Samael stood on a rooftop and watched the people on the street below as they milled about, each intent on his or her destination. So busy. So preoccupied.
So small.
He hadn’t chosen this particular downtown roof for any real reason. One seemed as good as another. To the west, beyond L.A.’s sprawl and its famed beaches, the sun lay buried in a haze of smog and smoke. The hills above Malibu were burning again. The scene reminded him too much of Hell, and he returned his gaze to the streets below.
Something just as fiery caught his eye. He sharpened his focus, narrowing in on the slender form of a young woman who had paused outside one of the businesses across the street. Copper hair glowed bright against the simple dark clothing she wore. The color could have come from a dye bottle; in this city of artifice, such things were to be expected. But somehow he thought hers was natural.
The business was a bar or nightclub. Smartly dressed men and women, most in their twenties or thirties, were entering the building, although Samael noticed they tended to go in one at a time, not in couples.
Even from this distance he could see the young woman’s obvious diffidence. She held something white in one hand — a piece of paper, he thought. Then she shook her head, shoved the paper in her pocket, and went inside.
Intrigued, he moved to the edge of the roof and stepped off. A normal man would have smashed his brains out on the pavement, but Samael was far from a normal man. The night air buoyed him up, and let him descend to street level at a pace of his own choosing.
No one noticed, of course. He wrapped darkness around himself, shielding his actions from curious mortal eyes. It was a talent all his kind possessed, one that made their work possible.
Not that he was on duty tonight. Friday nights could be busy, and if some gangbanger started shooting up a party, he still might be called in. For now, however, his time was his own. His fellow demon Abigor could manage on his own — and so could the City of Angels.
Samael felt his mouth twist at that thought. City of Angels. Quite the joke when one considered the fact that the last angels had left this city some time ago. Now, only Hell’s lieutenants watched over its populace and guided its unquiet souls to the afterlife.
Not all, of course. Even a town as corrupt as this one had as its majority those who led quiet, mostly virtuous lives. Their eventual fate was none of his concern.
But the murderers, the drug dealers, the rapists and the arsonists and the ones who made punching bags out of their wives and children — those specimens had earned themselves a one-way ticket to the underworld. Samael would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he took great personal pleasure in dumping those transgressors head-first into a lake of boiling blood.
The only thing Dante got right, he thought. Hell would actually be a much more interesting place if it followed the Italian’s model closely, but in reality it consisted of the aforementioned lakes of blood, vast plains of blowing ash and fire…and not much else. Little wonder its attendant demons did everything in their power to get assignments topside. Taking on a human form was a small price to pay in return for all the distractions the world had to offer.
His latest distraction was currently inside the bar across the street. He could wait for her to re-emerge, but he decided there would be little fun in that. Besides, he could use a drink.
Grinning, he shoved his hands in his coat pockets and stepped forward, intent on locating his prey.
~ * * * ~
I can’t believe I let Lauren talk me into this. Felicia McGovern risked a quick glance at her glass of cabernet. Half of it was already gone, and she’d only been inside for ten minutes. Typical that smooth-tongued Lauren, her agent, had somehow managed to convince Felicia that coming here tonight was actually a good idea.
From across the room came a tinkling sound as someone tapped a spoon against a wine glass. She sighed and picked up her own wine, then moved to the right. The next prospect took his place across from her, and she tried not to groan.
Speed dating. Whoever had dreamed up this particular social activity could probably trace a direct line back to the originators of the Spanish Inquisition.
“Hi,” said the stranger across from her, who had middle-management written all over him, from the medium-blue dress shirt to the carefully inoffensive tie. “I’m Trent.”
“Felicia,” she offered.
His eyes widened a bit behind wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s unusual.”
“It was my grandmother’s name.”
“Ah,” he said.
An uncomfortable silence followed. Felicia guessed he wasn’t terribly taken by her own appearance; she hadn’t bothered with dressing to impress and had ignored all of Lauren’s advice as to skinny jeans, slinky tops, and high heels. She’d made sure her clothes didn’t have any paint daubs on them, and that had been about the extent of her preparations. No point in selling a false bill of goods — the last time she’d had on high heels had been at a friend’s wedding two years ago, and the memory was painful enough that tonight she’d slid into her usual black flats without a moment’s hesitation.
