The Bliss Factor Read Online Free Page B

one thing they weren’t actually trying to kill him,” her father said. “They had plenty of time to finish him off and they didn’t. Second, they won’t know he’s at your house. Or where your house is. Or even who you are.”
    “How do you arrive at that conclusion?”
    “Because you changed your name, and lived at college for four years before relocating here to get your CPA. Because there’s no way to connect Rae Blissfield with Annie and Nelson Bliss. Your birth certificate isn’t a part of your college record, and I doubt the tiny town where it was registered has converted to electronic record-keeping.”
    “It sounds like you’ve thought all this through.” To back her into a corner. “But the people you travel with—”
    “None of them will talk.”
    She knew her father was right. “But—”
    “They’ll just think he took off.”
    “They who?”
    Annie shrugged. So did Nelson.
    Rae steeled herself and turned to Conn. “I don’t suppose you know who’s after you?”
    “Brigands,” he said with a perfectly straight face. “Lawless mercenaries.”
    “Why do they want to harm you?”
    “ ’Tis a mystery, milady.” But he grinned. “Perhaps my skill with the gentler sex annoys them.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Cut the Knights of the Roundtable act.”
    He drew himself up, as far as he could with a low ceiling cramping his style. “I am not a knight, I am an armorer, and far superior as my skill with a hammer and forge protects their very lives.”
    “O-kay.” Rae got to her feet, her father headed her off before she could try for the door again.
    He shooed her down the narrow hallway, crowding her back so she had nowhere to go but into the bedroom at the end of the RV. Rae managed to completely ignore the rumpled double bed.
    “You told me he had amnesia,” she said, keeping her voice down and shooting King Arthur’s tailor a quick glance over her father’s shoulder to make sure he couldn’t hear them. “This guy is delusional. He thinks he’s actually from the Middle Ages.”
    “Rae—”
    “Either he’s crazy or he’s doing it to tick me off, which, since he wants my help, is not very smart.”
    “It’s not an act,” Nelson insisted in a harsh whisper. “Somebody whacked him over the head about a week ago, hard. The blow would have killed anyone else.”
    “I’m not surprised. He strikes me as a guy with a hard head.” But she stopped trying to get by her father, and he relaxed, too.
    “When he woke up, he thought he actually was an armorer.”
    “As in sixteenth-century England, indentured-to-the-lord-of-the-castle armorer?”
    “Yep.”
    “He doesn’t have an English accent.”
    “Neither does anyone else.”
    Right, so he thought he didn’t have an accent at all. That actually made sense. In an alternate universe sort of way. “There aren’t any castles, let alone lords,” Rae said, “and people don’t ride horses or wear period dress—well, normal people.”
    “He hasn’t left the faire grounds since he lost his memory. It’s odd, really. He sees the tourists dressed in modern clothing but it doesn’t seem to shatter his belief in who he thinks he is. The doctor said—”
    “Wait a minute.” Rae put her hand on Nelson’s arm. “You took him to a doctor?”
    “No, but we called Mutch the Court Jester’s cousin. She’s a doctor in Philadelphia.”
    “What did Mutch the Court Jester’s cousin say?” Rae asked, shaking her head a little because she didn’t find any part of that question strange.
    “That it’s probably a defense mechanism.”
    “A defense mechanism that’s likely to get him killed. Or at least hurt again.”
    “It’s not about his physical safety,” Nelson said. “There might have been some emotional stress in his life before the injury that caused him to . . . check out for a little while. Or it could be a result of the blow, short-circuiting his long-term memory so that all he knows is the re-enacting but he