Hard Day's Knight (33 page)

“Are you all right?” he asked as he nipped my ear, his tongue soothing away the sting.

“ ‘All right’ is a bit of an understatement, my lusty knight. Oh, yes, do that again!”

He surged upward, and my muscles rippled around him, the breath caught in my chest. Pressed as I was against the tree, I was limited in my movement, but I managed to do a little swivel that damn near had him singing with pleasure.

“You’re so good, so hot, like liquid fire around me,” he gasped into my ear. I couldn’t answer; my brain had stopped working by that point. All that was left was the knowledge that there was nothing in my life that would be as important as my decision to take this man into my heart and keep him there forever. I twisted my arms around, grabbing his hair with both hands and yanking his head back.

“You’re mine, Walker, and I’m never going to let you go. Do you understand?”

His eyes crossed as I tightened every muscle I had around the long, hot, velvety-slick length of him.

“Pepper, my sweet, fiery Pepper, you warm me when no one else can—oh, god!”

“Yes, yes, I know it’s good, isn’t it? We fit so perfectly together.” Walker’s hips went wild against me, his body all but dancing as he thrust into me again and again. The pressure was building within me, my muscles cramping in anticipation of the big moment.

His back arched, thrusting his hips even harder against me. “Oh, god, I can’t—”

“Yes, you can, my darling,” I answered, sucking his neck, trying to reassure him with the tiny fragment of my brain that was left lucid. “I know it’s overwhelming, but just stay with me a few minutes longer. . . . Merciful heaven, you feel so good inside me!”

“Moth, no!” Walker’s voice was hoarse, his face caught between a grimace of pain and a stultifying look of the ecstasy that I sensed he was within seconds of reaching.

“Moth? My name is Pepper, you deranged and yet adorable man! Don’t stop!” I yelled, moving against him as his fingers bit into my thighs, shifting me against him. “Not now, not yet, please not yet!”

His eyes blazed at me as he writhed, but he didn’t stop his heroic attempt to send me to heaven and back, no, sir, not my Walker. Tears collected in the corners of his eyes, tears that I kissed away as I gave in to the red wave of rapture that crashed over me, filling me and binding me to him in a way so profound, it shook me to my core.

“Walker!” I yelled, my nose touching his, my body consumed with everything that we were together. I wrapped my fingers into his hair and shook his head until his teeth rattled. “I love you!”

He shuddered, his back arching even harder as he, too, surrendered his soul to the amazing, wondrous entity we had become. His eyes went wild as he shouted my name to the heavens while I melted against him, one great big puddle of Pepper goo, mindless to everything but the man who had so effectively filled my heart.

I gasped into his neck, his breath as rough as mine as he collapsed against me, pinning me to the tree. Beneath my hands a fine tremor shook his body, but whether it was from the stress of holding me up or from the power of our joining, I didn’t know. I kissed his neck, wanting to stay in his arms forever, but knowing that even hidden in the trees as we were, it was too exposed a spot to linger.

“My darling, my dearest love, my scrumdillyicious Walker, we have to . . .” I lifted my head from his sweaty neck, only to come nose-to-nose with the most annoying cat in the western hemisphere, a cat that evidently thought nothing of scaling Walker while we were making love. No wonder the poor man was twitching and writhing—I knew from experience just how sharp Moth’s claws could be. “Stop puffing your breath on me, you horrible beast. You smell like cat food!”

“I do?” Walker asked. “I don’t know why I would. I haven’t been eating any.”

“Very funny, Mr. Comedian,” I said, turning my head and giving his adorable chin a little love bite. “You know I was talking to this damned cat. Why didn’t you tell me he was climbing you?”

Walker also turned his head, this time to meet Moth’s inscrutable cat eyes. “It didn’t seem very important at that moment. We really have to do something about him. I’ve never been one for a menage à trois.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, one finger beneath his chin turning his face so his lips were back within range of mine. “I have a plan.”

 

The next five days passed in utter and complete bliss, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. My days were spent watching Walker and his team perform in the competitions, rooting on the Three Dog Knights during the competition hours, training with Walker in the off hours, spending my nights with my knight . . . and falling deeper and more irrevocably in love with each beat of his heart.