“So what do you do?” Felicia asked. She knew this wasn’t going anywhere, but she thought she might as well try to limp the conversation along for their allotted three minutes.
“I’m an IT specialist at an investment firm here in the downtown area.”
Of course he was. What else could he be, with that tie?
“And you?” he inquired.
“I’m an artist. Portraits mainly.”
“Really?” Although his tone sounded surprised, his expression was not. She could almost hear him thinking, Well, that explains the outfit….
She quelled the urge to leap to her own defense. In this town, “artist” was usually code for “waiter” or “barrista.” But she couldn’t think of a way to tell this baby-faced computer guru that she’d had her first gallery show at twenty-four, or that her latest commission, for a well-known studio exec, would net her upwards of fifty grand once she finished it. She hadn’t waited a table since she graduated from college.
“Yes,” she said. “I never was much of a nine-to-five type.”
She really hadn’t meant it as a dig, but his smile suddenly looked a little strained. He lifted his bottle of Pacifico and took a swig. “Must be nice to not have to worry about responsibility or any of that other annoying crap.”
Her eyes widened, and she forced herself to bite back a retort. Just because she painted full time didn’t mean she didn’t know all about personal responsibility. She’d never missed a deadline. She got up and painted every day, whether she felt like it or not. Some people might have the luxury of only having to worry about themselves, but she had her mother to take care of, and Carrie still with two years of college ahead of her –
Luckily, the now-familiar clink of the host’s spoon against its companion wineglass kept her thoughts from heading into places she really didn’t want to go. She mumbled an insincere, “Nice meeting you,” and grabbed her purse and cabernet, then hurried off to the next station.
She’d just taken a sip of wine when the next victim slid into the seat opposite hers. As she looked up to see what she was being inflicted with next, she stopped, wine glass lowered a few inches from her mouth.
Holy crap.
This new somebody was the polar opposite of the IT guy: tall, with a head of wavy overlong black hair. Black leather jacket, but not biker style — it was sleek and seemed to mold itself to his broad shoulders, and he wore a dark collared shirt underneath. A small red stone glinted from his left ear. Normally Felicia wasn’t much for earrings on men, but somehow this one seemed to suit him, gave him an almost gypsy-ish air that went along with the inky hair and swarthy skin.
“F-Felicia McGovern,” she blurted.
He smiled. “I’m Sam.”
Such a prosaic name for an exotic specimen of a man. “Sam what?”
“Let’s just go with Sam for now.”
Fine. She knew the event organizers had everyone’s pertinent information, so if she wanted to let them know she was definitely interested in this Sam-whatever, she didn’t think they’d have too hard a time figuring out which Sam she meant. There weren’t many six-two black-haired Italian underwear models in this lot.
Not that he really looked like an underwear model. He wasn’t pretty enough. His features were on the rough side of handsome, and when he smiled, lines showed in the skin around his eyes. She liked his looks no less for that. In fact, she liked them better. The planes of his face made her fingers just itch to pick up a paintbrush.
She decided it was probably better not to dwell on what those shoulders and broad, capable hands did to other parts of her anatomy…
“You ever been to one of these before?” she asked.
“No.” He shot a quick glance around the crowded room, at the well-dressed men and women and the faint air of desperation that seemed to cling to each one of them. “I’m guessing you haven’t, either.”
“Am I that obvious?”
“Let’s say you don’t really fit in.” His own drink was a shot of tequila or vodka; he lifted it and consumed its contents with a neat, practiced flip that told her he’d done that sort of thing a time or two before. “But that’s all right. I don’t, either.”
That was for certain. He stood out like a Chinese crested rooster in a clutch of white hens. “So why did you come?”
Those dark eyes caught hers. He had amazing lashes, sooty and thick as his hair. “I was looking for something different.”
Her agent Lauren probably could have come up with a witty reply to that. Felicia forced herself to hold his gaze and said, “So have you found it?”
He didn’t blink. “I think so. Tell me, is your hair color natural?”
