Blackstone finished his beer and set the bottle on the floor. “I’ve never heard you be so defeatist.”
“Maybe you haven’t listened.”
“You always supported me. In fact, you pushed me at times. I seem to recall you were the one who took me to Nora and who wouldn’t let me forget how I felt about her, even though I thought I was going to be with Emma for the rest of my life.”
“That’s you,” Darius said.
“That’s my point,” Blackstone said. “You do this for your friends, but not for yourself. I bet you’re being noble so that your friend Darius can have her. But I don’t see him here. He hasn’t contacted her. She’s trying to find him and she can’t.”
“Darius isn’t her soul mate,” Darius said.
“You know this because he told you?”
“He knows it.” Darius finished his porter and then burped. He shouldn’t have had the beer on an empty stomach.
“All right,” Blackstone said for what seemed like the thousandth time. “Then you’re being noble for some unknown soul mate, which is even more inexplicable. Being noble gets you nowhere. I did it for Nora and Max, and all she has to show for it was a slightly unpleasant divorce.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand why you won’t fight for the woman you love.” His gaze met Darius’s.
Darius closed his eyes and flopped backwards on the sectional.
“I hired her,” Blackstone said.
“So?” Darius said. He didn’t open his eyes. “I quit.”
“I want you to come back.”
“Not while she’s there.”
“So you’ll get the woman you love fired?”
“Stop saying that.” Darius put an arm over his eyes, blotting out the light that filtered through his eyelids.
“Fired?”
“The woman you love. It sounds so pathetic.”
“It sounds romantic,” Blackstone said.
“Like you know romance,” Darius muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Blackstone sighed. “If I have to fire her to get you back, I will.”
“What if I say I won’t ever come back?” The words were hard to say. He didn’t know what he’d do then.
“I don’t know.” Blackstone sounded sad. “I’d probably nag you for the next thousand years.”
“Your restaurant won’t be around that long.”
“Says who?”
“Says the rules. How’re you going to convince the world that you’re not Alex Blackstone who has looked the same for the past 200 years?”
“I have some ideas,” he said.
Darius brought his arm down and opened his eyes. “What kind of ideas?”
“I’d let someone else run it for a while, maybe.”
“In a pig’s eye.”
“Or maybe I’d be an absent owner, coming in only at night.”
“As if that would work.”
“Or maybe I’ll get you to manage it for a while.”
“People recognize me as part of the restaurant too.”
“Not if you quit.”
They stared at each other. Finally, Darius sighed. “You’re not being fair.”
“Sure I am,” Blackstone said. “I’ll get rid of Ariel at any moment on your say-so.”
“Even if I say so right now.”
“Even if.” Blackstone didn’t hesitate. He was very convincing.
“I don’t want her there, Aethelstan,” Darius said.
Blackstone studied him for a moment, then sighed and stood. “All right. I’ll call her in the morning and tell her.”
He picked up both beer bottles and tossed them in the recycling bag under the sink. Darius watched him, but he couldn’t sense any posturing on Blackstone’s part. The man seemed to mean what he said.
Ariel, who had no job and no money, would lose what little hope she had gained from this day. And it would be his fault, all because he was trying to prove a point. A rather childish point for a man who was nearly 3000 years old, trying to prove that his best friend really liked him by hurting someone else, someone who didn’t deserve to be hurt.
“Don’t fire her,” Darius said.
Blackstone faced him, gaze impassive. He didn’t smile triumphantly as Darius might have done. He didn’t do anything at all. “I said I would. I keep my promises.”
“I’ll come back,” Darius said. “Keep her on staff.”
“I said I’d get rid of her if you came back,” Blackstone said. “I mean it. We’ve been friends for a thousand years, even if I’ve been a poor one. I’ve only known her a day. I owe her nothing.”
“I know,” Darius said. “I appreciate the offer. Keep her.”
“You have control,” Blackstone said. “If you think she should go, just fire her.”
Darius shook his head. “She’s your employee. Treat her like the others.”
Blackstone grinned. “Which means you can fire her, like you do all the other employees who need to be fired.”
Darius propped himself on his elbows. “I don’t want to have control over her.”
“You won’t have any more control over her than you have over our other employees.” Blackstone shrugged. “No sense treating her differently.”
“I can’t be objective,” Darius said. “I might fire her for flirting with someone tall, dark, and handsome.”
“I won’t flirt with her,” Blackstone said. “I can promise that.”
“Believe it or not,” Darius said, “I didn’t mean you.”
Blackstone flushed. Then he shook his head ever so slightly. “Guess I deserved that. I really don’t listen, do I?”
“Let’s just say it’s not one of your strengths.”
Blackstone nodded. “All right. I’ll be in charge of hiring, firing, and generally managing Ms. Ariel Summers. Deal?”
“Deal,” Darius said.
“Come back to work, then?”
“Tomorrow,” Darius said. “I have some gory, violent movies I’ve been saving up.”
Blackstone grinned and picked one off the pile. “Notting Hill is violent?”
