"How long are you going to keep up this farce, Georgie?" His words were a challenge, trying to draw me out. "You can't honestly think you have a future with him. Or that you two can stay chaste forever. For Christ's sake, even if you can keep your hands off him, no human male's going to stay celibate for long. Especially one with a large fan base."
"Did you miss the part where I said it's my business?"
Heat rose to my cheeks. Despite knowing better, I'd recently gotten myself involved with a human. I wasn't even entirely sure how it had happened since I've always gone out of my way to avoid that kind of thing. I guess you could say he sort of snuck up on me. One moment he was simply a warm and comforting presence at my side; the next I realized how intensely he loved me. That love had blindsided me. I hadn't been able to resist it and had decided to see where it might take me.
As a result, Jerome never failed to remind me of the potential disaster I courted daily in this romance. His opinion wasn't entirely unfounded. A small part of this was because I didn't have a good track record with serious relationships. The larger part was that doing much more than hand-holding with a human would inevitably lead to me sucking away some of his life. But hey, all couples have their stumbling blocks, right?
The demon smoothed down the jacket of his perfectly tailored black suit. "Just friendly advice. It makes no difference. I don't mind if you keep playing house with him—denying him a future, a family, a healthy sex life. Whatever. So long as you keep up the good work, it's all the same to me."
"Are you done with the pep talk? I'm late."
"One more thing. I thought you might like to know I just made some arrangements for a pleasant surprise. One you'll like."
"What kind of surprise?" Jerome didn't really do surprises. Not good ones, at least.
"Wouldn't be a surprise if I told you, now would it?"
Typical. I scoffed and turned away. "I don't have time for your games. Either tell me what's going on or leave."
"I think I'll leave. But, before I do, just remember something. " He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around to face him again. I flinched at his touch and his proximity. The demon and I were not as buddy-buddy as we had once been. "You only have one man who's a constant in your life, only one man you will always answer to. A hundred years from now, he will be dust in the earth, and I will be the one you keep coming back to."
It sounded romantic or sexual, but it wasn't. Not in the least. My tie to Jerome ran deeper than that. A binding and loyalty that literally went straight to my soul. A connection I was bound to for all eternity, at least until the powers of hell decided to assign me to a different archdemon.
"Your pimp routine is getting old."
He stepped back, undisturbed by my rancor. His eyes danced.
"If I'm a pimp, Georgina, what's that make you?"
There was an ostentatious poof of smoke, and Jerome disappeared before I could reply.
Fucking demons.
I stood alone in my apartment, turning over his words in my mind. Finally, remembering the time, I headed for the bedroom to change clothes. As I did, I passed Horatio's certificate. Its gold seal winked up at me. I flipped it over, face down, suddenly feeling queasy. I might be good at what I did, but that didn't mean I was proud of it.
I ended up only being about fifteen minutes late for my friend Peter's shindig. He answered his door before I could even knock. Taking in his billowing white hat and KISS THE COOK apron, I said, "I'm sorry. No one told me Iron Chef was being filmed here tonight."
"You're late," he chided, waving a wooden spoon in the air. "So what, you win an award and think you can forget all about propriety now?"
I ignored his disapproval and swept inside. It was the only thing you could do with an obsessive-compulsive vampire.
In the living room, I found our other friends Cody and Hugh sorting large piles of cash.
"Did you guys rob a bank?"
"Nope," said Hugh. "Since Peter's trying to provide us with a civilized meal tonight, we decided a civilized pastime was required."
"Money laundering?"
"Poker."
From the kitchen, I could hear Peter muttering to himself about a souffle. It sort of diminished my image of a bunch of shady characters huddled around a backroom card table. "I think bridge would be more appropriate."
Hugh looked doubtful. "That's an old-person's game, sweetie."
I had to smile at that. "Old" was kind of a relative term when most of us could boast centuries. I had long suspected that among my circle of lesser immortals—those who were not true angels or demons—I had more years than any of them, never mind the optimistic claim of being twenty-eight on my driver's license.
"Since when do we even play games?" I wondered aloud. Our last attempt had involved a game of Monopoly with Jerome. Competing with a demon in a struggle for property and ultimate control is kind of futile.
"Since when don't we play games? Games of life, games of death. Games of love, of hope, of chance, of despair, and of all the myriad wonders in between."
I rolled my eyes at the newcomer. "Hello, Carter." I'd known the angel was lurking in the kitchen, just as Peter had felt me coming down the hall. "Where's your better half tonight? I just saw him. I thought he was coming too."
Carter strolled in and gave me one of his mocking smiles, gray eyes alight with secrets and mirth. He wore his usual transient ware, ripped jeans and a faded T-shirt. When it came to age, the rest of us couldn't even compare to him. We had all once been mortal; we measured our lives in centuries or millennia. Angels and demons…well, they measured their lives in eternity. "'Am I my brother's keeper?'"
Classic Carter answer. I looked to Hugh, who was, in a manner of speaking, our boss's keeper. Or at least a sort of administrative assistant.
"He had to take off for a meeting," said the imp, stacking twenties. "Some kind of team-building thing in L.A."
I tried to imagine Jerome participating in a ropes course. "What kind of team building do demons do exactly?"
No one had an answer for that. Which was probably just as well.
While the money sorting continued, Peter made me a vodka gimlet. I eyed the bottle of Absolut on his counter.
"What the hell is that?"
"I ran out of Grey Goose. They're practically the same anyway."
"I swear, if you weren't already an abomination before the Lord, I'd accuse you of heresy. "
When all the money was sorted, including my contribution, we sat around the vampires' kitchen table. Like everyone else in the known world right now, we started playing Texas Hold’em. I could play okay but fared far better with mortals than immortals. My charisma and glamour had less effect on this group, which meant I had to think harder about odds and strategy.
Peter scurried around during the game, attempting to play and watch his meal at the same time. It wasn't easy, since he insisted on wearing sunglasses while playing, which then had to be removed while he checked the food. When I commented on how this would be my second fancy dinner in two nights, he nearly had a fit.
"Whatever. Nothing you had last night will even compare to this duck I've made. Nothing."
"I don't know about that. I went to the Metropolitan Grill."
Hugh whistled. "Whoa. I wondered where you got the glow from. When a guy takes you to the Met, you can't really help but put out, huh?"
"The glow's from a different guy," I said uncomfortably, not really wanting to be reminded of a tryst I'd had this morning, even if it had been pretty hot. "I went to the Met with Seth." The memory of last night's dinner brought a smile to my face, and I suddenly found myself rambling. "You should have seen him. He actually didn't wear a T-shirt for once, though I'm not sure it made a difference. The shirt he did have on was all wrinkled, and he couldn't really tie the tie. Plus, when I first got there, he had his laptop out on the table. He'd shoved everything else aside—napkins, wineglasses. It was a mess. The waiters were horrified."