Dark Sexy Knight (A Modern Fairytale) (22 page)

He was in love with Verity. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Had she heard that Sandy was back? Did she know? Fuck. Her words—
I’m not good at sharing
—suddenly resonated in his head. He needed to see her, to talk to her and make sure that she knew that Sandy was no threat to what they had.

He stepped around Sandy, but she grabbed his arm, and when he turned around, she was waiting. She leaned forward quickly, her lips pressing against his, but Colt reacted immediately, pushing her away as forcefully as he dared. She stumbled back a few steps before righting herself.

“I said I’m
not
available,” he growled softly.

Sandy looked over his shoulder, toward the doorway of the barn, raising her voice considerably to be heard from several yards away. “Looking for someone, honey?”

Colt whipped around just in time to see Verity’s face contort, her sweet lips falling open, her chest heaving with short, shallow breaths.

“I . . . I’m just . . . I . . . no!” she said in a broken voice before turning and disappearing from sight.

“Verity!” he yelled, starting after her.

“Looks like you might be available after all,” said Sandy from behind him, grasping his arm.

He stopped and turned slowly to face her, yanking his arm away and forcing his fisted hands to stay curled and motionless by his sides. “Stay the fuck away from me.”

Then he turned around and ran after Verity.

***

Tears tumbling down her cheeks, Verity ran through the employee hallway, stopping at the gift shop to grab her purse from under the counter and continuing to the double doors where the evening audience would be lining up in about an hour. She ignored Beverly’s calls and could barely see through her tears, but she didn’t stop running until she got to Colton’s car. She unlocked it, opened the door, sat down, and put the key in the ignition. She didn’t know where she was going. She just knew she had to get as far away from
The Legend of Camelot
as possible.

Putting the car in gear, she floored it into reverse, then forward, beelining for the exit and pulling out onto Peachtree Road. Her tears wouldn’t stop, blinding her as she raced through a red light, almost getting sideswiped before she realized that she’d kill herself if she didn’t slow down.

It was too good to be true . . . too good to be true . . . too good to be true
, she repeated over and over in her head, finally pulling into the parking lot of a Walmart.
I should have known my bad luck wasn’t gone.

Tears cascaded down her face in streams as she rested her forehead on the crest of the steering wheel, letting herself have a long cry. Eventually, after quite a while, the tears subsided a little, and she decided to try to make sense of what she’d just seen.

Was there any chance they hadn’t been kissing? She shook her head, more tears falling. No. His lips were scarlet from Sandy’s lipstick.

Verity gulped, sniffling as more tears wove their way down her cheeks.

It didn’t look like a passionate kiss
, whispered her heart.

“But it was still a kiss,” she said aloud in a pitiful voice.

He didn’t have his arms around her.

“But her hand was on his arm. He was letting her touch him.”

He broke off the kiss quickly.

“Probably because Sandy noticed me standing there, and they wanted more privacy.”

He yelled your name as you were running away.

“Did he?” she said, thinking back. She didn’t remember him yelling her name, but she’d been so upset, maybe only her subconscious had registered it. Everything was becoming jumbled and mixed-up in her mind.

Whether or not he’d yelled her name became an important part of the equation as afternoon turned into evening and she still sat in his car, dressed in a princess dress, her beautiful memories of last night mixing with the horror of watching him kiss another woman today.

It took so much strength and effort for her to try to see Colton and Sandy’s kiss in any light other than mutual desire, but after she calmed down and stopped crying, she concentrated hard and forced herself to re-create
exactly
what she’d seen.

She’d turned the corner of the barn as Colton was heading out, but suddenly he whipped around and kissed Sandy. It was a quick kiss, ending with Sandy stumbling back several steps as though pushed away. Colton mumbled something Verity couldn’t hear. While Sandy asked if she was looking for someone, Colton also turned around, and yes, she could see it in her mind: the sheer horror on his face. And yes, as she ran away, he called her name. She remembered.

But she still couldn’t make sense of it.

Why was Colton’s shirt off? Who had initiated the kiss? And why hadn’t Colton immediately run after her?

She took a deep breath, surprised to note that the sun was getting lower behind Walmart. She looked at the clock on the dashboard: six thirty. She’d been sitting in the car for almost an hour. The show wouldn’t be over for a while, but there was only one way to get the answers she needed. She had to talk to Colton. Turning the key in the ignition, she started the car and headed back to the castle.

***

Colt paced in front of the living room window, staring out at the street, looking for his car. It was after eight o’clock now, and she still wasn’t home. After Verity had peeled out of the parking lot, Colt asked Sebastian for a ride home, then called Lynette to say his stomach was hurting. As Sebastian headed back to work, Colt checked in the garage for the car, but it wasn’t there. He still ran into the house calling her name, but everything was quiet. She wasn’t home.

His squire was already queued up to play the Viking Knight tonight, and since he didn’t have a car, Colt was stuck at home, where he paced like a caged animal, wondering where the fuck she was and if she was okay and if she would ever come back.

“She has to come back,” he muttered time and again. “Her stuff is here.”

He knew what it must have looked like to her—him kissing his ex-girlfriend in a dark barn with no shirt on. Fuck. He knew exactly what it looked like. And yet, when he thought about what they’d shared last night, it hurt him that she hadn’t let him explain, hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt. Didn’t she know how much he loved her? Couldn’t she see that his feelings for her weren’t fickle or weak?

He sat down on Aunt Jane’s couch, his head in his hands, and closed his eyes. What if last night was all he’d ever get? What if Sandy had ruined things with Verity?

“No!” he raged, swiping Aunt Jane’s porcelain figurines of Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood off the coffee table in front of him. “FUCK THAT! No, no, no! Fuck!”

