Page 64 of Stags

“Oh,” he said. “I like fantasy.”

“Well, this is fantasy romance,” she said.

“Uh huh,” he said. “So, you women have just taken over all the things, haven’t you? What are these books like? She’s got the sword, and he just watches her kill things and then is like, ‘Oh, baby, it makes me hot when you’re violent?’”

“You sure you don’t read this genre?” She picked up a book, the first book in a series that had been out for a while, but that she had been thinking about trying. “I’m thinking about buying this.”

“I’m buying it for you,” he said.

She looked up at him. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, as a friend thing,” he said. “Friends buy each other books, right?”

“I don’t think friends do that.”

“Sure, they do.”

“WHAT DO YOUeven do?” Athos was saying, dunking one of his fries into ketchup. “Like, for a job?”

Tawny wasn’t sure why she’d approached him. She wasn’t sure if she wasn’t two seconds away from punching him in the nose, really. The sex had been hot. She had liked it when he took charge like that. She’d never been with a guy who would really and truly honestly do that. Calling him ‘sir’ had been incredibly sexy, but she was embarrassed to admit that. Thinking that just because they’d been good together naked meant they could have lunch together was probably stupid, though. “I own an event-planning business,” she said.

“Seriously.” He ate a fry, nodding at her. “I should have expected something like that.”

“You said you were a lawyer,” she said.

“Yup,” he said.

“What kind of lawyer?” she said. “You do a whole bunch of dramatic closing arguments?”

“Uh, no. I do mostly estate law and inheritance stuff,” he said. “Pretty much never on the inside of a courtroom. Very dry stuff, lots of paperwork, nothing even remotely dramatic.”

She smiled, not really having expected that answer from him.

He propped himself up on an elbow. “You shouldn’t get to know me, actually. I’ll disappoint you. I’m not how you think I am, not really.”

“You said something like that before,” she said.

“It’s true.” He picked up another fry. He surveyed it. “I never did anything in bed like what we just did.”

“We weren’t in bed.”

“Right,” he said. “So, uh, tell me about event planning.”

“Well, I don’t do a lot of the actual events,” she said. “I started out that way, planning the events themselves. I was working for a different event-planning company, and I realized what I wanted to do was to do what my boss did, which was to go out and schmooze and convince people to hire an event planner and then match the right event planner to the right person.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“Yeah, a lot of times, people hire someone who’s really talented but just isn’t right for the job. People have different styles, and it’s really easier to put together two people who mesh than it is to try to make the event planner mesh her style to the person who hired her. No one does their best creative work when they are self-censoring.”

“Makes sense,” he said, nodding. “So that’s what you do, then.”

“I recruit clients. I find them the right event planner. And then I stay with that process, checking in to make sure that everything is going smoothly throughout. The client pays me, and I pay the event planners, but I only keep a small percentage, like a finder’s fee. I’m good at what I do, though, so I do pretty well for myself.”

“I bet you do,” he said.

“Are you a good lawyer?”

He ran his forefinger over the tip of one of his antlers. “I’m adequate.”

---