It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked that question, but for some reason she could feel the heat rise in her cheeks. Damn that whole redhead-skin thing anyway. “I suppose you want to know my age and weight, too.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that it’s quite…unusual.”
So are you, she almost said, but she managed to keep the words from slipping out. No point in getting quite so personal just two minutes after meeting the guy. She shrugged and replied, “Irish on both sides of the family. Mom and Dad were both redheads. I just got it double barrels. So what about you?”
“Neither of my parents is a redhead.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
Another one of those white-toothed smiles. She noticed that his canines were slightly sharper than normal. “Actually, I’m part Irish, too. Black Irish, though.”
She wondered if he were teasing her. It was probably best to ignore the teeth; it would be just her luck to have the hottest guy in the room turn out to be a vampire or something. Keeping her tone dry, she said, “I would never have guessed.”
Of course the event’s host chose that moment to tap his spoon against the glass. It figured. The conversations with the guys she didn’t care about dragged on forever, and this one felt as if it was over before it even got started.
Sam didn’t seem inclined to move, however. He gazed at her thoughtfully, then said, “Why don’t you and I get out of here?”
“Excuse me?”
“I know I don’t need to meet anyone else. How about you?”
From the corner of her eye Felicia saw the pair who were supposed to occupy the table next standing off to one side. Neither one of them looked exactly thrilled to find her and her companion still occupying their spot.
“Well, it doesn’t really work that way — and I think we’re supposed to move — ”
He stood then, unfolding all six-foot-plus inches of his imposing frame from his chair. A shake of his head, followed by, “Tell me, Felicia — do you always follow the rules?”
Of course she didn’t. Well, she wanted to think that she didn’t, but she couldn’t seem to come up with a single example supporting that conclusion. Hastily she gathered up her purse and half-empty glass of wine. It was one thing to talk big about breaking rules and quite another to be deliberately rude; if she and Sam didn’t move on, then this new couple wouldn’t have anyplace to sit.
She shouldered her purse, then turned back to him.
Rather, the spot where he had stood. He was gone, apparently disappearing into the crowd so quickly she hadn’t even seen him leave.
Guess he’s not into good girls, she thought, even as she fought back a wave of disappointment so acute she actually felt it as an ache in the pit of her stomach. Since there didn’t seem to be anything else for her to do, she made her way to the next station, where yet another wholly uninteresting candidate waited for her. Great.
She took her seat and mumbled a pleasantry, but she couldn’t help looking past the table where she had just been sitting. Some poor woman was going to be upset when she realized she didn’t have a partner for this particular segment.
But that table was occupied by a couple who seemed to be speaking with some animation. Frowning, Felicia scanned the rest of the circle. Sam was nowhere to be seen. If he’d left in the middle of the session, shouldn’t his absence have caused a gap in the circle of men? Every table was full, however, with no sign that he had ever been there.
What the hell?
~ * * * ~
He let himself walk down the street, eschewing the speedier ways his kind used to move around the city. Sometimes he found it beneficial to surround himself with humanity, with their endless variations and petty concerns and cheap vitality. If he didn’t allow himself to think, he could almost pretend that he was one of them. Odd fantasy, and one his fellow demons didn’t appear to share. None of them could see the appeal in being human, apart from the evanescent pleasures this world provided. And since demons could avail themselves of those pleasures without all the pesky inconveniences of being mortal, why would they want to bother with being real humans?
Why, indeed.
Perhaps he had taken his leave of Felicia too abruptly, but that mattered little to him. Nothing wrong with tantalizing her, leaving her wanting more.
He knew he wanted more of her.
Throughout the ages he had taken human lovers as the mood struck. Not indiscriminately, of course, but with human form came human desires as well. Those desires could be ignored or sublimated as need be, but there had never been any prohibition against fraternizing, as long as a demon’s lover wasn’t someone intended for Hell.
No worries on that score with Felicia McGovern, of course. If anything, she seemed almost too proper for his tastes. He liked a woman with a bit of the wanton about her. On the other hand, he was willing to put up with quite a bit for a chance at seeing those glorious copper curls of hers spread across a pillow.
The mental image sent a flood of heat through his loins. But he was no mortal man, ruled only by his flesh. He ignored the wave of desire and moved on. After all, he had gone some time without physical release. He could wait.
