Page 31 of Trickster King

She nodded and gave my cheek a pat. “I’ll handle it. I’ll let you win this one because you’re not asking for anything unreasonable.”

“It’d be a pretty shitty thing to fight over,” I admitted.

“It doesn’t hurt I like when you get bossy. How are Bullmanchu and his friends doing?”

“They’re fine. They liked bath time, and they loaded into the trailer without a fuss. Senator Padrino’s ranchers and some others are using their transports to haul the rest of the cattle, so hopefully it’ll all be done before dinner is ready.”

“They’re about twenty minutes out, so your plans to feed everyone should go off without a hitch. The banker I spoke to was real concerned, Pat. You? Buy three trucks and trailers to go with them at one time without carefully handling every line of paperwork? The poor man asked if you were sick.”

I laughed at the thought of some banker covering for me so my wife wouldn’t discover my other acquisitions early. “I’m not sick. I’m calling it therapy. If I moved all my cattle here and fix all the fields at the ranch, I won’t get any more fungal infections. If I don’t get any more fungal infections, my wife might praise me.”

“I could see that happening,” my wife admitted. “And what might your wife do while praising you?”

“I’m really hoping she’ll drag me to my favorite rooms in the palace to do whatever she wants with me, if you want me to be honest about it.”

She giggled. “If you don’t get any more fungal infections, I’m sure your wife will keep that in mind. I’m going to go check on the kids while you prepare an offering for the food-thieving tyrants.”

“It will be the best offering I can make for them,” I promised.

Peace came in many shapes and sizes, but little beat the satisfaction of feeding a hoard of hungry people, especially my family. As desired, I had enough leftovers to send my wife home with a cooler loaded with chicken, everything wrapped to my satisfaction and numbered. I made use of one of the rancher’s laptops to email the head of the kitchen staff so he knew what to do with my meticulously packaged meals for my wife, making a few adjustments to how much she should be fed to appease the food-thieving tyrants. I thanked him for covering for me before going to see my wife off.

Senator Padrino flew off with her without incident, and I sighed my relief.

“He suggested we should spend the night here,” Geoff said, coming to stand at my side. As I wouldn’t budge until the helicopter was out of sight, he waited with his typical patience. When I remained silent, he added, “After Deidre left, Randy gave Eddie his black horse. There were tears, and Randy handled having the talk about how it was all right to have his stuffed animals. This made the crying worse, but Randy thinks he’s just overly tired.”

Ah. “He’s putting Eddie to bed.”

“Yep.”

“Then I guess we’re staying here for tonight. I hope Randy came prepared with a story. I didn’t.”

Geoff laughed. “I’m sure he can handle it. Randy asked me to occupy you with making plans for tomorrow so we can hit the road fairly early. We’ll be getting up before you to do a full check of the SUV, as it was left unsupervised. We’ll need to figure out what time to leave, where we’re going, and who to expect to go with us. Even if we took all three trailers, we don’t have enough to transport the horses, so Randy offered to drive one of the trucks while we take the SUV with Eddie.”

I nodded. “We can take the six best that way, and one of those will be the foal Eddie picks unless he decides he wants the unborn one.”

“He’ll probably pick one close to training,” Geoff admitted. “He’s a chip off your block for that. He wants to be in the saddle, and he wants to train animals just like you do.”

“Has he been tested for horse empathy?”

“No, but he will be, especially with the other empathy symptoms cropping up. We, as a kingdom, have learned through our mistakes with you.”

“Pardon?” I eyed Geoff. “I mean, I accidentally bonded with Jessica, but did anyone think I would escape her?”

“One of your parents was a Royal empath, completely missed because of the nature of our system. You’re very probably a Royal empath as well—and that’s even ignoring your bonding ability with horses, which continues to develop in strange ways. You’re sensitive to horses you’re bonded with, but once you sell off a horse and transfer ownership, outside of your close bonds, you drop bonds. Almost at will. There are those who consider this to be a royal level talent. Not Royal, not like the one that killed one of your parents, but royal enough.”

I grunted at the reminder of my parents’ death. I’d wanted them to see the wedding, and it had taken me months to stop grieving each night before bed, something that had alarmed Jessica at first.

She’d grown up surrounded by men who’d never shown emotions, giving her no idea how to handle when I’d cried over the parents I’d loved and lost. In a way, seeing my vulnerability had helped her when her parents had died.

In our rooms, new and old, she understood she could cry for everything she wished she’d changed before reaching the point of no return. Her father had held on long enough to meet Adam, and on his dying breath, he’d kissed my cheek and thanked me for restoring hope back to Texas.

Jessica had never understood what he’d meant, but I’d figured it out.

In his eyes, Jessica had been the embodiment of his hope for Texas’s future with our children becoming his ultimate legacy. They carried my name rather than his, but his hands had helped shape our family.

“Her Majesty’s father found a great deal of comfort in your parents’ deaths. He grieved along with you, as you know. He’d grown to respect them before they passed. But he understood, in that moment, that you were truly the best man for his daughter. And now you’re going to be in his same shoes.”

“Deidre’s showing the same symptoms as Eddie.” A statement, not a question.

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