darling.” He noticed her visible flinch at the familiarity, and he tried not to react. Part of being able to indulge in his extracurricular activities depended on making sure people saw him as a spoiled brat who’d never grown up. And part of him was a spoiled brat who’d never grown up, so it wasn’t all that hard to pull off. “I know a lot about a lot of influential people with unusual problems, I should say.”
The waiter arrived to take their starter plates and replaced them with calamari salad. Theia picked up a set of little tentacles, holding them up in the light.
“Not a fan of squid?”
“Hmm?” Theia had popped the calamari into her mouth, and she chewed for a moment before responding. “No, I love squid. I was just admiring it. I love it when they include the tentacles instead of just the rings. They’re the best part.” She took another bite, this time with her fork. “So these unusual problems.” She paused to chew and swallow. “Shape-shifting.” She’d lowered her voice on the word. “It’s actually fairly new to me, so I’m not used to people talking about it so openly. Are there really a lot of them?”
“More than you’d suspect. The job of Smok’s consulting arm is making sure no one does suspect. Sometimes it’s literally cleanup—which I don’t do.” He showed her his hands—no calluses, manicured nails. “We have crews for that. People who don’t mind getting their hands dirty and who can be counted on to be discreet. We had a crew out to your sister Dione’s house a few months—”
“Ione,” Theia interrupted him with her mouth still partially full.
“Sorry?”
She swallowed and wiped her lips with her napkin. “She goes by Ione. It drives her crazy when people pronounce her name wrong, like you just did, so she dropped the D.” Theia paused, apparently only just registering what he’d said. “You were at her house?”
“Not me personally. Like I said, I’m not big on cleaning things. But we sent a crew at Rafe’s request to do some repairs after a certain dragon demon stomped around in her living room. And I understand his trigger was, well, fairly intimate.”
Theia reddened slightly. Dev’s transformation was reportedly triggered by sex and blood.
“My point is that responding to unwanted supernatural activity, whatever the trigger, by cleaning up after the fact may be lucrative, but it’s inefficient. At Smok Biotech, we develop technologies to suppress unwanted transformations. Among other things.” He figured any more information would just overload her if she’d only recently learned that shifters were real. “And people will pay a lot of money for that kind of control. Particularly people in the public eye. Entrepreneurs. Actors. Politicians. Imagine how the public would react if the president turned into a poison-spitting were-newt in the middle of a White House press conference?” Lucien glanced up with a smirk. “Bad example. He’s clearly not bothering to use our tech.”
Theia laughed again, her nose wrinkling. He definitely liked making her do that.
The main course arrived, and they were distracted for a bit by both the presentation and the flavor, truffle and fungus in wine sauce drizzled over the top of the perfectly grilled steak and an artful swirl of béarnaise surrounding mashed root vegetables with edible flowers on top. Lucien found he liked watching Theia eat food that delighted her almost as much as he liked making her laugh. But not quite as much as he was sure he’d like tasting her mouth the way she was tasting that filet mignon.
Lucien focused on his own food for a moment, trying to think more appropriate thoughts.
“So what is it you’d want me to do?”
He glanced up sharply, nearly choking on a mouthful of mashed turnip as he inhaled at the wrong moment. It would really be something if she had to return the favor from the wedding reception by performing the Heimlich maneuver on him.
“At the lab,” Theia clarified, eyeing him suspiciously. “Why do you need me?”
Managing not to choke, Lucien set down his fork to take a drink of mineral water. “We have an excellent staff of researchers but only a handful of lab techs who know the full extent of what we do. I thought it would be good to have someone on staff that I don’t have to hide things from.” Not those things, anyway. He’d gotten used to hiding everything else. “And you’d be well compensated,” he added. “In case that wasn’t clear.”
“You want me to be a lab technician?”
“More than just a lab technician. I mean, that, too. But...” He hadn’t really thought about how he was going to broach the subject of her gift. They’d talked around the reputation of the Carlisle sisters, but he hadn’t actually mentioned clairvoyance outright. “Someone with both technical and esoteric knowledge would be invaluable. Someone who could make...educated predictions of the likely outcomes.”
Theia’s body language had loosened up significantly over the course of the meal, but in an instant she was back to being stiff and tight and on guard.
“Sorry, did I say something wrong?”
“What exactly is it that you think I can do, Mr. Smok?”
Oh, crap. He was Mr. Smok again.
“I...understood you had oracular powers.”
“Oracular.” Her forehead creased with irritation. “You think I can see the future. That I can just look into my little crystal ball and tell you how Smok stock is going to do tomorrow.”
“Well, not exactly—”
“Who told you I had these oracular powers?”
Lucien was beginning to feel uncomfortable under her gaze. She might not have oracular powers, but he was starting to think she could burn a hole in his family jewels with those eyes.
“It’s common knowledge in the community. The magical community.”
“And the magical adjacent, of course.”
Lucien shrugged helplessly. “Sorry. I’ve obviously stepped in it here, and I’m not really sure how.”
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Smok.”
“Fire away.”
“Do you and your kind think my sisters and I are some kind of magical Pez dispensers? Is there a creep board out there on the internet somewhere, some ugly little masculinist corner of the deep web where you guys swap stories about how to hit on magically gifted women?”
Lucien nearly choked again at the word masculinist.
“I’m not sure what you think my kind is, but I think you’re taking my interest the wrong way.”
“So you don’t want to sleep with me to get your magical rocks off.”
Something in her words made him snap, like a percussion grenade had gone off inside him. “Listen, sweetheart, if all I wanted to do was sleep with you, I wouldn’t have wasted the company money on a fancy dinner. I would have just done it, and right about now is when you’d be gathering your clothes and making your exit so I could roll over and go to sleep.”
Theia pushed back her chair and stood, her napkin falling to the floor. “Thank you for the dinner, Mr. Smok. Enjoy rolling over and sleeping next to your hand.”
Still suffering the effects of the mental percussion grenade, he wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened, but it was both delightful and painful to watch her walk away in those heels and that skirt.
Theia ordered a car on her way outside, and in fifteen minutes she was back at Phoebe’s ranch house yanking off the skirt and kicking off her shoes and grabbing a startled Puddleglum for a forcible cuddle in the papasan chair by the picture window.
Who the hell did