Page 36 of My Knight

I turned just enough to catch his face, and a huge smile spread across mine. “You don’t play fair.”

“Not when it’s something I really want,” he whispered.

His words sent a delicious shiver down my spine. My stomach flipped, and heat bloomed low and slow.

“That’s it!” Dove yelled. “Now it’s boys against girls for the rest of the day!”

“Oh boy,” I giggled, turned fully in Pirate’s arms, and placed my hands on his shoulders. “You pissed off Dove.”

He looked down at me, and everything around us—dogs barking, people shouting, footsteps stomping across the grass—blurred. The way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world he gave a damn about, like he saw me and nothing else… it nearly stole my breath.

And just like that, I didn’t care about the game.

Didn’t care about anything else but him.

Pirate

It all came down to this.

The guys had won three games. The girls had won three games. And now, after a day of chaos, shouting, and more competitive smack-talk than an entire season of football. It was all down to the final event of the Iron Fiends Cup.

The Egg Walk.

Dove and Olive were in the middle of the yard, setting up what could only be described as a haphazard obstacle course—four old tires, a scattered pile of two-by-fours, seven buckets lined up in a zigzag, and a sprinkler going wild at the far end of the yard.

I narrowed my eyes. “I’m surprised we didn’t do a sack race.”

Dice, standing next to me with a cupcake in one hand and a water bottle in the other, snorted. “Don’t give her any ideas.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“I actually had fun,” he added after a beat, like it was some big confession.

I had too. Pretty sure we all did. Even Yarder, though he kept pretending he wasn’t grinning the whole damn time.

“I’m going to get dinner ready,” Adalee called from the patio.

“No!” Dove said instantly and threw a hand in the air. “It’s not fair if you miss the final round.”

Adalee shielded her eyes from the sun. “Fine—then Fade has to come help me. That will even it out.”

“Anyone want to tell her it hasn’t been fair all day?” I muttered under my breath.

The girls had Mac, which gave them ten, but we still had two extra with having Drew and Mark on our team. Not that we’d complained.

“No,” Dove repeated. “You guys can just go first.”

She motioned toward the starting point, and the rest of us wandered over. From where we stood, it looked like someone had just dumped random crap in the yard and called it a challenge. Tires, wood, buckets. Absolute chaos.

“Uh, what exactly are we supposed to do?” Adalee asked, with her hands on her hips.

“Come on,” Dove said, way too cheerfully. “It’s easy.”

We all looked at her like she’d lost her mind.

“First,” she pointed to the tires, “you do a figure eight through these. Then zigzag through the buckets. Then climb over the first pile of wood, then figure eight through the second set of tires, climb the second pile of wood, run through the sprinkler, and turn around and do it all again back to this line.”

She smiled. Like it was reasonable. “Easy peasy.”

---