The little statues crashed into a far wall, smashing into tiny pieces that fell onto the carpet.

“Please!” he growled, upending the coffee table and kicking a leg off just as headlights brightened the room.

He raced to the front door and whipped it open to find Ryan walking up the driveway.

“Hi, Colton!” he said, waving cheerfully.

No thunderface. No thunderface.

“Hey, buddy,” he said softly, through clenched teeth, looking over Ryan’s shoulder at Verity, who sat in the front seat of the car, facing straight ahead, staring at the garage.

“Artie won,” said Ryan. “Again.”

“Yeah. He wins every Wednesday,” said Colt.

“Yeah. Every Wednesday. Ver’ty said go to bed.”

Ryan walked up the stoop and into the house, past Colt, his footsteps fainter and fainter as Colt walked away from the house, toward the car.

He took a deep breath and stood beside the driver’s door. She was still wearing the princess dress she’d been wearing when she caught sight of him and Sandy in the barn, which meant that, while she’d picked up Ryan after his shift, she hadn’t gone back to work, where she would have changed back into street clothes before coming home. He reached for the car door, relieved that it wasn’t locked, and squatted down beside her.

“Please, sunshine,” he said as gently as he could. “Please let me explain.”

When she turned to him, the sadness in her eyes made him feel worse than any beating he’d ever taken from his father. They were bloodshot and swollen, like she’d been crying for hours, and behind them was such immense sorrow, he felt like he’d die if he couldn’t take away her pain.

“You were . . . k-kissing h-her.”

Her voice was so soft and small, so broken, he could barely hear her.

“No,” he said. “She kissed me. I pushed her away.”

“You didn’t have a shirt on.”

“Neither did Sebastian or Shawn. We’d been training in the sun for hours. We were all sweaty and beat.”

Her eyes welled with tears, so full, he didn’t know how they didn’t fall. And when they did, he winced.

“You didn’t . . . you didn’t come after me.”

“I
did
, baby,” he said. “You burned rubber out of the parking lot with me calling your name behind. Sebastian brought me home, and I waited for you. I’ve been waiting for hours.”

She took a sobbing, gasping breath and leaned forward, her forehead resting on the steering wheel. “I don’t know what’s real.”

“
You’re
real,” he said, panic rising in his chest. Her reaction was scaring him. She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t talking to him. “
We’re
real. What we have is real.”

She lifted her head and looked at him, exhaustion and sorrow warring for dominion on her face. “Good things don’t happen to me.”

“What do you mean, baby?”

“I don’t get to have good things, good luck.” Her brow furrowed. “I get
bad
luck.”

“Sunsh—”

“I wasn’t wanted,” she said quietly. “I was a mistake. A surprise. Whatever you want to call it. I wasn’t planned, and I knew it. I always knew it. Good things happened to other people, to people who were wanted, not to me. Ten little girls rode their bikes to school, but mine got stolen. The chicken pox skipped every kid in town but me. My boyfriend dumped me for the head cheerleader. My other boyfriend dumped me when my life got complicated. My parents died within weeks of each other, and you know what I inherited? A brother with an IQ of sixty-one and a pecan farm that was killed by a tornado. Know how many other farms in Camilla got hit besides ours? None. Zero.”

When she started speaking again, her voice was stronger and angrier, and Colton wasn’t sure whether he should be grateful or wary, because he felt the same storm swirling within her that often swirled within him. “When I moved here, I could only afford a room in a shit-bag, flea-ridden motel, where my brother and I were harassed daily, but hey, it was a roof, right? Except we couldn’t find jobs, and the money disappeared day by day until we were a minute away from a homeless shelter, which would have meant being split up—Ryan with the men and me with the women. And you know what that would have meant? That I couldn’t look after him, couldn’t protect him. That’s what
should have
happened! Don’t you see? All I have ever known was
bad luck
.”

She sobbed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand for a moment. “Except that you came along. And the moment I met you, you changed all of that. You found us jobs and gave us a home and protected us.”

The tears were coursing down her cheeks now, and it took all his strength not to reach for her, because he was desperate to reassure her and comfort her, but he sensed she needed to say everything. He nodded, encouraging her with his silence to continue. “Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had
good
luck. No. I had the
best
luck. I had
you
. And it was like all those tough knocks were worthwhile because you were the prize. I had to have all that bad luck so the scales would be cosmically balanced when you came along.”

She paused for a moment, sobbing, dropping his eyes. “Is my bad luck back already?”

“No, baby. No, I promise,” he said gently. He couldn’t bear it anymore, so he reached out and took her hand. It was small and cold, and he held it between his like a precious treasure.

She wove her fingers through his, seizing his eyes. “I’m
in love
with you. Losing you would break my heart, Colton. I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

“Stop,” he said, reaching across her lap and unbuckling her seat belt. “Please stop.”

He pulled her gently out of the car and swooped her into his arms. She rested her head against his shoulder as he kicked the car door closed and strode into the house. He didn’t stop until he reached his room, placing her on the bed and lying down beside her.

“I didn’t realize how much I . . . I mean, seeing her touching you . . .,” she started crying harder.

Colton pressed his lips to her hair, tightening his arms around her shuddering body.

“If what you saw between me and Sandy today makes you think you’re losing me, you’re wrong. You’re so fucking wrong, it’s not even . . .” He paused, blinking his eyes against a burn of tears. “I am
totally
in love with you, sunshine. And I need you just as badly as you need me. You’re sunshine and laughter. You’re patience and understanding. You give your whole heart and only ask for mine in return. You have it. You have all of it, baby. You’re the
luckiest
thing that has ever happened to me.
You
are my sweet place, Verity Gwynn, and the
only
way you’re losing me is if
you
walk away because I’m not going anywhere. Ever.”