“He’s trying to get rid of true love.”
“So they say, right? Those lying Fates?”
“They’re not lying.” The boy shook off his aunt. “My dad’s been fighting for them all along. My dad and my Aunt Viv and my Uncle Dex. And now the Fates say they need you. So you should help them.”
“I should, huh?” Rob asked. He’d never been comfortable around children, especially precocious ones.
“Yeah, you should.”
Megan reached for her nephew, but he slipped away from her, walked up to Robin, and mimicked his posture, putting his hands on his hips and standing with his legs slightly apart.
“I never took Robin Hood for a coward,” the boy said.
John gasped.
Megan said, “Kyle!” apparently in an attempt to admonish the boy.
But Rob just narrowed his eyes, feeling the anger flare. The boy wanted him to get angry. The boy was psychic and knew how to make him angry — so Rob’s shields weren’t working as well as he thought.
Still, he loathed it when someone called him a coward, particularly someone who didn’t know his history.
Although this little boy had just called him Robin Hood. So the boy did know, and the boy still used the word.
“I’m not a coward,” Rob said.
“You are too,” the boy said.
“Because I won’t help three women who let my wife die? You have a lot of living to do, boy, before you understand that.” Rob crossed his arms, and rocked back on his heels. “In fact, I hope you never do understand it.”
“They were just following the rules!” the boy said.
“Yeah, I’ve followed rules,” Rob said. “Just because the rules exist doesn’t make them right.”
“The Fates hurt your wife?” Megan asked.
“Eight hundred years ago, Aunt Meg,” the boy said with deep sarcasm.
The anger Rob had only barely controlled flared again. What did that child know about pain, anyway?
“So you’ve told everyone that you’re Robin Hood?” Megan asked.
“I haven’t told anyone,” Rob said. “You people have been calling me that.”
“Please.” Megan shook her head slightly. “Give me a little respect. This is Chapeau Enterprises, and ‘chapeau’ means hood or hat in French. Your friend is named Little John. I wouldn’t be surprised if you called your secretary Maid Marian—”
“That’s enough!” Rob was shouting before he realized he had opened his mouth. He couldn’t take this lack of respect any more. “Get them out of here, John, or I will.”
“They came with the Fates,” John said, unfazed by Rob’s anger. John had seen it too many times before. “If you let the Fates out of your office, I’m sure everyone will leave happily.”
They wouldn’t, of course. The Fates wanted something from him, and the woman, with her blazing green eyes, hadn’t stepped back at all. She seemed as angry as he felt.
“You have no right to yell at me or Kyle,” she said. “You don’t know us. We’re not here to bother you. I drove the Fates here to discuss their contract dispute with you. I was only doing it as a favor to Kyle. I hadn’t expected to walk into a place filled with angry people and a lot of blame. Had that been the case, I wouldn’t have brought along a sensitive eleven-year-old—”
“Aunt Meg!” The boy, Kyle, rolled his eyes in obvious embarrassment.
“—and I wouldn’t have brought the Fates. They’re unusual women, and I’m not sure if I like them, but they don’t need this abuse.”
She was beautiful when she was mad. She spoke softly, which people rarely did when they were angry, and the emotion flooded her creamy skin with color that accented the auburn of her hair. Those green eyes flared and held him like he hadn’t been held in a long time.
Normally this kind of anger calmed him down—he liked being the reasonable one in the room—but he wasn’t feeling reasonable.
“Abuse?” he said softly.
“Abuse.” She crossed her arms. “You shout and bluster as if you control the very world. When, in fact, all you’ve done is lock three helpless, naïve women in your office and somehow got out on your own, and then shouted at a little boy you’ve never met before. If that’s not abuse, then you’re bordering on it.”
He stared at her. She was young — younger than she seemed at first glance. Clearly a product of this country and the last thirty years.
“Lady,” he said as gently as he could, considering how angry he still was. “When I was a boy, beatings were common, women were little more than property, and if one of your betters killed your brother, you had no recourse at all. I’ve been a soldier in one of the bloodiest, most senseless conflicts in all of history. I’ve seen more abuse than you can even imagine.”
She raised her chin at him, that fine face filled with skepticism. John had moved away so that he clearly wasn’t part of the discussion. Kyle had moved to the other side of the room, almost as if he couldn’t stand to be between Rob and Megan.
“Locking three—in your words—helpless and naïve women in my office isn’t abuse. It’s reasonable, considering how badly I’d like to slap all three of them. And raising my voice isn’t abuse either. It’s justified when my best friend lets in the three women who hurt me the most because they want a favor!”
Her eyebrows had risen so high in her forehead that she looked comical. But her expression told him she found nothing funny about the moment.
“I don’t care how you were raised,” she said in that horrible reasonable tone. “Your parents were obviously wrong, and whatever country you were in was barbaric. But that doesn’t mean you can treat people here like this. I demand that you unlock the door and let those women out.”
“Or?” Rob asked.
