A Dark and Stormy Knight Read online

  A Dark and Stormy Knight

  by Bridget Essex

  Synopsis:

  A warrior woman, a lonely artist, and a love story that's out of this world...

  Mara, a painter, lives in a quirky artist community in downtown Buffalo, and though she loves her roommates like family, she has always felt alone. But, each night, a sexy, dark-haired woman haunts her dreams, dreams that almost help her forget the betrayal and pain she's suffered in her life. She paints to block out the bad memories, and in every painting, the woman from her dreams—as if by magic—appears.

  One fateful night, Mara rescues a drowning person from the Buffalo River: a beautiful woman with a serious wound who claims to be a knight from another world. The woman's name is Charaxus, and—despite her outlandish story—she inspires longings in Mara that she has never felt before. As her attraction to Charaxus grows, Mara discovers that the mysterious, brooding knight is telling the truth—and that she is the woman Mara has been dreaming about for a lifetime.

  But someone dangerous and dark is hunting Charaxus, and is it Mara's fate to lose the woman of her dreams forever?

  A DARK AND STORMY KNIGHT is a sexy, romantic novel about overcoming past heartaches and learning to believe in happy endings. This book is set in the same world as A KNIGHT TO REMEMBER, FOREVER AND A KNIGHT, and DATE KNIGHT, but it is a stand-alone book. It is part of Bridget Essex's Knight Legends Series: women knights, real-world high jinks, and love stories that transcend space and time.

  "A Dark and Stormy Knight"

  © Bridget Essex 2016

  Rose and Star Press

  First Edition

  All rights reserved

  No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Rose and Star Press except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews. Please note that piracy of copyrighted materials is illegal and directly harms the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication:

  For my own lady knight in shining armor—you are my universe.

  And this book is especially dedicated to my sister, Kitty, who loved my stories enough to get them inked on her skin. Your constant support is the reason I write today. This dark and stormy (k)night is, and always has been, for you.

  Contents:

  Chapter 1: The Unexpected Goldfish

  Chapter 2: The Unexpected Rescue

  Chapter 3: Do You Believe in Magic?

  Chapter 4: A Surprising Development

  Chapter 5: Starry, Starry Night

  Chapter 6: The Knight of My Dreams

  Chapter 7: Her Body’s Art

  Chapter 8: A Goldfish Breakfast

  Chapter 9: When the Battle’s Lost and Won

  Chapter 10: Across the Universe

  Chapter 11: Screw Your Courage to the Sticking-Place

  Chapter 12: Only You

  Chapter 13: In that Heart Courage to Make Love Known

  Chapter 14: Come What Come May

  Chapter 15: Blood Will Have Blood

  Chapter 16: Not Lost

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1: The Unexpected Goldfish

  “My knight in shining armor!”

  I chuckle while toeing the door closed, balancing the five boxes of pizza on my hip and nearly losing my balance as I kick my shoes off. “I wouldn’t go that far, Iris,” I tease, but Iris is already dancing forward, snatching the pizza boxes out of my hands and pirouetting in place as she inhales the delicious aroma wafting from the hole in the top box.

  “Mara’s back with the ‘za!” she shouts at the top of her lungs.

  I toss my purse on the floor beside the large pile of shoes, and then I’m on my knees in a split second to avoid being bowled over by Sammie—who bowls me over, anyway, plastering me onto my back. My enthusiastic (“aggressively affectionate” might be a better description) dog slobbers love onto my face.

  Love in the form of drool.

  When Sammie was adopted, the shelter said he was part husky, part Saint Bernard, part terrier, and part every-other-dog-you-can-think-of. He looks cobbled together, as if a toddler took various dog parts and taped them on top of each other. And he has the zany personality to match.

  I love him like crazy.

  “Okay, baby,” I tell him, squirming beneath his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk until I manage to rise into a sitting position. I ruffle his fluffy brown ears, and then Iris offers me a hand, pulling me up to my feet.

  “You’ve got a little something there,” she says helpfully, pointing to my ponytail, and I groan, trotting toward the nearest bathroom to wipe my dog’s drool out of my hair.

