“Are you really safe out there?” Lacey hated herself for the whine in her voice.

  “Bernard has guards stationed around us,” Colt’s mouth twisted in annoyance. “If you feel that badly about it, I’ll stay home.”

  Home. The dungeon had become their home. Goblins bustled by with more stone and supplies for the backyard. Lacey watched them and wished that they could bring Kat inside instead. But even that was dangerous. Sure, Kat could come inside, but with the dungeon red, they wouldn’t even notice an incursion. They’d talked about sneaking Kat in, but if anyone saw her, it would be the same as announcing that the dungeon was open to invasion while they were taking time off, or worse, sleeping.

  “You should be able to go out and see Kat,” Lacey tried to convince herself more than Colt.

  “If you’re going to sit here and worry, I won’t enjoy myself,” Colt reasoned. He was sitting on the wood deck, his back to the stone bench that surrounded the fire pit, playing with Beka. “I’ve seen her today. I can last a night without her.”

  “Does she know that?” Lacey tried to tease him, but it fell a bit flat.

  “I can meet her at the entrance and explain,” he looked at her pointedly, tugging on the short length of thick rope he’d fashioned into a tug toy for Beka. Beka growled playfully and shook the toy. “We can hang out right there without me ever leaving the dungeon.”

  Now that they had the ability to speak through the dungeon barrier, they almost never used it. The coupons had made that option almost redundant, until now. Lacey had almost forgotten about it.

  “You can resist touching her?” Lacey’s smile was a little more real.

  “It’s like Skype only better,” he didn’t take the bait.

  “I’m just being irrational!” Lacey protested, her hands waving around her head.

  “Okay,” he sounded far too rational for her comfort. “Let’s go over the worse-case scenario. You’re good at those.” It was a coping mechanism that he’d learned for her when things had been really bad in college. “What’s the worst that can happen if I go out there with Kat?”

  “You get assassinated,” Lacey jumped to the first thought that came to her mind. “No, wait. You and Kat get assassinated together while you’re making out in the woods.”

  Colt laughed and rolled his eyes at her attempt at humor. “Okay. Then we both get respawned and meet back here in a few days. That means you’d have the horrible task of running the dungeon all by yourself for a few days.”

  “I’d probably close the dungeon for those days,” Lacey imagined the scenario and felt the fear release a little bit, then ramp up again as her mind jumped to another horrible thought. “But we don’t know what would happen to you if you die here. You might not respawn. Or, you might respawn as an adventurer and I’d be stuck here alone in the dungeon forever.”

  “And you might have to use your coupons to come out to see me,” Colt chuckled. “And we’d know for sure what would happen if one of us died. I’m almost tempted to get myself killed out there just to know for sure.”

  “That’s not funny,” Lacey growled at him, but he was undisturbed by it and that took all the grumble out of her statement.

  “We don’t even lose the dungeon in that scenario,” Colt’s shrug was jostled by Beka’s powerful tugs on the rope. “I’d get to adventure for a while. If that’s the worst you can do with that paranoid mind of yours…”

  “I can do better,” she got up from her spot to pace. “You and Kat are killed, but so is Bernard. There is a coup and some other faction takes over the fortress that Bernard built. This new faction kills off all of Bernard’s people and lays siege to the dungeon.”

  “Have you counted up all the dungeon closure coupons we have?” he countered.

  “Uh,” Lacey stopped, her arms dropping to her sides. “No. Have you?”

  “No, but let’s find out,” he waved toward the pedestal. “Go ask the pedestal. It knows.”

  “Aren’t you already late to meet with Kat?” Lacey argued, but she also went inside to check with the pedestal.

  “I sent Ginger with a note that I’d be late,” Colt called out to her.

  As she played around at the pedestal, Spark lifted a tired head up off her perch at the very top of the cat tree that one of the Goblin crafters had made for her. Lacey looked up the numbers, and, sure enough, the pedestal was keeping track of everything. Lacey paused on the trip back to the patio area to give Spark a scritch under the chin. Spark gave back a huge yawn full of sharp baby kitten teeth and then gave a half-purr, like she was too tired even for that.

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  The pets had spent the afternoon chasing everything that moved out in the backyard. Beka had needed reassurance that her playmate didn’t like the black panther better than Beka, so she’d pestered Spark for hours to play. Every time that Spark had laid down to rest, Beka had whined until Spark had given up on her cat naps. Until the Goblins had delivered the cat tree, Spark had been coaxed time and again to go back out and chase something new. Now she lay sprawled in a small fur hammock, exhausted by the puppy’s energy.

  “How much time do we have?” Colt called Lacey back onto the patio.

  “A little under a month, altogether,” Lacey admitted, letting herself sit next to him.

  “You can survive a month-long siege here by yourself,” he was annoyingly logical, which was the point of this coping mechanism for her anxiety attacks. “In that time, Bernard, Kat, and I can mount an offensive to tear down the very walls that Bernard worked so hard to build.”

