AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She snorted. “Yeah, right, like that’s high on his agenda. Then again, I keep forgetting you don’t see his illusion, and that love spell won’t work on you. You might be okay. Watch yourself, though.”
If she was our mole, she was good. Everything she said could have had a totally innocent meaning, or she could have been hinting that she knew I’d lost my immunity. “I’ll be okay,” I said with a cheerful smile. Nope, nothing wrong here whatsoever, I tried to project.
She snorted again as she returned to her lab. Oh, I so desperately needed to get some solid evidence on this, preferably evidence that Ari wasn’t the one, even if that took me back to square one. I could hear Owen’s voice coming from a lab near his, so I darted into his lab, hung the ornament on his office doorknob, then hurried away. I lingered in the hallway for a while, but it wasn’t as though Ari was going to go out and sabotage something while I waited. Watching her probably wouldn’t work very well. I’d have to find a way to set a trap and catch her red-handed, but you had to be pretty sneaky to catch a thief, and I’d never been that good at being sneaky. I was getting better, what with all the secret keeping I’d been doing lately, but I was still a novice compared with Ari.
By the time Friday rolled around, I was truly looking forward to going out with Rod. As I dressed for the date, I gave myself a stern lecture about not falling under the influence of whatever spell he threw at me. I had no magical defenses, but I retained at least a little bit of common sense, and if I knew there was magic at work, I stood a better chance than your average girl off the street.
For the finishing touch of my outfit, I slipped my feet into the red shoes. I couldn’t hold back a smile as I thought that maybe he’d be the one having to resist me. I once more felt like the girl who’d snagged all the guys at the nightclub the previous weekend. The weather forecast threatened freezing rain and possibly snow, but it wasn’t supposed to start until later that night. This was a simple dinner, so I should be home long before it got nasty. My shoes would be safe from the elements.
The door buzzer sounded, and I hurried to the intercom. “Hi, it’s Rod,” the voice crackled over the speaker.
“I’ll be right down,” I said. I grabbed my coat and my purse and headed out.
“I thought we’d stay more or less in the neighborhood,” he said when I stepped out the front door. “With the weather the way it is, I didn’t think we wanted to rely on cabs to get us home.”
“Good thinking,” I said.
He steered me down a nearby street to a modest, snug little restaurant. “This is one of my favorite places. I hope you like it,” he said as he ushered me inside. So far, he was behaving like a perfect gentleman, as though this truly was a business dinner rather than a romantic date. I didn’t even feel the dizzying effects of his attraction spell. Maybe he’d decided against wasting the energy on someone he didn’t think would be affected and was gentleman enough not to use the spell on other women while he was with me.
Once we’d taken off our coats and settled ourselves with menus at a candlelit table, he smiled at me and said, “By the way, I didn’t tell you how nice you look tonight.”
“Thanks. You look nice, too.” I didn’t think it would be a good idea to tell him how much nicer than normal he looked to me. Or would he feel better knowing I saw him this way? His psyche would take Dr. Phil hours to untangle. If I ever managed to get Owen truly talking, I’d have to ask what it was in Rod’s childhood that had made him so insecure.
“Do you want to get an appetizer? Preferably something warm?”
“Sounds good. Order what you want, and I’m sure I’ll like it.”
The dinner ended up being far more comfortable than I’d anticipated. Somewhere during the appetizer, I managed to forget about the disconnect between what I saw and the Rod I knew, and the man in front of me became just Rod. He was funny, smooth, and charming—the perfect dinner companion. As the waitress cleared our dinner plates, Rod said, “Do you mind if we don’t order dessert? I’ve got something back at my place I thought we’d enjoy.”
Ordinarily, my warning bells would have gone off, but in spite of Rod’s reputation, he’d shown nothing more than a friendly, businesslike interest in me up to that point. If he was using his spell, it was too subtle for me to notice. I hadn’t even once thought about what it would feel like to kiss him.
“That sounds nice,” I said. Of course, the moment I thought about not thinking about kissing him, I couldn’t help but think about kissing him. If that made any sense whatsoever. But it wasn’t like I felt compelled to kiss him, just mildly curious.
“No thanks,” he told the waitress when she brought the dessert menu. He paid the check, then we bundled up to brave the outdoors once more.
The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees while we were inside. I wished I’d been sensible and worn boots instead of being so vain as to wear a short skirt and the red stilettos. Rod put his arm around me, but I doubted he was making a move on me, and even if he was, I didn’t mind because it made me that much warmer.
We hurried to his building, then both of us breathed a sigh of relief when we got inside the warm lobby. “I’d better not stay too late,” I said, as we waited for an elevator. “It looks like that storm may hit early, and I don’t want to have to go home through the snow.”
“We’ll keep an eye on the window, and on the clock,” he said. An elevator arrived, and he gestured for me to go ahead of him. He lived near the top of the building, so it seemed like it took several minutes before we got to his floor. While we faced each other across the elevator, I felt a strange tension growing between us. It was an entirely different feeling from the ease I’d noticed in the restaurant, and it seemed to have come out of nowhere. Even as I tried to fight the feeling, my breathing grew faster.
I didn’t think it was his attraction spell, though, or else it was affecting him the same way. He was practically panting. Could it be that we were really that attracted to each other? I’d never been the least bit turned on around Rod, except in the past couple of weeks when I’d noticed the effects of his attraction spell. This kind of thing didn’t happen because of one good dinner, did it?
Both of us rushed for the door when the elevator finally came to a stop. The air seemed to have grown very heavy in there. I felt a little more normal once we were out in the hallway. Whatever it was eased up, so I felt almost relaxed again as I waited for him to unlock his apartment door.
He ushered me inside. “Have a seat, and I’ll make some coffee,” he said. I dropped my purse on the floor inside the doorway, then draped my coat across a chair and sat on the sofa. The last time I’d been in his apartment, I’d just been magically mugged. It hadn’t changed much since then—a typical high-end bachelor pad with leather upholstery, blond wood, metal and glass, plus a great view of the city lights. “If you like, you can put on some music,” he called from the kitchen.
I went to his entertainment center and looked through his CDs. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing as I noticed the number of surefire seduction discs in his collection. He seemed to have the complete works of Barry White, as well as a broad collection of mellow jazz. Naturally, he had a recording of Ravel’s Bolero. What Casanova didn’t? I selected the least sultry jazz disc and put it in the player.
He emerged from the kitchen with two mugs of frothy coffee. “I hope this is good,” he said. “I found it at the store and thought it looked interesting.”
“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble for me,” I said, as he went back to the kitchen, only to return with a packet of cookies.
“You’re worth the trouble. You should know that. But if it makes you feel better, I’m not putting these out on a plate. Just take some from the box.”
“Now, that’s more like it,” I said with a laugh, as I took a couple of cookies out of the box. I felt that ease I’d enjoyed during dinner return. Whatever had happened in the elevator seemed to have dissipated.
“I wanted to thank you again for getting me involved in the morale-boosting effort,” he said. “That’s the main reason I asked you to dinner. For the first time, I feel like I’m really part of what’s going on in the company.”
