Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (53 page)

While that revenge fantasy might have been appealing, I doubted it would ever happen. For one thing, I was fairly certain Traci would do everything in her power to make sure that whoever they did hire to help with the baby was unattractive. Newport Beach probably abounded with horror stories of that type, and while I didn’t think much of Traci’s mental abilities on an intellectual level, I had to admit she could be cunning enough when the situation required it.

“Does your mom know?” Nina asked.

I lifted my shoulders before swallowing the rest of my appletini. “By now? Probably. I mean, Lisa probably called her.” Of course, I didn’t know that for sure, but Lisa tended to take her position as the oldest child seriously. Any time something needed handling, she was the one to do it.

Nina skewered one of her cocktail onions with the plastic stick and stuck it in her mouth while I tried not to shudder. I still couldn’t see how she stood those things. “But you haven’t heard anything?” she said.

“No.” Which, on the face of it, was a little odd. Usually my mother would have called me to see how I was handling news of such magnitude. Her silence seemed to signal one of two things: either she was so upset that she didn’t want to talk to anyone, or for some reason Lisa hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to tell her. Neither explanation was at all reassuring.

“Well,” Micaela said, then hesitated. She’d just finished the last of her appletini and looked slightly wistful. Sounding a little too hearty, she continued, “I’m sure she’ll work through it.

Jennifer had a dubious expression on her face, as if she wasn’t sure at all, but I guessed tact prevented her from coming out and saying so. Instead, she remarked, “I think we need another round,” and lifted a hand to flag down the waiter.

He reappeared, carrying the crab cakes and quesadillas we’d ordered, then took our request for the next round. Looking sour, Micaela asked for a Diet Coke, while I branched out into a caramel apple martini, and Jennifer and Nina both stuck with their original choices.

“Anyway,” Jennifer said, with the air of someone who wanted to get on to the good stuff, “Nina was telling me that you’d met someone new?”

“Well, um — sort of,” I replied, feeling a little cornered. I flashed Nina a sideways glare, and she gave an almost imperceptible lift of her shoulders by way of apology.

“‘Sort of’?” she echoed. “I mean, he
did
take you out on your birthday, didn’t he?”

“Does this mean you broke up with Danny?” Micaela demanded suddenly.

“No, I did not break up with Danny,” I said. “I’m just trying this whole dating more than one guy at once thing. I mean, it worked well enough for Nina in college.”

“Oh, yeah, that was great,” Micaela remarked, her tone caustic. “Who was that guy — Eric? — you know, the baseball player — ”

Nina and I both answered at once. “Aaron.”

Micaela waved a hand. “Whatever. Anyway, Nina, it was
so
much fun having to stall him in the hallway that one time you got your dates mixed up, and he showed up while you still had David Lippman in your room. You barely got David’s pants back on and him out the window before Aaron came charging in.”

I’d actually forgotten about that. Sometimes Nina’s man-juggling had gotten a little complicated. “I’m not being quite that extreme,” I said with a laugh.

The waiter reappeared with the next round of drinks, and I plowed on into the caramel apple martini. This one really did taste a lot like the Halloween treat of my childhood — with an added kick.

“Well, if you do dump Danny for good, let me know,” Micaela remarked. “I’ll take him off your hands.”

I choked on a mouthful of martini. “What?”

Nina and Jennifer both gave her disbelieving stares.

She looked back at the three of us and shrugged. “Hey, I think he’s kind of cute. Besides, your biggest beef with him is neglect, right? Well, with my schedule, I need a guy who isn’t clingy. Sounds like a match made in Heaven to me.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” I said.

“Why not? At the very least we could just be fuck-buddies or something.”

Boy, was she off-base. “Sounds like a great plan, except for the part where he’s a rabid Catholic who doesn’t believe in premarital sex.”

My comment made all three of my friends snap their heads around to give me a shocked look.

“You’re kidding, right?” Nina asked.

“Nope,” I said, then took a large sip of my martini. Yummy.

Her tone accusing, she said, “You never told me that.”

“Well, it’s sort of embarrassing, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, who likes to go around advertising that they’re a forced celibate?”

Jennifer shook her head once again, and Micaela said, “Hey, I can still work with that. I’m Catholic, too, you know.”