  Unfortunately, the bathroom is locked.

  I knock.

  “Who is it?” Toby sings out from behind the door.

  “It’s Mara, Tobes—Sammie slimed me,” I tell him patiently. “How long are you going to be?”

  “I’m practicing my faces!” Toby sings again.

  I shake my head and groan, banging my forehead gently on the wooden door. “That’s awesome, but can you stop for just a minute while I wash the drool out?”

  Toby throws the door open as dramatically as possible. Actually, Toby does everything as dramatically as possible, including dressing for the day.

  I didn't see Toby before I left to pick up the pizzas; he's a night owl and usually begins his day around six pm. So I'm taking in his appearance for the first time now: he's currently dressed as a mime. Like…an actual mime, with white face paint, a black bodysuit, and a French beret tipped at a jaunty angle on his head.

  Keep in mind that Toby is almost seven feet tall, as thin as a sapling, and comprised mostly of elbows and handsome poses. He throws one of said poses at me now, cocking his hip and placing his hand on it, as if he just walked the runway in Milan…in a mime costume.

  “How am I going to get that part if I don’t practice my faces, Mara?” he complains to me; then, without a pause, he turns his white-painted nose toward the kitchen, grinning. “Hey, do I smell pizza?”

  “I banged on your door before I left and told you I was going to get it,” I say as I sneak past him into the bathroom. “But there were some…um…amorous sounds coming from your room, so I didn’t push the matter.”

  “Rod and I were engaged in a lovemaking session that involved a trapeze,” says Toby. He starts down the hallway, aiming for the kitchen. “So thanks for the space, Mara!”

  “Wait—a trapeze?” I shout after him, peeking out of the doorway, my mouth hanging open.

  “Cecile said it was okay to install one!” he calls out airily over his shoulder, and then he’s rounded the corner and drifted out of sight.

  I guess I should pause here to explain my living situation—because it’s...kind of unusual.

  I live in a grain elevator.

  The first question I get asked when I tell people this is—actually, no, there are no follow-up questions. Instead, people tend to stare at me as if I’ve just told them I’m an alien from the planet Venus, so I usually have to clarify the situation quickly.

  I live in Buffalo, and if you’ve watched any show about blizzards on the Weather Channel, you’ll know what we’re famous for (besides the chicken wings and a really, really bad football team). But at the turn of the century, Buffalo was a booming city and one of the biggest grain producers in the world. Weird, I know. The manufacturers needed somewhere to store all of that grain before they shlubbed it onto the boats on Lake Erie or sent it down the Erie Canal.

 
So they built the grain elevators.

  Unless you’re from Buffalo, you’ve probably never heard of the grain elevators before. Think massive, industrial-looking buildings, all metal, scraping the sky. Now imagine them empty and rusting, like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. When Buffalo stopped producing so much grain, the elevators were abandoned.

  Despite being a blue-collar city, Buffalo has a thriving arts community, and we love to play up the corroding-metal and crumbling-dreams drama of our bygone era. So when a friend of mine, the indomitable Cecile Sanderson, bought an old grain elevator with the intention of transforming it into an artists' residence, I—and several other fellow artists—jumped at the opportunity to live in the rusty building beside the Lake Erie shoreline.

  Cecile named the elevator the Ceres, after the Greek goddess of grain, and once the renovations were, more or less, complete, we moved in, and the rest is history. Or herstory, as the case may be.

  Admittedly, this is a weird way to live. But if you’re keen on cohabitating with a bunch of artistic misfits—which I am—it’s a lot of fun. All of that creativity... We bounce ideas off of each other and spend long nights talking about art, life, and everything else. I’m a painter, and being around so many other creative people really fuels my work.

  However...living with so many people with their heads positioned firmly in the clouds makes for some, well, interesting situations.

