Completely Smitten (15 page)

The assistant lunch chef was cooking the midafternoon meals, in addition to acting as sous chef for evening. The actual sous chef was on vacation—early February was not a busy time for restaurants in Portland—and everyone was doing a little extra to cover for her.

Except Blackstone, who had somehow gotten this rabbit stew in his head. Lately he’d been doing a lot of dish creation. Darius actually thought it might be a reaction to the fact that Michael and Emma had had their first child in January. Blackstone had decided not to have children a long time ago, but when his friends sent announcements of their little bundles of joy, his verbal response was always joy and his actual response was to create something new and wonderful of his own.

Rabbit stew didn’t, in Dar’s opinion, measure up to a newborn daughter with raven black hair and stunning blue eyes. But he didn’t tell Blackstone that.

What he was trying to tell his old friend was that they needed a better system for training and keeping their wait staff. Most waiters at upscale restaurants were used to temperamental owners. Blackstone was kinder than most, and although he was temperamental, he usually managed to hide it from his employees.

No, the problem the wait staff had with Quixotic was that they thought the place was haunted.

And why wouldn’t they? Sometimes dishes magically appeared from the kitchen. Sometimes a burnt sauce repaired itself. Sometimes the flowers in the bud vases would change between lunch and dinner, and no one could remember doing it.

Blackstone, in his quest for perfection, would occasionally use his magic to alter things in the restaurant, and he was terrifying the staff. Darius had to admit that he was guilty of manipulation at times too, but he usually tried to keep the magic to himself.

“That’s the third backup hostess we’ve lost in the past six months,” Darius was saying.

Blackstone didn’t seem to notice. He picked up a slice of carrot and held it toward the light. Darius knew what he was doing. If Blackstone couldn’t see light through the center of the carrot, then he wasn’t slicing thin enough.

“We really need a lunchtime maitre d’,” Blackstone said without looking at Dar.

“This is Portland.” Darius suppressed the urge to sigh. They’d had this discussion off and on for the ten years Quixotic had been open. “You get too formal at lunch and our business will be cut by two-thirds. We’re already pushing the price point. If we get snobby on top of it, people will only come here when they’re trying to impress someone.”

Blackstone set down the carrot and resumed cutting. “You’ve been saying that forever. Do you have studies that prove you’re right?”

“Studies?” Darius crossed his arms. “We don’t need studies. We could just do a controlled experiment. Spell this place, create an alternate reality for a few weeks, give us a maitre d’ at lunch, and see what happens.”

Blackstone looked at him sideways. “You didn’t do that, did you?”

Darius raised his chin. “Why?”

“Because you need a familiar. Any magic you do would be slightly off, and the results you get—”

“Would be off as well. Gee, thanks for the support, boss.” Darius slipped off the chair. He was getting tired of this discussion. He’d been investigating different types of familiars. Blackstone’s was a snake named Malcolm who kept himself hidden most of the time. His wife, Nora, would probably have a cat when she came into her magic.

But Darius didn’t know what was right for him. And he didn’t know why he was having problems with his magic now. He’d been without a familiar for centuries. Maybe the problems were occurring because he was so close to the end of his sentence. Maybe it was the Fates’ not-so-subtle way of reminding him that his future would be very different from his past.

He had no idea, though, when the sentence would end. Aside from Ariel, he hadn’t met anyone with a soul mate in the past year. Then he frowned. That wasn’t entirely true. Emma and Michael’s new daughter, Sabrina, had the sign of a soul mate buried deep in her beautiful blue eyes, but she was a bit young. Even if she wanted to be matched up, he would refuse until she was at least six months old.

Usually Darius saw a lot of people who were missing their life’s mates. In fact, he often had his pick of people to work with. But since he saw Ariel Summers, he hadn’t had a choice at all. Fortunately, she was far away from him. He thought of her often, but he didn’t want to see her.

He didn’t want to be tempted by her.

