“What, that you’ll go broke, or that I eat like a horse?”
“Both.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out some bottled water. Just watching him do something so simple, seeing the width of his shoulders and the way his biceps strained against the dark sweater he wore, was enough to set my body throbbing. Goddess, if I couldn’t handle standing a few feet away from him, I was doomed.
I cleared my throat and forced my mind toward something that had nothing to do with having him take me right there on the kitchen floor. “Did you know this place was haunted?”
At that question he shut the refrigerator door abruptly and turned back toward me, eyebrows raised. “What?”
“It’s haunted by a ghost named Mary Mullen. Died of diphtheria, sounds like. She’s been hanging around here, trying to find her husband and her children. You’ve never seen her?”
Connor was staring at me as if he’d never seen me before. Maybe he hadn’t. Not really. “How do you know that?”
“It’s my talent. I’m surprised your spies didn’t tell you that.”
“He didn’t — I mean, no one ever mentioned it.”
I was sure the “he” in that sentence had to be his brother Damon, but I let it slide. At least Connor hadn’t bothered to deny that the Wilcoxes had been collecting information on me.
“So you talk to dead people?” he asked.
“Yes, I communicate with earthbound spirits, if that’s what you mean by ghosts,” I said primly.
Once again, he didn’t rise to the bait. “That’s interesting. And no, to answer your previous question, I’ve never seen her. No cold spots, no personal items moved around, no nothing. Not that my talent is conversing with the spirit world.”
“And what is your talent, Connor?”
A cloud seemed to pass over his face, but then he replied, his tone casual, “Nothing so spectacular, I assure you.”
“Well, it has to be pretty good, to be able to hide the fact that you’re a warlock.” It was something that had been troubling me ever since I realized he’d managed to hide his true identity from me so well. Normally, I should have sensed that he was a member of a witch clan from the very moment I met him, even if I couldn’t have known he was a Wilcox. But I’d felt nothing. He’d seemed like a civilian to me…up until the moment he bent down to give me the consort’s kiss.
Voice even, he replied, “That wasn’t me. That was Damon’s spell.”
“Damon’s quite the multi-tasker, isn’t he? Any other little tricks I should know about?”
He gave a humorless laugh. “A few. But I don’t think we need to talk about that now.”
“Fine,” I said. I could tell from his expression, the tight set to his jaw, that he wouldn’t appreciate any prodding on that subject from me. “But we do need to talk, don’t you think? I mean, last night you said we would ‘hash this over in the morning.’ Well, it’s almost noon, and you haven’t said much of anything except to tell me where the bagels are.”
Surprisingly, he said, “You’re right. Take these” —and he handed the white paper bag holding the sandwiches to me— “and I’ll get some plates and water and stuff.”
The first floor of the apartment was pretty much open-plan in style, except a few closed doors that might be a guest bath and a coat closet. The dining area sat just on the other side of the bar of granite that acted as a sort of separator from the kitchen, so I went there and settled myself in one of the heavy wooden chairs. Like the table, they were simple, almost rustic in appearance, but that didn’t fool me. I’d spent too much time shopping for furniture recently not to know that they, like almost everything else in the apartment, had not been cheap.
Connor came out of the kitchen carrying a couple of glasses and a bottle of Evian water, along with some brown earthenware plates. He set everything down at the table, then seated himself across from me. Probably just as well that he didn’t sit directly beside me; one brush of his knee against mine under the table, and I would’ve been in serious trouble.
After he sat, he busied himself with pulling the paper napkins and the sandwiches out of the bag, not really looking at me as he set a sandwich wrapped in white paper down on my plate. “I didn’t know what you’d eat, so I got you smoked turkey with provolone. Hope that’s okay.”
“It’s fine,” I said. The bagel notwithstanding, I was ravenous. Probably my body trying to make up for all the energy it had lost last night through stress and sleep deprivation.