Free Totally Spellbound by Kristine Grayson Page B

somewhere, and he looked almost feral.
    “Should I call security?” Rob
asked.
    “No!” John sounded
panicked. “I just want you to assure me that you won’t blame me
when—”
    The door shoved open the
rest of the way, and women piled into Rob’s office. But Rob wasn’t
looking at them. In the middle of the reception area stood a small
boy, and next to him was that woman.
    The beauty.
    He stood and started
toward her. She hadn’t noticed him. Instead, she was holding the
boy’s shoulders as if she were keeping him from something, and she
was watching the scene before her with something like
horror.
    Then the door slammed
closed.
    “Really,” John said again, “I’m
sorry.”
    And with that, he pulled the door
open, let himself out, and slammed the door shut again.
    Rob blinked twice, trying to figure
out what had happened. He had been looking at the beauty (was she
real?) and then the door slammed, John left, and three women stood
before him.
    Three very familiar women.
    Three very powerful women.
    The Fates.
    Rob had vowed he would never see them
again.
    “Get the hell out of my office!” he
snapped.
    “Robin,” Clotho said, “just hear us
out.”
    She did seem unusually tiny—he
remembered these women as being larger than the mountains
themselves—and she looked a little too ordinary in her pink blouse
and tight blue jeans.
    “The circumstances of our
visit are quite unusual,” Lachesis said.
    She was a redhead. He had
known that, but he hadn’t focused on it, not really. And she was a
well-proportioned redhead who knew how to dress. That cream-colored
blouse did wonders for her figure.
    But she wasn’t the redhead he was
looking for. That redhead had been outside the office.
    Hadn’t she?
    “We want you to listen before you jump
to any conclusions,” Atropos said.
    She seemed tiny, too, and
a lot more exotic than he remembered, with the heavy dark eyebrows
and black-black hair that was rare in this part of
America.
    “I don’t want any of you in here,” he
said. “I want you out this minute. I don’t care what you do to me.
You can imprison me for the rest of my life, just get the hell out
of my face.”
    “We know you’re angry,” Clotho said.
“But—”
    “Anger doesn’t begin to cover it.” He
couldn’t remain in the same room with these women. He pushed past
them, afraid he was going to be turned into a toad as he did, and
grabbed the door.
    Someone was holding it
closed.
    Damn Little John.
    “We asked him to spell the door,”
Lachesis said.
    “We knew you’d be difficult,” Atropos
said.
    “We know you’ve never understood our
position on the mortality of mortals,” Clotho said.
    “Or on the necessity of death,”
Lachesis said.
    “But we believe we can overcome that
little difference,” Atropos said.
    “And make an agreement that suits us
all,” Clotho said.
    Rob focused on them
again, mostly because he had no choice. “Little difference?” he
asked. “ Little difference? You let the only woman I’ve ever loved
die.”
    “We didn’t let anything,” Lachesis
said. “We just had to stop you from making a horrible
mistake.”
    “Horrible mistake.” His hands
clenched. “I’ve seen so much death over the years, and I’ve never
understood it. We have the power to reverse it, and you always get
in the way.”
    “If we still had magic, then we’d show
you why this is necessary,” Atropos said. “We’ve learned a lot in
the past few months.”
    “Months?” he repeated.
    “Yes. We learned about how difficult
it is to understand things you’ve never experienced,” Clotho
said.
    “I’ve experience more death than I
ever wanted to,” Rob said.
    “That’s not what we mean,” Lachesis
said. “We mean a lack of death. It’s happened before. Everything
gets out of whack.”
    “In fact,” Atropos said, “if I
remember right, you lived through one of the back-in-whack moments.
That plague?”
    “The Black Plague?” His head was
spinning. He was