And he had been tempted—especially after she had made those phone calls. A whole series of them, spanning the last few months, each time asking him to put her in touch with Darius, each time saying she had a bit more information and she just wanted him to give her the last piece.

It took him a while to realize that she had been getting her information off the Internet, and it was unnerving to realize just how much information about him was available.

She found nothing about Darius, of course. He’d actually done a search on Nora’s machine to see if he could find out anything about himself (never telling Nora why), and he found only one mention of his old self, listed as a winner on a website on the ancient Greek Olympic Games.

No other mentions of Darius existed, although he did find hundreds upon hundreds of references to some of his other old aliases. Merlin got the most press, Andvari the dwarf the least.

Blackstone and Nora thought Andvari was his real name. Blackstone had always believed that Darius came from Norway. While it was true that he’d had his interactions with Loki and Thor and the other Norse gods (enough that he got mentioned in more than one Norse mythology book as the dwarf whose fortune Loki had stolen. Actually, Darius had given Loki the fortune as a favor, and Loki had abused it—but that was a long and involved story, one he didn’t like to think about much), he was never really part of their pantheon.

The closest he ever came to pantheons was his literary immortality. His influence on Shakespeare and Dickens created some of the more memorable characters in English literature, and he also could make that claim for a Spanish classic as well.

But websites on those characters didn’t refer to Darius. It was all the references to Andrew Vari that made him nervous—some of them over a hundred years old.

It might be time to change the alias, or at least leave the Pacific Northwest.

“What’s with you?” Blackstone asked.

He had put the carrots and leeks in a pot, along with some kind of broth and fresh herbs. No rabbit yet. Blackstone couldn’t decide if he wanted to use rabbit from one of his suppliers or see if he could find some actual Old English hare of long lineage to replicate the taste.

“What do you mean?” Darius asked, although he had a hunch he knew. He had started to stomp off, only to become lost in thought. These lapses of concentration had become common for him in the last few months, and they were beginning to annoy him.

“You snap at me, start to leave, and then you don’t go much farther than the counter. Something’s been bothering you, and I think it’s got nothing to do with finding a familiar.”

Blackstone usually wasn’t that interested in other people’s problems. Darius leaned against the stainless-steel table leg. If Blackstone noticed Darius’s preoccupation, then it had to be really obvious.

“I was just thinking that I’ve used the Northwest as my home base for more than a hundred years. Maybe it’s time to move on.”

Blackstone set his knife down, spread his long fingers on the cutting board, and looked at Darius. “You getting tired of all of us?”

Darius shook his head. “It’s just come to my attention that I’ve been here for a long time. Maybe the restlessness I’m feeling has something to do with that.”

“Or maybe it has to do with Emma’s new baby. Or my marriage to Nora. Things have changed drastically over the last ten years. Sometimes you find change unsettling.”

Darius had never found change unsettling, but he’d often used it as an excuse to cover up some of his matchmaking behavior. He gave Blackstone a false smile. “That could be it.”

Darius didn’t want to continue the conversation, so he pushed open the swinging door and entered the dining room. Only one of the Power Lunchers remained, staring at the bill mournfully as he sipped European coffee in a demitasse.

Blackstone did cater to the trendy coffee crowd, but tradition lover that he was, he also provided old-fashioned types of coffee in old-fashioned ways.

The tourists were exclaiming over their salads and soups, staring at the cast iron wire sculptures on the walls, and rubbing their fingers over the linen tablecloth. Blackstone had decorated the place in Northwest modern—lots of cast iron and neon, with touches of class like the tablecloths and the bud vase on every table.

Quixotic had both a glassed-in balcony and a terrace on the second floor that overlooked the main dining room down below. Its interesting interior was just one of the many things that made people return to the restaurant. The main reason was, of course, the food.

Darius went to the maitre d’s station and made certain the correct menus were waiting to be handed out that evening. Then he went to the long bar near the front window. He’d found his stool so that he could reach the back bar where the main cash register lurked when he caught a movement out the window.

