Totally Spellbound (20 page)

“I’d prefer not to use any more magic
than I have to,” he said.

She looked skeptical.

“Besides, driving from here to the
hotel wouldn’t leave a magical trail.”

“Oh.” Apparently, that
convinced her. Not the pleasure of his company, not the warmth of
his presence. “I guess you can come then. If you want to leave
now.”

She looked pointedly at the papers in
his hand. He set them down.

“Now’s fine,” he said.

They were being so oddly formal with
each other, as if they didn’t know each other.

Of course, they really didn’t. They
hadn’t met before last night—if that even counted in the realm of
meeting anyone. After all, they hadn’t had much of a conversation
last night, and today, mostly, they’d dealt with the
Fates.

He’d only assumed she was as attracted
to him as he was to her.

And that was probably a false
assumption. Considering his lack of experience with modern women,
and considering her ability to turn on the compassion when she
needed it, he had probably misread every single signal she’d
sent.

“Let’s go then,” she said, and led him
out the door.

He followed her through the hallways
of his own company. He tried to imagine what it looked like to her.
Cubicles and neutral brown walls covered with tasteful prints
picked by his interior designer fifty years ago.

Someone had recently told
him that those prints were worth money—collector’s value, hard to
come by—but he had ignored it. Everything half-a-second old in
America was considered an antique. Even the office equipment here,
except for the ugly cubicles, of course, and even those were
ancient by American standards. He’d bought them at the insistence
of his team, almost twenty-five years ago, when the Age of the
Cubicle was just beginning.

But Megan didn’t seem to
notice any of it—not the art, not the Eames chairs, not the gray,
functional desks with the state-of-the-art computers. She didn’t
even nod at the employees as she passed them. Instead, she kept her
head slightly down and headed toward the stairs and, ultimately,
the exit.

Those Interim Fates had called her an
empath, and her abilities in that library had seemed uncanny. Now
she was acting like an empath as well: in room after room, all
filled with emotion, she was walling herself off.

Just like he had done when he had
returned from the Interim Fates. He had walled himself off so that
he could fight an important battle.

She walled herself off just to get
through a crowd.

His heart went out to her again. Did
she know that her discomfort around large groups of people came
from her natural magic talent? Or did she assign something else the
blame?

And how could he explain to her that
the abilities she’d shown—the way she had talked to those girls,
the profession she had chosen—were as much a part of her as that
mind-reading ability was a part of her nephew?

She hurried down the art
deco staircase that he had installed against the advice of his
first designer, a man he had hired when this building was being
built. That man had had no idea that deco was going to be classic;
if Rob had taken his advice, the place would be an outmoded
curiosity, instead of one of Vegas’ hidden architectural
wonders.

He had always gone his own way.
Always. Even when he’d fallen in love with Marian.

He’d married her toward the end. But
in an era when everyone married, remained chaste, or had mistresses
in other towns to hide the bastard children, he had lived in sin
with a noblewoman in the forest, no less.

For centuries, everyone had told him
to date, and he’d tried on occasion, only to fail.

And now he was falling for an empath
nearly eight hundred years his junior who had no idea what kind of
windmills she was tilting at.

Was that why he was falling for her?
Because she was tilting at windmills?

Hardly anyone did that. The true
idealists were as rare as empaths, and just as fragile.

“Megan,” he said, “wait.”

She stopped at the main glass doors.
The security guards watched him approach her as if they’d never
seen him like this.

Maybe they hadn’t. He felt vulnerable
again.

Sometime in that walk from his office
to the front of the building, his emotional walls had
crumbled.

She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Wait for what?”

He didn’t know the answer to that. He
just wanted to be beside her. Walking with her, instead of behind
her. At her side.

For as long as she would have
him.

He didn’t say any of that.
He was afraid he would scare her.

“For me,” he said simply. “I just
wanted you to wait for me.”

Wait for him.

Megan had waited for a man like Rob
all of her life.

And, in this postfeminist
era, she was embarrassed to admit it, even more embarrassed to
admit she was attracted to man whose attitudes were so out-of-date
that they had been old-fashioned in the medieval era.

She was tired. And very
confused.

Those Interim Fates had taken all of
her energy, and she still wasn’t sure she’d helped them.

She wasn’t sure she had helped
anyone.

The doors in front of her were warm
from the Vegas sun. Above her, an air-conditioning vent sent chills
down her spine. She needed to move.

She pushed on the doors just as Rob
caught up to her. He slipped a hand onto the small of her back,
sending a different kind of chill up her spine.

Maybe she was attracted to him because
he was so very handsome. He moved beautifully, and she was always
attracted to graceful men. Then he had that melodious voice, with
its unusual accent, and she was lost. Just lost.

He could be a Neanderthal and have
those qualities (although a Neanderthal wouldn’t have those
qualities—not in the looks department or the movement department,
but maybe in the voice department [although the accent would be
completely different, provided, of course, Neanderthals had the
physical ability to speak a complicated language like English]) and
she’d still be attracted.

The bottom line was, simply, that the
combination of looks, brains, movement, and accent was just lethal,
at least for her, and he could think she was property, hit her over
the head with his club, and drag her away by her hair, and she
would let him.

