4. Chapter 4
Alaric
Robin stared at me out of the back door of the Three Rs next morning. I’d chosen to ring the bell, not walk in, although I still had the spare key. He frowned and didn’t step aside, looking self-assured despite the casual clothes that replaced his suit. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m scheduled to start at eight, aren’t I?”
“It’s ten past seven.”
“I’m an eager beaver.” When his frown didn’t ease, I added, “I figured you’d be here.” I held out the key, as evidence of my goodwill.
Robin took it, hesitated, then swung the door wider to let me past. “I didn’t expect you to show up at all.” He closed the door behind me, reached as if to reset the alarm, and then sighed. A scorch mark surrounded the panel Barnes had fried with his magic and the box hung dead. “Crap. I’ll have to replace that.”
Robin wore loose jeans and a tidy dark-blue Henley with the Three R’s logo on the breast pocket. Deep shadows surrounded his eyes, and I wondered how he’d slept. His hair was its usual perfection, though, and his chin was clean-shaven as ever. “How are your wrists?” I asked.
He shrugged and tugged his sleeves lower. “Fine. Already forgotten.”
“And how are you?” Harry queried him from the floor six feet behind us.
Robin jumped and whirled. “How did you get in?”
Harry preened his whiskers. “You can’t keep a rat out. Whatever do they teach you humans in school?” He glanced my way. “No intruders. No spells. No trouble. See you later.” One leap took him to the second shelf of a nearby unit, the next to the top level opposite, and he vanished from view.
Robin sighed. “You know, I’d almost convinced myself last night was all a dream.”
“Do you want it to be?” If I backed away from Robin permanently, and nothing jolted his memories, the Great Spell would make sure his recall faded. Slowly, and probably never completely, given the intensity of his exposure. But the Great Spell would convince him that magic was a lot less powerful than he’d imagined.
“No.” Robin met my eyes and jerked his chin up. “I have questions, though.”
He’d been silent the whole drive home from Barnes’s place, so unlike himself I’d worried. I'd tried to persuade him to let me come in, let me take care of his cord-bruised wrists or at least explain, be a sounding board, let him yell, if nothing else. He’d told me to go home, though, in a tone that had no wiggle room. He’d looked distant, but not shaken to where I could ride over his wishes. So I’d gone.
I was glad to see him bouncing back. “I’ll try to have answers, but some of this is confidential. For my safety and for Harry’s.” I’d pressed that point home before I left him, but it bore repeating. “Remember the Upheavals?”
He frowned and nodded. Schools only taught a tiny fraction of what had happened in the 1990s when sorcerers and humans clashed out in the open, but there were enough deaths, especially among the sorcerers, to make my point. Enough prisons and torture and hunting folks down too. The Great Spell had softened human memories but the aura of disaster lingered.
I told him, “I’ll answer what I can, as long as you promise to accept when I can’t tell you more. As long as you keep Harry safe.”
“Of course!”
“Don’t tell people about the talking rat. Seriously.”
His lips twisted. “They wouldn’t believe me.”
I caught his gaze. “The wrong people would.”
“Ah.” That gave him pause. “Okay, I understand. But how do you know I’m not one of the wrong people?””
Putting my hand on his chest over his heart was a liberty, but he didn’t shake me off. Warmth seeped from his skin to mine through the thin cotton. “I worked for you for a week. You’re a great boss, fair but not soft, kind but not weak. You showed me who you are, day after day.”
“A guy too unsure to drop the suit and tie after a week?” He said it like a joke, but his eyes held a shadow of doubt.
“Hah. Unsure?” I let my hand trail lower. “I seem to remember being on my knees to someone who was very sure.”
That chased some of the shadows and he smiled. “I do remember that.”
“Vividly.” I plucked at the waistband of his jeans. “Now you’re out of the suit, and no less attractive. Do you think you can be just as bossy in a Henley?”
Robin gripped my wrist, trapping my hand against his hip. “Is that a challenge?”
“Well,” I said. “It occurred to me that the rest of the staff will be arriving in half an hour. We can talk while they’re out here working, but I prefer dropping to my knees without any risk of an audience.”
The pleased sparkle in Robin’s eyes was reassurance I’d urgently needed. I haven’t lost him. He glanced around, and I wondered if he liked the idea of being sucked off right here in the midst of his retail domain. But when I made a move to kneel, he tugged on my arm. “Not here, tempting as it may be. Let’s head to my workshop.”
We walked side-by-side through the half-lit store. The six inches of air between his shoulder and my arm felt overheated. I was regretting wearing my tightest jeans for him.
“So is this a one off?” he asked as we passed the lighting fixture section. “How long will you stay?”
“I promised you two weeks’ notice, and I’ll keep that promise. I work for myself, so I have flexibility.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m a PI. I find people, check out things, do background investigations, stuff like that.”
“With magic?”
I’d made the decision not to keep him in ignorance, back this morning when I’d shaved twice and pulled on these jeans, instead of heading to my own office. “Sometimes. But I’m good with computers. Most of the background stuff is online.”
We paused outside the workshop door. He set his hand on the knob but didn’t turn it. I wondered if he was thinking about the cabinet and Kimber’s Death Rites .
I said, “I promise, the cabinet’s gone and the book as well, burned to a crisp. A couple of our people sifted through the ashes once the fire was out and there was nothing left. You’re safe.”
