Masked Possession. Alana Delacroix

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СКАЧАТЬ she laughed. The sweet sound hit him like a punch.

      Slow down, brother. Take yourself in hand. He’d seen the woman for a total of seventeen minutes. No need to worry about wedding bells yet. He glanced at her again, noticing how her long lashes cast a shadow on her high cheekbones.

      “Do you agree?” Julien asked.

      Eric looked at the golden skin on Caro’s long throat and didn’t even answer.

      “I said, do you—”

      “That sounds good,” Stephan said hastily. “We’ll hear from you by tomorrow at noon, then? We’d like to keep this quiet, obviously. Can you come by the house?”

      “Oui, pas de problème.” Julien made a note on his tablet, refusing to look at Eric. “Let me walk you out.”

      They stood to leave and Eric took on the Alex masque that he had arrived in. Stephan nodded politely, but Eric wasn’t going to miss a chance to touch Caro, even if it was nothing more than a formal, professional hand shake. She stepped back as he approached her and Eric frowned.

      “Something the matter?” he growled.

      “It’s, ahh…” She turned to Stephan as though appealing for help.

      “You shifted out of your Alex masque,” Stephan accused, his blue eyes narrow. “Did that happen without you noticing?”

      Shit. That shouldn’t happen. He glanced down, wondering who he was. The clothes still fit, but with convergence, it was possible to take on physical traits from multiple masques. Stephan’s comment about ending up with four heads was based on a very possible outcome. Dread swept through him.

      “Eric,” Caro said softly. “You’re Eric Kelton.” Again he admired how perceptive she was.

      “Then I have to apologize,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “Most people would much prefer to shake hands with Alex. I made him to be quite charming.”

      She held out her hand and gave him a long look that made his heart pound. “Is that so? A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kelton.”

      Her handshake was firm, the skin soft. He gave it a quick shake and dropped it almost before it was polite. A strand of her hair had fallen out of her tightly tamed hair and he had to fight a ridiculous impulse to tuck it behind her ear.

      Remember, he told himself as he turned around to become Alex again. You’re not interested. You can’t be interested.

      It still took every ounce of his self-control not to check to see if she was watching him leave.

      Chapter 5

      Caro and Julien spent the rest of the day hammering out the plan for Eric Kelton. Julien was so pleased at landing Eric as a client that he forgave Caro the cardinal sin of lateness, compounded by the secondary sin of coming up with the winning idea in front of the client. He much preferred his staff to get ideas and convey them in private, allowing him to “refine” them before presenting the concepts as his own.

      It was good to be working because creating the actual scheme distracted Caro from the topic that was uppermost in her mind. Namely, the exceedingly gorgeous Eric Kelton. He wasn’t what she’d expected from a masquerada. Had she flirted with him? Maybe. It didn’t matter. Not only was he a masquerada, but he was clearly not interested in her. Remembering how he’d dropped her hand as if she was on fire made her want to bang her head against the desk in embarrassment. She must have been clutching at the poor guy’s fingers like some sort of obsessive fan girl.

      It wasn’t that he was influential. She’d met more than one celebrity at both the Post and JDPR and had realized they were regular people. People with entourages and fancy cars, but still mere individuals with no more right to deference or obsequious kowtowing than anybody else.

      Yet Eric fascinated her, and she told herself firmly that it was only her curiosity that was aroused. What kind of a man had such incredible determination that he could live not one, but two public lives, not to mention all the others? Why did he choose those masques? Was he after fame? Money? Anonymity? Or something else? Man, he must have great time-management skills, she thought irrelevantly.

      Forget it. He was a masquerada. She was going to do her job, and do it well, but that was it. Thinking about his motivations, or about him in general, was asking for trouble. Masquerada were captivating by nature—their gifts of mimicry always drew people in. Look at her own parents, her poor father enthralled by the novelty of her mother’s parade of masques, finally leaving only when he realized he’d never know the real woman. Perhaps, Caro now thought, there hadn’t even been a woman to know. How could her mother become all those others without constantly fragmenting her own self? At the end, what would be left?

      Caro leaned back and let Julien’s chatter wash over her as she stretched, then pulled herself out of her chair to walk to the window. JDPR was on the top floor of a small building near King Street and she could see a glint of blue water and a plane taking off from the island airport when she looked south. She thought of sunny vacations and beaches, even though chances were good the passengers were on their way to get bitten by the black flies in Thunder Bay.

      “What about a night cruise?” Julien’s voice came from behind her.

      Caro nixed that instantly. Thanks to the attack in the Washington alleyway, she couldn’t bring herself to leave her apartment after dark. The moment the sun started to set, the need to make sure she was inside, and safe, became overpowering. It kind of put a damper on her social life. She didn’t care about that—she didn’t actually have a social life—but she didn’t want to parade her weakness in front of Julien.

      Estelle brought in some sushi for their lunch, winking at Caro as she passed over a cup of burning-hot green tea. After sorting through the Styrofoam containers for his order, Julien pushed aside his laptop and mixed wasabi into the dark brown soy sauce he poured neatly into a tiny plastic dish.

      “Our new client seemed taken with you, mon ange. I’d say be careful, but everyone knows he doesn’t appreciate statics. I doubt he’d ever be with a half-blood like you, lovely though you are. Too good to associate with outsiders, I’m told, and more arrogant than the usual masquerada. That’s saying something. Did you see how he spoke to me?”

      A thrill rushed through her at the idea that Eric had noticed her as anything more than the PR flack who was going to haul his ass out of trouble. Caro immediately repressed it, reminding herself that she wasn’t interested in masquerada. She ignored the barb. Julien could be a real bitch when he tried. The compliment she also carefully pretended not to hear since he had been uncomfortably observant about her appearance lately. Instead, she said, “Statics?”

      “Mon dieu, I keep forgetting how ignorant you are of some of these things. Un bébé. Our new clients are masquerada, Caro.”

      She resisted an eye-roll. “Yes, Julien, I know.”

      “Then a static is someone who can’t change. A human. You are close enough to a static, since you don’t take on masques, or can’t.” He gave the end of his sentence a questioning lilt that she refused to react to.

      “Oh. Makes sense.” She found an avocado roll with her chopsticks and popped it in her mouth. She wasn’t in the mood for fish.

      “He’ll know you’re arcana, though. Everyone knows I don’t hire humans.” СКАЧАТЬ