Totally Spellbound Read Online Free PDF Page B

rose, with pale skin and dark hair and
even darker eyes. “She was too amazing to be pretty.”
    “Amazing.” John smiled
approvingly. “So you chatted her up, used the old Hood charisma,
and wrapped her around your little finger, right?”
    “Of course not,” Rob said.
    “But you at least got her number,
right?”
    “Number?”
    “As in telephone number?” John said.
“You know, the way people in the new millennium do it?”
    “I liked the old millennium,” Rob
said.
    “Then I take it you didn’t get her
number,” John said.
    “Why would I?”
    “Because she’s the first woman that
interested you in eight hundred years.”
    “That’s not true. There was
Charise.”
    “Two dinners, a goodnight, and a thank
you? Four hundred years ago?”
    “Her parents scared me
away.”
    “They just wanted to meet
you.”
    “They wanted me to marry
her.”
    “Dating wasn’t a common
thing in the early sixteenth century.”
    “I know.” Rob wanted out of this
conversation. “I lived through it, remember?”
    “That’s what we were discussing,” John
said. “You didn’t live through it. You floated through
it.”
    “Says the man who has
never made a commitment in his entire life.”
    “I’m committed to causes, not
women.”
    “Well, so am I,” Rob snapped, hoping
his tone would close the door on the conversation.
    “What happened to the man who said you
couldn’t have a cause without a woman to support it?”
    Rob glared at him. Even after all
these years, he hated discussing Marian. And John was wrong. Rob
had been involved with other women, and not just Charise (whom he
always brought up to irritate John). He’d known several widows who
wanted nothing more than he had—some companionship, some shared
times, and a warm bed.
    Then there was that dancer
in Paris in the 1920s—the only woman he’d lived with since Marian.
She’d been interesting, and the entire fling had felt
daring.
    But he wasn’t a fling sort of man. He
was monogamous. In fact, he was a one-woman kind of man.
    The only problem was that
his one woman had shown up—and died—at the beginning of his very
very very long life.
    The conversation had to end. It was
making his sour mood even darker. He was going to change the
subject.
    But John got there first. “Were you
afraid of her?”
    “Go to work, John,” Rob said. “Get out
of my office.”
    “Because it seems like you
were if you didn’t get her number. Tell me you at least got her
name.”
    “Out. Now.”
    Judging by John’s
expression, it was good he no longer carried a staff, or he would
have thwacked Rob on the head with it. “You should’ve at least
gotten her name.”
    “I could fire you.”
    “It hasn’t worked before.”
    “I can still whup you,” Rob
said.
    “Right,” John said. “With the help of
security.”
    Rob smiled for the first time that
morning. “Whatever it takes.”
    John smiled back and eased out the
door, closing it gently behind him. Rob stared at it.
    John knew him well. Rob was afraid. He
wasn’t afraid of dating or seeing a new woman or even spending time
with a companion.
    He didn’t mind meeting someone
new.
    He was afraid of something
old.
    He wasn’t going to give his heart to a
mortal again.
    He wasn’t going to go through that
kind of grief ever again.
     

 
     
Six
     
    Someone stood beside her. She could
hear him breathing. And he smelled of waffles and scrambled eggs.
Bacon, too. And coffee. Oh, how she wanted coffee.
    Megan opened her eyes. A man in
uniform stared down at her. He had lovely blue eyes, fringed with
long black lashes, a zit on his right cheek, and stubble beside it.
His cap was a little too big, settling on the back of his head as
if it were glued there.
    He held a tray in one hand.
    “I’m sorry,” he said as if he’d
repeated it more than once. “But the kid has
disappeared.”
    Kid? What was a man,
wearing a uniform and holding a tray, doing in her bedroom? And
what did he mean by kid?
    Megan