man to pursue her, the man to charm her right out of her tight jeans and onto a smooth-sheeted bed for a night of unparalleled pleasure. Now?
He shivered, his near hand drifting to the persistent ache at his side.
Now, not so much. If at all.
So much for finding a means to forget.
The men bantered back and forth, the sound mixing into the mishmash of noise in the crowded pub until all Gareth heard were random words, shouts of encouragement at the telly and, below it all, the faint vibrations of both fiddle and bodhran from the corner where the musicians had begun to prepare for the show.
A fiver slid into his view, followed by Jared’s voice. “So what of it, Gareth? You in?”
Slipping the euro back into the middle of the table, he looked up and forced an approximation of a smile. “My mind’s been wandering about. I’d be a poor Regent and even poorer assassin to take a blind wager, don’t you think?”
Jacob’s smile fell a bit, and the other men went still.
Gareth wanted to yank at his hair, wanted to shout at them to just behave normally, but he knew it had taken months of his withdrawing from them to get the men to this place where he was now unfamiliar. He didn’t want them to remember him this way after he was gone, but rather they should remember him as he had been. Might as well attempt to set things to rights.
With an air of feigned casualness, he retrieved his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a hundred note, sliding it across the table with the general irreverence he’d been known for over his lifetime. “But it’s not to say I can’t sweeten the pot for the man about to dive into the seedy Shadow Realm of bloody taunts and bodily wagers.”
The men leaned in as if he was their puppeteer, the money their master.
“Go on, then,” Jacob said, eyes bright.
“I’ve a hundred that says not a one of you can get the redhead to take you home tonight.”
“That was the wager—that you could talk her out of the bar and back to her place,” Jacob said, smirking.
“I’m not favored in this one, gents. It’s not fair for me to use my gods-given charms—plural—against the lot of you.” He leaned back, hands gripping the chair back, and kicked his feet out in front of him. “Too much like taking candy from babes. So, you care to play or is it all talk with the lot of ye?”
There was a great deal of shifting in seats and casual glances left and then right to see who would be the first to man up or bow out. Finally, a lad named Alex, slapped a ten-euro note on the scarred table and grinned. “I’ll take that wager.”
Gareth chuckled. “You’re barely out of short pants, Alex. What could you possibly know about seducing a woman?”
“Far more than you think, you gobshite,” he responded, his broad shoulders squaring. “I’ll have the lass eating out of me palm before sunrise.”
Gareth grinned. “And that, right there, is why you’ll lose.”
Alex’s brow furrowed.
Leaning forward with an air of absolute seriousness, Gareth clasped the younger man’s shoulder. “The goal in spending the night with a woman has nothing to do with feeding them like a wee bird.”
The men all laughed. Several more bills were added to the pile as their group grew more boisterous.
Gareth chanced a quick glance over his shoulder at the woman in question. If he was honest, what he really wanted was another look.
She’d nearly reached the bar. From somewhere deep in the group of men she passed through, a brawny hand snaked out and grabbed her backside hard enough he imagined she’d bruise.
He was out of his chair before his mind registered that he’d responded. It turned out his intervention wasn’t at all necessary.
In what appeared to be a single move, the bartender grabbed the offending man’s hand at the same time she whipped the tray out from under her arm and swung it down, edge first, on the tender spot between wrist and hand. Before the man could properly yelp, the woman spun the tray in her hand and smacked the man over the head with it. The tray splintered and the man slumped forward. Issuing rapid apologies, two of the patron’s companions eased him to the floor.
Gareth hardly spared the downed man a look. No, he was too fascinated by the woman standing over the proverbial body and holding nothing but the metal ring of what had been a wooden serving tray. She wielded it like a weapon. And standing over the man like she was, Gareth could imagine her gladly wrapping the ring around the offender’s neck should he offer anything other than an apology following his physical set-down.
But something about the woman, something he knew he had overlooked, forced him to focus on her with more intensity.
With her shoulders thrown back, her breasts appeared fuller, her body leaner, her waist thinner and her legs impossibly longer. Her hair seemed to crackle with life. And her eyes? They conveyed competence and fury in equal measure.
The man at her feet stirred and Gareth took a step forward, intent on aiding her whether she needed it or not.
As if she’d singled out his movement among the bar crowd, her eyes met his. Fists clenched, she tossed her hair and turned back to the man at her feet. A firm nudge of her toe had his head lolling back. A partial beer she claimed from another table roused him...when she tossed it in his face.
The bar quieted so much so that the commentary from the soccer game’s announcers seemed to skate across the tension strung person to person—tension that centered wholly on the redheaded woman.
It was sexy as hell.
Behind him, Jacob stood and sighed dramatically, propping his forearm on Gareth’s shoulder for mock support. “I’d love to be trapped between those thighs, gents. I’ve an inkling she’d hurt me in the best possible way.”
Gareth knocked the young man’s arm aside with only partially feigned irritation. “Sit down, Jacob. You’re no match for the likes of her.”
He continued to watch the woman. Something about her wasn’t quite right, but damn if he could put a finger on the vibe she emitted. It was nothing he’d ever encountered before. But before any of his trainees engaged her, be it in a bit of fun or...something else, he’d know who, and what, she was.
* * *
Ashley tossed the drink tray’s metal ring over the antlers of a large Irish sika deer with the misfortune to have found itself mounted on the wall in the name of art. She’d never understand men’s minds, no matter the effort she put into it. But if her epithicas was about to occur, she would indeed spend a great deal of time considering ways to harness one of them into giving up a week of his life for bed sport. A night? Oh, that was fine. But for her to be safe, to ensure her fertility remained suppressed and as undetectable as possible, she had to have a beck-and-call lover on hand for the hormonal surges. Only regular sex would satisfy that need. It had humiliated her for years until she’d come to realize it was either take a lover or risk end up a branded wife. There was always some part of her that wondered what it would be like to stay with a man by choice versus need, to wake up to him in the morning out of love and not compulsion. The epithicas had always destroyed that, though. Until she’d met Geoffrey the Swedish incubus, befriended him and set up a routine over the last several cycles. That this one might be early? She could call him...
Stepping behind the bar, she dropped the pass-through. It landed with a loud whump. The sound reanimated the crowd. Men and women alike began to chatter. More than one looked at her with open curiosity, and she knew that wouldn’t bode well. Strangers in Ireland never stayed strangers long. People were too friendly. And curious. No, not “curious”—wicked curious. A good Irishman or Irishwoman would have your life story from you before you’d finished your first cup of tea and your hopes, dreams and heartaches before you were halfway through your second. It was part of the reason she loved the