Colton Lane watched them walk into the job fair together. He caught the way the girl’s eyes scanned the room from the doorway of the Marriott ballroom, checking out the various tables set up around the perimeter. She was a tiny little thing, wearing a simple, sleeveless, cream-colored dress with a black belt cinched around the waist, and her light blonde hair up in a high ponytail.
He cocked his head to the side, staring at her. She was too short and small to be model-beautiful, but she was trim and had a clean, fresh-faced look that was pretty, that made her seem vulnerable. He shifted his gaze up, to the man standing just behind her. Taller by a head and a half, and easily weighing in at three hundred pounds, her companion had loped in on her heels, his jeans pulled up too high, his prematurely graying hair slicked into submission, his eyes down, his posture slumped. They were an odd pair, for sure, but despite what he guessed to be about a decade’s age difference, she appeared to be in charge. That was the thing that had most captured Colt’s attention.
Lynette elbowed him in the side to get his attention. “Colt started with us—what now?—three years ago? Four?”
Colt shifted his attention to the woman sitting beside him at the long table set up for recruiting new “cast members.”
“Five and a half,” he muttered.
“Five and a half!” said Lynette, beaming at Colt with a bright, can-do smile before turning back to the job applicant who’d stopped by their table. “We have real employee retention at TL’oC. I can promise you that. Now, tell me, have you ever worked around horses . . .?”
TL’oC was Lynette’s cheesy way of describing TLOC, or The Legend of Camelot, to prospective employees. She stressed that, unlike their competitors, The Legend of Camelot medieval dinner theater show was a company that treated its employees with tender loving care. (“Heck! It’s right there in the name!” Cue eye roll.)
The muscular young man in front of the table laughed weakly at some joke Lynette made about being a knight in shining armor, and Colt gave him a wan smile.
“Is that what you do?” the kid asked.
“Am I a knight in the show?”
The kid nodded, his fingers unconsciously pinching the application that Lynette was tapping against them.
“Yep,” said Colt, running a hand through his shoulder-length blond hair. “You start off as a squire. Learn the ropes. Six to nine months later you can start working toward being a knight. Get to know the horses, study the routines.”
“I’ve seen the show,” said the kid. “It’s awesome.”
Colt nodded, as he knew he was supposed to, although truthfully it somehow got exponentially less awesome doing it night after night, year after year, holidays and weekends, to drunken revelers and screaming children.
Good luck having a life when you’re a knight at The Legend of Camelot, kid.
“Yeah. It’s a ton of fun,” he said, his voice flat as a pancake.
“You, uh, you have to work out a lot? To be a knight?”
“Uh-huh. There’s a weight room at the, uh, the castle. You can use it as much as you want.”
“Yeah, you’re in good shape,” said the kid, who wasn’t in bad shape himself.
Colt was ripped and he knew it. Whatever dissatisfaction he found in his job, he made up for in the gym. Someone he knew called it his “happy place.” As he thought of her, he flicked his eyes back toward the odd couple still standing just inside the doorway, wondering about them and wishing he didn’t care.
“It’s strenuous work,” said Colt. “Though Lynette here can tell you that the servers hauling around trays full of thirty chickens with potatoes and corncobs are no slouches either.”
“The serving wenches,” said the kid, using his hands to pantomime huge breasts and chuckling like Butt-Head. “Yeah. They’re hot. Perk of the job, huh?”
Sure. If you want to shit where you eat.
“You know it,” said Colt, but only after Lynette nudged him under the table. He turned to her. “I’m, uh, I need to hit the john.”
Lynette gave him an exasperated look.
He hadn’t been her first choice this weekend. Artie Kingston, the Head Knight, generally accompanied her to these sorts of events, pulling out his bright white, toothy grin and winking at the women who stopped by for server applications. Artie was the poster child for The Legend of Camelot and wore the mantle proudly. Colt, on the other hand, was there for the paycheck. And