Nina made a skeptical noise. “Yeah, right.”

“Uh, yeah,” Micaela retorted. “All right, so I haven’t exactly been observing lately. But my family is — there aren’t a hell of a lot of Methodists in Boyle Heights, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Sounds great to me,” I commented. The rapid-fire martinis were starting to make me a little swimmy. “I’ll put a bow around his neck and send him on over to your place next chance I get.”

“You are too much,” Jennifer said. “He’s a person, not a DVD you can swap back and forth.”

I shrugged. I knew that Micaela was half-joking, and so was I, but it really wasn’t that bad an idea. I didn’t want to leave the boy completely off on his lonesome, and Micaela was right — between her screwy schedule and his tendency to disappear for long stretches, she and Danny would probably make a much better couple than he and I ever had. Of course, there was the minor complication that he’d never expressed even the slightest interest in Micaela, but that could be corrected without too much trouble.

“Not even oral?” Nina asked suddenly. Talk about one-track minds.

“Okay, TMI!” said Jennifer, sounding more than a little exasperated. “I’m trying to eat a crab cake here.”

Oh, right, there was food. I leaned over and snagged a section of quesadilla. After biting off the point and savoring the spicy cheese and black bean salsa, I replied, “Not even that.”

“Honey, no wonder you’ve sounded tense lately,” Nina said.

You don’t know the half of it
, I thought. After all, sexual deprivation is no fun, but it’s even worse when you’ve got more than a year of tension bottled up, and then you meet a guy who swings your gauges over into the red. I guessed I probably should have just counted myself lucky that I hadn’t torn Luke’s clothes off the night before.

Then, unbelievably,
his
voice.

“Christa?”

I paused, martini glass halfway to my mouth, then turned to look back up and over my shoulder. Luke stood there, a martini of his own in his right hand. He wore a dark suit of such casual elegance it had to be Armani or something similar, with a deep wine-colored shirt underneath.

Speak of the Devil
, I thought. Then,
Is he
following
me?

“Oh, um, hi,” I said lamely.

Nina made an ostentatious throat-clearing noise.

“Right,” I added. “Luke, this is my friend Nina — and Jennifer — and Micaela.”

He extended his hand to each of them in turn, wearing that gorgeous half-smile of his. “Ladies.”

Jennifer’s gray-blue eyes were about the widest I’d ever seen. Micaela gave Luke a frankly appraising glance. And Nina — well, Nina was looking from Luke to me and then back again, with about the same expression you might expect from someone who had just spotted a UFO. Or a unicorn.

“I didn’t know you were coming here,” I said, my tone about two shades away from outright accusation.

“I’m meeting a business associate for some drinks. He happens to be partial to the melon martinis here.”

Business associate?
What kind of business associate would the Devil have? I tried to look past him to see if some other well-dressed denizen of the underworld was loitering near the bar, but none of the men there stood out in particular. Lola’s attracts its share of L.A. hipsters, but no one else in the bar radiated that air of indefinable chic which Luke seemed to possess in spades.

“Is he, now?” I asked, eyes narrowing a bit.

Luke’s gaze caught mine, and I thought I saw the corner of his mouth quirk ever so slightly. Then again, it wasn’t very well lit in there. I could have been imagining things. “I’ll let you ladies get back to your evening. It was very nice meeting all of you.”

With that he gave us all a nod and another smile, then sauntered off in the direction of the entry to the main restaurant.

Naturally, Nina was the first one to break the stunned silence that followed his departure. “Oh. My. God,” she said at last.

Close, but no cigar
, I thought.

Micaela set her Diet Coke down on the table and let out a low whistle. “Girlfriend, he is
fine
.”

“Where on earth did you meet him?” Jennifer asked.

“At The Grove,” I said. “We just sort of — bumped into each other.”

“And you had the guts to pick him up?” Nina demanded.

“Well, actually — ” I couldn’t help smiling. “It was sort of the other way around.”

There was an impressed silence.

“That’s great,” Jennifer said, after a short pause. “That means he must really be into you.”

“I think so,” I replied cautiously. “I don’t want to rush anything, but — ”

“Rush it,” Micaela said. “Believe me — you don’t want to miss out on a piece of that.”