The time wasn’t without moments of lunacy, however. When I trained with Walker, he ceased being my adorable dream knight, turning into Walker the Hun, scourge of my life. We argued about everything, from the way I held the lance to the fact that I had stolen his favorite black Venetian hat and claimed it for my own (it was a very cool hat and looked good on me, a fact Walker had to admit one night when I stood before him wearing nothing but it). After spending ten minutes with Walker instructing me at jousting, I understood completely why Veronica had warned me against training with him.

“Are you deaf, woman?” Walker yelled at me the third day into training. “I told you this morning not to brace the lance against your shield, and yet you just did it again!”

I squinted at Walker and thought seriously about running him through with the pointy end of my lance. Surely it was justifiable homicide? The only thing that kept me from throwing down the lance and quitting was my audience.

Word had gotten out that not only was Walker jousting again, but he had taken a new pupil under his wing. I didn’t realize until then just how well respected the man was in the jousting community, but the fact that every morning before breakfast, and every evening after the day’s competition was over, a group of ten or so squires—and occasionally even a couple of jousters—gathered to watch Walker put me through my paces said something about how highly valued his instruction was.

I glanced at the gang of usual suspects, giving them a little wave of my lance to let them know I wasn’t going to take Walker’s bullying. They liked it when I argued with him.

“Try it again, and this time keep your lance steady, and do
not
rest it on the shield. Only amateurs do that.”

“Who are you calling an amateur?” I yelled as he turned to walk over to the spot he claimed as his viewing stand (it was a lawn chair with a cooler of beer). “I won’t take that sort of a slur, you scurvy knave! You’ve insulted my honor. I challenge you to a joust!”

The squires cheered and looked hopefully at Walker.

“Stop playing around, Pepper, and get to it. We don’t have all evening to waste.”

Those squires who were married or in long-term relationships pursed their lips and shook their heads.

“Waste? Excuse me, who insisted that Bliss stop training me just so he could take over the job?”

Walker crossed his arms over his chest, which would have been a nice intimidating move if Moth wasn’t lying draped over his shoulders, his tale flicking lazily across Walker’s mouth.

Two or three of the squires began to make wagers.

“Get on with it, Pepper.”

“I challenged you to a joust,” I said, waggling the lance at him. “You can’t refuse a challenge.”

The squires all nodded.

“Yes, I can.”

They shook their heads.

“No, you can’t. It’s illegal. It goes against the code of chivalry.”

Three nodded, four shook their heads, two pulled out a pack of cards and began to play a game.

Walker frowned and spit the end of Moth’s tail out of his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you don’t want to joust—”

“But I do, with you, but you won’t. And that’s not fair!”

“Dammit, Pepper, I’m not jousting with you,” Walker bellowed.

The squires, to a man, froze.

“Why not?” I bellowed back.

“Because I’ll break your bloody neck, that’s why!” he roared.

It was at that moment that I realized he loved me, but he hadn’t yet admitted it to himself. Oh, I knew he didn’t want to break
anyone’s
neck, but it was the way he stood there yelling at me, a vein on his neck bulging, his face red with anger, his eyes icy slivers of silver cold enough to burn liquid oxygen. Only a man in love would get so upset.

That knowledge warmed me through the following two days, and despite the blissful moments I spent in Walker’s arms, I couldn’t help but worry about what was happening to him. The Three Dog Knights finished twelfth in the team competition, well out of the money. No further accidents had happened, nothing out of the ordinary, and everyone seemed to relax, feeling the worst was over. Walker’s covert investigation—which he refused to share with me, the beastly man—got him no farther than my own interviews of anyone and everyone who could have reasonably been around the stable the days before I noticed Marley’s leg. I had given up trying to find out anything about the lances—those were stored in a shed next to the arena, the shed locked and supposedly secure, but I suspected it would be all too easy to sneak inside.

No, what had me worried wasn’t a horrible plan against the team; it was worry about one man who filled my heart. Walker had continued to joust moderately well, but not nearly up to his past standards, according to a whispered conversation I had with Vandal, Butcher, and Bliss the morning of the swordplay competition.