“Nope, just gory,” Darius said. “Now would you get out of here before you embarrass me further?”
“You don’t have to ask twice,” Blackstone said and waved his arms. He disappeared in a flash of light.
“Show-off,” Darius muttered. Then he glanced at the DVDs. He wished he’d known Blackstone was going to study them. He’d have left out his guy flicks. The romantic comedies were there for research. A matchmaker always needed new tricks for ways to unite couples.
Even if the female half of one of those couples was a woman he cared about more than he was willing to say.
TWELVE
ARIEL’S ANKLE ACHED. Acting as lunchtime hostess in a fancy restaurant was harder than she had expected. And she wasn’t even the hostess in charge. She was the junior hostess, just learning her duties.
Hostess in Charge or Hic, as she jokingly had called herself, was Sofia Harney, a fiftyish woman who bore a striking resemblance to Sophia Loren. She was tall, big boned, and big busted, but surprisingly fit all the same. Her long brown hair was streaked with gray and she wore huge glasses over heavily made-up eyes.
She had a broad laugh and more energy than Ariel could ever hope for. And all the regulars seemed to know and love her.
“Can’t believe you’re retiring, Sofia,” more than one regular said as she led him to his table.
“I’m not retired,” she would say in response. “I’m moving to the weekends. At my age, you shouldn’t have to work full-time.”
Sofia’s change to weekends, and the fact that the other junior hostess had quit before Ariel started, meant that Ariel would eventually become the Hic.
“I think any healthy twenty-year-old should learn the value of hard work,” said the man currently in front of Sofia. She laughed, just like she had at every variation of this
remark she had received all day.
“So do I,” she said. “Which is why I’m training young Ariel here.”
Ariel smiled, just like she was supposed to, even though she didn’t want them to think she was too young for the job or only twenty. She didn’t know why her age seemed important here, but it did. She found herself actually wishing for a few more years—or at the least the wisdom those years could allow her to claim.
Sofia sat the man and his party at the table where the tourist had had his heart attack the day before. The tourist was doing surprisingly well, the hospital had told her when she called first thing that morning on Blackstone’s behalf. In fact, the nurse had told her, he was doing better than any heart attack patient they had ever had.
“I’m beginning to think we should clone him,” she had said.
Ariel straightened the menus behind the maître d’s stand and looked out the door. The restaurant was gaining its midafternoon quiet. She was looking forward to it. She needed to sit down. Even though she had splurged and bought herself special shoes that would give her ankle good support, her feet hurt. She should have known better than to wear new shoes on the first day of the job.
“You looked bushed,” Sofia said as she approached.
“You don’t,” Ariel said, “and you did all the work.”
Sofia gave her that lovely smile. “Go. Sit. After I finish here, I’ll teach you the mysterious art of the cash register.”
Finishing here was making certain that the all-important reservation log was up-to-date. New customers who had never been to Quixotic before were called to remind them about their reservation. The restaurant was so busy that if a customer were a no-show after an hour, his table was given away.
Sofia said she spent a good part of the early afternoon on the phone, confirming reservations and making new ones. Indeed, the phone had started to ring at one-thirty, just like Sofia had predicted it would.
The afternoon bartender was stacking the bar’s dishwasher. He smiled at her as she sat down.
“First rule of Quixotic,” he said. “Never look like you’re just resting.”
Ariel started to stand and he waved her back down.
“All I meant was that you had to drink something if you sit here. What’ll it be?”
“I don’t suppose I can have a gin and tonic.”
“Sure you can,” he said, “but I don’t advise it. You still have an hour or more.”
She smiled, liking his easy affability. Everyone seemed content with their jobs here, and it didn’t seem like an affectation. A few had talked softly about the building and how uncomfortable it made them—seems some people thought it was haunted—but everyone loved the restaurant, and as a rule, they liked Blackstone.
She had been warned, though, that he could be cold if something didn’t go his way. Not angry, not violent. Cold, as if a withdrawal of his famous charm was enough to make people uncomfortable.
Andrew Vari hadn’t shown up yet, which Sofia said was odd. He normally came in around eleven. But apparently he had left work early the day before and hadn’t returned. The entire staff thought that was unusual.
The staff didn’t have the same opinion of him that they had about Blackstone. They called him the Enforcer, saying he was the one who had all the terrible jobs. He hired and fired, and had called employees in for dressings down on several occasions.
No one disliked him, so far as she could tell, but no one felt close to him either. A lot of the staff went out of their way to avoid him, considering him odd.
If his treatment of her had been any indication, she could understand why they were leery. He had been one of the rudest people she had ever met.
The bartender held up an empty glass. “First rule of Quixotic,” he reminded her.
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I’m tired and I’m not even done.”
“First days’ll do that to you.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I suppose.” That and lack of exercise. She’d been worrying too much and not taking care of herself. Time to change that. Even her body was saying so.
He turned the glass so that it caught the light. “Um…”
“7Up,” she said.
He grinned. “I took you for a diet kinda girl.”
“Nope,” she said. “I like my sugar pure and unadulterated.”
