Hard Day's Knight (2 page)

“Nope, sorry, I’ve got too much to do, what with the official Wenches’ Conference and all. Besides, Mom paid
you
to take care of him.”

“Only for the flight!” I dug through the ice in the cooler and extracted a chilled bottle of water. “They were supposed to be home by now to receive the horrible beast with open arms.”

“Yeah, well, you know how Dad is. Once he gets an idea in his head, there’s no changing his mind. He’s always wanted to see the Klondike.”

“He’s the only man I know who’d feel it necessary to drive from Seattle to Ontario via Alaska,” I grumbled as I swigged the cold water. “Moth, dammit . . . argh! No! Spit it out! Bad cat!”

“You really should keep a closer eye on him,” CJ said as I grabbed the cat and pulled out of his mouth the bit of tent he was gnawing on. “Mom’s really attached to him. She’d never forgive you if anything happened to him.”

Moth shot a slitted, yellow-eyed glare at me as I picked him up.

“The feeling’s mutual,” I growled, and lugged him over to the pyramid of stuff in front of our tent. I checked the snap on the long leash that was tied onto a lounge chair, adjusted his harness so he couldn’t slip out of it again, and tethered him to the chair so I could put stuff away. “There isn’t enough money in the world to pay me for having to babysit him for two whole weeks.”

“Well, it’s not like you have a lot of other options, is it?” CJ asked.

I froze in the act of hauling the sleeping bags into the tent.

“Oh, Pepper, I’m sorry. That wasn’t nice of me. I didn’t mean it. It’s not your fault that unemployment is so high in Seattle.”

I shrugged the sting of her comment away and tossed the sleeping bags inside the musty, faintly mildew-scented tent. “It may not be nice, but it’s the truth. I don’t have anything else to do except sit around and watch my unemployment benefits run out.” That wasn’t really the truth; my days were very busy, what with job-hunting and all the volunteering I did to keep myself sane—I didn’t even have time to date, let alone sit around and do nothing—but still, her point was taken.

“Maybe if you went to California? I always heard that was a good place for software engineers.”

“It
was,
which is why when so many of us were laid off two years ago, everyone moved to Silicon Valley and its environs. I figured with the mass migration south, I’d have a better chance at finding a job where I was, but . . .” I shrugged, unwilling to dwell on my increasingly desperate situation. This was supposed to be my vacation, my man-hunting, romantic, “fall madly in love with some gorgeous guy” vacation. I wanted to forget the depressing life I would have to face if it all came to nothing.

“Isn’t there anything else you can do?” CJ asked, her brow wrinkled as she sat on her heels watching me. “You’ve got a degree; surely there must be some job—”

I shifted a few more boxes into the tent. “You’d think so, huh? But since there were some fifty thousand other people let go by the local airplane company, there’s
nada
job-wise. Squat. Zilcho. Not even a McDonald’s fry-jockey job.”

“Boy, that is hard.” CJ sucked her lower lip for a moment as I flopped down exhaustedly on the cooler, brushing at the trickles of sweat snaking down the valley between my breasts. “I guess you don’t really have any other option but to find yourself a man, fall in love with him, and live happily ever after. Fortunately, I’m here to help you.”

My shoulders slumped as the full realization of what I was doing hit me. I’d been in delusional mode ever since my cousin had convinced me that she’d be able to hook me up with a veritable God of perfection, courtesy of the local Renaissance Faire and international jousting competition. And now here I was, actually believing her promise of finding me a man, a soul mate, someone who would fill my empty, lonely life. It was all so . . . sordid. Unrealistic.
Stupid.
I let my damp forehead drop into my hands as I moaned. “Oh, Ceej, what am I doing? Why did I let you talk me into this? Your plan is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous! What was I thinking? I’m thirty-six, unemployed, have a degree in programming and half of one from the vet school I quit before I got eaten by something big with sharp teeth, and guys don’t even look twice at me. Why on earth did I imagine that you can find me a man in two weeks when I haven’t in sixteen years of concerted searching?”

“Because I can!” She tipped her head to the side as I rocked miserably on the cooler. “I told you that Butcher and I met at the Faire last year, and we were madly in love after just a couple of days.”