“Or what?” Megan said.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll call the police,” she said.
He laughed. “What will they do? Arrest me for locking women in my office?”
“I’ll tell them that you threatened those women, which you did, and that you raised your voice at my nephew and that I was worried for his safety.”
“Then why not get him out of here?” Rob asked.
“Because I brought those women,” Megan said. “I’m responsible for them. Let them out!”
“All right,” he said. “On one condition.”
She was breathing hard. He tried not to look at her breasts. They were as perfect as she was, moving up and down with each deep, angry breath.
He hadn’t been this attracted to any woman in a long, long time.
“What condition?” she snapped.
“Have dinner with me.” The words came out before he realized what he was going to say. That was the second time he’d done that in this conversation. Whatever had he been thinking?
Of course, he hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem.
“You think you can manipulate me into having dinner with you? You’re delusional.”
“You want those women, don’t you?” Rob asked.
Her mouth opened slightly. Then it closed. She looked at young Kyle, whose eyes seemed extra wide behind his thick glasses.
“I don’t even like those women,” she said.
“You don’t like me either,” he said. “So it seems like an even trade to me.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Kyle said. “I mean—”
“Kyle!” Her voice was harsh, although she hadn’t raised it.
The boy closed his mouth, too, and leaned against the wall. But Rob didn’t need to hear any more. The boy was psychic, and she was undefended. She might not like Rob, but she was intrigued by him.
“I’m not sure you’re nice,” Kyle said to him.
Rob looked at the boy.
“I always thought Robin Hood was nice.”
Rob chuckled. “I fought a sheriff and killed his men, all in the name of a cause. I was a soldier after that. They called me a man’s man. And you thought I was nice? Who clean
ed up the legends you’ve been reading?”
The boy dropped his chin. “Zoe says you’re nice.”
“Zoe?” Rob only knew one Zoe—at least, only one Zoe who was still alive. “You know Zoe Sinclair?”
“She’s marrying my dad.”
“Zoe’s getting married?” Rob couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t thought of Zoe as the marrying type.
“To my dad,” the boy said again. “She thinks you’re nice too. In fact, she thought it was a good idea for the Fates to see you.”
“Zoe sent them?”
“She found their spinning wheel,” the boy said. “They want you to steal it.”
Rob looked at John, who shrugged sheepishly. “The famous wheel? The one on which they spun life and death? The one they told me about but never showed me?”
“They said it was stolen three thousand years ago,” John said. “But they’re not very good with time.”
“This fantasy convinces you to help these women?” Megan asked. “What has my brother stumbled into here?”
Rob looked at her. She really didn’t know.
“Let me show you,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
Thirteen
She wasn’t standing in the reception area of an office building any more. Instead, she wobbled slightly on stone-covered grass. The air smelled of the sea. Before her, cliffs rose, their walls blindingly white in the hot sun.
The sky was as blue as Kyle’s eyes, and the ocean matched it. But Kyle wasn’t anywhere around, and neither was John Little or Little John or whatever he was called.
Instead, Robin Hood stood beside her, watching her with a bemused expression on his face.
He looked out of place here, in that beautiful suit, with his brown hair and his pale, pale skin. His eyes twinkled, though. She’d never seen his eyes twinkle. That made him seem almost human.
The first time she’d met him, he’d looked like a fantasy man. This afternoon, he’d been a nightmare.
And now his eyes were twinkling—on this rock-strewn hillside, with an ocean pounding hundreds of feet below.
“What’s going on?” she asked. She’d been asking that too much in the last few days.
“Do you like ouzo?” he asked.
“What?”
“Or don’t you drink?”
She shook her head.
He nodded toward a white building she hadn’t seen until now. It was hidden against the upper part of the cliff face. “They serve a mean ouzo. But we can go somewhere else if you like.”
Somewhere else? Where were they now? She made herself take a deep breath. She’d never breathed air quite like this, filled with the sea and such sunshine and scents she’d never smelled before.
The sun in Vegas wasn’t this bright, and the sky wasn’t this clear. This looked as unreal as the highway had last night, when she’d seen the rabbit and the falcon and this very strange man dressed like a hunter.
“Take me back to Kyle,” she said, not sure if she was away from Kyle or just having some sort of bizarre hallucination.
“Not yet,” Robin said. “You wanted to know what was going on, and you were wedded to your perception of reality, even though it’s not an accurate one.”
She had spoken those words to patients, over and over again. But her patients hadn’t understood how the real world worked. The world she had grown up in. The world with Mini Coopers and Las Vegas office buildings and little boys who read too many comic books.
Not a world with psychics and people who talked about the Fates as if they were real.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
He gave her a soft smile. It made his face seem—less harsh? Warmer? And yet somehow even more masculine and mysterious—then he pointed in front of him.
Her gaze followed his finger. Ahead stood a mountain shrouded in fog. The fog looked fake, especially in this bright, sunlit world with the clear, clear edges.
“Mount Olympus,” he said. “You’ve probably read about it.”
