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I remembered that he’d said he was an orphan who didn’t know who his parents were. Although I was curious about his background, I didn’t know if that was a touchy subject for him, so instead I said, “I guess you, Merlin, and I are in the same boat, then. He’s not technically an outsider, since he was the founder, but he doesn’t really know anyone else in the company.”
“That’s one of the reasons he was brought back. We didn’t know if we could trust our previous leadership. We needed someone above suspicion with no ties to the current employees.”
I was dying to ask him what he meant by that, but we’d reached the subway station, where a platform full of rush-hour commuters wasn’t the best place to talk about magic.
I used to hate riding the subway at rush hour, but since I’d started commuting with Owen, I’d learned to like it a lot better. He could reach the overhead bar, and since I couldn’t, he’d hold me steady with an arm around my waist. I had a feeling that was the only way I’d ever get contact that intimate with him, so I had to enjoy it where I found it. Standing like that with him made me remember every romance-novel cliché I’d ever read about weak knees and pounding pulses, while it didn’t seem to affect him at all. Reason number seven-hundred sixty-eight why I was pretty sure he didn’t feel about me the way I felt about him.
I felt a pang of disappointment when we lurched to a stop at the Union Square station and shoved our way to the doors. My daily time with Owen had nearly come to an end. I’d have to wait until the next morning when I emerged from my building to see him again.
Oh boy, did I have it bad. I thought I’d talked myself out of the crush that ate Cleveland, but no matter how many pep talks I gave myself about how an ultrapowerful wizard of mysterious parentage might make a great fantasy-novel hero but would probably make a lousy boyfriend for a girl like me, and no matter how many clues I found that proved he saw me as nothing more than a friend, the next time I saw him, it started all over again. If I didn’t know for sure that magic didn’t work on me, I’d have suspected him of using one of Rod’s attraction spells.
We finally came aboveground and I took a deep breath of fresh (or what passed for fresh in the city) air. I started to head for the crosswalk, but Owen paused. He frowned as if in thought, then said, “Do you have any plans for dinner?”
“Not that I can think of. Both my roommates said they had late meetings this evening, so I’m on my own.”
“After today, I don’t even have the energy to throw something in the microwave. Do you want to get some dinner?”
My heart did back handsprings worthy of the Olympic gymnastics team while my brain reminded it that this didn’t sound like a date. It was merely two single people who didn’t want to eat alone. “Sure,” I said with what I hoped looked like a casual shrug instead of a nervous spasm.
He smiled and his blue eyes lit up. “I know a great little diner down the street. It’s nothing fancy, just good food and a lot of variety. I’ve been eating there for years, and I haven’t had anything bad yet.”
You could probably poison Owen and he wouldn’t complain, but I’d also learned that he didn’t give a compliment he didn’t mean wholeheartedly, so I said, “I’ll take that as a recommendation. It sounds wonderful.”
He led the way across Fourteenth and then down a block to a little corner diner. It would have been nice if he’d held my hand, taken my arm, or even put a guiding hand to my back, but this was really the first time we’d been together in a nonwork capacity, so I reminded myself not to let my imagination run away with me. This was not a date.
The waitress who met us at the door appeared to know Owen, for she greeted him like an old friend. “Well, hey there, handsome. I thought you’d abandoned me,” she teased.
He turned crimson and didn’t meet her eyes as he said, “I haven’t been eating out much lately.”
“As long as you’re not cheating on me with some other waitress. Would a booth work for you tonight?” she flirted.
“That’ll be fine, thanks,” he said mildly, his color gradually returning to normal.
The waitress put a little extra wiggle in her walk as she led us to our table. She was old enough to be Owen’s mother, but he still seemed to have the same effect on her as he had on me. She plunked napkin-wrapped rolls of silverware and laminated menus in front of us with a warm “Here you go,” then got a pad out of her apron pocket and asked, “Now, what can I get you to drink?”
We both asked for water, and I was surprised that she was as friendly to me as she was to Owen. Maybe she was merely enjoying having a good-looking man around without getting possessive about him. I liked her better already.
“You really must eat here all the time,” I teased Owen as soon as she was out of earshot. “You’ve definitely made an impression.” I was rewarded with a slight pinkening of his ears as he kept his eyes focused on his menu. Someday I’d have to catalog his various kinds of blushes and see if there was a correlation to the kind of embarrassment. “Any recommendations?” I asked.
“As I said, everything I’ve tried has been good. I like their burgers. The Greek food’s good. The turkey and stuffing remind me of Thanksgiving at home.”
There was yet another tantalizing mention of home. I was dying to ask more, but I’d have to know more about him to be able to ask him more about himself. From what little I knew of Owen, I had a feeling he’d tell me what he wanted to tell me, regardless of what questions I asked.
I chose to start at a broader level. We could get more personal later in the meal. “There’s a café a lot like this in my hometown, except it’s only open for breakfast and lunch, and the waitresses call you ‘hon’ and ‘shug.’”
“There seems to be a place like this in just about every small town in America,” he replied, his eyes still on his menu.
“Are you from a small town, too?” Now we were getting somewhere.
“I’m not sure where I was born, and I have the vaguest memories of living in a city when I was very young, but I grew up in a tiny old village up the Hudson.”
The part of me that harbored the killer crush gloated at my more rational side as one of the possible barriers between us melted away. I’d thought of us as so radically different that we’d never be able to find common ground, but if he was a small-town boy, then on some level we might have a similar background.
“I imagine your definition of ‘old’ in this part of the world is different from mine,” I said.
“Pre–Revolutionary War,” he said with a nod.
“Yeah, very different. My hometown dates from not much more than a hundred years ago.”