But first, he wanted to make her wait for him.
~ * * * ~
At first Felicia wasn’t sure she’d heard the host correctly. “Excuse me?”
He sent her a look that was half-annoyed, half-pitying. “As I said, we have no record of anyone with a first name of Sam participating tonight. Are you sure you heard him correctly?”
If it had been a difficult or complex name, that might have worked as an excuse. But “Sam” was pretty hard to misunderstand. On the other hand, hadn’t he said, “Call me Sam”? That seemed to imply his name wasn’t really Sam. But why would he show such an obvious interest in her, only to give her a false name and then disappear into the night?
The beginnings of a headache started to throb at the base of her neck. Felicia knew she should just admit to herself that she’d struck out, then take herself home, make some herbal tea, and call it a night.
Some part of her refused to give up, however. “I might have gotten his name wrong,” she told the host. “But he was pretty recognizable. Tall guy, longish black hair, black leather jacket, and an earring?”
He gave her a stare that made her want to reach up and feel the top of her head in case she’d suddenly sprouted a pair of horns. “No one like that. Maybe it was someone from the restaurant who came here into the bar by accident or something, but he wasn’t signed up for the event.”
Her encounter with Sam felt anything but accidental, but she didn’t think she could come up with a way to tell the host that without his handing her another one of those horn-spouting stares. Better to cut her losses and get out of here before she did anything else to make herself look like a complete idiot.
She said, “Okay, sorry. My mistake.” She wasn’t sorry, and she didn’t think she’d made a mistake, but she did know she’d already wasted enough time here. Sam was obviously long gone. No point in pursuing the matter any further.
Cool night air surrounded her as she stepped outside. She felt better almost immediately, even though the evening breeze was dry, all moisture stolen by the bluster of Southern California’s Santa Ana winds. At least she couldn’t smell the fires; the smoke had been driven out to sea by the harsh gales. It was beginning to get chilly, despite the day’s heat, and she wished she had thought to bring a jacket.
Her loft was only a few blocks from the restaurant/bar where the speed-dating event had been held, so she didn’t bother with a taxi. Friends told her she was crazy for roaming around downtown by herself, but she’d never felt unsafe. The local news broadcast far more stories of people going nuts in suburbia than of mayhem in L.A.’s center. A few miles away, down in the sprawl of South Central, things were different, but the people here in the heart of the city tended to leave one another alone.
She’d purchased the loft a few years back before gentrification had really taken hold. At the time she’d had to drive miles to get to a supermarket, but now a gleaming new Ralphs was within walking distance. Her newer neighbors were just as likely to be lawyers or Internet entrepreneurs as artists and musicians, but that was all right. She liked the variety, and the fact that, while everyone in her building tended to keep an eye on everyone else, people mostly stayed out of her business.
Not that Felicia had much business to stay out of. Between making sure her mother was doing all right in the managed-care facility where she now lived and keeping an eye on her younger sister Carrie, now a junior at UCLA, men had been pretty low on Felicia’s priority list for some time. Her agent Lauren had poked and prodded until Felicia finally agreed to the speed-dating event, mostly to get her off her back.
And see how well that turned out, she thought, as she turned her key in the lock and let herself into the loft. She dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and went to put the kettle on the stove. What she really needed was some peppermint tea to bring much-needed moisture back to her throat, followed by a good night’s sleep. She knew better than to paint when she felt like this; the deadline for her latest commission was coming up quickly, but she knew she’d make it. What she couldn’t afford was any mistakes brought on by exhaustion…
…or preoccupation with a certain black-haired stranger. Despite her best efforts to put the brief encounter behind her, his face kept swimming up in her mind. Those eyes like pools of ink, the clean, sculpted lines of his jaw. She’d always been a sucker for a good chin.
Or maybe just a sucker, period. She needed to stop making the mistake of dating creative types; they invariably left her high and dry when things got the least bit difficult. On the other hand, she couldn’t think what she’d have in common with someone in a supposedly stable career, like an accountant or a banker or even a high school principal. Carrie kept hinting darkly about trying to fix her up with a certain eligible anthropology professor, but that was more of a running joke between them than anything serious.
