Damsel Under Stress (2 page)

“What is it?” I asked, immediately concerned.

A paper cup bearing the shop’s logo appeared between his hands, and he picked it up and took a long sip. I noticed then that a similar cup had appeared in front of me, so I got a little caffeine into my system while I waited for him to answer. Cups appearing out of nowhere were practically normal in my life, especially around Owen, so I’d long since gotten used to it.

“Ari got away last night,” he said at last, sounding like he’d finally caught his breath and settled down some. Ari was the wicked fairy—and my ex-friend—who’d been helping our company’s enemy by spying and sabotaging from within Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., the company where both Owen and I worked. We’d exposed her at the company party the night before, and she’d been taken into custody by the company security forces.

“How’d she escape?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to have to go to the office and see if I can detect any remnant traces of spells that might have been used. I’m sorry to have to bail on you like this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I insisted. I’d never been the type to stamp my feet and demand that a man make me his number-one priority in life, so I certainly wasn’t going to start now when my date’s other priority happened to be saving the world from bad magic.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised. Then he tilted his head and gave me a smile that would have made me agreeable even if I had been throwing a hissy fit about his priorities. “Care to walk me to the subway?”

“Sure.” I picked up my paper coffee cup. “Good thing we got these to-go, huh?”

His cheeks went pink. “I usually wouldn’t do that, but I didn’t have time to wait in line.” We took our cups and headed to the exit, then went up the steps to the street level.

Away from the crowded coffee shop, we could talk more freely about Ari and Phelan Idris, the guy who had to be behind all this. “I guess Idris’s calm exit last night should have been a sign he had something up his sleeve,” I said. “He usually wouldn’t give up that easily.”

“Maybe. But he’s never struck me as the type to care all that much about a damsel in distress. He’d be more likely to forget about her and move on to the next person he thinks he can use.”

“Unless she knows too much about what he’s up to, and if she was willing to betray us to him, it stands to reason she could be persuaded to tell us about him.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure that was the case. And I’m not sure ‘persuasion’ is the right word.” He sounded so cool about it, practically icy, that it sent shivers down my spine.

“You weren’t going to torture her, were you?” I asked.

He choked on the sip of coffee he’d just taken, and I had to pat him on the back until he caught his breath. “Torture? No! You didn’t think we’d do that, did you? But there are other methods for getting information out of people.”

“Good. I’m mad at her, but I wouldn’t want to go that far. If she got away, does that mean someone else in the company is working for Idris?”

“That’s what I’ll have to find out. Did he pull this from the outside, or was it an inside job?”

“Our work is never done, is it?”

“
My
work is never done. I don’t think you’ll have to worry much about this one—at least, not yet. We’ve got some immunes doing verification work on the security force, and they’ll be helping with this initial sweep.”

I probably should have been stung by the implication that I wasn’t needed, but what I actually felt was a great sense of relief. I had my own job to do, and I liked my little corner of the company. I was looking forward to returning to what passed for normal during the holidays. Christmas was barely a week away, and the last thing I wanted to do was take on a big new project with only a few days left in the office before the holiday.

We reached the Union Square subway entrance, and Owen paused before heading down. “I’ll call you later, and I will make it up to you.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” I replied, giving him a little wave. Only when he was out of sight did I realize that our first real date hadn’t gone any differently from almost any other time we’d spent together up to that point. We’d walked to the subway station and talked about work, like we did every weekday morning. Nothing had changed. He hadn’t kissed me good-bye, and there had been no affectionate physical contact while we’d walked—no hand-holding, no arm around me.

I couldn’t hold back a disappointed sigh as I turned and headed toward home, away from the red-and-white-striped stalls of the holiday market that seemed made for browsing hand in hand with someone special. This certainly wasn’t the way I’d imagined this day going not much more than twelve hours ago. I smiled to myself as I remembered the night before.

I’d still been floating on air as we left the office party, giddy not only with my success in exposing Ari as the company spy and saboteur, but also with the fact that Owen Palmer had kissed me and told me how he felt about me.

We took a cab back to my place, and I invited him up for some hot cocoa and a chance to rehash the events of the party. Although the shabby little apartment I shared with two roommates was a far cry from his comfortable town house, he hadn’t looked like he felt at all out of place there. I had to restrain myself from doing a happy dance in my kitchen while I made the cocoa. All I could think was, “Owen Palmer is sitting at my kitchen table, and he kissed me!” A lot of strange and wonderful—and some not-so-wonderful—things had happened to me in the last couple of months, but this was the one I had the most trouble believing.

I was almost afraid to leave the kitchen and return to the dining alcove, for fear he wouldn’t be there, that I had imagined the whole thing. But there he was, looking so very handsome in a tuxedo. After all the kissing and other displays of affection not too long before, a kind of goofy awkwardness had developed between us. We didn’t quite meet each other’s eyes as we sat at the kitchen table, drank cocoa, and ate Christmas cookies. I wondered if inviting him up had been a bad idea, after all.

“That was a nice party,” I said at last, when I couldn’t take the silence anymore.

“Well, aside from a few disruptions,” he replied with a crooked smile.

“Yeah, I guess. Are our office parties always that interesting?”

“It depends on how you define ‘interesting.’ They’re probably not anything special to us, but most people would find them a little odd.”

“Oh yeah. I can see that if you worked for a brokerage firm you might find this party kind of different.” Argh! I was alone with Owen Palmer, and all I could do was make small talk about the office party.

