Florida Knight Read online

  “Barbara!”

  The outer door swung open. Footsteps approached the inner office. At the look on her employer’s face, Kate swallowed what she was going to say, but stubbornly refused to turn and look. She had been set up, and she didn’t like it.

  “Oh, my!” Barbara breathed.

  Okay, so it was rude not to look. She wanted to keep her job, didn’t she? Kate turned her head.

  Oh my and Wow! When she’d suspected something momentous was about to happen, this was definitely not on her list of possibilities. Somehow Kate was on her feet, even as all the ridges of her brain, and places south, seemed to be curling at the edges, threatening to go up in smoke.

  “Lieutenant Turco, Kate Knight.” Barbara’s voice was a distant buzz, the name sailing straight over Kate’s head. Her lips curved into a semblance of a smile as her hand was swallowed in a grip as strong as it was brief.

  Attorney Falk, having satisfied the minimum dictates of courtesy, made good her escape.

  Kate never noticed her boss’s rapid retreat. When a woman towers ten inches over five feet, it takes a lot of man to look down on her. Lieutenant . . . Whatsit almost made her feel delicate. Tall, dark and lean, his was not a face one wanted to meet on a dark night. A prankster’s caricature of hardline features snatched from Willem Dafoe or Jack Palance. All angles and planes, with deep-set black eyes surrounded by a maze of frown lines, lips that looked like they never smiled, topped by a cap of short straight black hair. The scowl he turned on Kate could only be described as ferocious. Clearly, the lieutenant was not pleased to be here.

  “Kate Knight. That your real name?” he challenged.

  Kate’s tongue seemed to swell until it filled her mouth. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t possibly know. She had to say something. She would not let him do this to her. She was stronger, far stronger than the woman she used to be. “Of course,” she snapped, green eyes challenging black.

  A curt nod, he waved her to a seat. Her own. Instead of sitting on the rose leather sofa designed for client comfort, he perched himself on Kate’s desk, even though she’d been certain his ramrod stiff back would never bend. He was close enough she could smell his aftershave. Something sharp, tangy, and oh-so-macho. He’d dressed for the occasion, Kate noticed. Blue jacket over light gray pleated pants. Sparkling white shirt, discreet navy tie. The overall effect was intimidating. Kate’s pulse pounded its way up another few notches toward massive stroke.

  He slapped a wallet-style badge down in front of her. “Michael Turco, Lieutenant, FHP.”

  Obviously, he expected her to be impressed. And she was. City cops, county cops were a dime a dozen. A state cop—a state investigator—was something else again.

  “Did they tell you why I’m here?” Michael Turco asked.

  “Just that I might be able to help in some way.”

  As he tucked his badge back inside his jacket, Kate thought she caught the bulge of a shoulder holster. It was the closest she’d ever been to a gun. Which was, of course, why a shiver was scooting up her spine. Couldn’t be any other reason, right?

  He shot her a look, and Kate felt photographed, X-rayed, cataloged, and tucked into storage for instant recall at any moment in the next fifty years. How far beneath her tall skinny figure did he see? Beneath the silver blond hair ruthlessly confined in a French braid above a narrow face almost as strong and angular as his own? Except that her worry lines, her badges of age and experience, weren’t nearly as deep. And, with an inward sigh, Kate had to admit her chest bulged only slightly more than his.

  If he was disturbed that so little had been done to prepare his way, Lieutenant Turco didn’t show it. “Okay, here’s the story,” he declared. “You’re a member of this LALOC group, right?”

  From the tone of his voice he might as well have been asking if she was a member of Al Qaeda. Ridiculous! In the history of the world there had been few less harmless groups than the Lords and Ladies of Chivalry. Kate gritted her teeth and nodded.

  Suddenly, he was on his feet, pacing the short distance between the outer door and Barbara’s office. Lieutenant Turco ran a hand through his buzz cut, betraying the first sign of uncertainty Kate had seen in his hard-as-nails façade. “I have a case—somewhat personal,” he admitted. “It’s high priority only to me, but I’ve been given permission to pursue it in my spare time.” He took a deep breath which sounded perilously like a groan. “To do that, I need your help.”