  I stare at myself in the mirror and try to see my reflection, but it’s difficult with Iris’ motivational post-it notes littering the shiny surface. You are beautiful through and through! has to come off in order for me to find the strand of drool draped over my ponytail. I pick it up with my finger and pull it off of my hair, letting the sink water wash it away. Toby’s mime makeup is all over the counter, and when I take a step backwards to grab one of the hand towels from the shelf, there are, of course, no hand towels left. Instead, there’s a silky kimono covered in blue butterflies (which might be Iris’ or Cecile’s or Miyoko’s…or Toby’s). I leave that on the shelf and shake my hands in the air, letting little droplets fly. When I glance back at the mirror to make certain that I removed all of the drool, I stare at something that’s staring at me with just as much surprise.

  On the back of our toilet, and on top of a stack of books that includes the Kama Sutra, the first three Hitchhiker books, and a Donald Trump biography (with devil horns drawn over his forehead), is a brand-new goldfish bowl. The goldfish inside of it glances up at me dolefully.

  For a long moment, I do nothing. It’s common for new pets to appear overnight in the Ceres, after all.

  But the goldfish bowl is precariously balanced on top of those books, and—as I learned in fifth grade science class—goldfish bowls make goldfish go blind, due to the light reflecting off of the curved glass. I sigh as I stare down at the bowl and its aquatic inhabitant. Then I’m picking the bowl up and exiting the bathroom. Some of the goldfish’s water sloshes out of the bowl and onto my shirt as I carry it into the kitchen.

  “Hey, do you know whose goldfish this is?” I ask Toby, who's trying to fit an entire slice of pizza into his mouth. He looks up at me with wide eyes that remind me of a baby owl, and he mumbles something, but around the pizza, it sounds like “mmf, mff, ffm,” which isn’t very helpful.

  I turn to ask Iris next, but she’s obviously in the middle of an argument with someone on Facebook. I know that look: she’s scowling at her phone as if it’s a miniature version of Donald Trump (the doodled-on book in the bathroom is hers), and she’s jabbing at the screen while muttering something dangerous under her breath.

  “Hey, Iris?” I say, and then I try again three more times before she tears her eyes away from her screen and slams the phone down onto the counter.

  “Asshole,” she growls, then grabs a slice of cheese pizza, hissing as she burns her fingers on the melty cheese. “Don’t they know that racism is—”

  “I’m sure they have no idea,” I tell her gently, smiling as I set the goldfish bowl down on the counter beside the open box of ‘za. “Hey, do you know whose goldfish this is?”

  “We have a goldfish now?” squeals Iris, going from “completely pissed about the state of the world” to “there’s an adorable animal within my immediate vicinity” in a heartbeat. Characteristic Iris. “Can I name him?! I name him Vladimir Futon! Get it? Get it? Like Vladimir Putin!”

  “That doesn’t quite work,” I begin, at the same time that Toby fist-pumps the air—in what I’m assuming is solidarity for the goldfish’s new punny name.

  “No, Mara, I don’t know whose fish that is,” says Iris then, taking an enormous bite of pizza. “But you should—mmf, ffm—ask Cecile.”

  “Okay, thanks—hey, Sammie, no!” I groan. I tell my dog no about eighteen-thousand times per day, give or take a few, so he doesn’t pay me any mind as he jumps up, placing his two massive front paws on the counter as if to grab himself a slice of pizza. Instead, he spots the goldfish bowl and tries to angle his head just so in order to lap out of it, his enormous tongue licking the rim of the bowl enthusiastically.

  “Iris, will you watch him for me? I’ll go ask Cecile about the fish really quickly.”

  Iris is nodding, affectionately shoving Sammie off of the counter with her hip before grabbing herself another slice.

  Sammie sits down at her feet and looks up at her with pure hope, a big doggie grin on his adorable doggie face.

  “Tell everyone they'd better come down now, before all of the pizza is gone!” Iris calls out as she drops the rest of her slice into Sammie’s waiting maw. I glance at the four as-yet unopened boxes of pizza on the counter; I don’t think we're going to run out of slices anytime soon.

