Page 20 of Lucky or Knot
Especially right now, when every time I closed my eyes I pictured my lover from the night before, either under me—or under Cunningham.
At least this way my blood pressure didn’t spike everysingle damn time.
My cock had perked up, though. I ignored it, because sitting there half-drunk and getting myself off thinking about the guy who’d tricked and lied to me was simply too pathetic, even if no one would ever know about it but me.
Why had he tricked and lied to me, though? It didn’t make any sense. Half of me wished Declan had been available to talk it over, but I was mostly glad he’d been too busy to keep plumbing the depths of my humiliation with me, useful as his perspective might have been.
Arnold Cunningham had all the money in the world, probably even more than Declan, but at that point only super rich guys showing off for other super rich guys cared about the difference. I certainly didn’t. And that car the fairy had been driving cost over a hundred grand, so apparently Cunningham extended his showing-off-his-wealth to showering it on his…companion. If Declan had seen them together at events, that meant Cunningham didn’t keep him hidden away as a dirty little secret, either.
Which meant…well, it meant the fairy hadn’t needed to cheat me. The bit about not wanting to use any traceable form of payment made sense, if he had a jealous sugar daddy, but why take back the coin when money had to be the least of his problems?
And of course, his explanation about the bet had obviously been total bullshit. Now that I thought about it, he hadn’t been very specific about the terms, had he? And his unstated and therefore not-an-actual-lie implication, that he’d lost a bet with a friend about taking an alpha knot, didn’t make any sense, either. He hadn’t needed my knot; his boyfriend had one, which he probably put in him on the regular.
I took a shot of Scotch, but it didn’t quite banish that image. Fuck me.
All right, so what, then? No matter how I turned it around in my mind, I couldn’t come up with any theory that fit.
Declan might be right that trying to get to the bottom of the mystery, get what I was owed, and get revenge would end in disaster—because all of those would require seeing the fairy again.
Seeing him again. And possibly more than seeing him.
No, dammit. That would be too stupid even for me.
I poured another drink and tried to convince myself that I was smarter than that, and hoped I’d manage it before I passed out.
***
Declan delivered on his promise. I woke up on the couch the next morning to several texts from him. He’d sent me three addresses: Cunningham’s main office downtown, his mansion in the hills, and info about a penthouse he maintained at one of the Strip’s most upscale casino hotels, in which he apparently owned the majority stake.
While I scrolled through those, I rolled off the couch, wincing at the excessive amount of sunlight pouring through the blinds I’d forgotten to close the night before, and wandered into the tiny kitchen to start some coffee.
Shifters didn’t get hangovers, so I couldn’t understand why I had this heavy, not-quite-right feeling. Coffee would help. It might be mostly psychosomatic, given that caffeine didn’t affect me much more than liquor did, but the smell always reminded me of my father in the kitchen in the morning, brewing his little pot of tar on the stove in his coppercezve. The aroma and the bitter flavor always helped me focus and prepare for whatever came next.
Although I used a coffeemaker instead of doing it the old-fashioned way, much to my dad’s disgust.
As I clicked the machine on, my screen lit up again. Declan had sent an attachment, and it had only started downloading onto my crappy outdated phone when I opened up the message thread.
The attachment popped up. The mug I’d been pulling out of the cabinet slipped from my hand, and I cursed and flailed and fumbled, barely catching it.
That was the fairy’s face looking up at me from the screen in a photo very obviously taken for his driver’s license, and even with the gruesome lighting and the DMV’s best attempt at making him look drunk, dead, and angry, his skin glowed and his eyes and hair gleamed and his lips pouted kissably…and my cock twitched.
All of a sudden I was all the way awake, even though the coffee machine had barely begun to hiss and spit.
Declan hadn’t only sent me the fairy’s photo. He’d somehow gotten hold of the entire driver’s license application, photo included. A lot of the little boxes had been filled in with a code the State of Nevada used on paperwork when the answer to a question didn’t apply to a supernatural or non-human entity. The fairy hadn’t provided a birthdate, place of birth, or his mother’s maiden name, just for example. He’d also declined to register to vote and to be an organ donor, probably luckily for democracy and also the health of anyone in need of a kidney.
But he had put down a name, because apparently even fae skittishness about the magical power inherent in names wasn’t enough to defeat the Nevada bureaucracy.
Despite everything, I couldn’t help starting to laugh.
Tyler Tania. Really? I mean…really?
Of course, the same clerk who hadn’t quibbled over Ty Tania the fairy also hadn’t disputed his absurd claim to be five foot six, so maybe it’d been a don’t-give-a-fuck kind of day at the DMV.
Tyler. All right. I’d call him Tyler. I’d call him whatever, but mostly, I’d just call him.
Because right below an address that I was pretty sure matched that hotel Declan had texted me about was a phone number.
And fuck it. Seriously, fuck it. Maybe Cunningham would answer. Maybe it’d be the concierge of the Audacity Casino and Hotel. Maybe my number would be tracked and recorded and a hit squad of pissed-off werecoyote goons would be breaking down my door before I’d finished my pot of coffee.