  And it was killing him, Kate realized. This was a man who hated to ask for assistance of any kind. “So this isn’t official?” she ventured, fighting to stay calm, think rationally, even as she felt bolts of tension shooting from his taut panther-like body like a shower of sparks from a welding torch. Lieutenant Michael Turco was more than the confined space of her office could accommodate. Either the office, the lieutenant, or she, was likely to go up in flames at any moment. Maybe all three.

  “Dammit, of course it’s official,” Michael growled. “It’s just not top priority. Do you think we went to all this trouble to find an insider so I can play at sword-fighting?” His palm slammed against the heavy wood of the door into the corridor. The pacing stopped. After a frozen moment, he turned to face her. “Okay, okay, none of this makes sense, does it? My fault. Investigators are cool, ruthless types. We drink hard, never crack a smile, don’t give a damn about our families. Robots without emotion, that’s us.”

  “So this is personal.”

  “Very.”

  Kate scooted her chair back a few inches as, once again, the cop from the Florida Highway Patrol sank onto her desk. He was by far the most overwhelming man she’d ever met.

  Another of those sharp, assessing looks. “Mrs. Falk really didn’t tell you what this is all about?”

  “No.” Kate was a fighter. She looked straight into the depths of those fathomless black eyes and waited.

  “There was a so-called accident at The Medieval Fair in Manatee Bay a month ago . . .”

  “I was there,” Kate interjected. “As a vendor. I was at my booth and didn’t see it, of course, but everyone was shocked. Things like that just aren’t supposed to happen.”

  “Damn right they’re not.” Michael Turco’s dark eyes drifted away into his own personal hell. He didn’t care what the Bible said about vengeance being the Lord’s. This was his own personal crusade, and he’d do damn near anything to bring it off.

  He turned the full intensity of his gaze back to the woman in front of him. She wasn’t young, only a few years less than his own thirty-six. And she was a lot stronger and tougher than he’d expected. About as far from a classic Fair Maiden as a girl could get. He’d pictured a sweet young thing, a malleable creature who’d do whatever he told her. Kate Knight was a surprise. Not a good one. She raised all his hackles, red-flagging the instincts that had kept him alive for so long. And at the moment those big green eyes were demanding, Get on with it! Tell me what’s going on.

  “The kid who was hurt at the tournament is my brother. Ten days in a coma. He’ll be in rehab for months. Learning to speak, walk, read. We’re still not sure if he’s going to make a full recovery.” Ignoring her words of sympathy which, he had to concede, seemed genuine, Michael plowed ahead. “So, yes, it’s personal. But when I started to check the immediate source of the problem, I turned up a whole can of worms. It would seem the Age of Chivalry has acquired something rotten, its own Wicked Sorcerer you might say.”

  Kate hadn’t expected him to be whimsical or clever. He was right, of course. She had a stereotyped niche in her brain labeled “Cops,” and she was finding it difficult to see him as the all-too-human man he obviously was. He was also beginning to interest her. Her reactions to him, as a state cop and as a man, might frighten her, but the situation was intriguing.

  “The knight who hit Mark—that’s my brother—tells me he had trouble with his lance, the balance wasn’t right. That’s how he happened to strike Mark in his visor. Afterwards he discovered his lance was metal, not wood. A su
bstitution had been made. We questioned the kid who fought him, the two squires at that end of field. They were all Mark’s friends, traveled the circuit with him.” Michael shrugged. “I’m told I frightened them half to death, but the truth is, in the end I had to believe them. It’s about ninety-nine percent certain they had nothing to do with substituting a metal lance. So I began to look farther back, check what’s been happening at other Medieval Fairs over the past few months. Have you heard any rumors?”

  The question was sneaked into his narration in what Kate supposed was his best interrogation mode. It was effective. Words tumbled out as she hastened to reply. “After the accident at the Fair in Manatee Bay, rumors started. A whisper here, a whisper there. Other accidents. Odd, unexplained incidents. The vendors aren’t as close as the traveling performers since we don’t all go to the same fairs, but the gossip travels fast once it begins. So, yes, there was talk.”

