Completely Smitten (14 page)

The girl, completely uncertain about how to react to him now, moved her hands forward to help, then moved them back. She did this several times, before he said, “I’ve got it.”

She nodded, keeping her gaze averted, and he instantly felt sorry for what he’d done. She was clearly a good kid. She’d apologized, she’d tried to help, and he had made her pay for his foul mood.

“Sorry,” he said around the cigar. It wasn’t a very good one. Next time he conjured a half-smoked cigar, he’d have to make sure it was Cuban. “I’ve had a bad day. I just dumped the woman of my dreams.”

“You dumped her?” The girl looked up from the register.

Little minds, he thought. Would he be so very hard to love? “Yes,” he snapped. “She was chasing my car when I drove off.”

“That’s romantic.” The girl bagged his groceries.

“It wasn’t supposed to be romantic,” he said, feeling the need to defend himself even though he knew the girl was being sarcastic. “I was
dumping
her.”

She handed him his groceries but kept her fingers on the bag. “So you’re such a popular guy that you can treat the woman of your dreams like that.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Sure I do,” she said. “You have women crawling out of the woodwork to see you. That would be the only reason to treat someone like that. Because you know you can replace her.”

He tugged on the bag. “You really don’t understand.”

“You’re right, I don’t. Everybody I know has trouble getting a date but you. You’re so popular that you can act like a jerk. I mean, that’s gotta be the only explanation. You look weird
and
you’re mean. Is that what women really want? I don’t think so.” She leaned forward. “Tell me you were nice to her once in your relationship.”

He yanked the bag away from her, ripping one corner. “The best thing I ever did was let her go.”

“Does she think so?”

He didn’t answer that. Instead he stalked to the door and let himself out.

What gave that girl the right to lecture him? What gave anyone the right? How could she know what his life was like?

The rain had let up momentarily. He tossed the bag on the front seat of his car and slipped inside. The girl was still watching him through the windows.

What was it about her that rubbed him the wrong way? Her attitude? Her assumptions?

Or the fact that she was right?

Over all the years he’d been doing this work, the one thing he had learned was that few people were lucky enough to meet the person of their dreams, let alone talk to that person.

And he had kissed her.

Darius shook his head, trying to shake Ariel from his mind. He could do a spell to stop himself from thinking about her, but the way his magic had been going lately, he might make himself forget everything but her.

He reached into the bag, pulled out the bottled water, opened it, and took a sip. Warm. He sighed, put the water in the cup holder, and grabbed some beef jerky.

Blackstone would have his head for eating junk like this, but Darius didn’t care. Thwarted lovers were supposed to eat terrible food and drink too much and mope for weeks.

Of course, he couldn’t tell anyone about what happened. Not that he expected the people in his life to notice anyway. He had a reputation for being difficult that looked like it was just going to get stronger.

He sighed and put the car in reverse, spraying gravel as he drove too fast. The girl was still watching, still judging. Not that he blamed her. He had behaved badly.

At the last moment, he stopped the car and sent a small spell her way. He created it, a tiny weave of lace, barely visible to the naked eye, and blew it toward her. It went through the window and brushed her face before disappearing.

Then he smiled, feeling better.

That spell was small enough and familiar enough that he couldn’t screw it up. And he knew it was something she wanted.

A pretty girl in a dump like that could always use a bit of good luck.

Ariel sat in the Download Cafe, a latte to her left, staring at the screen before her. She sat at a counter that faced the wall, her laptop plugged into the access port beside her. The timer on the port clicked away, the minutes—and the cash they represented—disappearing quickly.

A handful of people sat at the tables in the cafe, and there was a line for service. But she was the only person sitting at this particular counter, and she hoped it would stay that way.

Her crutches lay on the floor beside her like a barrier. She’d learned, once she returned to Boise, that men seemed to think crutches provided an opening pickup line.

What happened to you
? was the least offensive of them. They went down from there.
How could such a terrible thing happen to such a pretty little thing
? Or the most common, most sensitive one,
Didja trip?

No
, she always wanted to answer,
but if you’re not careful, you will.

Friends had told her that she should be thankful that men were so interested in her, and they were probably right. But most men who approached her with lines like that were single for a reason. They were obnoxious and difficult— rather like Andrew Vari had been.

They were probably fine underneath. He had proven to be kind—reluctantly kind, but kind nonetheless—and she knew that she was judging them only on a very small part of their personalities. But they were doing the same with her. She was female, passably pretty, at least to them, and that was all they knew about her. How could anyone have a relationship based on that?

She scrolled down the screen, reading the responses the search engine had found her. She was on her fifth directory— the kind that searched phone records and found people’s addresses all over the country—and she had yet to find a listing for a Darius Vari. There weren’t a lot of Dariuses either, although there were more than she expected, too many to go through.

She found herself wishing that these directories came complete with high school graduation photos or mug shots. Then at least she would know if she had found the right man.

Even when she limited her search to men named Darius in the Pacific Northwest, there were too many to play guessing games with. None of them were named Vari or any variation (no pun intended) of that name. And she had no idea what else Darius’s last name could be.

She sipped her latte and worried about how much time she was spending searching for this man. Never mind the expense—downloading on someone else’s service was pricey, but she had no choice, given that she had no apartment—the time this was taking spoke of an obsession. And usually the only thing she was obsessed about was her training.

Ariel closed her eyes. Training. Of course. Something had to fill the void left by her inability to exercise. She was doing physical therapy—sort of, not really enough to count, given the fact that she still had on her cast—but nothing was taking the place of all those hours spent swimming, running, and biking.

Finding Darius had become her hobby.

Not that she knew what to do once she found him. She was hoping for an address or a phone number so that she could contact him and thank him. That way, he would have her address and phone number and maybe contact her in return. She needed something to hope for.