“He lives in England. You live here,” I pointed out, wondering if I shouldn’t just give in and have an indulgent wallow in self-pity.

“But I see him every couple of months, and just as soon as I get that job at the BBC, we’ll be set. And then there was Fairuza Spenser, Cathy Baker, and Mary Denhelm.”

I looked up, having decided against the wallow. “Who are they?”

“Wenches in my local chapter whom I introduced to their respective husbands last year at various Faires. You’ll meet them later. And the year before that there were three others whom I also found hubbies for. I’m a matchmaker extraordinaire, so relax and place yourself fully in my capable hands. Before the Faire is over, I will have not only found you your perfect man, but you’ll be deeply in love and well on the way to happily-ever-aftering.”

“Life is not a fairy tale,” I said morosely, wanting to believe her, but knowing that things like that just didn’t happen to people like me.

“No, it’s better,” she said calmly, then frowned as her brows drew together. “You have to help, though, Pepper. You can’t just stand around waiting for the love of your life to swoop you up and carry you off.”

“Why not? We’re surrounded by knights in shining armor.”

Her frown deepened. “I just want to make sure that you’re totally committed to the idea of finding a guy.”

“Committed like to a madhouse?”

“Pepper!”

I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, little joke. I’m committed; I really am.”

“I hope so, because once I find a guy for you, you’re expected to keep him. I just worry that you’re not really serious about this. After all, look what you’ve done at home.”

I stood up and glared down at where she sat poking through the bag. “What do you mean, what I’ve done at home? I haven’t done anything!”

She grabbed a handful of jeans around my knee region and tugged me down to the cooler. “Stop looming over me like a great hulk. You’re too tall. I can’t bend my head back far enough to see you. And that’s exactly what I mean—you seem to expect the perfect man to drop into your lap without your lifting a single finger to find him, but that’s not going to happen unless you get proactive. You have to admit that until now, you haven’t actually expended any energy in dating.”

I grabbed her ear and peered in. “Hellooo, anyone home?” She slapped my hand away. “Didn’t you hear me on the drive up here? I’ve looked and looked and looked, but all the guys back home are either unemployed plane mechanics or likewise unemployed software geeks. The first group hang around bars ogling women and having competitions about who can pee the farthest, while the second thinks a wild time is getting drunk and creating dirty computer animations.”

“Maybe your standards are too high,” CJ said thoughtfully as she eyed me up and down. “There’s nothing really wrong with you. You’re pretty, in a general sort of way. You have nice thick red hair. And freckles—guys like freckles. And if you’re a bit . . . well . . . solid, guys like that, too. Some guys.
Most
guys. And you’re smart; that’s a plus.”

I paced the length of the tent, avoiding Moth as he lunged for my ankles when I passed in front of him. “You try it, cat, and you’re going to find yourself locked into the tent for the next two weeks. Thank you for your so reassuring assessment of my many fine qualities, CJ.”

“You’re also stubborn, very set in your ways, and you like to argue, but that’s okay, I think we can work around those points.” She gestured expressively with her tiny little hands. I added that to the list of injuries I was nursing. In addition to being gainfully employed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a researcher—a job that allowed her to travel to England several times a year—CJ was graceful, delicately built, and had a charming little heart-shaped face and a fragile manner that left most men prostrate before her. I, on the other hand, was built along the lines of a brick house, or so my mother always used to tell me. Big-boned, tall, and gawky—that was me. The only way a man was going to be prostrate before me was if he accidentally ran into me and was knocked out cold. I knew it wasn’t fair to add CJ’s genetic makeup to my list of ways the world was picking on me, but I was too crabby to care.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s me. Maybe something’s wrong with me.” I avoided Moth’s lunge at my shoe-laces and plopped down to snag another bottle of cold water. “It just seems to me that guys today don’t have any
cojones.
They sit around and whine and don’t
do
anything. At least I’m out trying to find work. And when I’m not, I’m volunteering. I don’t spend my day watching soaps and complaining and trying to pee farther than anyone else.”

