Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set (96 page)

I don’t say anything for almost a full minute. I
feel my throat start to tighten up with guilt at the thought that I
was more than mildly attracted to someone who turns out to be my
favored lord and knight’s own
brother
. Then again, their
blood relation probably explains why they’re
both
so
charming and easy on the eyes.

“Are you
sure
he’s your brother?” I blurt,
before I get a chance to realize just how ridiculous that
sounds.

“I think I know who my own goddamned brother is,
Lisa.” Syr Phillip sounds hurt.

“I—I’m sorry. It’s just—it’s just all so
strange—“

“No, no—it’s my fault,” Syr Phillip replies. “I
never should have asked you to do something like spy on people you
barely know. You’re far too sweet a person to get caught up in
these nasty interkingdom politics. It was unfair of me to ask you.
Please accept my apology.”

“It’s all right, Phillip. Really. I didn’t mind it
at all. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Syr Phillip mutters after a tense
moment. “I think I need to get off to fight practice, Lisa. If I
know my kid brother the way I think I do, he’s going to have the
entire East Kingdom, Aethelmarc, and Tuchux nations fighting me
hand-to-hand in the Woods Battle this year. I’ve got to make sure
I’m ready for it.” Syr Phillip’s voice is heavy and edged with
despair.

“But—“

“Goodbye, darling.”

Syr Phillip hangs up before I can tell him he quoted
his brother’s warning nearly word for word.

Somehow I think the Dawsons must be a very
competitive family.

****

Two days later, Baroness Barlonda and Baron Grizzly
are hanging out in my living room, both sipping tallboy cans of
Pabst Blue Ribbon I bought on sale at Kroger’s. Barlonda has
brought the first rough cut of the silk brocade gown I’m to wear at
Crown Tournament, while Grizzly has lugged in several heavy books
on medieval history.

“We need to get you a real SCA name, hon,” Grizzly
says, flipping pages in an old, moldy tome that looks like it might
have been stolen from a college library at some point. “Lisa of
Winged Hills won’t cut the mustard at Crown.”

“It would be a perfectly good SCA name if there
wasn’t already one listed in the rolls, Grizz,” Barlonda chirps as
she guzzles the last dregs of her beer. She sets down the empty can
on my matted carpeting and reaches into her sewing case for the
gown’s bodice fabric pieces, which she starts pinning to my frame.
“Especially considering that the last Lisa of Winged Hills quit the
SCA at least fifteen years ago.”

“I know, but rules are rules, Barlonda. Nobody in
the SCA can have exactly the same registered persona name as
somebody else.” Grizzly runs his stubby finger down a few pages of
his heavy tome as Barlonda pins some sleeve fabric on my left arm
and makes some marks on it with tailor’s chalk. “Here we go,” he
says, tapping a page with a stubby finger. “You could be Lisa
Bartoldi di Napoli. That would give you a nice Renaissance Italian
persona of the noble class.”

I shrug. “Okay, sure, whatever.” I’m too preoccupied
with how sad Syr Phillip sounded the last time we spoke to care
much about medieval names.

Barlonda sets down her tailor’s chalk and gives me a
quizzical look. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“I’m just worried about Syr Phillip, that’s
all.”

“Oh, he’ll be just fine, hon.” Baron Grizzly says,
not looking up from his book. “Everybody says he’s going to win
Crown, you know.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” I sigh as
Barlonda unpins the brocade fabric pieces from my frame and starts
measuring my waist. “I think he’s getting too caught up in all this
funny business going on with the Dark Horde and the Tuchux.”

“Phil can take pretty good care of himself, Lisa,”
Barlonda says. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m worried about the both of you, too,” I admit.
“What happened at the Winged Hills meeting between the two of you
and Master Melphus really scared me.”

Barlonda and Grizzly exchange uneasy looks, but say
nothing.

“What is going on with
all
of you?” I
blurt.

“What do you mean, dear?” Barlonda says, her teeth
clenched around a mouthful of straight pins. Baron Grizzly abruptly
claps his heavy book shut and heads for the bathroom.

“There just seems to be a lot of funny business
going on,” I say. “I mean, first there was the strange way Baron
Grizzly acted around Syr Phillip at Lady Ramona’s party, then the
house fire, then the little incident at the Winged Hills
meeting—“

“Oh, it wasn’t an incident at all, dear. You’re
overreacting.” Barlonda tries to give me a reassuring smile around
the quiver of pins, but she ends up choking on one of them and has
to spit the whole stainless-steel wad onto the floor.