“Thank you.” He swung the door open. “I’m still not quite sure what happened.”
“Apparently Magnus Fairborn found a copy of an evil book.” Robin didn’t need to know the title. “He stored it in the cabinet with powerful protection spells. But he put a backdoor shortcut into the lock spell. Three drops of blood from the same person, placed on one of the doors. It’s a known technique. If he was incapacitated, he could give someone else the book that way. You triggered the backdoor accidentally.” Or the book induced you to trigger it. I’d mention that option later, when his exposure wasn’t so raw.
“Oh! When I cut my knuckle, then knocked on the cabinet with the bleeding spot, and then sliced my damned finger.” He eyed the scab on his fingertip. “Did the book make me do that so it could escape? I’m not usually clumsy.”
He wasn’t slow, my Robin. At least he also didn’t sound too creeped out. “Maybe. We’ll never know. Anyway, from then on, the door opened for you. Unfortunately, the cabinet also lost its camouflage spell when you opened it. That’s why Barnes and his demon’s scrying spell could finally locate the book.”
“Scrying?”
“A magical way of finding things, a spell that shows you where something or someone is hiding.” Usually, the sorcerer needed a physical connection to scry with, a scrap of the original or something that had touched it. I wondered what link to the Death Rites the demon had used. Hopefully, whatever it had been was burned now. “I gather they’d been looking hard since Fairborn died, but the cabinet’s spell hid the book until you triggered the lock.”
“Were you looking for the book too? Is that why you took the job here?”
I couldn’t deny that. Honesty was best, anyway. “Yes. We knew some of Fairborn’s stuff was sent here, but the cabinet hid from me, too, until yesterday.”
“And Barnes came for it last night.” He gave me a sharp look. “Beating you to the treasure by minutes. Were you going to steal the armoire yourself?”
A wry smile seemed like the way to go, although Robin didn’t smile back. “Not last night. I was going to try some opening spells. If they didn’t work, then theft was on the table later, yes.”
Robin nodded, his jaw clenched. “I guess I understand why. Was Barnes a black sorcerer?”
I frowned, remembering our interrogation of the hissing, struggling demon-ridden sorcerer. “Barnes had done landscaping work for Fairborn, and spied on him. He was always low-powered, little more than a hedgewitch, and hungry for more magic. Not black magic, necessarily, but he wasn’t picky. When Fairborn died, one of the demons he’d summoned escaped and seduced Barnes with offers of power. The demon wanted the book but didn’t know where it was, and they couldn’t find it till you broke the lock yesterday. Once they were able to scry for the location, they recruited his nephew and came here to get the cabinet and its contents.”
“What would they have done with the book?”
I shuddered. “We probably don’t want to know. Luckily, the lock shortcut was tuned to you by then, and they couldn’t open the cabinet. The demon had a spell prepared to sacrifice Barnes’s poor nephew next, if that axe didn’t break through.” The runes had been written on the shed floor, waiting for a human’s heart-blood. They might’ve worked.
“Did you ever find him? The nephew, I mean.”
“Yes.” Miriam had Barnes's nephew at her house right now. While I rarely condoned erasing memories, that young man would be both happier and safer without some of his. Not even Miriam had the strength to wipe them all clean, but a little tweaking from “possessed, magical uncle who was trapped by a demon” to “weird, deluded uncle who died when his shed burned down” would do the job. “He’s going to be all right,” I told Robin. “Will need some recovery time, though.”
“I bet.” Robin gazed around the workshop, his eyes distant. “I have other questions. Things I want to know, later…” But before I could become too worried about what he was thinking, he reached behind him, locked the door, and fixed a much keener stare on me. He drew himself up to his full height and crossed his arms. At a skinny five-foot-two, that should’ve been humorous, but somehow he managed to fill an imposing amount of space. “Right now, Alaric, I believe you said something about me still needing to seem the boss in jeans and a Henley?”
My dick gave a denim-strangled twitch at the tone in his voice. “Yeah, I did.”
“Any doubts I need to lay to rest?”
It should’ve been ridiculous— that short young man in glasses peering up at me, arms folded across his chest, chin up, ready to give me orders. Instead, it was the hottest thing I’d seen since… well, since the last time. “No doubts. Maybe plans.”
Robin’s wicked grin lit his face. “I make the plans, Alaric. And I think it would be a good plan for you to show me just how talented your mouth is. In case I’ve forgotten.”
Just my mouth? I wanted to turn and lean on the workbench and drag down my jeans. But the other staff were arriving soon, I had no condoms, and a sore ass wasn’t the best way to start an eight-hour workday. Plus, I truly wanted another taste of Robin with his dick down my throat and his hands in my hair.
So I went to my knees, there in front of my boss, and raised my head to meet his eyes. For a moment, the heat leaping from his gaze to mine faded to something else, something softer and more tender. I realized I wanted to explore that too, to figure out how we fit together when sex wasn’t the only thing on the table. I had two weeks to convince Robin to date me for real.
He reached down and ran a finger along my jaw. I turned my head and kissed his fingertip, and the sound he made was soft and pleased.
But courting Robin was something I wanted to give time and thought. Right now, here on my knees, I had no problem with a bit of fun, starting with the best blow job I could deliver. I locked my hands behind my back, licked my lips, and looked Robin in the eyes. “Tell me what to do, Mr. Forrest.”
Let the boss-employee games begin.
##### the end ####