Sympathetic Magic(27)
“I don’t want easy,” he told her. About a million thoughts were raging in his head, foremost among them the desire to drive to Prescott, find this Clay person, and punch him in the face. Hard. But that wouldn’t solve anything, would only make matters far, far worse. “Margot needs to realize that just because Clay was a cowardly prick, it doesn’t mean every man who’s interested in her is.”
“No, you’re definitely not cowardly,” Rachel agreed. “But you don’t have much frame of reference, either. You see things going fine for Connor and Angela, and maybe in the back of your head you think it should be the same for Margot. The problem is, Angela was barely a prima before her entire world changed. She doesn’t see why there should be an issue with her splitting her time between here and Flagstaff, because she hasn’t spent the past ten years being available whenever the people in her clan needed her. But Margot has all that history, and it’s not going to go away just because you want it to.”
Put that way, the prospect of getting Margot to change her mind did seem fairly daunting. But there had to be a way. He wasn’t going to give up that easily. “Okay, I understand that,” he said at length. “But she has to understand that history isn’t necessarily destiny.”
“True,” Rachel replied. “And I wish you luck in convincing her of that. In fact,” she added, as Lucas heard the front door to the apartment open and muffled voices coming from the tiny entry, “you can start right now.”
And as Lucas began to frown at her in confusion, he saw Rachel’s “friend” Tobias and Margot come around the corner of the dining room, and realized what Rachel had been planning all along.
6
To tell the truth, if she hadn’t been so on edge after her “date” with Lucas, she probably wouldn’t have accepted Rachel’s invitation to dinner in the first place. But when Margot had stopped by for a brief chat during her rounds, Rachel had made the offer, and at the time it sounded infinitely better than a Saturday night home alone with a book and a bowl of soup.
Now, though, Margot paused in the cramped dining room just outside the kitchen and wanted to flee. Because there was Lucas, leaning casually against the counter as if he’d done so a thousand times, watching as Rachel made Mexican rice. His gaze slid over to Margot, and she realized that, even though his posture looked relaxed, he was anything but. He hadn’t been expecting this, either.
“Hello, Lucas,” she managed to say, and the slow smile she’d already come to recognize spread across his lips.
“Hi, Margot,” he returned. “Guess you couldn’t resist Rachel’s barbacoa, either.”
Just the right note, friendly and unconcerned, as if the two of them meeting like this was something that happened every day. Margot could feel Tobias’ gaze on her and wondered how much he really knew. It seemed clear enough that Rachel had some idea of what was going on between Lucas and herself, with information probably supplied by Angela. Whether Rachel had said anything to Tobias, Margot wasn’t sure. Then again, Lucas might have mastered the art of appearing as if he didn’t have a care in the world, no matter what might be going on around him, but she wasn’t sure she was quite that skilled. She could have given something away, even while thinking she had everyone around her fooled.
“Do you need help with anything, Rachel?” she asked, hoping the words didn’t sound too strangled.
“Not at all,” Rachel replied. “The table’s set, and Tobias will help me get everything transferred over. Lucas, there’s a bottle of wine on the sideboard. Do you mind opening it? The corkscrew’s in the middle drawer.”
“Sure,” he said, pushing off from the counter where he’d been leaning and coming into the dining room. Luckily, the sideboard was on the opposite side of the space from where Margot stood, so at least he didn’t have to brush past her to get to it.
Tobias went on into the kitchen to assist Rachel, and so Margot found herself strangely at loose ends as she lingered in the no man’s land between the dining and living rooms. She watched Lucas head toward the aforementioned bottle of wine, extract the opener from a drawer in the sideboard, and begin to extricate the cork. Since Tobias and Rachel were clattering away in the kitchen, Margot decided it was safe to speak.
“Since when do you make a habit of having dinner with Rachel McAllister?”
“I don’t,” he said easily, twisting at the corkscrew. “But we had a few things to talk about.”
Margot had a pretty good idea what those “things” were. Casting a quick glance toward the kitchen, she replied in an undertone, “Why can’t you just let it go?”