCK?

The words escaped before he had a chance to think them over or give them permission to be said. What the hell was wrong with him and why the
fuck
couldn’t he make a smart decision around this woman?

Impossibly, her eyes lit up even more. “You mean it?”

No.
He grimaced. How could he retract the offer now? “Uh, sure.”

She searched his eyes dubiously. “But we’re all the way out in Decatur.”

There it was—a chance to say, “Oh, well. Too bad. Take care.” But he didn’t. He fucking didn’t.

He glanced up just as the light turned green. “It’s fine. Get in.”

He shrugged, reasoning internally that Decatur was in the same general direction as Stone Mountain, where he lived.

She gasped with delight, turned her head, and yelled, “Ryan! We got a ride! Come on! Before the light changes! Come on, now!”

Colton leaned forward, watching out the passenger window as her big lug of a brother loped over to the car, his shirt stained under the arms and around the neck with big, wet patches of sweat. He hesitated at the rear door.

“Get in, Ry. It’s okay.”

“He’s a stranger, Ver’ty.”

“He got us jobs. He’s a friend.”

“Oh. He’s a friend? I didn’t know that. That’s nice.”

“It’s real nice. You get in the back and buckle up, okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, opening the door and hefting his body into the car. “We can take a ride from a friend, Ver’ty. That’s okay. That’s the rule.”

“Sure is,” she said, as the light changed back to red and the driver behind them laid on the horn.

“Fuck you!” yelled Colt, rolling down his window just enough to give the guy the finger as Verity slipped into the passenger seat and slammed her door shut.

She pulled the seatbelt over her chest and buckled it before flashing him a ridiculously adorable smile, both dimples denting her cheeks.

“Ready whenever you are,” she said, folding her hands on her lap like they were going for a Sunday drive, which, technically, he supposed, they were.

“Fuck,” hissed Colt, shaking his head as the light turned green and he stepped on the gas.

***

“Our friend cusses a lot,” observed Ryan from the backseat. “Lots of cussin’, lots of cussin’, lots of cussin’.”

Verity jerked her neck around the seat to look at her brother. “That’s not nice. He’s giving us a ride so we don’t have to stand in the heat and change buses three times. You just look out the window and hush up.”

She loved her brother. Truly, she did. But Verity had a well-documented case of lifelong bad luck. She barely had a day when
one
thing went right—she couldn’t bear for Ryan to spoil it when two things, a job
and
a ride, had actually gone her way.

“Okay, Ver’ty,” he said glumly, his lips turning down. He lifted his eyes to the back of Colt’s head. “I’m sorry, friend. Didn’t mean no harm.”

“That’s, uh, it’s fine,” said Colton, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Ryan sighed. “Maybe I should take a little nap.”

“That’s a real good idea. Close your eyes and rest.” Verity softened her voice and her expression. “We got those jobs, Ryan. I’m real proud of you.”

“I’m real . . . proud of . . . you . . . Ver’ty . . .”

He closed his eyes, and his voice drifted off as he leaned his head against the window. Watching him for a second, Verity felt a pang of guilt. She shouldn’t have snapped at him to hush up. He was right. Their new friend
did
cuss a lot.

And smiled . . . well, now that she thought about it,
never
.

But Verity was a good judge of character, and for all his gruff words and dark scowls, she had seen his kindness in action, and she couldn’t believe that someone as kind as Colton Lane could mean them any harm, cussing or not.