The loft was well over two thousand square feet. Normally, Felicia enjoyed the feeling of space it gave and the warm, natural light that poured through its high windows, but tonight it felt oddly hollow, cavernous. The whistle from the kettle echoed off the wood floors and exposed brick.
A shadow moved outside one window, and she started. Then she realized it was only her next-door neighbor’s cat Dempsey, making his usual nightly rounds. Shaking her head at herself, she went to the kitchen and turned down the burner, then dropped a tea bag into a mug and poured hot water over it. The reassuring smell of peppermint drifted up to her nose.
Really, was one encounter with an interesting stranger enough to make her this jumpy? Better to chalk it up to the Santa Anas and their well-publicized effects, including short tempers and all-around jitteriness. Hadn’t someone once tried to use the hot, dry winds as part of an insanity defense?
Her windows looked east, toward Boyle Heights and the hills of Mount Washington and the Arroyo Seco. A gibbous moon had just begun to rise beyond their dark shapes, its face tinged yellow-orange from the dust and smoke in the air. Felicia wrapped her fingers around her mug and stared out into the night sky. She wondered if Sam was looking at the moon as well.
~ * * * ~
He found Abigor in one of his favorite haunts, at the base of the first “O” in the Hollywood sign. From this vantage point one could see the entire city spread out below. Tonight the air was almost achingly clear, save for the smudge of smoke that hung off the coast. Despite his form, Samael’s eyes weren’t quite human; no mortal could have differentiated between the haze from the fires and the equally black blur of the Pacific Ocean.
“Slow night?” he asked.
A beer bottle glinted as Abigor raised it to his mouth. He swallowed, then said, “Slower than the 405 at rush hour.”
“I had no idea L.A. was such a hotbed of virtue.”
“It’s not. I guess all the baddies just decided they didn’t want to check out on a Friday night.” He extracted a bottle from the six-pack next to him and offered it to Samael.
Since it was something drinkable this time — a Belgian ale — Samael took the offering and neatly popped off the cap. His nails looked human, but they were stronger. Far stronger.
“Weren’t you the one catching hell for drinking on the job last time?”
Abigor shrugged. “Technically, I’m not on the job right now. I’m just taking a break. Capturing souls with a Corona in one hand — yeah, they didn’t like that too much.”
Rules got bent all the time, Samael knew. After all, what could Lucifer or his lieutenants Beelzebub and Asmodeus do, except bust their minions back to Hell? Samael would prefer to stay topside, but he’d done guard duty in the Pit and survived to tell the tale. At least he wasn’t one of the souls stuck upside-down in a lake of boiling blood for all eternity.
He took a meditative swallow of ale. No beer in Hell, though. No steaks or air-conditioned movie theaters or the smell of wet earth after the rain.
No redheads with laughing hazel eyes and distracting dimples, either.
He was silent for awhile, his gaze fixed on the glittering carpet of light beneath him.
“You look like a demon with something on his mind,” Abigor remarked, just before he cracked open another beer. “Or someone, that is. The last time I saw you this moony, you’d just met that brunette up at the Observatory. Or was it the blonde down on Melrose?” He shot a glance at his watch and grinned. “It’s been what, five years since the last one? I guess it’s about time for you to be scratching that itch again.”
Samael raised an eyebrow but didn’t bother to reply. Sometimes it could be downright annoying to have someone around who’d known him for an eternity or two.
“I still don’t see the point,” Abigor added. “Seems like too much work to me. Hookers are so much easier. They don’t give a shit as long as you pay them what they’re asking. No weeping and wailing if you’re not there when they wake up in the morning — unless crying’s your kink, of course.”
“You’re pure class, Abbie,” Samael drawled. Abigor hated that nickname.
His companion scowled. His mortal form was that of a large black man with a shaved head, and the frown only made him look more forbidding. Forbidding to mortals, of course. Samael had worked with Abigor for several centuries by now. He was used to the other demon’s frowns.
And the ribbing. Samael sometimes wondered if he went so long between liaisons because he didn’t want to deal with the inevitable ration of shit Abigor gave him.
