me.”
Chapter Six
“I was expecting you
He grinned—another untamed, predatory flash of teeth that could almost pass for a smile. “I couldn’t wait another second.”
He seemed even taller than he had the day before—which was peculiar. He should have seemed smaller in the bright, expansive spaciousness of her office than he had in the cluttered, dingy surrounds of his shop. Perhaps it was seeing him in motion that made him seem larger than life. He’d been so still the previous night, but this morning he was a body in motion, testing every corner of her office, and her patience. He prowled the room, touching her things, trying to get a rise out of her.
“What are you doing here, Prometheus?”
“I’m so eager to be reformed I couldn’t wait a single day.” He flung his arms wide, throwing back his head. “I am your clay. Mold me into virtue.”
She arched a brow. “I’m not sure my skill as a sculptor is up to the task. The raw materials leave something to be desired.”
“I assure you I leave nothing to be desired. Thoroughness, that’s my motto.”
Karma did not blush. She was on her home turf. No amount of innuendo could fluster her. “I thought your motto was reckless endangerment in the name of freedom and fun.”
“Sounds wordy. Wouldn’t fit very well on a coat of arms.”
“Prometheus.” She made his name an epithet of impatience.
“Are you surprised I couldn’t wait until tomorrow? I only have two and a half months to live. I can’t waste days.”
So that was his new strategy. He was going to try to get her to budge on her terms by playing the my-life- is-about-to-be-cut-short card. He was on a clock. She could appreciate that. But her finders would be able to locate his heart in an instant and Rodriguez could doubtless summon the devil just as quickly. If Karma was indeed capable of impacting the link that connected him to the devil, curing him of his short lifespan shouldn’t take her and her people more than a single afternoon. It was hard to feel a sense of urgency.
And she might have had more sympathy for him if his predicament hadn’t been the result of his own terminal stupidity. Fatal recklessness.
“I suppose we can get started on your paperwork,” she conceded, feeling magnanimous—and hoping she could bore him into leaving. “Have a seat and I’ll get your packet.”
Karma rose, strode purposefully to the filing cabinets in the outer office—neatly organized thanks to Brittany’s boundless enthusiasm for menial office tasks—and collected one of the blank pre-hire packets. She returned to her office—half-expecting Prometheus to have commandeered the chair behind her desk—only to find he hadn’t obeyed her order to sit at all. Not surprising. What did alarm her was the fact that he’d managed to find the cabinet where she kept her personal family photos.
The interior of the carved cherry wood doors were lined with pictures of the people who meant the most to Karma. An intense feeling of exposure washed through her and she wanted to slam the cabinet shut on his fingers. Not that she hadn’t shown it to anyone else. Most of her consultants knew it was there. The only reason she kept it closed was because displaying personal photos on her desk diminished the professionalism of her space, but having Prometheus poking his nose in there was almost a violation.
“You don’t look anything like your father.”
He didn’t turn to face her as he said it, still staring into her personal life. Karma reapplied the starch to her spine and strode back to her desk. If she didn’t show him she was vexed by his invasion, he would move on to trying to annoy her another way, leaving her privacy private.
“Biologically, he isn’t my father,” she said with a matter-of-fact indifference she hoped would be the end of it. “We won’t bother with the tax forms since we’re merely trading services, but if you could fill out the first three pages—”
“That explains why your brother is so much darker than you are.”
“Jake is one-quarter African-American.” She tapped the packet on her desk, tidying the pages. “As you’ll see, everything is fairly straightforward—”
“Older or younger?”
Karma sighed. Apparently they were going to have a talk about her family. Lovely. “Older or younger what?”
“Is your brother older or younger than you?”
“Younger. Not quite three years. Any other trivia you can’t last another minute without knowing or can we get on with the paperwork?”
“I don’t do paperwork. So, did your mom get together with his dad after you were born?”
“Our parents met while she was pregnant with me and were married when I was four months old. The paperwork is necessary. Without it I won’t know how to best use your abilities.”
“‘Our parents’. So you consider him your father even though you share no genetic material. What about your real father?”
“He is my real father.” Karma grabbed a pen. If he wasn’t going to fill them out, she would fill them out for him. “Full name?”
“I don’t know your father’s full name.”
“
“I’ll give you my full name if you tell me about your real father.”
“That isn’t an even trade.”
“How about a more general swap? I will answer all your questions without evasions, if you do the same.”
Such an open-ended bargain sounded even more potentially hazardous, but Karma was secure in herself. She was private, but she had no secrets. Nothing she was ashamed of. As soon as he realized he wasn’t going to get to her with his questions, that knowing her history wasn’t going to give him an advantage against her, he would give up and by then she would have the answers she needed to place him. “Deal. You start. Full legal name.”
“Pro-me-the-us. Want me to spell that?”
“That’s really your legal name? Sounds like your mother and mine—”
“I had it changed. Legally.”
Curiosity sharpened to a knife’s edge, but Karma ignored it. She didn’t need to know why he didn’t want to talk about his mother or why he’d changed his name, what it had been before or when he’d done it. None of that was pertinent.
She wrote his name on the blank. “Contact number?”
“Trying to get my digits without paying your share, Karma? It’s your turn. Who was your real dad?”
“Darren Cox. I don’t know who got my mom pregnant with me and neither does she, but my father raised me.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Contact number.”
He rattled off the numbers. “You don’t want to know?”
“It doesn’t matter. I have a father.”
His mouth tightened and he turned back to the cabinet. “Your mom got around, huh?”
“She went through a phase in her twenties, trying to make up for the fact that she was still in middle school during Woodstock. What hours are you available to work?”
He shrugged. “Whenever. I don’t bother with a regular schedule at my store. It’s open when I want it to be. What do your parents do?” He closed the cabinet and began roaming again, hands in his pants pockets as his gaze
