Florida Knight Read Free Page B

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, bu t 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 substitution 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