  “But all that work,” Lacey gasped out at the thought.

  “And,” Colt interrupted her thought process. “I would then be a strong adventurer level nearer to Kat’s levels because she’d power-level me.” She opened her mouth to protest, but he talked over her. “And I could come in here and kill you off with Kat at my side so that you could go out there and adventure until you could also defend yourself without this silly dungeon master limitation. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t be cool.”

  “You’d kill me?” Lacey griped, but without heat. “Just so you and your girlfriend could take over my dungeon?”

  “Your dungeon?” he laughed at her, letting go of the rope to shake a finger at her.

  “It would be by the time you got high enough to defeat this place,” Lacey crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Possibly true,” he admitted.

  “Besides, it would be easier to just create all the rest of the levels during the dungeon closure so that I could get to Tier III and be invulnerable,” she raised a finger to proclaim.

  “Yeah,” he smirked at her. “Or we could do that part together to start with.”

  “Oh, yeah,” her shoulders slumped, and she sat next to where his back leaned against the bench.

  Colt let her think on that while he lunged at the dog’s toy. Beka darted away with a furiously wagging tail, bringing the toy back within reach of her human only to pull it back from him the moment he grabbed at it again. Lacey watched them play and let her mind lose the war with Colt’s logic.

  “Is that it?” Colt pushed himself up onto the stone bench beside her. “Or has your brilliant mind come up with yet another worry?”

  “I’m looking for something else, but nothing so far,” Lacey leaned into him.

  “Good,” he wrapped his arms around her in a friendly hug. “But I’m going to wait right here until you’re sure.”

  “Your girlfriend’s going to get jealous,” Lacey let her head rest on his shoulder.

  “Nope,” Cold reassured her, kissing the top of her head. “She’s got her own anxieties, but jealousy doesn’t seem to be one of them.”

  “Really?” Lacey lifted her head to look at him. They’d had their tests over enough girlfriends who were the jealous type.

  “I think so,” his brow creased as if the thought baffled him too. “She just doesn’t feel that way about you.”

  “You talked about it?” Lacey pulled back.

  “Yeah,” he chortled at her skeptical look. “We do talk, you know. It isn’t all just hanky-panky kissy stuff in the woods.”

  “No way,” she feigned total disbelief.

  “Brat!” he pushed Lacey’s head back down onto his shoulder. “Turns out she is the jealous type, but that you are different.”

  “What? Does she not find me a threat because I’m hideous or something?” Lacey left her head where he’d put it and relaxed into him, the comfort something that helped seal the portal to her anxiety even tighter than the logic.

  “No,” she could feel his chuckle shake her pillow. “She said she just trusts you that way. The reasoning that she came up with was that if we’d been friends this long without something happening to spark the romance and make us fall in love with each other, then it wasn’t likely to ever happen. She’s got an uncle that isn’t an uncle that had that type of relationship with her mom.”

  “Reason rarely has any say in jealousy,” Lacey argued, but she hadn’t gotten that jealous vibe from Kat at all. It was more of a curiosity as to why than that she believed Kat was hiding it.

  “Well, more reasoning is that she’s encouraged by my ability to have a friendship with you,” he went on. “She says it means that I know the difference between romantic love and friendship love and that it makes me more likely to resist other women.”

  “More women?” Lacey jerked up to say, having gotten her fill of reassurance and affection. “God forbid.”

  “Fine,” Colt shook his head, but let her go easily. “I happen to agree.”

  “Good, because with more women, your ego would be insufferable!” Lacey leaned back with a hand to her chest, her face full of horror.

  “It isn’t already?” he teased her, reaching for the tug toy that Beka had left at his feet during their moment.

  “Possibly,” she nodded sagely.

  Out of nowhere, Beka appeared to grab and yank on the toy before he’d gotten a good grip. A fierce, growling battle ensued, the growls coming from both sides of the wrestling match. He’d gotten yet another female in Beka, and he’d charmed her too. Lacey let herself relax into the good of the moment, the tension draining from her. Anxiety was a thief of happiness. Tonight, it had been caught and jailed by friendship, logic, and a friendly dose of loving tolerance.

  “Go ahead and use a coupon,” she offered, relaxed into the idea. “Ask Kat if she has a brother or something for me.”

  “Only child,” he winced at the thought. “I already asked.”

  “What?”

  “Not for you, but if she had brothers and sisters,” he laughed at her scolding look and then gave a mock-shudder. “I never thought I’d be with an only child again, but there it is.”

  Colt headed to the shower to wash off the dog smell. It took Lacey a few minutes to realize he’d been referring to herself as the other only child in his life. For a moment, she was tempted to be offended, but then she laughed.

  She still stayed up long enough to make sure he came home, not because she was a wreck of worry, but because she cared. It gave her time to make another dungeon and read two chapters of her book. The moment she heard Beka woof at his arrival and his assurances to the dog that he was home for the night, Lacey fell asleep in her outdoor bedroom.