I place my hands squarely on my hips and give the
older woman a piercing stare. “Are the two of you involved in drug
dealing, Barlonda? Because if you are, I would appreciate it if you
keep that kind of activity as far away from me as possible.”

Barlonda coughs. “Lisa, I promise you, we’ve
never
been involved in anything like that. Sure, Grizz and I
are known to take a toke of Mary Jane occasionally, and yes, we’ve
sometimes bought a nickel bag or two from Ramona or Melphus or one
of his buddies. We’ve been doing it for years and never once had a
single problem. But I swear to you, Lisa, we
aren’t
drug
dealers. We’d never even think of get mixed up in anything that
risky, especially with what Grizz does for a living.”

“What does he do, anyway?” I set my jaw and stare
deep into Barlonda’s eyes, searching for any deception that might
be hidden there.

Barlonda sucks in her cheeks before answering. “He’s
a chauffeur. He drives limos for one of the livery companies down
at the Cincinnati Airport. He’s just finished up a shift on Sunday
right before we came to the meeting—that’s why he was wearing the
suit. They do a lot of background checks on the drivers, so of
course he can’t get mixed up with anything—you know, criminal. So
please, don’t worry, dear. You have to understand, Lisa, that the
SCA attracts a lot of odd characters with odd personalities. You
can’t expect all of those odd personalities to get along with each
other perfectly all the time. What happened the other night was
nothing but a simple misunderstanding. Master Melphus is still
probably a little shaken up over what happened at Lady Ramona’s,
that’s all. Everyone is, in fact. I mean, the poor woman’s house
burned down.”

“But—it just seems that there’s a lot of strange
things happening. Even Syr Phillip thinks so. He—“

Barlonda holds up one hand. “I know Syr Phillip’s
probably got you asking more questions of more people than you need
to be,” she says, her voice soft and calm. “Take some advice from
me, hon. Stop asking so many questions about gossip and petty SCA
politics. Your number-one priority for the next week is to get
yourself ready for Crown Tournament. Once Syr Phillip wins—and he
will—you’ll have an entire year of your life to deal with nothing
but gossip and petty SCA politics. I suggest you stop being so nosy
and just enjoy the last week of peace and quiet you have left. Now
hold still, hon. I have to get this skirt fitted to your waist or
it won’t hang properly.” Barlonda gathers up the pins from the
carpet and begins fussing with my dress again.

“Barlonda’s right,” Grizzly shouts from the hallway
as I hear the toilet flush. He emerges from the hall and steps into
my cluttered cubbyhole of a kitchen, grabs the last Pabst Blue
Ribbon from my battered Kelvinator, and hands it to me. “Drink that
nice and slow. It’ll relax you. By the way Lisa, has anyone ever
told you that your bathroom is too goddamned little?”
I chuckle. “Yes, it is a little on the cozy side,” I admit.
Although
cozy
is probably too kind a word for my bathroom.
With as tall as Grizzly is, his knees were probably grazing the
tops of his ears when he was using my facilities. “This building is
from the late 1800s, and predates bathrooms,” I explain. “My
landlord told me once that my apartment’s toilet used to be a coal
closet.”

“I can believe that,” Grizzly snorts. “Oh, and by
the way, when I was in the john I came up with the perfect SCA name
for you. I guarantee nobody else in SCA has ever had it, past or
present.”

“What’s that?” I sigh. “That Lisa di Napoli name, or
whatever it was?”

“Even better than that. I hope you don’t mind, Lisa,
but I thought of it on the can. Your official SCA name from now on
will be Lisa Ladonna di Abbigliatura.”

“Wow. That’s really pretty.” I say. “Does it mean
anything?”

“Yep. Literally, it means Lisa, the Lady of the
Little Toilet. Lucky for you though, most folks in the SCA don’t
know Italian, so to them it’ll just sound like a pretty name.
Consider it a private joke, just among the three of us.”

“A lot of SCA folk have inside jokes for names,”
Barlonda says as she finishes up her fittings on me for the night.
“I do. My full SCA name is Baroness Barlonda Maria, La Dona Qui
Caro Tocino.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, taking a long sip of
beer.