  Chuckling, I ascend the rickety metal stairs that are hooked to the inside wall of the elevator, and soon I’m standing on the second level of the Ceres, a mezzanine that encircles the lower level. The bedrooms are situated along the curving wall. I knock on the first door—Toby and Rod’s room—because Toby said his boyfriend had been by earlier, but there are no sounds from within. Then I skip the next couple of doors, my and Iris’ bedrooms respectively, and I’m knocking on the fourth door, winding my way around the mezzanine.

  “Yeah?” Miyoko shouts from inside. She opens the door and grins out at me sheepishly. “Oh, great, Mara, it’s you. Can you help me with this?” She turns, her elaborate, full-length ballgown sweeping the floor. She gestures to the Elizabethan collar attached to her neckline. “The clasp is stuck, and I can’t get this thing off.”

  “Why are you practicing in full costume?” I ask her, and I unhook the clasp—it had gotten tangled in her glorious blonde hair. Miyoko is an amazing actress, and she’s currently starring in the Shakespeare in Delaware Park’s rendition of Macbeth—as Lady Macbeth.

  “Because the thing weighs, like, five hundred pounds, and I had to make sure I could be appropriately dramatic in it. And make sure no one could tell that I’m wincing in pain,” she says brightly, gesturing to the floor-length mirror behind her, propped up in the corner of her extremely bright room. Her walls are orange, her bedspread is hot pink, and all of her furniture has been painted aqua. It suits her cheerful personality perfectly.

  “Okay, so test it out. Act at me,” I tell her with a smile.

  Miyoko strikes a pose. “Yet here’s a spot,” she whispers, holding up her hands. In an instant, her expression has transformed from happy-go-lucky to one of spine-curdling dread. Her hands are curled into claws. “Out, damned spot!” She begins to rub her hands together feverishly. “Out, I say!—One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie!” She stops and grins at me again, which is a little disconcerting after she just looked so unhinged. “So, whadya think? Good?”

  “Great! Actually, you’re terrifying,” I tell her, darting forward and giving her a congratulatory hug.

  “Perfect! I’m going for the unraveling of Lady Macbeth’s sanity at that point.”

  “Well, it was spot on
,” I promise her, then startle, surprised, when Miyoko steps toward me, gripping my hand with wide eyes.

  “You know about the curse of Macbeth, right? That there's a curse on the play, and on every opening night, something terrible happens?”

  I nod vaguely. “But—”

  “I mean,” Miyoko goes on, “I'm not usually superstitious—”

  I suppress a smile. Miyoko is the most superstitious person I've ever met. She refuses to walk under ladders, and when she spills a bit of salt, she has to toss a pinch of it over her shoulder. Every Friday the thirteenth, she walks around with wide, fearful eyes...

  “—but what if this curse isn't just theater lore? I've never been in Macbeth before, Mara. What if the play really is cursed?”

  “I promise you it's not cursed,” I assure her. “There's no such thing as curses! And, anyway, the only reason that whole story came to be was because the players wanted to build a controversy, stir up curiosity. It's on the Wikipedia page.”

  “Wikipedia lies,” Miyoko tells me dismissively, waving her hand.

  I chuckle, gesturing downstairs. “Maybe so, but in good news, the pizza’s here.”

  “Oh, my God, I’m starved,” she moans, hitching up her skirts and sweeping past me. “Are you grabbing the others?”

  “Yeah—hey,” I call after her, and Miyoko turns to glance back at me. “Do you happen to know whose goldfish was in the bathroom?”

  “We have a goldfish now?” asks Miyoko wryly, and she shakes her head. “Nope. Anyway, hurry up, or we’ll eat all the pizza!” she laughs—it's a familiar threat in the Ceres—and then she’s racing down the steps, her fabulous gown trailing behind her.

  Miyoko in Elizabethan dress eating pizza: this I’ve got to see.

  The second-to-last room belongs to Cecile, and as I knock on her door, I lean back on my heels; the scent of pizza wafts up through the air and assaults my nose. My stomach rumbles, but I wait patiently for Cecile to warble out, “Come in!” Then I open her door and step inside.