Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut Read Online Free PDF

of a previous night spent partying. Additionally, also as usual, the overhang wasn’t evenly distributed. When Lee got into the office, she found that Gel had been there for an hour before her even though she’d come in early.
    Mass looked up from behind his plain dark desk inside their office’s little reception area as Lee pushed open the frosted glass door that said REH’MECHREN AND ENFIELD, LLP: LANTHANOMANCERS AT LAW. Massimo Alighieri had been with Lee and Gelert since a year after they started their practice, and had not changed even a hair’s worth in all that time. He still looked like a kid just out of grad school, lean, dark-haired, with huge dark eyes, a great aquiline nose, and a shock of untameable black hair that gave him the look of either a crazed composer or a mad scientist, depending on the time of day and the state of his blood sugar. Now, as Lee came in, he gave her a look that suggested the blood sugar was presently a problem. “Any messages.?” Lee said.
    “DA’s Office,” Mass growled.
    Lee flushed. “Oh no. Not—”
    “Yup,” Mass said. “But I think it was business. He didn’t look embarrassed.”
    “Hmm,” Lee said, and went on past, through the joint sitting area and into her office. It was spare enough, Lee having decided long ago to use the sheer size of the space to make whatever statements needed to be made to impress or reassure a client. Dark brown rug, the desk a six-foot by four-foot slab of goldstone with a tall-backed black leather chair behind it, and behind that, the commwall, Lee’s only indulgence—floor to ceiling, a considerable expense considering the height of the ceilings in this building. She opened up one of the storage cabinets faired into the wall, chucked her briefcase into it, and stood there brooding for a moment, wondering how long she could put off making the call.
    The wall opposite the commwall depaqued, and Gelert strolled in from his own office in front of a blast of noise. His office was as luxurious as Lee’s in its own way, including a matching commwall, but Gelert’s taste ran more to what Lee liked to annoy him by calling bric-a-brac—ten pedestals’ worth of ancient art, everything from Earth Minoan sculpture to Xainese iridium-glazed porcelain six thousand years old. The other indulgence was the sound system, which (along with its necessary soundproofing) had actually been more expensive than the commwall, and which now was thundering something symphonic: literally thundering. “What is that?” Lee shouted.
    Gelert sat down, and the sound diminished to a whisper. “Hovhannes,” he said. “‘Atmospherics.’”
    “Sounds like rain.”
    “That’s the next movement. Mass tell you who called?”
    “Yes. Why couldn’t you have taken it, if you were in?”
    “What,” Gelert said, “and deny you a chance for personal growth?”
    “Personal spite, you mean,” Lee said. “That’s about all I feel up for this morning. All right, fine, let’s get it over with.  Mass? ”
    “You don’t need to shout, I heard you…”
    The commwall in Lee’s office lit up in blue with the seal of the Ellay County DA’s Office—the un-Hoodwinked Lady, seated on the curule seat with scales and sword, and under it all, the single word HOLDING. “I bet his secretary answers,” Gelert said.
    “Be nice if that happened,” Lee said. “Somehow I doubt it will.”
    And she was right, for abruptly, there was Matt, looking, for him, unusually wrung out. Lee’s heart seized a little at the sight of him, a reaction that she suspected it was going to take her entirely too long to learn to control. Furious though she might be with him, heartsore and bruised though Lee might be, he looked no less handsome to her than he had the month before, and the urge to reach out and hold him and comfort him jumped right up in her as if the breakup had never happened. The reaction was infuriating, and unbearable, and she was just going to have to deal with it.