Baron Grizzly grins. “It’s Spanish. It means
Barlonda Marie, The Woman Who Loves Bacon.” Grizzly gives his wife
a playful slap on her ample behind, and they both laugh together,
helping to ease the tension.

We all share a good laugh, and I feel a little
better. But even so, I can’t help but wonder why whenever there are
strange goings-on in the SCA, they all seem to have at least
something to do with Syr Phillip.

Chapter
20

On the morning of the 36
^th
Annual Middle
Kingdom Crown Tournament, I rise early.

Extremely
early. My alarm jolts me awake at
four-thirty. Well, not quite
awake
. More like just
semi-conscious enough to throw my alarm clock against the wall so
hard it shatters.

I finally wake up for real around five forty-five
when I hear Pegeen pounding on my front door, screaming so loud it
wakes up Mr. Watkins next door—who promptly starts pummeling my
front porch with his metal garbage-can lids.

“Lemme in, Lees!” I hear Pegeen scream from the
porch as I finally roll out of bed and land on a pile of clean
laundry. “Mr. Watkins is trying to kill me out here!”

I make it to the front door and let Pegeen in just
as she narrowly misses another aluminum projectile. She’s still in
modern dress, but has two thick garment bags slung across her
back.

“I’ve been banging on this door for
twenty
minutes
, Lees. You were supposed to be up and ready to go by
now. I have to make sure your gown fits and telephone Barlonda to
be on deck for any last-minute adjustments once we get there,
remember?”

“Sorry, Pegeen,” I mutter, heading straight for my
bathroom as I vaguely recall something about Barlonda making her
umpteenth adjustment to my gown’s cleavage-maximizing bodice two
nights before. “I just haven’t been sleeping much the past couple
of days.”

“Having phone sex with Syr Phillip again?” Pegeen
scoffs from the living room as I sit down on my tiny toilet for a
pee. “I warned you about that, you know. Too much phone sex dilutes
the power of the real thing.”

“No, we just did that the one time,” I answer as I
flush the toilet and start running water for my shower. “I’ve been
a little anxious, that’s all.” I catch a glance of myself in the
mirror and see that there are industrial-sized bags under both my
eyes.

Pegeen pokes her head in the bathroom door. “Why?”
she asks, and hands me a fresh pair of underwear that she must have
plucked from the laundry pile next to my bed. I notice that her own
eyes look drawn and bloodshot, although I can’t imagine why. It’s
not like
she
has anything to be anxious about.

I step under the shower stream, and find that the
water is still running too cold. I stay under it anyway and dump
half a bottle of Pantene on my head in hopes that the icy water and
heavy shampoo fragrance will somehow force me into full
consciousness. “Well, there is the little matter of me probably
becoming Crown Princess of the Middle Kingdom sometime in the next
twelve hours,” I groan.

“You should be happy about that, Lees. Hundreds of
women throughout the SCA are insanely jealous of you right now, you
know.”

I rummage around in my shower caddy looking for my
razor, find it, and hastily start to shave my legs and underarms
without bothering to soap them first. Within seconds I shred my
left underarm and right thigh to ribbons.

“Goddamn it,” I mutter and toss the dull razor aside
in favor of a quick-and-dirty shower. I rinse my hair, rub on a
little body wash, and step out of the shower still semi-covered in
suds. I wrap a raggedy towel around myself and go to face Pegeen in
the hallway.

“Pegeen, it’s not that I’m not happy about the
possibility of becoming Crown Princess. I am, believe me. It’s just
that it’s going to be this huge responsibility. It’s going to take
up tons of my time. I might have to quit my job, too. Or at least
take an extended leave of absence, because as you know, Brad isn’t
too keen on me missing any work. I have no idea how I’m going to
pay my bills if I have to quit my job, or worse yet, get fired.
Plus,
everybody
I know in the SCA is acting really weird
about a lot of things right now. Syr Phillip especially. The whole
thing has got me kind of spooked.”

Pegeen looks me up and down and shakes her head.
“You’re bleeding all over the carpet, Lees. You should probably do
something about that before you put on this dress.”

I look down and see she’s right. The razor nicks on
my left thigh are gushing a crimson tide of blood, soap, and water
all over the floor, and the cuts in my armpit are quickly staining
my towel.