She hadn’t just read about it. She’d been there during her junior year in college. She’d managed to travel all over Europe that spring semester, and get college credit for it. At the end, she had gone to Greece all on her own, seen the Parthenon, and looked at Mount Olympus.
It hadn’t looked like this.
Which wasn’t exactly true. It had looked like this in a broken down, real world sort of way. The mountain before her looked like the Hollywood version of Mount Olympus. Certainly not the version she had seen on her trip.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Where’s the trapdoor? Is this like Disneyland, where we find some sideways exit and return to the world of neon, gamblers, and the Blue Man Group?”
He studied her for a moment, the soft smile gone. “There’s no trapdoor.”
“Then how did we get here?”
“Like this.” He snapped his fingers again.
And suddenly, she was standing in the living room of her condo. Newspapers were scattered across the floor. The three novels she’d been reading simultaneously were all facedown on her coffee table, along with two open cans of Diet Coke.
The dirty dishes she had left for later were still sitting in her sink, and the suit she’d worn to the office two days ago littered the hardwood floor of her hallway.
Her life really was a mess. She never used to be this sloppy.
“Is this better?”
She jumped. Robin stood beside her. She hadn’t realized he was still there.
He studied the portraits on her wall, all photographs of her family taken with her black-and-white camera. She’d been quite the photographer once, but she’d given it up to concentrate on her career.
“Why would this be better?” she asked.
“You were obviously having trouble seeing Mount Olympus as the real world. I thought maybe your home would be real to you.”
She walked to the window and looked out. Condos, strip malls, and freeways. Yes, she was in Los Angeles. The mountains were lost in a polluted haze, and even though the sun was out, the sky looked a vague gray-green.
“What’s going on?” she asked again. Only this time, she really wasn’t asking him, she was asking herself.
He took her hand. His fingers were warm and dry and callused, which surprised her. She thought an arrogant businessman like him would have soft fingers. Then she remembered the falcon.
He led her to her couch, pushed some magazines aside, and sat her down. He sat beside her, not letting her fingers go.
“There really is magic in the world,” he said gently.
She looked at him. This man had gone from furious to tender in the space of a few minutes. Of course, if he were to be believed, they both had gone from Vegas to Greece to L.A. in those same few minutes.
“Why would you put it on yourself to tell me this?” she asked.
He shrugged. She had a sense that he wasn’t going to tell her the whole truth.
“Somehow you’ve gotten mixed up with the Fates,” he said. “They’re dangerous women. You have a psychic nephew who knows Zoe Sinclair, who is also magic. You’re surrounded by people who have a power you haven’t been aware of until just recently, and even so, they haven’t helped you see that power. I don’t think that’s fair.”
“To whom?” she asked.
“To you.” His voice was still gentle.
“Why would you care about me?”
His eyes were a rich brown, the color of mahogany wood, and inside them, she saw layers of emotions, so many she couldn’t identify them all.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he asked. “Logically, I should have thrown you all out of my office today and gone on with my life.”
He didn’t say any more. After a few seconds, she prompted, “But?”
He shrugged. “I feel responsible for you somehow.”
She dropped his hand and stood up. No one was responsible for her except herself. She had always been responsible for herself. She didn’t n
eed anyone else’s help.
“Take me back to Kyle,” she said.
Robin frowned, looking confused. “What did I say?”
“You don’t have to take care of me,” she said. “No one takes care of me.”
“That’s pretty clear.” He was staring at his hands, but he was probably referring to her condo. It was in a state because she had left in a hurry, she wanted to say. But she didn’t. Because it had been like this for months. One of the classic signs of depression—letting herself, her home, her world, fall apart.
“You brought us here uninvited,” she said, and then stopped.
How had he done that? This wasn’t a planned set like the fake Olympus. (Had that really been fake?) This was her condo, right down to the slightly vanilla odor that had lingered ever since she knocked over a mostly melted scented candle behind her kitchen counter.
He looked up at her. “I wasn’t referring to your place. I haven’t been in my home long enough to make it this comfortable. I envy places that are lived in like this.”
He sounded sincere and a bit baffled at her emotion. She sank back onto the couch. “Then what did you mean?”
“No one around you has been kind enough to explain the magic that clearly exists in your life.”
His words made her heart twist. Kyle had always tried. Travers hadn’t known until recently. And then there was that thing Zoe had done with the eggs this morning.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Megan said.
“It seems pretty straightforward to me,” Robin said. “Sometimes when people learn about magic, they learn about it slowly. It takes a while for their new reality to filter in. But you don’t have time for a slow dawning. You’re driving the Fates around as if you’re their personal chauffeur. You have to know how dangerous that is.”
“You’ve used the word dangerous twice now about them,” Megan said. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head and sighed. “Where to begin?”
She was familiar with this. It almost felt like a therapy session, only she didn’t want to analyze this man. Still, she took those callused fingers in her own.
“Begin wherever you like,” she said.
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