“It must be frustrating to be unemployed,” she said, accepting a bottle of water. “And yes, you’re doing more than just complaining. It’s too bad that the women’s shelter or the literacy center can’t hire you, although honestly, Pepper, I think you’re being a little overly rough on the guys you know. Maybe you should just cut them a little slack? They must feel as helpless as you do at being in such a bad situation.”

I waved her explanation away. “It’s not just that; it’s the
sort
of men who are being produced these days. They’re all so wimpy! No guts to them, no balls! Whatever happened to the men of old, the men not afraid to stare death in the face and laugh a mocking laugh at it? What happened to their sense of adventure? Where are all the bold, daring men who would risk anything for the woman they loved?”

“Alpha males.”

“Huh?”

“They’re called alpha males, and you’ve been reading too many historical romances,” she answered with a smile. “Real men like that don’t exist. Well, they do—my lamb is one—but they’re few and far between. In reality, most alpha males are jerks. Butcher just happens to be a shining example of a delicious one.”

“Yeah, well, it seems to me that you’ve matchmade all the good guys already. There’s probably nothing decent left over.” I watched Moth as he dragged the aluminum-framed canvas chair over and tackled my left tennis shoe, viciously biting at the hard rubber of the shoe’s front. “I want a little romance, Ceej. I want a guy who will like me for the person that I am. I just want someone to love. Is it asking so much to find Mr. Pepper Marsh?”

CJ snickered for a second. “Mr. Pepper. Sounds like knockoff soft drink or a swishy hairdresser.”

“Ceej!”

“Is now the time to make a Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band joke?”

“No!”

She put on a suitably sincere face. “Sorry. No, it’s not asking too much. You just have to have faith in me, Pepper. I’ll find him for you, I promise.”

“Before the end of the Faire,” I reminded her, feeling once again the brief flare of hope deep within me. Say what you will, CJ did seem to have an extraordinary talent in matching up her friends and acquaintances. Maybe my luck was about to change. Maybe it was my turn to have something go right. Maybe—
Ow!
“Cat, I swear to you by all that is holy, if you do not release the flesh of my ankle, I’ll be wearing a cat stole!”

CJ snickered even harder as I squatted to disengage Moth’s claws from where he had attacked my naked ankle. “He’s just expressing his affection for you. He doesn’t like many people, you know. He tolerates Mom, but that’s because she’s the only one who feeds him. He pees in Dad’s shoes.”

“He’s about to use up one of his nine lives,” I said grimly as I plopped the cat down onto the chair he was tied to. “Sit. Stay.”

“You really don’t like animals, do you? No wonder you didn’t become a vet.”

“It’s not that I don’t like them; I just don’t trust them. You never know what they’re thinking,” I said, glaring at the huge orange-legged cat until he curled up into roughly the shape of a meat loaf, his front legs tucked under his big white chest. I wasn’t at all fooled by the air of innocence the cat wore—I knew from experience that he had a particularly creative and vengeful mind. “You’re up to something; I know you are. Just don’t try it when I’m around,” I told the cat, then looked back at my cousin. “Beastly things, animals.”

CJ giggled at my pun. “There speaks the daughter of a vet. How on earth could you grow up with animals all over your house and not love them?”

“You have no idea what it was like having a mother who was more interested her four-legged clients than in her only child, but I know all too well how innocent-looking, cute, adorable beasts are really bloodsucking leeches that demand constant attention.”

“Whatever.” CJ clearly wasn’t buying my sob story. She didn’t look the least bit sympathetic as she straightened her bloodred Irish dress and strapped on a long leather belt and tapestry pouch. “If it gives you pleasure to think you were abused, go for it. Just don’t say anything about not liking animals. Faire people are gaga over them, and that goes double when we’re talking about the way the men here adore their horses.”

I shuddered and plucked the water bottle from where I’d set it, reveling in the icy cold as I guzzled thirstily. I had had the erroneous idea that because Ontario was farther north than Seattle, it wouldn’t get at all hot. I was very, very wrong. “Horses are the worst,” I said, tossing the now-empty water bottle into one of the cardboard boxes used to hold bottles for refilling from the big ten-gallon water cooler CJ had lugged in. “They’re big, smelly, they step on you, and they eat your hair.”