  “What about LALOC . . . they have any problems?”

  The question was so soft, so casual, Kate almost missed the significance. She should have made the connection, she realized. The rumors at the Fair, the incidents at LALOC events. Analytical, wary, she was about as far from naive as one could get. She should have known.

  Accidents were not tolerated in LALOC, the Lords and Ladies of Chivalry, an organization dedicated to re-enacting the Medieval world in the twenty-first century. The whole idea was to have fun while re-creating a time when the ideals of chivalry prevailed. Tolerance of idiosyncracies was high. Tolerance of anyone getting hurt, physically or mentally, was rock bottom. Kate was not part of the hierarchy of LALOC, but she’d witnessed one of the odd occurrences and heard about several others. The most recent rumor was that the problem of safety was on the docket for LALOC’s upcoming Kingdom Board meeting.

  “Yes,” she nodded, “there’s been some trouble. It seemed accidental at first. Nothing worse than upset stomachs after a feast. Then it was a king snake in a cabin. Scary, but not dangerous. But, believe me, the screams still echo in my dreams. The worst I’ve heard of so far was an arrow that lost its blunt in a melee. Miraculously, it bounced off the chest of someone with studded leather armor.”

  “Would it interest you to know that according to LALOC’s national office these incidents have happened only in Florida?”

  “But the Fair incidents have happened all over the country,” Kate countered.

  “Right.” It was as if he were patting her on the head, murmuring a patronizing, Good Girl. “So we need someone in the local LALOC who also occasionally travels the Fair circuit as a vendor.”

  “Namely, me.”

  “You got it.” Kate hadn’t thought it possible for his black eyes to turn more sardonic, but they did. She felt sliced, diced, turned inside out. He was playing with her. There was no way she was going to get off the hook. She was his, for whatever he wanted, however long he wanted it.

  Stall. There had to be a way out of this. Ten minutes of Michael Turco were more than mind or body could stand. He threatened her hard-won control of her life. He terrified her. Rapidly, Kate reviewed their conversation, summoned up a question: “What were the incidents on the Fair circuit?”

  “Just thefts at first. Vendors coming back to their booths in the morning to discover their trunks had been ransacked.”

  “Oh, no!” Kate, knowing full well the hours and the agony necessary to create artistic treasures acceptable for the premier Medieval and Renaissance fairs, was genuinely shocked.

  “The tent over a booth collapsed in upstate New York, right on top of several thousand dollars worth of pewter and crystal. Then a privie—some damn kind of port-o-pottie—blew up in Chicago . . .”

  “Blew up?” Kate echoed.

  “Well, not like in dynamite,” Michael admitted. “Just a great whoosh of you-know-what that nearly gave some poor guy a heart attack. Then in Arizona a dragon ride started spouting real fire. After that, it got worse. A kid got a broken arm in Kansas City when a harness broke on the Climbing Tower. The worst—before Mark—was in Michigan when the sword swallower discovered the hard way that someone had honed his blade to razor sharp.”

  “Was he okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. You don’t swallow swords unless you know what you’re doing, but he required a few stitches. I think he retired.”

  Silence closed in on Kate’s small office. They were in a Mediterranean-style building constructed in the heyday of Florida development only a few years before the stock market crash of 1929 brought on the Great Depression. Once a dormitory for a military school wealthy enough to bring its students south for the winter, the structure now housed a mini-mall and offices with apartments above. In the corridor outside, Kate knew, were the bustling sounds of boutique shoppers, restaurant patrons, people wanting to hire a wedding planner, a disc jockey, private detective, or attorney. The world of the brand new twenty-first century. Yet here, behind the door with Kate Knight and Michael Turco, was a world hundreds of years removed. A world of kings and queens, lords and ladies, knights and fair maidens, wizards and sorcerers, warlocks and witches.

  “Are you saying we have a psycho out there?” Kate asked.

  “Possibly. Since the fairs are run by a variety of organizers—some local, some professional—and your LALOC is separate from all of them, it took a long time before anyone even recognized we had a problem. And why is even tougher to figure.”

  “So it’s a psycho,” Kate repeated.

  “So we—the state of Florida, my brother and I—need your help.”