“Not much use for class in our line of work,” the demon said. “But hey — you want your class and your ‘relationships’ and your amusing house wines? Go for it. I know they — ” and Abigor jerked a significant thumb downward — “don’t give a fuck as long as the job gets done.”
True enough. Abigor’s choice remarks were the only feedback Samael had ever received in regard to his relationships with mortal women. If those liaisons didn’t interfere with his real reason for being topside, then no one seemed to care.
Why, then, did he feel a most un-demon-like trickle of disquiet down his spine when he thought of Felicia McGovern? He wanted her, but this went beyond that. It was one thing to want more of her flesh than the creamy throat he’d spied above her loose-fitting shirt. It was quite another to desire the sound of her voice or the flash of a dimple next to her mouth.
It had been a long time. That was all. Had he gone this long before? A year here, a year there, but five? He couldn’t recall. Days and nights blended together and became one long, flashing kaleidoscope of memory when time had no true meaning.
“The job will get done,” Samael said. “It always does.”
Abigor clapped a hand on his shoulder and offered him another beer. “I know, brother. I know.”
~ * * * ~
“So?” Lauren prompted. “How was it?”
Felicia pretended to consider. “More fun than a root canal but probably not as much fun as having bamboo shoots shoved under my fingernails.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Okay, it was probably more fun than being waterboarded.”
Lauren gave her a pained glance. “I know some of these things can be kind of shady, but this one came highly recommended.”
“By whom? Osama Bin Laden?”
“You mean you didn’t meet anyone? Not one guy worth a phone call?”
Not for the first time, Felicia wondered why Lauren cared so much. Then again, her agent had gotten married a scant ten months ago. Now she seemed convinced that her life’s mission — besides getting her clients the juiciest contracts possible, of course — was to make sure everyone single around her got paired off as well.
She hesitated. “Well — ”
Lauren pounced. “Aha! Spill it.”
“There’s nothing to spill.” Fighting the bubble of annoyance rising in her, Felicia went to the window where she’d positioned her easel to catch the best of the morning light. Had she gone a little too yellow in her flesh tones? Maybe it was just the uneasy ochre-tinged sunlight outside. Another fire had popped up overnight, this one in the hills above Glendale. “Okay, there was this one guy who seemed moderately interesting. But he must have been a gate crasher, because they didn’t have any record of someone named Sam there that night.”
“But you got his number.”
“No.”
“You gave him yours?”
Felicia picked up an easel and began mixing more paint. Weird light or no, the studio exec was looking distinctly jaundiced. “No.”
An audible sigh. Lauren crossed her arms and came closer, although she kept a respectable distance between the fresh paint and her expensive suit. “You know, Fel, in some ways you’re the most capable person I know. And in others — ”
“ — I might as well be five. I know.” Despite the peppermint tea the night before and the healthy seven hours of sleep she’d gotten, Felicia could still feel the phantom edges of a headache lurking at the base of her skull. Much more questioning from Lauren, and it would probably grow into a full-blown three-aspirin monster. “It’s all right. I really don’t have time for that sort of thing right now anyway.”
To Felicia’s surprise, Lauren nodded. “You’re right — you don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
Lauren flipped a few strands of her expertly highlighted bob away from her face. “You’ve got the contract, if you want it.”
“If I want it?” Felicia didn’t have to ask which contract it was. The negotiations had been going on for so long she’d felt certain they were never going to end. Or maybe they would, but not in her favor. “I get to paint the governor?”
“Not just the governor, but his whole family.”
At a price tag that would keep her going for the next couple of years. Not that she’d ever allow herself to coast like that. More to the point, Lauren would make sure enough new contracts were lined up that Felicia would be lucky to get a week off before she had to plunge into the next painting.
Still, she’d be a complete idiot if she didn’t admit she was a very lucky woman. She’d abandoned false modesty about her work back in her undergrad days, but Felicia knew that in this business, talent made up only a small part of actual success. Several friends whom she’d thought of as equally talented were still hustling to get their first gallery show.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Thanks, Lauren. I really do appreciate all the work you put into making this deal.”
Her agent waved a hand. “Of course I’m going to hustle for ten percent of a pie this big. Frank and I are thinking about going to Tuscany next spring. I’ve got to start saving up.”