Right now she didn’t have a lot.

Part of that was her fault. The injury was going to prevent any kind of training at all. The doctors felt that she’d be able to run again, but that it would take time. They told her that she needed to be patient.

She also needed to figure out what she was going to do to make money. She had money in the bank, thanks to last year’s endorsement deals (most of this year’s canceled when they learned that she wouldn’t be able to swim again), but it wasn’t very much. Triathletes weren’t that well known, and female triathletes were even less well known. The endorsement deals she’d gotten were small, and she’d had to repay some of the money sponsors had sent her to keep her training for the Hawaii Ironman. That, the unexpected time in the hotel, and all the changes had bitten deeply into her savings.

She was going to have to find some kind of job—and soon.

Ariel set her latte down and hit the link for advanced search. This time, she filled in the fields so that the search might have Darius, might have Vari, might have Oregon, Washington, or Idaho. At the last minute, she added a might-have Andrew too.

If she was going to spend a bundle on computer time, she might as well get her money’s worth.

The search gave her a lot of junk, but as she threaded through it, she found something interesting.

There was only one Andrew Vari in Oregon, and he lived in Portland. She found no listing for an Andrew Vari in Idaho, which made sense, considering these directories were based on phone company records and the house in the mountains had no phone.

Vari was her only link to Darius, and he had a car with Oregon plates.

She had found him.

But she wanted to make sure. She went back to the initial search engine and expanded her search to include newspaper articles and websites. She used the same parameters as before. By hitting “might” instead of “had to” she was getting a lot more information, some of it seeming to be relevant.

Instantly she got some strange hits, most of them with references to something called Quixotic, which, she thought, didn’t describe Vari at all. One of the hits was for Quixotic’s website, and she clicked on the link.

After a momentary darkness as her machine coped with the change, her screen revealed an elaborate website devoted to food. Apparently Quixotic was a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, and its owner, Alex Blackstone, was a well-known chef, if the reviews on the site were any indication.

The restaurant had been written up in everything from the
New York Times
to the
London Times
. Most of the articles were linked to the site, and she followed the URLs to interesting places. A few of the reviews had photos not just of the restaurant, which looked unprepossessing from the outside, but also of Blackstone.

He was a tall man with long black hair and sharp eyes. He was classically handsome, a type that didn’t appeal to Ariel at all. In many of the photos, his lawyer-wife stood beside him, a petite blonde who looked like she was still in college.

Ariel was confused. She had no idea why the Quixotic site kept coming up in her Andrew Vari search. She scanned the reviews, and while they told her about the excellent grilled salmon and Blackstone’s way with recipes that had existed since the Middle Ages, they said nothing about an Andrew Vari.

Until she came across a
GQ
puff piece about the restaurant. In it, the writer mentioned Blackstone’s assistant—“a diminutive man named Andrew Vari, who was so close to Blackstone that many of their friends called him Sancho Panza.”

It was the word “diminutive” that caught her. A polite word for small. She searched farther, found more pictures, and finally saw one with Blackstone leaning against a bar and Vari beside him, sitting on one of the bar stools. They looked like an unusual pair of men—one tall and elegant, the other short and tough. Yet somehow their comfort with each other came through the photograph.

So she had found Andrew Vari. Ariel picked up her latte and studied the photograph. He seemed calmer than the man she had met. That man had looked panicked.

Vari had been lying about Darius. But why? Because they were involved in nefarious dealings, like Evelyn had suggested? Or because of something else? And how would she ever find out?

She went back to her initial Vari search and stored his home phone number and address on her computer. She would call him. If she couldn’t get him at home, she would get him at Quixotic. And then he would give her a way to contact Darius.

If he refused, she’d send a letter to Vari and ask him to forward it to Darius. That couldn’t be hard, could it?

She would get her contact. Not as smoothly as she liked, but it would happen And maybe she would get to see him again.

Maybe that would stop her thoughts about him, the way she found herself musing over his looks, dreaming of him, and tingling at the memory of his kiss.

She could find a new obsession—and finally move on.

Cupid’s Revenge

(February)

Ten

Darius climbed into his chair and sat down next to the stainless-steel table so that he could watch the master chef at work. Blackstone had been experimenting with rabbit stew. He was trying to recreate a recipe he’d had in Queen Elizabeth I’s court about 500 years before. In those days, rabbit stew was considered peasant food, but apparently one of her chefs had made it into a delicacy.

Over the years, Darius had watched Blackstone recreate hundreds of recipes. Unfortunately, by the time he found the right combinations, the staff was usually heartily sick of the main ingredient.

Right now, Blackstone was cutting leeks and carrots into very thin slices. He’d been debating about adding potatoes for the last hour. Darius had remained silent on the subject; he had a hunch the missing ingredients in the stew were rot and mold. Even in the palace in those long-gone days, the food was never very fresh.

Darius’s chair was really a stool with a seat and a back Blackstone had had it made especially for him when he realized that no restaurant would get a five-star rating when its manager spent much of his time sitting on the counters talking to people.

Darius did like to be at eye level, and the kitchen was not set up for that—at least for him. Everything was built for Blackstone, who was at least six feet tall (Darius had never bothered to figure out by how much his friend towered over him) and so Darius often found himself staring at lips of counters and edges of stoves. He could see into ovens and pick things off lower shelves, and that was about it.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The lunch crowd had left and the dinner crowd wouldn’t show up for another three hours. A few Power Lunchers lingered over dessert and coffee, their business not done, and some tourists had just arrived.

Darius didn’t even have to open the swinging door to know that the new customers were tourists. They showed up after the lunch rush and ordered the swordfish, which had just been favorably mentioned in the new Michelin guide to Portland.