A faded blue Dodge Caravan was parked outside, its windows fogged. Someone was sitting in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper.

He tried to look away but found that he couldn’t. Something about that Caravan caught his attention. It certainly wasn’t the van. It was at least ten years old, boxy and covered with grime.

Then the person in the driver’s seat set down the paper and rubbed at the condensation on the window with a sleeve. A face appeared in the cleared spot, staring at Quixotic with apprehension.

His heart stopped—or it felt as if it had stopped—or it felt as if it should have stopped.

He’d recognize those sharply defined features anywhere, that shock of auburn hair. He even knew that the eyes, which were too far away to see clearly, were green.

Ariel.

She was right outside.

He hadn’t gotten rid of her after all.

Ariel pressed her nose against the cold glass. The rain had stopped, but the damp chill had gone all the way to her bones. Or, more accurately, her bone. Her ankle still wasn’t 100 percent, and she felt the changes in weather in that broken bone.

The doctor who removed her cast told her she was lucky. He said, judging by the nature of the break, the injury should have been much worse. There should have been hairline fractures throughout the ankle and the bones of her foot, and there were none.

A miracle, he had said, especially considering how long it had remained unset and vulnerable.

She didn’t see it as a miracle, at least not on days like this when it ached. She sighed, and her breath fogged part of the window again.

Time to make a decision.

She told herself she had come to Quixotic to apply for the hostess job advertised in that morning’s
Oregonian
. She needed the work. She was becoming desperate. Her savings were gone, thanks to the fruitless move to Portland. A chain of sports stores had hired her to manage their Oregon branches. She’d accepted, moved, and the chain was bought out a month later by a competitor, who immediately liquidated the Portland stores, calling them redundant.

She wanted to call him a few names but had refrained, hoping he would hire her. He didn’t, of course. She really didn’t have enough experience for the position. She had been a prestige name, one designed to bring in the triathletes who seemed to congregate in this part of the Pacific Northwest, but that was it.

The new owner had seen her salary as a liability, not as an important investment in name recognition and advertising.

So she was left with enough money to continue eating and to pay her rent for the next three months. She didn’t even have enough money to move back to Boise. Renting a truck, paying first, last, and a security deposit on a new apartment would eat up all her cash.

Not to mention the fact that she didn’t want to move back to Boise.

Ariel grabbed the newspaper and held it tightly, staring at the ad. She had driven by Quixotic every day since she had moved to Oregon. She had looked at the nifty calligraphic sign that rose up the side of the building, and the framing neon on top, and wondered what would happen if she walked in. Would she find Darius? Would Andrew Vari talk with her?

Vari had been rude to her on the phone—ruder than he had been in person. But his rudeness had been oddly tender, as if he was apologizing while he was saying terrible things. He did not encourage her—in fact, he made her feel as if she had been bothering him, which, she supposed, she was.

He kept denying that he knew Darius, and she still had the firm sense that he was lying to her.

Maybe she was deluding herself.

She kept telling herself that she had to forget Darius, but in truth, she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since the moment she met him.

And now this ad appeared. She had lied to herself to get herself here, telling herself she was only here for the job. After all, how much training did being a restaurant hostess take? She’d waited tables in high school and had done some cocktail waitressing in college. Surely that would qualify her to seat rich patrons in a fancy restaurant.

Besides, if it didn’t, she had a tailor-made excuse to talk with Andrew Vari.

She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. She had been out here for half an hour. Either she went inside or she left.

And if she drove away, she had to promise herself that she would never contact Andrew Vari again.

She sighed, opened her eyes, and checked her hair in the rearview mirror. Then she opened the door and stepped outside.

It was colder than she expected. Chill air sent goosebumps up her nylon-covered legs. Her still-sore ankle complained about the high heels she wore, but she felt she had no other choice. She was very careful about where she put her feet. No sense tripping and reinjuring herself.