He laughed, and as he did, the main door opened. Ariel slid off the stool, the habit of attending to the door already engrained. She couldn’t see who was coming through the glass, though, until he had stepped inside.
It was Andrew Vari.
He wore a dark gray pinstripe suit, a red tie tucked into his vest, and a single red rose in the buttonhole on his lapel. Over his shoulders he had casually slung a black raincoat, and on his head, he wore a fedora with a red hat band. The fedora was tilted rakishly to one side.
The entire look gave him a presence that more than compensated for his height. He looked like he had stepped off a movie set.
“How was lunch?” he asked Sofia, and he clearly wasn’t talking about the food.
She smiled at him. “Good afternoon to you too, Mr. Vari. Got out of bed a little late today?”
“Just because you’re going to reduce your time at the restaurant, my dear, doesn’t mean you can ask impertinent questions,” he said, walking toward the maître d’s desk.
“It’s too late to change now,” Sofia said.
Vari looked at her sideways, and Ariel held her breath. His eyes were blue. She had never noticed that before. They were the deep clear blue of an afternoon sky, and they were striking. She hadn’t expected to find any part of him attractive.
“You know,” he said to Sofia, “most people here respect me, and would never speak to me that way.”
Sofia shrugged. “They’re just afraid of men who wear clothing as if it were a costume.”
He stepped away from the desk and extended his hands down his suit. “What’s wrong with my outfit?”
Ariel didn’t move. She stood beside her chair, wishing she could disappear behind the bar. She still wasn’t sure how to talk with him. She’d thought about it all night and had come up with nothing. She didn’t want to apologize, exactly, but she didn’t want to upset him either.
“Nothing’s wrong with your outfit,” Sofia was saying. “That’s the problem. It’s too precise. By two in the afternoon, most men would be a little rumpled. Their flower would have wilted—”
“Watch it,” Vari said. “Most men hate public discussion of wilting.”
“—or the creases in their trousers would have been ruined. Or they would be wearing the wrong color socks. Let me see your socks, Andrew.”
He frowned at her. “My socks are personal.”
“Andrew.”
Ariel let out a silent breath. It was clear this was a game to them, a ritual that they both seemed to enjoy. The bartender leaned forward, his bar rag in his hand. He was smiling.
“Sofia, employees aren’t supposed to harass the boss.”
“You’re not the boss,” she said. “Blackstone is.”
It almost seemed like Vari winced, but the movement was so quick that Ariel wasn’t sure she had seen it.
“So I can harass you all I want.”
“If that’s the case,” Vari said, “then I’ll have to talk with him. There are laws against sock inquiries these days.”
“But they’re misdemeanors,” Sofia said. “Let’s see the socks.”
Vari sighed and raised his trousers. His shoes were perfect, black leather with a single tassel. But his socks were an unexpected treat.
They were bright red, like the tie, the flower, and the hat band.
“Oh.” Sofia’s voice trilled downward in disappointment. “I was hoping for green.”
“Green would be wrong,” he said with complete seriousness.
“But green would prove that you’re not wearing a costume.”
“Green would prove that I’m color-blind, which I’m clearly not. You hate
that I dress better than you do.”
Sofia smiled. “I suspect you have a fashion coordinator on the payroll and I want you to share.”
Vari smiled too, and the look was a revelation. His battered face had a warmth to it that Ariel had only glimpsed at the airport. She felt that shock of recognition again, as if she had spent a lot of time with this man at some point in her life.
Sofia had turned toward her. “Andrew,” she said, her tone suddenly tentative, “apparently you haven’t been introduced to Ariel Summers. She’s our new—”
“Daytime hostess, I know.” He faced her and bowed slightly, as if he were meeting a duchess. “Miss Summers.”
No one had called her “miss” in years. “Mr. Vari.”
He rose to his full height. He didn’t even come up to her shoulder. “I see that your ankle is better.”
Her mouth was dry. “Yes.”
“Is it strong enough for you to spend all day on it?”
The bartender was peering at her as if she had grown a second head, and even Sofia’s smile had disappeared. Blackstone had come out of the kitchen. Ariel could see him out of the corner of her eye, making his way through the tables toward the front.
Was he coming to protect her? Or to defend his position in hiring her without Vari there?
“Yes,” she said. “It’s strong enough. Thank you for asking.”
She felt like a schoolgirl meeting the principle. One false step and she’d be gone.
Vari’s gaze met hers, and she felt that same flutter again. Something about him drew her forward. She had to struggle to stay where she was.
“Did you ever find your friend Darius?” he asked, and those striking eyes had an odd expression in them. Was it hope? If so, what kind of hope? That she would find Darius for him?
“No,” she said.
“You still think I know him.” That was a statement and not a question. He was standing awkwardly, his hands at his sides. She got the sense of contained energy, as if he felt like he needed to bolt.
Blackstone had reached them. He paused at the edge of the tables and watched, his entire expression wary.
“He knows things about you and your house that no one else should know,” Ariel said.
Vari tilted his fedora back. “You know them.”
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