Knight in Leather by Holley Trent Page B

here.”
    “You’ll be all right, big guy. Just remember—slow and easy. She’ll come around. I promise.”
    Ethan had to believe her. He didn’t really have a choice. It wasn’t like he could trade Dasha in for a different mate. Even if he could, he wasn’t so sure he would. The one he had had already imprinted on him.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
    “What the hell?”
    Dasha burrowed a little lower into the pile of covers she’d built up at the end of Siobhan, Caryl, and Daryn’s sofa and squinted at her phone screen. The fairy slumber party had puttered out hours ago. The three women had stumbled, tipsy and giggling, to their beds, but Dasha couldn’t sleep. She could blame her sugar high from all the cookies she’d eaten during the barbecue, or perhaps even stress. Whatever the reason, every time she closed her eyes, she received a barrage of thoughts about everything under the sun. That sort of brain activity was a far cry from being sleep-inducing, so she’d figured she’d play some games on her phone until she nodded off.
    She hadn’t expected to see that name popping up in her BUY, BUILD, DESTROY! friend request list.
    “EthanGotchA,” she read, and snorted. “Cute.”
    She paused her finger over the accept button, pondering how he’d found her in the game. She was searchable by her social media accounts and email address, but—as far as she knew—he didn’t have knowledge of those. Unless someone told him.
    She rolled her eyes, and fired off a text to Simone. Gonna shiv you when I see you in the morning.
    Her friend probably wouldn’t see the message until whenever she got around to rolling off of Heath, but Dasha was content with the nice little note being there waiting for when Simone woke.
    She hit the accept button anyway, figuring being cordial couldn’t hurt. It wasn’t like the guy was awake. He wouldn’t know whether she’d accepted or declined until the next time he opened his app.
    Humming softly, she went about her business, building up houses and shops and scanning her friends’ little worlds to see who needed aid and who needed to be taken down a few pegs.
    She sent a category-four hurricane to one bustling city, snatched up the building materials from the fallen skyscraper, and hid them in storage in her city. The other player would only know Dasha was responsible if he happened to check the contents of her storage. Once the materials were repurposed, the ownership labels fell off. She didn’t plan on leaving the items in storage for too long. She immediately assigned the wood and metal to be used in reinforcing her city’s walls and spent a thousand BBD bucks to accelerate the process. She’d be in the clear if that guy didn’t wake in the next hour.
    Suddenly, an in-game message popped up on the screen, and she yipped, thinking that the guy did already see the carnage. His retaliations were always excessively brutal, which was why she only poked at him when she thought he was asleep. When she saw the username tagged onto the message, though, her heart rate didn’t slow any.
    EthanGotchA: How the bloody hell do you play this game? It says I have to wait eight hours to do anything else. Is that right?
    Dasha let out a tittering laugh and rubbed her eyes. The correspondence was benign enough. She could handle benign.
    dotdotdotdash: That’s right. When you’re first getting started, you’re limited in how much you can get done. You either have to wait or spend game bucks to get stuff faster.
    EthanGotchA: I’ve got 1000 game bucks.
    Dasha was sitting on a cool million, but she’d been playing for six weeks.
    dotdotdotdash: That’s not going to get you very far. If I were you, I’d save the bucks, and just wait the eight hours. The game will become more interactive once there’s more stuff in your village.
    EthanGotchA: What should I do before then?
    Dasha clucked her tongue and tapped her chin contemplatively. She’d pondered making up a new screen name and starting the game