If it weren’t for him being the Devil, I would have been inclined to agree with her. I certainly wasn’t the sort of girl who indiscriminately hopped into bed with men, but it had been a long time. There were exceptions to every rule. And, as Micaela had pointed out, the guy was fine.

“So how many times have you seen him?” Nina again, always wanting to know every little detail. I loved Nina to death, but she was used to being the center of attention, the one who attracted all the guys (and women, too, apparently), and the fact that I’d somehow managed to snag one at least several steps above my usual pay grade had, I think, aroused just the tiniest bit of jealousy.

“Well, my birthday, of course,” I replied. “And then Friday night — we went to Musso & Frank’s and then to the Observatory — ”

“The Observatory?” Micaela asked, eyebrows lifted. “Since when are you into astronomy?”

Nina cut in, “Christa said it was ‘lovely.’”

Micaela gave a little laugh, but Jennifer, bless her, came to my defense. “And it probably was. I think it was great that he came up with something besides just the same boring old dinner and a movie deal.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Then he came over for drinks last night — ”

“You never told me that,” Nina said.

I guessed I hadn’t. Right then I wasn’t sure whether that was simply because it had slipped my mind or because I really didn’t want to discuss Luke with her. I think I’d been hoping to keep things low-key for a little while longer. Well, he had sort of put the kibosh on that by showing up here, of all places. He’d made it sound as if it were simply a coincidence, but I knew better than that.

Without trying to seem too obvious, I looked off in the direction he’d disappeared, but I didn’t see him. Oh, well.

“So he came over for drinks — ” Micaela prompted.

“That’s all. We had a glass of wine and talked, and then he left. I’d had sort of a rough day, after all.”

“That’s it?” She looked disappointed. Maybe she was trying to live vicariously through my (so far) nonexistent sex life.

“He was very supportive about the whole thing with my father and Traci,” I added.

“You told him that?” Nina sounded shocked.

“Sure. Why not?”

She gave a dismissive shrug, but she did appear to be genuinely surprised. “Honey, I make it a rule never to drag guys into my sordid family life until we’ve been going out at least a month.”

“You don’t have a sordid family life,” I pointed out. It was true; her parents still had a very solid marriage, and Nina’s equally gorgeous younger sister was a star student at Columbia University.

“Okay, whatever. I just figure, why dump the angst on them in the beginning and scare them off?”

I had to admit that was a valid point — in most cases. However, Luke already knew all about what was going on with my family, so there would have been absolutely no point in trying to hide things from him.

“It was fine,” I said. “I don’t think I scared him off. After all, he came over to say hi to all of us. And he held me for a long time last night before he left.”

“Held you,” Nina repeated.

“Yes,” I said.
And it was wonderful....

“Looks like we’ve got a keeper here,” Micaela remarked.

Jennifer nodded. “He does sound awfully nice, Christa. What does he do?”

That question again. I didn’t think a reply of “guarding the souls of the eternally damned” would fly here, so instead I just trotted out the old “independently wealthy” line again.

The slightest gleam entered Nina’s green eyes. “You know guys will say that when they’re actually just unemployed.”

“Oh, really?” I retorted. “Then unemployment benefits must’ve gotten a big bump-up lately, considering he picked me up for our first date in a Bentley Arnage.”

“Holy shit,” Micaela said, in respectful tones. Out of all of us, she was probably the only one who might have previously seen one of those cars in person. You got a lot of exposure to that sort of thing when you worked in the film industry.

Another silence fell. I took advantage of the break in conversation to flag down the waiter and order another round. Remembering Luke’s mention of the melon martini, I requested one of those and looked over at Nina and Jennifer. Micaela was still forlornly nursing her Diet Coke.

“I’m good,” Jennifer said. “Some water, though, please.”

“Another Downright Dirty for me,” Nina said. “I’m not driving.”

“Rub it in,” Micaela sighed.

The waiter departed, and Nina chewed meditatively on her last cocktail onion. “So somehow you managed to find an unattached, gorgeous, rich man who likes to hear you talk about your messed-up family and who enjoys buying you expensive dinners.”