Then to make the situation even more awkward, a key turned in the front door. At least one of my roommates was home. I’d hoped I’d be able to solidify things with Owen a little bit more before subjecting him to my roommates, but I guessed I should have thought of that before inviting him up. Why, of all nights, did they have to come home early on a Friday night?

And, just my luck, both Gemma and Marcia stepped through the door. Then they both froze, their mouths hanging open, when they saw who was sitting at the table. They didn’t have to say a word; I could read their faces quite clearly: “So, this is the guy you’ve been talking about? What took you so long to make a move?”

I glanced at Owen, and the beet-red color of his face was a good sign that he’d read their faces as easily as I had. He stood, like a good gentleman, and I hurried to make introductions. “Gemma, Marcia, this is Owen. We work together.” I left out the “And he kissed me! He likes me!” part for decorum’s sake. Besides, I was sure we’d get to that the moment he left. “Owen, these are my roommates, Gemma and Marcia.”

He came around the table and approached them where they still stood frozen not too far inside the doorway. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said, shaking their hands. They managed to respond, but they looked like something out of a zombie movie. I thought I detected a hint of drool on Gemma’s chin. Then he turned to me and said, “I’d better get home.”

As I helped him collect his overcoat from where we’d draped it over one arm of the sofa, I said, “I’ll walk you out.” I went with him as far down the stairs as the first landing, then he paused.

“Thanks again for a nice night,” he said.

“And thank you.”

“Do you want to get together tomorrow? Maybe for brunch, and then we can spend the day together?”

It sounded like heaven to me. “Sure. That would be great.”

“Okay. How about we meet at ten at that coffee shop on Irving Place near my house? I’d pick you up, but I’m not sure your roommates could deal with that right now.” Although his tone was teasing, a flush shot up from his collar to his hairline, and I suspected that he was the one who wasn’t sure he could handle my roommates.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Great. I’ll see you then.” And then he placed his hand on my cheek and bent forward to kiss me, a soft, warm, firm, gentle kiss that somehow felt like a hug at the same time.

Even the next day, the memory of that kiss made me almost warm enough to have to unbutton my coat, although it was a raw December day. If I thought about it, I could still feel the touch of his hand on my face.

I doubted much had changed in those few hours. He was just being Owen, utterly dedicated to his life’s work. That was one of the things I liked about him. If he’d blown off the crisis at work because he wanted to spend the day with me, he wouldn’t be Owen and I wouldn’t have liked him nearly as much.

I got to my apartment building, unlocked the front door, and went up the stairs, pausing only briefly on that landing where the last kiss had taken place. Then I went the rest of the way to my apartment, which was more crowded than I expected it to be. Not only were Gemma and Marcia there, but Connie, the former roommate who’d married and moved out soon before I came to New York, was there, as well. They were gathered around the kitchen table, looking like they were having a summit meeting.

“Katie! You’re back early,” Gemma said when she noticed me. “What happened?”

“He had an emergency at work, so we just had coffee,” I said as I took off my coat. I left out the part where we had coffee while we walked to the subway station. Gemma and Marcia, in good girlfriend form, weren’t inclined to be forgiving toward what they perceived as my dates’ missteps.

“What did you say he did?” Marcia asked.

I hadn’t said anything about what he did. It was kind of hard to explain without bringing up the concept of wizards, and if I said he worked in research and development, it didn’t sound important enough to warrant the kind of emergency absences I could expect from him. “He’s an executive with the company I work for,” I said. That was probably vague enough and sounded important enough to cover a lot of bases.

Marcia nodded. “Yeah, that’s the downside of dating powerful men.” As driven and career-oriented as she was, she was the most likely to understand someone else who made work a priority. I was surprised, though, at how wistful her voice sounded.

“When you’ve got one who looks like he does, you can make the occasional allowance, but don’t let him get away with it too often,” Gemma said. She turned to Connie and added, “You should have seen this guy. He seemed pretty nice, too, what little we saw of him. Our little Katie snagged herself a good one.”

“What brings you down to this end of the island?” I asked Connie.

“Minor relationship crisis,” Gemma answered before Connie could speak. “And you’re just in time.”

“For what?”

“Ice skating at Rockefeller Center.”

While I was still trying to figure out what ice skating had to do with a relationship crisis, Gemma handed me a piece of paper. “What do you make of this?” she asked.

The paper was stiff and heavy, the kind used for formal correspondence. I unfolded it to see a handwritten note in a flowing script. The note invited Gemma and her friends to go ice-skating this morning at Rockefeller Center, and specified a time that Philip would call for us. “It looks like an invitation to me,” I said with a shrug.

“You don’t think it’s odd?”

I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Saying there was something odd about Philip, Gemma’s boyfriend, was putting it mildly. Although she didn’t know it, he was a magical person who’d been living under a frog enchantment for decades before he was freed a month or so earlier. You couldn’t expect a guy who’d been living near a pond in Central Park and existing on flies to be anything approaching normal. I thought he was coping pretty well with adapting to modern times and readapting to life as a human, but it wasn’t as though I could tell Gemma all that. She didn’t know anything about magic, and there’s no way to explain the frog thing without getting into magic.

“A handwritten note is unusual,” I admitted. “It is kind of charming, though. It’s sweet.”

“It was hand-delivered, by someone else. It’s like he’s avoiding me, or something. Hasn’t he heard of text messaging? Or maybe this nifty new invention called the telephone? I always have my cell with me, so he has no excuse for not being able to reach me directly. And what’s with inviting all my friends? What kind of date is that?”