The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (22 page)

Rio finally stopped chatting about babies long enough to glance up at him from beneath her long, silky lashes. “I think you’d be a great sheriff,” she murmured.

Suddenly he thought he might have to revise his thinking. She wasn’t very big, but she was pretty tough, and he’d be damned if she didn’t have him starting to rethink his position on the job. He groaned again, and Seven slapped him on the back.

“Let’s find your table. It sounds like you need a beer.”

“Do you have any whiskey?”

Rio closed her eyes in utter bliss as she took another bite of enchilada and fire-roasted salsa. Say what you would about some demon restaurants and the questionable origin of their roasted meats, Zephyr and Seven really knew how to fire-roast their salsas. When she opened her eyes, a man was standing next to her table, watching her, amusement in his pale green eyes.

Luke had gone to the kitchen with Seven to learn how to make a flaming dessert after the two of them had formed some weird male bond while talking about Quidditch. Luke had claimed the game was more fun to watch when they set the brooms on fire, and Seven had countered that the stakes were higher when the winners were allowed to drop their defeated foes over a cliff.

“Hard to keep a league running if you keep dropping teams off cliffs,” Zephyr had observed as she passed by on her way to another table with a tray of drinks.

The word
league
had been enough to send Rio groping for her own drink, and she’d downed half the glass of Demon Pale Ale without stopping.

“It’s always nice to observe someone enjoying her food,” the man said, holding out his hand. “Chance Roberts.”

Rio automatically started to hold out her hand in return, but then she yanked it back.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know you. And after the past few days, you’ll excuse me if I’m a little leery of touching strangers.”

It was a lie. Everybody in Bordertown had heard of Chance Roberts. Everybody in the freaking world probably had heard of him. He was rich. Astonishingly, obscenely rich. Not rich like
I can buy people new cars when I blow them up
, but rich like
I just bought Wall Street
.

All of Wall Street.

He’d invented a computer system that made all the others look like stone tablets and chisels. Of course, nobody outside Bordertown realized that there was magic involved. If they did, they probably wouldn’t care, so long as their Twitter feed worked.

Chance indicated Luke’s empty chair. “May I sit?”

Before waiting for her assent, he seated himself and offered her a smile. The man was great looking, she’d give him that. Tawny blond hair that looked like he spent a lot of time in the sun went perfectly with his deeply tanned skin. He looked a little rough—a little dangerous—and also like a man completely in control of every situation he encountered.

She had freaking had enough of arrogant men.

“No, you may not sit down. You may leave because my . . . friend is on his way back.”

“If you’re talking about Luke Oliver, I can see him through the kitchen pass-through window, and his back is to us. There’s no need to be alarmed, Ms. Green. I only want to speak to you.”

Rio looked around. The restaurant was very full, so it wasn’t like he’d get away with trying to hurt her. She might as well listen to whatever it was he had to say, so he’d leave before Luke got back and decided to blow something up.

“Fine. What?” She almost laughed when she thought of what the nuns would think of her rudeness, but then she remembered that she never again had to worry about what they thought.

“You’re very beautiful, has anyone told you that?” He laughed, and the sound was darkly seductive enough to turn female heads at several nearby tables. “I’m sorry, that was an idiotic question. Of course you must hear that all the time.”

“Yes, I’m a freaking beauty queen,” she drawled. “Now can we quit with the butter-Rio-up portion of the conversation and get to whatever your point is?”

Chance’s eyes gleamed, and she had the feeling she was entertaining him. It ticked her off.

“Blunt. I like it. Here then, as you humans say, is the deal. I represent a consortium of people who are very interested in you. Especially now that it’s almost your—”

“If you say twenty-fifth birthday, I’m going to scream,” Rio warned him.

“Celebration of the anniversary of your birth,” he finished smoothly.

He smiled, flashing a mouthful of beautiful white teeth, and a passing waitress nearly dropped her tray.

“Okay, you seem like a smart guy.” She took a sip of her beer and then pointed a finger at him. “So why are you, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, acting as a lowly messenger boy? I was a bicycle messenger until very recently, so trust me, I know about lowly.”

Oh, he hadn’t liked that at all. He clenched his jaw against whatever he had been about to retort and shook his head.

“Let’s just say that my interests align with theirs in this matter.”

Rio wanted to punch him. “Now I’m a ‘matter’? Funny, I used to think I was a person. But that was before the Winter Court Fae, the League of the Black Swan, and now the famous Chance Roberts all expressed an interest in little old me.”

His face had tightened minutely at the mention of the League, and Rio found that very interesting. Also, for such a powerful man, he didn’t have much of a poker face. She put her anger aside and started thinking through the convoluted facts of the matter. Why was she wasting time baiting Roberts when she could be interrogating him?

“Why? What is it about my birthday that’s important? Who exactly do you think I am?”

