“And, by the way, where did you go last night?” Guy had not stayed in the suite, thank gods.
Guy shrugged his brows. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” He strolled off as if making a dramatic exit from a stage.
“Idiot,” Tommaso mumbled and then headed back inside to face Charlotte.
~~~
Charlotte had left the table the moment Tommaso returned, telling him with a sharp tone that she’d see him back out on the golf course after he was done eating. “And I paid the bill,” she had snapped.
Too distracted by the room full of people eating delicious phlegm chowder—Dear gods, the horror!—Tommaso didn’t stop Char from walking out. After seeing her very unwelcoming expression, he realized he needed a few moments to reformulate his plan of attack. At least until Ashli, the Goddess of Love, arrived to save the day.
In the meantime, though, what the hell could he do? Charlotte wasn’t the least bit interested in him and seemed to value the fact that he wasn’t making any moves.
Annnnd, lest you forget that she’s brokenhearted over being rejected by your best friend and you’re now having evil blackouts. That last part was cause for concern, but at least his act of defiling the soup had been harmless.
He left the restaurant, shaking his head at himself. Until Ashli arrived, he would have to try to make some headway with her. On his own.
If she doesn’t like being chased, perhaps she will enjoy chasing. It might make her feel in control, being in the driver’s seat, pursuing a man.
The only problem was that he was a man. A man who was used to going after what he wanted and being in control. He’d have to get her interested in him, enough that she’d do the pursuing.
But this breed of subtle seduction was a skill women excelled at, not men.
What have you got to lose, man?
CHAPTER TEN
Matchmakers, Inc., Headquarters.
“Dear gods, woman! How you torture me!” From his desk on the fourteenth floor in downtown L.A., Zac stared across the stretch of gray carpet at Tula as she emptied the contents of her file cart into the new cabinets they’d installed this morning. What started out with a few hundred immortals looking for their special someone had turned into thousands overnight. Most of them hopeless cases. They had everything from ancient cantankerous vampires to lonely sex fairies to a crusty putrid Maaskab who’d already flipped teams. Dear gods—do they think I’m a mate-magician? There were limits to even the Universe’s powers when it came to finding love for the truly unlovable. In either case, Immortal Matchmakers, Inc., was officially over its head in work. They’d have to hire more help and start throwing a hell of a lot more singles parties. The good news was, however, that his and Cimil’s punishment would be over much faster. The moment they matched one hundred immortals with mates, they’d be given back their powers and allowed to return to their realm.
Tula ignored Zac’s comment as usual and continued with her wholesome filing work, in her long wholesome flowery pink skirt and long-sleeve pink blouse that blocked every bit of delicious cleavage he knew she had hiding underneath.
Zac groaned as she did absolutely nothing provocative or sexy. “Can’t you at least pretend to be completely slutty and into me?” That might temper his urge to seduce her. “After all, I am shirtless—for your pleasure, of course—so it’s only natural for you to want to show your gratitude.”
“Eww…no.” She shot him a look. “And I already stripped down to my undergarments on Friday—a humiliating experience, by the way—just to get you off my back. It didn’t do squat, as you pointed out.”
“Yes, but I also suggested you get naked. There’s still hope it could work.” Although, he doubted that would quell his urge to tempt her either, now that he thought about it. Merely seeing the petite woman in her giant granny panties had given him cause for an emergency jerk-off in the men’s room.
“No,” she snapped, continuing with her duties. “And shouldn’t you be focusing on finding your mate? ’Cause she’s not me. That’s for sure.” Yes, Tula had been sitting in the summit meeting when he’d had that brief moment of panic, wondering if he wasn’t beginning the journey to evil himself.
He felt all better now.
Zac leaned back in his black leather ex chair. “What if I give you Sundays off? To get off. With me, of course.” They worked seven days a week in this office because when you were immortal and serving a work sentence, who gave a fuck about weekends?
Tula mumbled something that sounded unpleasant beneath her breath and continued sliding beige folders into their alphabetical slots.
“Sorry? Didn’t catch that,” Zac said. “Were you saying that you’re finally coming to your senses and want me to deflower you?” He crossed his big awesome arms over his very chiseled bare chest, which women found irresistible. “My large cock and I can go all night, in case you were wondering.” He smiled, waiting for her to blush as usual. “In fact, consider yourself lucky your boyfriend dumped you before you handed over your virginity—his little weenie would’ve lasted all of a minute and then you’d be living your life with that wondrously underwhelming memory.”
“That’s it!” Tula threw down the pile of folders in her arms. “I’ve had enough, Mr. Zac.” She stomped over to her desk, which was only a few feet from his, right in the middle of the large room. She opened her desk drawer, grabbed her extremely large flowery purse, and marched toward the elevator doors.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She repeatedly jabbed the call button before turning around. “I’m quitting. That’s where I’m going!”