She’d probably even enjoy
it.

And that just made her even more
disgusted with herself.

They stepped outside into
the blazing afternoon heat. It didn’t matter that there was an
awning above them or that the nearby building pumped cool air onto
the street; it was still the middle of the desert and so incredibly
hot that she felt as if she would melt at any moment.

The chills from the
air-conditioning dissipated immediately. The chills from Rob’s hand
remained.

She walked at her normal
pace to the parking garage, forcing him to keep up with her. She
had blamed him all day for having emotions that ran the gamut from
anger to kindness, but her emotions had been all over the place,
too.

Too many times, she’d let a man’s
kindness blind her. A man who treated her with respect, a man who
listened to her, a man who acted as if she were important, she used
to misread those signals and think that he was falling for
her.

She rounded the corner into the
parking garage. It smelled of old gasoline, and wasn’t really much
cooler than the sidewalk.

Rob had managed to keep up with her
and keep his hand against the flat of her back. She liked
that.

She liked it a bit too
much.

Even if she discounted the fact that
he believed women needed to be taken care of, even if she ignored
the way that he had stomped all over her in the conversation with
the Interim Fates, there was still the matter of their
eight-century age difference.

Yes, he might have a love
for Maid Marian that had lasted for the ages, but she had died ages
ago. And in that time, he had to have known other women.

Maybe this was how he met them,
charming them, showing flashes of himself, using his magic to woo
them, and then getting what he wanted—whatever that was (could a
man who had lived 800 years still think with the wrong part of his
anatomy? She’d always heard that older men started using their
upper brain long about fifty, but did that apply to men who aged
slowly over several centuries? And who could she ask? She didn’t
know anyone else who had met someone as old as Rob. Except Zoe,
whom she didn’t know well either).

“You’re very quiet,” he said, his
voice echoing against the concrete dividers.

“It’s been a difficult
day.”

That was an
understatement. She had discovered that her brother was not only
magic, but engaged; that her poor nephew had been able to read
minds ever since he could remember; and that there was not one, but
two, groups of Fates—ditzy women/girls who somehow controlled the
universe.

Anyone would be stressed after all
that.

Her Mini Cooper sat alone in the
section of the parking garage designed for small cars. Hardly
anyone owned a small car anymore. Across the divide, dozens of SUVs
vied for space.

She waved her hand at the passenger
side—she didn’t even want him to think he could drive her car—and
unlocked the doors. As she crawled in, she watched Rob fold himself
into his seat.

He looked comfortable
enough.

She closed her door, put the key in
the ignition, and started the car. Rob turned toward
her.

“I make you nervous, don’t
I?”

She wasn’t sure how to
answer that. He did make her nervous, but not in the way he
thought. She wasn’t nervous because she was afraid of him. She was
nervous because she was attracted to him, and how could she admit
that to a man who was famous not only in his own time but also
throughout the generations?

And, under another name,
he was famous in this time, too. Only as a billionaire playboy who
jet-setted from place to place.

So she decided for bravado
instead: “I was just thinking that I must make you
nervous.”

“Me?” he said after a moment. “You?
Make me? Nervous? I—”

Then he laughed.

“I guess you must,” he
said.

She grinned at him. She hadn’t
expected him to make her smile.

Then she backed out of the parking
space. The car turned easily, and she didn’t even come close to the
SUVs. She probably should have checked her bumper before backing
out, though. One of those monstrosities had probably hit
her.

She clicked the
air-conditioning higher, not that it did any good yet, and rolled
down her window. Rob’s was already down.

She turned left, trying to remember
exactly how she had gotten here.

It felt like a lifetime ago. In fact,
she could hardly remember how to operate the car. Of course, that
probably had something to do with the man beside her.

He was a powerful
distraction.

“You know,” he said, looking out that
open window, “the Interim Fates called you an empath.”

“They called you a hottie,” Megan
said.

“Well, in your case, it’s
true.”

What an obscure compliment
to give her. At least he wasn’t repeated tried-and-true
lines.

Lines tried and proven true over
centuries.

She shivered. The air
coming from the blowers had grown chilly. She rolled up her window
and turned the air-conditioning on full blast.

“What they said about you is true in
your case too,” she said.

He grinned at her sideways. “I’m not
trying to butter you up.”

“I’m not trying to butter you up
either. They’re right. They’re too young for you, but they’re
right.”

And there it was, in the open. The age
thing.

“They’re too
immature
for me,” he
said. “I’ve learned over the course of my long life that age really
doesn’t matter.”

So there had been other women,
probably hundreds of them.

“I would think it would have to.”
Megan came to an intersection, thankful that the stoplight ahead of
her was red. She needed a moment to remember the route to the
hotel. “I mean, after all, what do people have in common anyway? A
shared history—not just the time they spend together, but the time
they spend on the planet—accumulated wisdom, and years of
observations—”

“Does my age bother you?” he
asked.

“Um…” It was her
turn to stammer. For a moment, she wished she was an interim fate
and could say
well, duh!
with impunity. “Sure. I mean, yeah. I mean,
shouldn’t it?”