“He’s holding back, that’s what it is,” Vandal said, plucking a latte from the cardboard holder that Bliss carried. “Did you see him in Realgestech? It was like
he
was made of steel, not his armor. He sat on Marley’s back like a great big lump.”

Butcher shook his head, carefully holding a latte for CJ and his own cup of tea. “He’s afraid, Vandal. Fear will do that to you sometimes.”

“The question is, what are we going to do about it?” Bliss asked, biting her lower lip as she glanced toward Walker’s tent.

“He’s taking a shower,” I reassured her.

Her shoulders slumped. “It’s not that I don’t have the fullest respect for him—I know how he can joust. We all do.”

Vandal and Butcher nodded their heads.

“Top drawer,” Vandal said.

“Best there is,” Butcher added.

“And we all know what hell he went through after the accident, but we’re not going to stand a snowball’s chance in a Scotsman’s kilt if he doesn’t snap out of it.” Bliss’s forehead wrinkled as she thought of something. “Did you see his face when Farrell walked off with the team trophy? There was nothing there—no anger, no sorrow, nothing. It was as if he doesn’t care anymore.”

“He cares,” Butcher said slowly. “It’s buried deep, beneath all the self-hatred and fear that he’ll hurt someone else, but it’s there. He would have gone home if he didn’t care.”

“It’s not enough,” Vandal said, his voice mournful. “He’s ruining all our chances just because he’s lost his nerve. Everyone knows that we would have come in the top three if Walker’s low scores hadn’t pulled us down.
Someone
has to get him to shake out of it.
Someone
has to bring the old Walker back to life.”

Bliss turned to me. “Pepper, couldn’t you—”

I choked on the sip of latte I was taking. “Not a chance. You’ve seen him whenever I talk jousting—he goes Joust Nazi on me.”

The three shared a glance before turning back to me.

“Oh, no,” I said, snatching Walker’s cup of coffee from Bliss before backing away from them. “I know that look. You’re not getting me to do anything else. Walker and I have an unspoken peace treaty going on, and I don’t want anything to ruin it.”

“You’re the only one he’ll listen to,” Vandal whined, grabbing my sleeve to keep me from running.

“Bull! He’s known you guys much longer than he’s known me,” I said, still trying to make my escape.

“He’s not sleeping with us,” Butcher pointed out.

“So? The act of sexual congress does not give the congressee magical powers of persuasion.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s an Ale Wench who could have me painting myself blue and dancing naked on the green if she put her mind to it.”

Butcher shot Vandal a scathing glance. “You did that last year at the French championship. No, I agree, Pepper is the logical choice. She can talk to Walker where we can’t. He knows how we feel; we’ve all talked him blue about the way he’s been jousting.” For the first time since I’d met him, his eyes held none of the gentle amusement that was normal. Instead, his usually warm eyes were bleak and flat. A cold shiver rippled down my back at the look. “We aren’t getting through to him. Only you have the ability to do that.”

The three of them looked at me with such hope in their eyes that I couldn’t just walk away as I wanted. Instead I went back to Walker’s tent to feed Moth, wondering how on earth I was going to broach the subject without Walker going ballistic.

That was the thought that consumed me most of the day. While the Three Dog Knights sat in the small outdoor arena to cheer on Butcher, Fenice, Vandal, and Geoff during their matches, I let my mind dwell on the problem at hand.

How was I going to tell the man I loved to throw away caution and joust like the maniac he used to be? At first I had thought his reputation had been exaggerated, but after listening to some of Walker’s tales about past tourneys, I had a new appreciation for just how he had earned the title of Walker the Wild. The key was to get him to make a sincere attempt to win the competition without endangering his—or anyone else’s—life, which meant I had to polish up that tarnished self-image he held.

“Easier said than done.” I sighed as we watched the competition.

“What is?” Walker asked, his voice a low velvet rub against my skin, his breath hot in my ear. I relaxed into his side, stroking Moth where he lay on Walker’s thigh.