  How low, how underhanded could you get? The man was a real piece of work. Kate knew, absolutely knew, she was going to hate what he wanted her to do, but he’d boxed her into a corner with no exit. Refusing to help was like rejecting the American way, let alone the glorified ideals of the Age of Chivalry.

  Kate heaved a sigh more heart-felt than the one which had echoed from Barbara Falk’s office. “So what do you want me to do?”

  Chapter 3

  As they’d talked, Michael leaned closer and closer to Kate, using sheer physical bulk to emphasize his words. By this time they were nearly nose to nose. Truth was, the blasted woman seemed to pull him in like a magnet. Appalled, Michael snapped to attention, his back perpendicular to Kate’s desk. He fought a panicked urge to spring to his feet, to put the width of the room between himself and this strange attraction. Couldn’t let her see he was running scared. Amazons were absolutely, positively, not his type. And, besides, this was business. Strictly business.

  Careful, Turco, careful. One wrong move could shatter his plans into ineffectual dust. “Medieval Fairs don’t come along often,” Michael noted, easing into the problem with what he hoped was sufficient subtlety. “But LALOC has meetings each weekend, though they’re pretty much a closed corporation—“

  ”Anyone can come to an event,” Kate broke in. “Anyone at all. They just . . .” She lifted her chin, let her gaze slide away toward a spot somewhere beyond his left shoulder. Whatever thought had just occurred to her, it seemed to spark a wicked gleam in the depths of those huge green eyes. “The only requirement is a costume,” Kate announced.

  “A costume?” Michael glared. No way in hell. Fool! Of course he had to have a costume. He should have known.

  “Guests can be any race, religion, or gender persuasion, but they have to wear a costume,” Kate declared. “Any time period up through the Renaissance—though that line’s gotten kind of hazy, what with all the men who want to dress as cavaliers.”

  “Cavaliers?” Michael echoed, resenting his ignorance.

  “Something like The Three Musketeers,” Kate explained with a tolerance that caused his teeth to ache. “You know—tall boots, short capes, big hats with ostrich plumes, rapiers, lots and lots of swashbuckle.”

  Momentarily distracted from his bad humor, Michael gaped. “Men want to dress like that?”

  “They look glorious,” Kate assured him. “Lots of black velvet. Very pettable.”

  “Oh, shit!” Kat
e’s face might be perfectly straight, but Michael knew she was pulling his leg. She had to be. “Okay, let me get this straight. If I want to attend one of these weekend meets, I have to wear a costume?”

  Kate caught his gaze and held it. This time there was no mistaking the smug look, the mocking twinkle in the depths of her sea green eyes. “Right,” she affirmed. “And we call them Events. The weekend meetings,” she clarified, “we call them Events.”

  Events. They’d sure be Events if Michael Turco had to make a g.d. fool of himself in a costume. The shine on his black dress shoes was suddenly of intense interest as Michael avoided Kate’s challenging gaze. Amused condescension, that’s what he’d seen. The fool woman was enjoying this. Gloating while watching him squirm. For the first time since Michael had seen his brother’s bloody head lying on the scuffed green turf of the tournament field, his determination wavered. He was asking to be set down among a bunch of people wearing costumes? He’d be in costume himself? To even consider it, he had to be out of his mind.

  “You don’t have to be a cavalier,” Kate offered. “You can be a barbarian raider from before the Conquest. You could be an itinerant knight or . . .”

  Michael’s head shot up. “A Black Knight?” he snapped.

  “Yes, of course. Except, ” Kate added hastily, “you can’t really be a knight until you’ve learned to fight and won enough battles to be declared a knight.”

  Michael stared in disbelief. “Learned to fight?” he echoed.

  “Learned to fight the LALOC way,” Kate elaborated in a tone sharply reminiscent of his high school history teacher expounding to a class comprised primarily of jocks.

  Then, suddenly—just as his temper simmered toward boil—Michael realized he’d won his personal battle with Kate Knight. Somewhere in their sparring she’d accepted the idea of him joining LALOC. His lips curled in a surge of satisfaction. “So you’re willing to introduce me to LALOC,” he purred.