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Senga balanced on her toes, kissing Erramun.  There was a split second where she thought he wouldn’t respond before he kissed back, pressing his throat against her hands.  As she drew on the kiss, letting her thumbs brush against the tattoos she’d inked into his skin, he put first one hand and then the other on her waist to brace her.

She snaked one hand around to the back of his neck and drew out the kiss; he pressed his hand against the small of her back, holding her to him.  She caught a breath and stole a glance at him; he had closed his eyes.  He leaned in towards her; she kissed him again, her fingers all pressing into his neck.

At the moment when she thought that her toes might give out, he lifted her up.  She wrapped her legs around his waist and kept hissing him, pressing her whole body against his.  They were still wearing quite inconvenient clothing; she wanted to do something about that, but that would require either that she stop kissing him or stop touching him.  Possibly both. Neither were acceptable.

He turned slowly around, so slowly she almost didn’t notice what he was doing, and set her on the bed.  A moment later, he set her on the bed and, very slowly, disengaged.

Senga opened her eyes and made a soft noise, not quite a complaint.  He froze.

“I think,” he murmured, “that Mistress-” Continue reading →

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There were, at the very least, not literal traps between the Solar in the back left of the downstairs and Senga’s room in the middle right of the upstairs, or at least not new ones.  Senga found that she was holding Erramun’s hand, and she found that he was holding very firmly to that hand.

She closed the door behind them and locked it.  She turned to look at him as he released her hand and dropped to his knees in the middle of her sitting room.  “Mistress.”  His voice sounded rusty; it hitched in the middle of the word.

“Erramun.”  She needed a manual for this.  Aunt Mirabella had clearly not seen fit to provide her with all of the things that she needed for this endeavor.  If it turned out she wasn’t really dead, Senga was going to have come very stern words with her. Continue reading →

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“I have to ask again, are you an idiot?”

“You don’t have  to be an asshole.  I know how Keeping works, you giant shit, so you can back off and just assume I’m not asking or talking about the bond.  Obviously you’re protective of her.  Obviously you have to obey her.  That has nothing to do with the way you’re looking at her right now.”  Ezer rolled his eyes and flapped that away with a wave of his hand. “Anyway.  There’s a job.  It’s a recon, and if you, mister, can listen and follow a plan, then we could use you.  If you can’t, then you’re staying back here.”

“You can’t give me orders,” Erramun snarled. Continue reading →

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“I’m just saying, she knows more than she’s saying.”

Ezer was following Senga and Erramun around the house.

This might have been adorable in a normal case, but since Senga was trying to get a moment or seven alone with Erramun, it was growing a little frustrating.

“And I’m saying, of course she does.”  Senga checked the back door to the garden – the one in the Sturdy – and found it, too, locked.

Her cousins were fae.  They couldn’t enter a house without an invitation, any more than she could. But that wouldn’t stop them from sending an agent, or a team of them, if they thought it would work.

“What do you mean, of course she does?” Continue reading →

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Ezer cleared his throat. “How likely is this to interfere with our business?”

“I think,” Senga admitted quietly, “that it’s already doing so.  I think that whatever happened with that job the other day, it was probably family-related – my family.  I mean, unless you or Allayne have come up with enemies lately that you haven’t told me about.”

“What about Chitter?”  Erramun looked between the two of them, ignoring the staff for the moment.

Ezer snorted. “She just makes online enemies.  They’d hack the house – one of them made the icemaker spew ice all over the kitchen once – but they don’t generally sink to attempted murder.  They think it’s messy and sort of below them, I think.”

“Murder?”  Candavish leaned forward.  “You’re not speaking of Mirabella.” Continue reading →

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It took them another fifteen minutes to calm Chitter down that time, during which the tea and coffee – and Chitter’s soda – arrived. The maid bringing the drinks made things either better or much worse by looking Chitter in the eye and apologizing for being late. “I had to feed the moat creature, you see.”

“Moat creature! Moat Creature! Wait…”

Five minutes later, Senga had managed to convince Chitter that there was no invisible moat and no moat creature. Five minutes after that, with Candavish’s amused help, they’d managed to calm her down.

“Honestly. You could have just told me that you were kidding,” she huffed.

“I believe I did. Twelve minutes ago. Although-” Continue reading →