“Quitting?” He stood from his desk. “Why the hell would you do that?” He’d hired her after she’d begged him for a job. Okay, technically Cimil hired her, but he’d agreed to let her stay because she’d said she needed the money to finish college. And if there was one thing he couldn’t resist, besides tempting people, it was helping them. The gods were hardwired that way. Assisting humanity, deploying their divine gifts, trying not to go crazy because the world was such a fucked-up place and so were they—that was a deity’s gig.
Tula stared at him, her big innocent blue eyes tearing up. “You think I am just some thing—a toy—for you to play around with? You think that my broken heart is a joke? Well…well…fuck you! Mr. Badass God!”
Zac’s jaw dropped. “Did you actually just use the F-word?” She never cussed.
“Uh-huh. That’s right,” Tula continued. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! You’ve ruined me. Turned me into a dirty-mouthed, disrespectable woman who will never be able to face her mother again! Are you happy now?”
“Uhhh…is this another trick question?” Of course he wasn’t happy. He didn’t like seeing her upset one little bit, actually. A total shocker. He never cared.
Tula opened her mouth to speak, but then snapped it shut and huffed. The elevator chimed and the doors slid open.
“Tula, wait! Don’t leave.”
She stepped inside and then turned and faced him. “You’re the worst god on the planet. I hope they never give you back your powers,” she said as the doors closed.
Words failed Zac. But what shocked him more than the fact that she’d used a bad word, wished him ill, and quit was how much her anger towards him stung. He felt…he felt…well, frankly like he’d lost something important.
What? You’re a jackass. She’s just a human. A tiny insignificant human who prides herself on things that do not matter. Purity, goodness, those were things only fools believed in. He’d seen seventy thousand years of human evolution to know that. Sooner or later, mortals grew up. They had sex—some for love, some to satisfy hormonal needs, some for survival or procreation—and through the course of their lives, they became intimately familiar with joy and triumph, failure and pain. Mostly pain. Things, such as cuss words or maintaining one’s public image, became irrelevant, fading away as the human began to grasp the pure and simple fact that being alive was a messy affair. As it was meant to be. Like a gian
t puzzle where if one was lucky, a few precious pieces fit together. The rest was…well, chaos. Random. Different paths colliding as billions of people played out their lives in this world.
Those who remained fixed and rigid in their ways, who denied themselves the simple pleasures and moments of joy offered to them, including fucking—okay, and chocolate—were missing out. Because for humans, life was short. And certainly too short to worry about making the entire world happy or trying to make others think one was respectable. Hell, he’d never once heard a person proclaim on their deathbed that they wished they’d fucked less or used less profanity. Hell no. It was the other way around. Humans always said that they wished they’d been braver and said what was truly on their minds. They wished for more time with the people they loved. As for romance, one Scotsman he’d watched die over a hundred years ago said it all with his final breath, “I wish I had plucked every one o’ mi dear Betsy’s feathers. But nay. I gathered but a handful. No’ even enough to stuff a pincushion.”
Zac sighed. Ah yes. Words to live by. And he couldn’t waste his time trying to make mortals like Tula see the light. Waste of godsdamned time.
Then why are you so fucking upset?
The cell phone on his desk rang, disrupting his very important and divine epiphany. “What!” he barked into his phone.
“Don’t ‘what’ me, you giant twat,” said the deep voice on the other end of the phone.
“Votan, always a displeasure,” Zac said.
“Shut it. I need a favor—and stop calling me Votan.”
“I’ll start calling you Guy when you stop acting like a two-thousand-year-old.” Such a juvenile.
“Just remember, Zac, you need my vote when it comes time to lift your banishment.”
Bastard. “What do you want?”
“I need you to track down Ashli.”
“Ha! I knew it was only a question of time before Emma lost interest in you.”
“Idiot. It’s not for me; Tommaso needs help with his woman.”
“Tommaso? Why didn’t you say so?” Just because Zac had had to put Tommy into jail didn’t mean he’d pass up the chance to help the man; putting Tommaso in jail yesterday morning really had been for the poor guy’s benefit anyway. He didn’t want Tommaso turning into a full-blown Maaskab and running off and killing people. Then the gods would’ve had to execute him. Now at least he had a chance at getting his life back.
Whoa. What’s happening to me? It wasn’t like him to be so compassionate.
“Make sure Ashli gets to Palm Springs by tomorrow,” Guy demanded.
“Tomorrow? No can do. Last time I spoke to her, she said she’d be ‘unplugging’ and spending time with Máax and her baby. No deity business unless it was a matter of, and I quote, ‘the world is fucking blowing up. Again.’ This is not that.”
“Convince her. You are, after all, the God of Temptation, so fucking tempt her.”
“Although I thoroughly enjoy the tempting game since it’s part of my nature, may I remind you that I do not actually possess any powers at the moment. And why do you even care what happens to Tommaso? The last time you spoke of him, you were cursing the Universe because he still lived.” Yes, yes. Zac had heard the spiel at the last summit meeting about Guy helping Tommaso because he’d vowed to be his guardian, his very own freedom being the collateral. But Zac didn’t buy one word of it.