“That’s why I love you, Lauren — it’s that altruistic streak.”
Of course Lauren didn’t seem fazed at all. “I’ll let you get back to work. I just wanted to deliver the good news in person.”
And pick my brain about the speed dating, but Felicia just nodded. She didn’t want to get back into that again, not when she kept feeling that disappointed stab in her midsection whenever she thought of Sam and the way he had disappeared on her. Stupid, really, to get so knotted up over a guy she’d talked to for only a few minutes. Maybe she couldn’t completely control her physical reactions to a man, but at least over the years she’d learned how to channel that energy into something worthwhile.
Repressing a sigh, she picked up her paintbrush and returned to the neglected portrait.
~ * * * ~
It was easy enough for Samael to get her address. He didn’t pretend to be omniscient — he left that sort of thing to the Man Upstairs — but her name was unusual enough that a quick online search turned up a portfolio of her work, as well as her agent’s contact info. And the agent seemed all too happy to spill the details when he went to her office and introduced himself.
“Sam, is it?” asked the agent, a sharply attractive woman in her late thirties. The quick up-and-down glance she sent in his direction seemed to say she didn’t mind giving the hairy eyeball to a strange man, despite the rock on the ring finger of her left hand.
“That’s right. I had to leave in a hurry — I was on call that night — and I didn’t have time to get Felicia’s number. But then I Googled her and got your contact information, and — ”
“Say no more, Sam.” Another arch look. “Normally I wouldn’t do this, but since I know Felicia regretted not getting your number…” She lifted her shoulders, then bent down and retrieved a pen from her desktop. “I don’t think she’ll mind too much.” With a flourish, she scribbled a phone number on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” he said, and gave the paper a quick glance before shoving it in his jeans pocket. Now no matter what happened, he had the number committed to memory. “Do you mind if I tell her where I got her number?”
“Not at all.” Her lips curved under their layer of expensive lacquer. “Just let her know she can thank me later.”
~ * * * ~
The phone rang, and Felicia muttered a curse. Always at the wrong time. Just as she had finally gotten that damned flesh tone right….
After shrilling for what seemed like an interminable stretch of time, the phone went quiet. Thank God for voicemail. It was so much easier to ignore a call when you didn’t have to listen to an answering machine broadcasting a message.
She set her brush down on the tray at the base of the easel and reached up to knead the tight muscles at the base of her neck. Vaguely, she realized it had gotten to late afternoon without her even noticing. The quality of light had changed enough that she knew she should stop working. Oh, she’d paint under artificial light if she had to, but she was getting really close now. No point in screwing up the painting just because she wanted to sprint across the finish line.
The phone rang again, and Felicia felt a spasm of guilt. Most people knew to email her instead of calling, but what if it was the nursing home trying to get hold of her for some reason?
When she picked up the phone, she heard the fast dial tone that indicated she had a message. She typed in her access code and waited, back tense with misgivings. Ever since her mother’s diagnosis, she’d steeled herself for the inevitable phone call, the one she dreaded and yet, in some dark little corner of her soul, wished would come sooner rather than later.
No brisk nurse’s voice or cool doctor’s tones came to her ear, however. Instead, she heard the baritone of a man she thought she’d never encounter again.
“I’d say you were a hard woman to find,” Sam’s message ran, “but you’re really not. Your agent gave me your number. Want to try again without a time limit?” Then he left her a phone number.
He sounded relaxed, casual, as if he weren’t the one who had pulled the disappearing act. Her first instinct was to erase the message without even writing down his number. But what would that prove? She’d already admitted to herself that the guy had gotten under her skin. And he’d been interested enough to track her down through Lauren. His actions spoke of a certain tenacity she found admirable. There could have been a perfectly logical reason for his hasty departure from the speed-dating party.
She was done painting for the day, anyway. And what better way to celebrate her new contract for the governor’s portrait than to go out to dinner with the first man she’d found remotely interesting in longer than she could remember?
Well, when you put it that way…. She grinned, then played back the message so she could write down Sam’s number.
Buy at Amazon • Buy from All Romance Ebooks • Buy directly from Pink Petal Books
All content © Christine Pope and may not be used without permission.
