“Holy shit.” April wasn’t part of our Faire, but even she sounded impressed. “Where’s the entrance?”

“Up that way.” I couldn’t see the gates I was pointing toward, but the stream of people told me I was indicating the right way.

“A little bit of a hike, then.” April looked behind us, where the grassy lot continued to fill slowly with cars. “Holy shit,” she said again. “This isn’t a Faire. This is a town.”

“Yeah.” Mitch had been here before—so had I; if you grew up around here you went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival at least once during your childhood—but even his eyes were a little wide at the vastness of it all. “This place is . . . It’s pretty big.” He paused. “That’s what she said.”

I was too nervous to snicker, but April elbowed him in the ribs, and that was good enough.

“Okay. We’re going in.” He reached over his head for the back of his T-shirt, pulling it off and tossing it into the back of the truck.

April sighed. “All right, Kilty. Naked enough?”

“Look on the bright side.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her as he stuck his keys into the sporran he wore attached to the kilt. “I’m not working this Faire. Which means I get to wear this kilt the way it’s meant to be worn.”

I coughed. I didn’t want to think about what Mitch was or was not wearing under there. Which was sad, because thinking about Mitch in a kilt used to be one of my favorite hobbies. The man was born to wear that green plaid, just long enough to brush his knees, leaving a glimpse of thigh when he walked. He wore boots strapped over his powerful calves, and now that he’d doffed his T-shirt that was the whole of his costume. Looking at Mitch in costume had been the best part of Faire for years. My priorities had changed a lot lately.

It took April a beat longer to follow Mitch’s innuendo, but I could see the moment when it clicked. She rolled her eyes, shook her head again at him, and then turned to me. “You ready for this?”

Why did she have to ask me that? My stomach rolled, and the butterflies in there took flight, wiggling their way through my bloodstream until everything tingled. I was in no way ready for this. But I sucked in a long, slow breath and wiped my damp palms on the skirt of my dress.

“Yeah.” I didn’t sound at all convincing. “I’m ready.”

* * *

  • • •

  Comparing our Faire to the Maryland Renaissance Festival was ridiculous. If Willow Creek’s Faire was a small town, then the Maryland Ren Fest was New York City. The Big . . . Turkey Leg? Whatever. You couldn’t compare the two was what I meant.

We joined the masses of people heading for the ticket booth and the entrance. The sounds of bagpipes and drums floated on the air, combining with voices in the distance. Excited expectation surged through my blood. I hadn’t been to this Faire since high school, but the sounds were as comfortable and familiar as my own heartbeat.

As we stepped through the gates April stopped in her tracks, her eyes round. “Oh, shit,” she breathed. “This is on a whole other level.”

“That it is.” Even Mitch seemed to need a moment to get his bearings, and I touched his arm to steady myself. We’d walked through a portal into another world. These weren’t stages and glorified tents put together by volunteers over a couple weekends. These were buildings. Actual, honest-to-God permanent structures that looked like they belonged in a medieval village. My first thought was What about winter? Even though there were crowds all around me and the whole scene bustled with life, I wondered what this place looked like in the dead of winter, covered with snow and empty of patrons. I couldn’t get my head around the idea that this setting existed all year round, whether there was a faire going on or not.

At the same time, this place felt like home. I knew this place. Maybe not this physical place specifically, but I knew Renaissance faires. I knew the sounds of the people around me, the voices of vendors selling roses and flower crowns out of wagons near the entrance. I knew the sweet smell of deep-fried anything and the savory scent of every kind of meat on a stick, and the sound of our feet shuffling in the dirt of the lanes. Butterflies still swirled all through my body, but my soul felt calm. I knew this place, and I loved this place.

Now all I had to do was find the man I loved, somewhere in this medieval metropolis, and convince him to take me with him. Should be simple.

Beside me, April heaved out a long sigh, a hand on her hip. “So how do we find him? There’s so many people.”

Mitch leaned over and tapped the map that she’d picked up at the entrance. “This should help, dontcha think?”

She punched him in the arm, which he didn’t even register, and shook the map open. She squinted at it, turned it over, squinted at it again. “This thing is ridiculous. There are a million acts and they’re scattered all over.”

I took the map from her. “It’s not that bad. We just have to find their listing, and then figure out where their stage is.” I frowned at the map. “Hmm. I get your point.” The map only emphasized how huge this place was, and it was hard to figure out which stage was which. But my eyes zeroed in on the Dueling Kilts’ listing as if it were printed in bright red, with arrows pointing at it. Your man is here!

At least, I hoped he was still my man. And I hoped he was there. What if he’d already left? He could have set them up for the weekend and taken off already. He could be out of the state by now. He could . . .

Enough. There was only one way to find out.

We set off, past the “official” souvenir shop that sold T-shirts and hats, past the booth where people could make wax castings of their hands—why, that was always my question—and I regretted the sandals I’d worn almost immediately. Sure, they looked great with this dress, but how could I have not thought that through? I knew how uneven the terrain was, and how easy it was for minuscule rocks and little tiny sticks to find their way under your feet when you had open shoes on. But I gritted my teeth against the annoyance and soldiered on. The sun was already high in the sky, and it was shaping up to be a hot day. The sundress had been a good call, even though the cotton was already sticking to my back in an extremely unsexy way.

“Oooh.” April had taken control of the map again as we neared the stage where the Kilts performed. “There’s a bookstore here! I need to tell Emily about that. And look, there’s a maze. Near the jousting field. We should—”

“Stay on task, Mama.” Mitch plucked the map out of her hands.

She took it back again. “Fine. Their show starts in ten minutes. Do we want to go find him now?”

I shook my head. “No, they’re getting ready for the show. I don’t want to mess with that.”

“Makes sense. We’ll just go sit in the audience and watch it?”

“No, we should wait till after.” Mitch said. “That would be the professional thing to do, right? We don’t want to disrupt their show.”

“No,” I said. “We don’t want to go there after, either. The audience will be leaving, the guys will be selling merch, maybe getting tips . . . we don’t want to interrupt that either.”

“Okay.” April pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “So we don’t want to go before the show, during it, or after. Should we just wait outside the gate till the end of the day?”

“Yes.” My nod felt loose, as though I were a bobblehead doll. “That’s an excellent idea.”

“Nice try.” Mitch’s hand clamped around my arm as I spun on my heel to go back the way we’d come. The man had a grip like a vise; there was no way I could squirm out. He propelled me forward, which was a good thing because my legs had stopped working.

“Okay, but seriously,” I said as he dragged me down the lane, April following behind us in case I made a run for it, “they’re about to start a show and we shouldn’t interrupt that.” Wow, my voice went really high when I babbled.

“It’s fine,” Mitch said. “We’ll sit in the back. They won’t notice us.”

But I wasn’t listening to reason, or anything, really, at that point. “They’re busy, you know? They’re working. I don’t even know where we’d find them. We can’t just—”

“Mitch? Hey, Mitch!” The three of us stopped walking and turned around. Mitch dropped my arm and smiled.

“Dex! Dude, how’s it going?” He went in for a fist bump, and after that they did that weirdly complicated handclasp thing that men did instead of just shaking hands like normal people. It was a cornucopia of kilted hotness, with Dex in his man bun and Mitch in his shirtlessness. Both with strong, broad backs and powerful legs, and I wasn’t interested in either one of them.

“Doing good, man, doing good. What are you doing here? This isn’t your Faire.” Dex laughed. “Couldn’t get enough this summer, right?”

“You know it.” Mitch’s laugh was a low and easy rumble, because what did that guy have to worry about? “No, we’re actually here to . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, and he raised his eyebrows at me. The message was clear: Should I ask?