There was a long pause before Guy replied, “My interests in Tommaso are none of your business.”
“Of course they’re not. I simply enjoy knowing about anything that causes you angst. It gives me great pleasure.” And if he had to guess, Guy was only doing this to appease his mate, Emma. Gods, this has to be killing him. Guy hated Tommaso with a passion.
“Fuck you, brother. Find Ashli. Get her to Palm Springs by tomorrow. Make sure she knows she is to help Tommaso capture Charlotte’s heart.”
Zac nearly choked on his tongue. “Did you say Charlotte?”
“Yes.”
“Andrus’s Charlotte?”
“Now you are catching on.”
What the hell was happening? Good turning evil, evil turning good, immortals rejecting mates, and now this?
Zac ran his hands over his very silky head of awesome black hair. “Fuck.”
“This is what we are hoping for,” Guy pointed out.
“Indeed. I will call you if anything comes up.”
“Excellent. And brother?” Guy asked.
“Yes?”
“You’re still an epic asshole for what you did to Kinich and Penelope. But if Emma had belonged to someone else, even one of my brothers, I am finally beginning to understand that I would’ve turned the world upside down to have her.”
In other words, he understood that Zac had done everything in his power to win the woman he loved, including playing dirty.
Only now, Zac knew he never truly loved Penelope. He could only remember the want, the desire, the need to make her cross the line and want him.
It wasn’t like that with Tula. I want…I want…I want her to see the good in me.
Fuck! “I gotta go,” he said in a panic, ending the call and running for the elevator. “Tula!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
While making his way to the eighth hole, Tommaso carefully rehearsed what he would say to Charlotte. First, he’d have to do a little groveling for continuously cutting out on her. Second, he’d need her to start seeing him as a sexual object, one to be exploited and used and sucked and ridden hard, day and night, and…
Who the fuck are you kidding? That was his fantasy. And thinking about doing those things to Charlotte instantly sent blood rushing to his cock.
He looked down at his orange and white plaid shorts. Well, that’s not obvious. He pulled his shirt hem over his enormous bulge and started thinking about unsexy things such as Cimil. And her horrible unicorn. And that basement full of moaning clowns.
His dick began flagging. There, that’s better. But the moment he spotted Charlotte’s sweet womanly figure off in the distance, her back to him, he couldn’t help but get excited again. Godsdammit!
He was about to stop walking to try to deflate the randy bastard again when something struck him as odd. Or, more accurately stated: wrong. It wasn’t so much the way Charlotte stood, but something about the rigidity of her posture. Almost like, almost like when a small animal realizes it’s been spotted by a wolf. There’s this moment of stillness where it can’t decide if it should run or remain perfectly still, hoping it was mistaken about being seen.
That was exactly how Charlotte stood. She even had her fists balled as if readying to fight.
“Charlotte!”
She didn’t move, and whatever she was looking at, just up over the ridge, was out of his line of sight.
Fuck. His bodyguard slash military training kicked in, and he started running as fast as he could, all the while his brain going into defensive planning mode. There were no weapons anywhere nearby, but Charlotte had the golf bag about thirty feet from her, containing a whole hell of a lot of nice heavy clubs. Shit. Did he go for her or for the clubs first?
“Charlotte! Run!” he screamed. He hoped she might turn around, see him sprinting in a raw panic, and then give him a look—a scowl or a frown or something to indicate that his imagination had gotten the best of him.
But that wasn’t what happened.
He screamed her name again, but she remained frozen about fifty yards away, staring off at something that clearly terrified her. And yes, she was most definitely within earshot because a small group of golfers up ahead and off to the right had all looked in his direction when he’d yelled.
The soft grass making it impossible to run any faster, Tommaso yelled once more. Useless.
I’ll go for her first, he decided. Ten yards. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five… He grabbed her from behind and was about to shove his body in front of hers, but she yelled and twisted her body in such a way that their feet became entangled. They both went down in a mes
s of arms, legs, and a loud crack, with Tommaso landing right on top of her.
Charlotte’s body went limp, and he immediately scrambled off her. He got to his feet and looked around, searching the horizon for whatever had immobilized her. There was nothing there. Not that he could see.
He glanced down at Charlotte, who lay there unconscious, a bloody rock about the size of his fist to the side of her head.
“No, no, no!” He kneeled down to discover a wound on the back of her head. How had this happened? He’d been trying to protect her.
But from what?
With my luck she was just daydreaming. And then he’d tripped on top of her and cracked her skull open.
Two men in white golf shirts and baseball caps came running over. One of them screamed back to their caddy to call for help.
Tommaso had already removed his shirt and began applying pressure to the wound.
“What happened?” one of the men asked.
“She fell,” Tommaso said.
“But we saw you running for her,” one guy said.
“And then you tackled her,” added his companion.
Just then, three more men came up, all wearing blue jumpers with the resort’s logo on the front. They were supposed to be gardeners, but Tommaso knew those straight backs and clean cuts.
Uchben.
They started herding the men away, saying that they’d already called for medical assistance.
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