Totally Spellbound Read Online Free PDF Page A

changed. He no longer believed that
the imposter King of England, John, and his henchman, the Sheriff
of Nottingham, had created poverty all by themselves.
    In fact, over the years, Rob had come
to realize that the Bible was right; the poor would always be with
us.
    That didn’t mean a man had to stop
trying to help them.
    He still robbed from the rich to give
to the poor, but now he did it legally, through charitable
corporate entities that he’d set up over the space of decades. And
now the rich pretended to enjoy the privilege, believing they would
get a return on their dollar.
    They rarely did.
    He pushed papers aside on the Lucite
desk that some designer had thought would be a pleasure to work on,
and pulled his plush chair away from the window.
    Outside, the Vegas strip winked at him
— its bizarre architecture ruining the view of the mountains that
he’d had when this office was built sixty-five years ago. The
desert had its own stark beauty: the browns of the sand, the greens
of the cacti, and the subtle whites and grays of the mountains in
the distance.
    He used to love the clear
air, the way that the land met the horizon so softly that they
seemed to blend into each other. But over time, the air had become
the most polluted in the nation, the buildings had destroyed the
view of the horizon, and the city had sprawled so far across his
lovely desert that he couldn’t find a comfortable place to fly his
falcon any more.
    Rob sighed and adjusted the window
tint to dark before he sat down. Now he tried to avoid the Vegas
office as much as possible. He worked out of New York and London
whenever he could. The cities were what they had always been:
centers of commerce, places where humans congregated, places where
he would never consider setting his falcon free for a
hunt.
    The office itself looked
stark and foreboding in the shaded morning light. The plants, all
some form of desert succulent, seemed faded, the furniture that
horrible see-through stuff that he’d been meaning to replace for
some time.
    Even the rug’s geometric
design—a black triangle bisecting a gray square—irritated him. He
just couldn’t justify a remodel on an office that he used only
three times a year.
    And unfortunately, this
was one of those times. Vegas cooled to 102 degrees at night—if 102
degrees could be called “cool” (and he supposed it could,
considering the temperatures were 115 during the day)—and was the
warmest place on the planet this side of hell.
    Even though he hadn’t
lived in England full-time since the nineteenth century, he still
considered himself an Englishman at heart, and Englishmen preferred
their cool nights to have a bit of ground fog, a touch of rain, and
temperatures below 55. Anything else was a complete and utter
abomination.
    He sighed again. Perhaps
the exercise and sleep hadn’t improved his mood. It was still as
foul as it had been yesterday evening when John had kicked him out
of the office and told him to take care of himself.
    As if on cue, the door
opened, and John Little poked his head in. The man was hideously
misnamed. He was six-seven and two-seventy-five when he was trim,
and he wasn’t always trim. He’d gone on the Atkins Diet a few years
ago, saying it reminded him of the Good Old Days, and had lost
about fifty pounds, making him seem less like a treehouse and more
like a tree.
    The name John
worked—although over the centuries he had sometimes called himself
the Irish version, Sean, and occasionally (always under duress) the
French Jean. He’d use different variations on Little, too—sometimes
opting for Petit and sometimes for Pequeño.
    He’d had fun with his name
in ways that Rob couldn’t. Even though John Little had lived on
through the mythology as Little John, the name wasn’t nearly as
recognizable as Robin Hood.
    “You don’t look happy,” John said as
he stepped inside. He crouched as he did so. While the other doors
in the building had been redone to accommodate