His gaze traveled down to her locket and then back up. A look of wonder spread across his face.

“You don’t even know who you are, do you? How intriguing.”

He started to laugh, and her blood pressure shot through the roof.

“I know exactly who I am,” she shot back. “I’m the woman who is tired of this conversation. If you don’t have any answers for me, then you can just leave. Now.”

She felt Luke before she saw him, as if the air in the room had shifted, or gravity had tilted to concentrate on his approach. Luke was headed toward their table, and he was moving fast. She shoved her chair back and stood up to intercept him before he started destroying things or people.

“I’ve got it handled,” she said firmly. “Don’t blow up my friends’ restaurant.”

She put her hands on his chest to stop him, but it was like trying to slow down a speeding bullet train. He lifted her out of his way before he plowed over her, but she could feel the heat rising in his body and knew serious trouble was coming.

“Oliver,” Chance said, rising unhurriedly from his seat.

“Roberts,” Luke replied, blue flames already glowing around his fingertips. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here? If you’re bothering Rio, consider this your last meal.”

Chance smiled, not giving a hint that he was the slightest bit worried. So maybe he did have a good poker face after all, because everybody else in the restaurant was scrambling to get out of the way.

“I didn’t eat, unfortunately. But if it had been my last meal, I couldn’t imagine a better place to enjoy it, or a better dinner companion. I was just having a conversation with your
friend
.” He put a mocking emphasis on the word that made Rio start blushing.

Luke noticed, and all the muscles in his big body tightened as if in preparation for battle. Rio moved to stand between the two men and wondered if stomping her foot would do any good. Or maybe dumping her beer on their heads. She hated to waste good ale, though.

“Enough. I’ve had enough of all of this. Mr. Roberts, if you have something you want to say to me you can call my cell phone.” She gave him the number. “But I’m warning you, if you don’t have any more information for me, then don’t bother to call. I’m tired of vague insinuations and even vaguer threats. There are an awful lot of people claiming to know something about my past and, I guess, my future, considering everybody’s interest in my birthday, but nobody’s willing to tell me anything.”

She turned to signal Zephyr that she wanted the bill. “For now, I’m leaving. I need to check on my fox.”

Roberts bowed to her in a surprisingly elegant motion and then walked out the door. The restaurant patrons slowly returned to their meals and conversations, and Seven walked over to the table smiling.

“This one is on the house,” he said, and he shushed her when she tried to protest. “Trust me, it’s worth it to us for the pure pleasure of watching Chance Roberts get put in his place.”

“He tried to buy us out once, did we tell you that?” Zephyr said, walking up to stand beside her husband.

The demon couple frowned at the memory.

“Let’s just say it was a very unpleasant few months. He has resources that I can’t even begin to imagine,” Seven said. “Even on the Demon Rift ruling council, we suspect.”

“Is he a demon? I couldn’t read him,” Luke said.

Seven shrugged. “We don’t know, either, and nobody else seems to know—or at least they’re not admitting it if they do.”

“He told me he wasn’t human, but didn’t go any further,” Rio said. “Great. Just great. Now a guy who’s buddy-buddy with the demon council is after me.”

She hugged her friends and thanked them for the excellent dinner, which was now roiling around in her stomach like acid.

“I don’t like that man,” Luke growled as they left the restaurant.

She suddenly smiled. “I’m proud of you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “For what?”

“You got angry, you read the situation as there was a man threatening me, and yet you didn’t blow anything up. Not even a single car met its maker. This is real progress!”

He started muttering something under his breath, and she laughed all the way to the Jeep.

Luke and Kit sat on the couch and watched in astonishment as Rio took yet another swig from the bottle of Summerlands Shiraz. Her second.

“Does that sort of thing happen to you all the time?” She was slurring only a little, so either she had an enormous capacity for very strong wine or it just hadn’t hit her yet.

He shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. “It happens more often than I would like.”

Rio had persuaded him to stop by Bordertown Spirits, and a couple of thugs had rushed into the wine store while Luke and Rio had been there. The unlucky criminals had picked the worst possible time to try to rob the store. Luke had already been in a bad mood, and they were just making it worse. So he’d picked them up, knocked their heads together, and hurled them out the front door.

Then he’d pulled out his wallet to buy the bottles of wine Rio had selected.

“I didn’t really do anything, and I didn’t blow up even a single bottle of wine,” he pointed out, wanting some credit.

She started laughing so hard that she fell over sideways on the chair. “That’s true. But you blew up their getaway car.”

“Hey! I let the driver jump out of the car first,” he muttered.

Kit yipped and laughed at him in her fox way.

“Traitor,” he told her.

“Will you be buying him a new car?”

“Hell, no.
Criminal
,” he said, wondering why that wasn’t obvious.