Free Totally Spellbound by Kristine Grayson

still liked
the fast-moving future, and hoped he would never stop liking
it.
    Except he could do without the heat.
Sweat ran down his face the moment he left the air-conditioning. If
he’d known the women would be late, he would have brought out a
bottle of water.
    He was waiting for the
Fates, and for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why they
hadn’t just popped in. He had been a bit stunned that they had
called him—who knew that those three women understood how to
operate a phone, let alone put it on conference call so that they
could continue their wacky one-two-three way of
speaking?
    He had been a bit freaked
out when he had taken the call in his office, and he would have
thought it was all a hoax, except that no one could mimic those
voices or that bizarre way they talked.
    They asked him for help, and he felt
that he owed them. He had bargained with them for Rob all those
years ago, and they had given in. They had never asked for anything
else in return.
    Until now.
    All they wanted, they had
said, was a meeting with Rob. They knew feelings were still sore
(their words), so they had come to John to have him set up the
meeting.
    He hadn’t set up anything. He just
told them to get here pronto. Then he’d take them to
Rob.
    But they hadn’t gotten here pronto.
Now it was half-past pronto, and they still hadn’t
arrived.
    And he was getting really
nervous. Had they moved him aside so that they would have some kind
of weird access to Rob without John around? And if that was the
case, why hadn’t they simply popped Rob out of his office and taken
him to their rather stately abode near Mount Olympus?
    John wiped the sweat off
his forehead and shifted his folded, lightweight suit coat to the
other arm. He was about to go back inside to page Rob and make sure
he was still in his office when a Mini Cooper pulled up to the
curb.
    A beautiful redhead leaned out and
asked if this was the address of Chapeau Enterprises.
    “Yeah,” John said, wondering if this
was part of the trick.
    “Great. Can I park here?” she
asked.
    He pointed to the parking garage
beneath a nearby building, and she waved merrily at him, thanking
him as she drove away. He squinted at the car. It was filled to
brimming, like a clown car. He saw too many heads for that tiny
interior.
    Then the car disappeared into the
parking garage, and he focused his attention back on the
street.
    Rob would want to know
where he had been and what he had been doing. John wasn’t sure he
wanted to fess up to talking to the Fates, let alone setting up an
appointment with them. He’d been Rob’s best friend, confidant, and
occasional head-knocker for centuries now, ever since they had met
near Sherwood Forest.
    Those years had been defining ones:
they had lived an adventure, not realizing they had magical powers,
and they had lived by their principles, something they lost briefly
during the Crusades, and something Rob had struggled to maintain
ever since.
    John liked the life they
were living now—they were operating on a grand scale compared with
the Forest—but he also knew that his friend was desperately
unhappy. The unhappiness had gotten worse over time as Rob had
realized how alone he was.
    He had always believed that no one
could substitute for Marian, and John agreed. Marian had been an
original, just like all the other women John had met had been. But
Marian had been suited to Robin, and he hadn’t given any other
woman a chance.
    Not in 800 years. Every hundred or so,
John tried to change Rob’s attitude.
    So far he hadn’t been successful, but
that didn’t make him stop trying.
    The redhead came out of the stairwell,
her arm around the shoulders of a young boy. The boy had
intelligent eyes and an air of magic around him that was so strong,
John felt it like a slap.
    Kids shouldn’t have that much power.
It was wrong. It wasn’t the way the world worked—or at least the
world that John understood.
    He was so focused on the kid that for
a