“Ms. Cox?”
“Karma, please.” Karma rose, smiling professionally at the walking Ken doll who’d entered her office with a fistful of Calla lilies. She suddenly understood what Brittany had meant. If anyone was ever too perfect, with every hair too perfectly in place and every plane of his face too perfectly sculpted, it was this man. She almost expected his teeth to sparkle when he smiled. “What can I do for you, Mister…?”
“Norris. Carlton Norris. You may remember my Aunt Regina.” He lifted the lilies. “These are from her. She’s very grateful for your help with her ghost problem. She’d been saying that house was haunted for years but I’m afraid none of my cousins took her very seriously.”
“I remember Regina. She was very passionate.” Karma came around her desk to accept the proffered flowers. “I suppose you were her one supporter?”
“Actually I was as bad as any of them.” He gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Until I saw a ghost for myself. Suffice it to say, it opened my eyes to a number of things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as life is too short to spend in a boardroom and if my aunt is right about her house being haunted, what else might she be right about? Like the fact that I should ask out the pretty proprietress of the company that saved her house.”
Karma gave him her most professional smile. It wasn’t the first time a former client had come by to say thank you, though it was the first time she’d had one try to pimp out her nephew in the process. “Mr. Norris, I’m flattered—”
“Before you blow me off, give me a chance to plead my case.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she didn’t date and usher him out the door when she drew up short. What kind of person had a unilateral policy against dating? A person with a stick up her ass. Damn it. She looked at the flowers in her hands. She couldn’t get back to work until she put them in water anyway. “You have five minutes to convince me.”
“I would have settled for three.” Carlton Norris smiled, all matinee idol teeth, exactly like she’d imagined. Then, as she found a vase and ducked into her washroom to fill it with water, he began itemizing all the ways he was the perfect catch—financially solvent, always opened doors for ladies and sent his mother flowers on Mother’s Day, and preferred classical music though he’d taken his little sister to her first boy band concert—which he argued should have qualified him for imminent sainthood, but all he was asking for was a date. He was charming, singing his own praises with a wry self-deprecation that struck precisely the right balance of pride and humility, and he even came bearing a letter of reference from his Aunt Regina, should she doubt his sincerity.
There was no good reason for her to say anything but yes—and still Karma wanted to say no. She could come up with excuses all day long—he was too perfect, too slick, too smooth—but the truth was, she simply didn’t want to go out with him. She felt nothing when she looked at him. But was that his fault? Or something defective in her? Had she buried her own libido under so many layers of inhibition that she didn’t even feel it anymore? Her reactions to Prometheus called bullshit on that last supposition. She just wasn’t attracted to Carlton Norris—though he was exactly the kind of man she should be dating. Stable. Steady. Reliable. Good.
“Come on, Karma. My aunt’s psychic says I’m exactly what you need.”
Since his aunt’s psychic was on her payroll, Karma couldn’t fault the information, but… “What about what you need?” And why did Mr. Perfect here need his aunt’s psychic to get him a date? There had to be a catch. But what if there wasn’t? What if he really was her perfect and psychically ordained match and Prometheus had her so primed to question every motive that she ruined her best chance at happiness?
“All I need is a chance. So what do you say? Give a guy a shot? It’s only dinner.” Carlton smiled winningly.
And Karma felt nothing. But she forced herself to smile back—even though she had no particular desire to spend an evening with him. “I’d love to,” she lied, to drown out the sound of Prometheus’s voice telling her to let her hair down. “How’s tomorrow evening?”
Carlton Norris left her office with plans to pick her up at seven and Karma tried to feel a giddy swoop of anticipation, but all she felt was a fierce determination to prove there were no sticks anywhere in the vicinity of her ass. She was going to let her hair down, damn it. If it was the last thing she did.
“I have presents for you.”
Prometheus burst into her office, five minutes early this time, and Karma frowned. She knew better than to trust a warlock bearing gifts, especially a punctual one. When he reached her desk, he pulled one hand from behind his back with a magician’s flourish. An odd silver charm that couldn’t seem to decide if it was a Celtic knot or a yin-yang sign dangled from the leather thong in his fist.
“This is to give you a focal point, something external to center your magic through so you don’t have to break down your fortress of solitude to work your magic, and this is to help you relax.” The other hand appeared, holding a giant, economy-sized bottle of Stolichnaya.
Karma glowered. “That’s your master plan to train me? Vodka?”
“It’s a time honored technique for helping people relax. Why fight history?”
“History has taught us that people are idiotic when drunk.”
“And? You could use some idiocy in your life.”
“I’m getting tired of you telling me what I need in my life.”
“Do you want my help?”
She ground out, “I do.”
“Then you need me in your life. And tonight, vodka.” He smiled, a curve of the lips that was almost feral, in no way resembling the perfectly civil curve of Carlton Norris’s perfectly civil lips. Karma felt something low in her belly stir. “Aren’t you going to look at your present?” He swung the charm, rocking it like a hypnosis aid from his long fingers.
“Set it there.” She wouldn’t touch it until she’d had a chance to test it for traps. Not that she thought Prometheus would actually hurt her—they’d gone beyond that—but manipulate her? That he’d do without blinking.
He spread it before her on the desk with a flourish and stepped back. Another man might have been insulted by her obvious mistrust, but Prometheus seemed to take it as a compliment. “Do you have ice?” he asked as he backed away.
“The freezer in the break room. Down the hall to the left.”
Then he was gone, taking his massive presence—and massive bottle of vodka—with him and leaving her alone with the charm.
It was an elegant piece of work, both physically and magically, layers of pressed metal and subtle tendrils of spells. Confidence and strength folded over focus and something else she couldn’t quite describe, though if she’d had to put it into words, she would have called it one-with-the-universeness, a sort of cosmic acceptance. She looked for booby traps, probing into the soft layers of spell, but found nothing suspect. Just clean, white magic. Not the slightest oily slick of dark. Even the leather thong was harmless. She brushed a finger over it tentatively, alert for any spells that activated at her touch, but nothing changed, no spell trap snapped closed around her. Had he really given her a gift to help her with no strings attached?
“Did I pass?”
She looked up to see him cupping a tumbler filled with ice in one palm while the other hand gripped the neck of the massive bottle.