Free All The Queen's Men (Fantasy Heights) by Meg Silver Page B

singular manner of stress relief.
    She remembered watching Ben and Jerod spar once, awed by the ugly brute force of it all. Ben needed a vastly different set of skills to combat Thomas. What he needed, really, was to spend far less time on his back. Ben’s height and weight and strength left him lacking in balance. He could never land a blow before Thomas took advantage of that weakness and knocked his legs out from under him.
    The third time Ben went down, he groaned out a laugh. “I hate you.”
    Thomas tried to be nice about it. “You’re getting better.”
    “Yeah. I maybe got some dust on your cuffs that time. I’m such a badass.”
    “You’re just rusty, is all. I’m not.”
    “No kidding. Go embarrass someone else.”
    Jerod stepped onto the stage. “My turn.”
    She told Mr. Hughes, “Jerod didn’t know Thomas was back in training with military intelligence. Maybe if he’d known, he wouldn’t have tried to take him on. Or let his temper take over. I mean, I’m sorry, but there was some really weird tension, there.”
    Once again, Thomas had started out trying to be nice. But from the moment Jerod picked up his weapon to ‘spar,’ the gloves were off. Still, Thomas didn’t put Jerod on his back. He simply got behind Jerod time and time again, showing that he could have taken him down easily. Which in a way was probably worse than actually doing it.
    After the fourth time, and Thomas and Jerod faced each other once more, Amanda had sneezed. Thomas glanced toward the sound.
    As soon as he looked away, Jerod punched him. Belted him right in the face.
    She raised her eyes to meet Mr. Hughes’s, who sat across the table waiting to hear all about it. If only she knew what Thomas had told him. Worse, she had no idea if Mr. Hughes was aware of the whole mystery client debacle, or his son’s role in it. What the hell was she supposed to say? And what choice did she have but to be honest?
    Mr. Hughes sighed. “It’s all right, Amanda. You can tell me the truth without hurting my feelings. I know Jerod took a cheap shot, and it’s my fault. I’ve held Thomas up to my son as an example one too many times, I think.”
    She filed that one away for future processing, and told him everything she could remember, or at least a diligently sanitized version. Thomas hadn’t retaliated. Later he would say he probably had it coming, but in the moment, he hadn’t been allowed to respond to Jerod one way or another. While her eyes were still wide and her mouth still open in outraged surprise, Ben had started to yell.
    She had never seen Ben angry before. She hoped never to see it again, either. It was easy to forget his size and strength when he was his usual jovial self. Anger him, however, and he would be glad to remind you. Ben ejected Jerod from the set. Rehearsal had ended and Amanda was left staring at Thomas, watching the whitened skin around a small purple mark on his cheekbone begin to swell.
    In a dry sort of voice, she’d said, “Welcome home.”
    That earned her a wry lift of a brow, followed by a quick inhale and a twitch at the pain in his cheek. She hustled him out, and he took her home to his place, a smallish cottage on the fringes of town, secluded and shaded by trees. They went in through the back door into the kitchen, where she deposited him at the table and hurriedly rooted around for a plastic bag, dishtowel, and then some ice for his cheek.
    As she’d pressed the makeshift icepack to the swelling wound, Amanda noticed something. He was avoiding eye contact, and had been ever since they’d left the resort.
    “Thomas, what is it?”
    He leaned back and pulled her hand and the icepack away from his cheek. The dark eyes that met hers at last were starkly confrontational. “How long have you known?”
    There was no pretending she didn’t know precisely what he meant. “Since yesterday. Jerod sat with me during the Washington-State interview. It was his soap. His elbow. And there really