Chapter 6

I WAS STILL FEELING A BIT DISORIENTED TO SAY THE LEAST when I went in to work the next morning. It actually hadn't been all much past ten when the Devil dropped me off the night before, but I hadn't been able to sleep for hours. I even wrote an entry about my experiences in my private blog, hoping it might help me to set down the evening's events. To say I just had the craziest birthday ever is probably an understatement, but it was. I'm still trying to process what happened, to understand how someone like me, Christa Simms, Ms. Ordinary, could have had dinner with the Devil. Wow, that looks even worse written out. I wanted to not believe him at first. But that trick of transporting us halfway across town in the blink of an eye? Not something I could easily ignore. And when I tried to come up with "plausible" explanations for what had occurred, they just didn't work. When your explanations are so convoluted that they start to sound crazy, too, then it's generally easier to take something at face value, even if your brain really doesn't want to.

The really insane thing, though, is that I enjoyed myself. Maybe I shouldn't have, but who would have thought the Devil could be such a gentleman? And fun. And amazingly good-looking, and...

Uh-oh.

I have a feeling this is going to get complicated. Then I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for what

seemed like half the night before I finally dozed off. It didn't help matters much when I got into my car the next morning and found myself staring at the fuel gauge in bewilderment. I could have sworn that it was getting close to empty; in fact, I'd made a mental note a few days earlier that I'd probably have to get gas on Wednesday. But there it was, the needle just a hair past full. Trying to win my affections with free gas? I thought,

then shook my head and carefully backed the car out of the garage. There wasn't a lot of room between it and the building, so even though I'd been doing the same thing for almost two years by that point, I still took it easy. Then I climbed out of my car, and shut the garage door and locked it.

I was running a few minutes late, since my sleeplessness of the night before had led to some definite sluggishness that morning, but I doubted anyone would notice. Most of the magazine's staff tended to be late-morning people. I got in around eight-thirty most days, and the only person who arrived before me on a regular basis was Marta, the receptionist, who had to be there so she could answer the phones starting at eight. It was a good morning if anyone else showed up much before nine o'clock. I liked having that time to myself at the start of the day; it allowed me to attack whatever bits and pieces might have come in after I left the afternoon before. Besides, the one good thing about getting to work before my boss was that she didn't have a clue about what time I actually did show up.

The art department had produced a few layouts late in the day — they were waiting in my in-basket after I let myself into my office. Michael, the art director, and Jesus, his assistant, rarely appeared before ten o'clock, but they also usually stayed until at least six or seven, depending on what sorts of deadlines they had breathing down their necks.

Yeah, I know — Jesus — very funny. But I didn't name the guy.

Anyway, I logged the layouts as being turned in and then went to put them in the feature editor's inbox. As I was walking back from his office, Marta called out to me.

"Hey, Christa! Delivery for you!"

Mystified, I turned and made my way over to the receptionist's desk. An enormous bouquet of roses in a cut- crystal vase sat there, almost obscuring Marta's bright red hair.

"These just came," she said.

Of course, the roses were my favorite kind — the creamy ivory type with deep red edging along the petals. There had to be two dozen of them — no lightweight baby's breath helping to fill the vase here. Just glorious roses, so many I could smell them from a few feet away.

Marta was looking at me with a mixture of envy and curiosity. Certainly, no one in my dating past had ever shown any evidence of being this extravagant.

I saw a cream-colored card almost obscured in the masses of flowers. I didn't want to open it in front of Marta — not when I was fairly certain who had sent the flowers — so I only smiled and said, "Thanks, Marta. I'll just get these back to my office." And I scooped up the vase and hurried away before she could start asking any questions.

Once I was safe within the confines of my own office, I plucked the card off the little plastic holder and sat down in my chair. With fingers that trembled just a little, I ran a fingernail under the envelope's flap and opened it. The card inside was the same plain ivory stock, so the black writing on it stood out plainly.

Thank you for a wonderful evening. I'll call you soon. The only signature was a scrawled "L." For Lucifer?

My phone rang. I jumped and dropped the card. Heart beating a little more quickly, I leaned over and looked at the display on the phone. All it said was that it was a wireless caller, with no number shown. Still, I had a pretty good idea of who it might be.

Strange how I could identify his voice right away after only one evening spent in his company. "Do you like the flowers?"

"They're — they're gorgeous." All the normal questions, such as "how did you know those were my favorites?" or "how did you get this number?" seemed superfluous. Instead, I asked, "How did you find a florist that was open this early?"

"You have such a practical mind, Christa. I like that." He paused, and then said, sounding amused, "There's a place up on Crescent Heights that opens at eight."

"Oh."

Of course, I couldn't see his face, but somehow I got the impression he was smiling. "I wanted to know if you were available this evening."

Well, he was persistent. I'd give him that. "I can't go out with you tonight," I said.

"Why not?"

Because you're the Devil, I thought, but I only replied, "I can't go out every single weeknight — "

"What about this weekend?"

"I'm going down to Orange County to see my mother on Saturday."

"Friday, then?"

Resistance was obviously futile. "Oh, all right," I said. Besides, it wasn't as if I had anything else going on.

"I'll pick you up at seven. Enjoy the flowers." And he hung up.

I sat there for a minute, holding the handset and looking at it blankly, then replaced it in the receiver. It figured that my social life required the Devil's intervention to bring it back from the dead. Trying to force him out of my mind and not succeeding very well, with those amazing roses staring me in the face — I booted up my computer, then checked my email for any articles that might have come in the evening before. Several of our contributing editors worked freelance and emailed their Word files from home. I'd been expecting three and had only gotten one. Typical.

Still, that single article gave me something to work on. I opened Pandora on my Mac and chose a classical music station; I needed something to calm my nerves. After a while, I got back into the rhythm of things, tightening the prose, fixing some egregious run-on sentences. Seriously, you'd think some people never paid attention during their high school English classes.

Then I heard the voice of Jacqui, my managing editor, inquire in disbelieving tones, "Do not tell me those came from Danny!"

"Um, no," I replied.

She came around the corner of the desk, and looked from the roses to me and back again. "Spill," she said.

"Um...." I hedged. Luckily, I'd already hidden the card in my desk drawer, but still, it was fairly obvious that Mr. On- Again, Off-Again Koslowski wouldn't have sent me anything so amazingly beautiful. Or expensive. "I sort of met someone."

"Oh, thank God!"

I wasn't sure that was who she should be thanking, but I managed a smile.

Jacqui was about fifteen years my senior and generally treated me less as an employee than as the long-lost little sister she never had. Most of the time I didn't mind — in a lot of ways, we were closer than I was with my own sister. But it also made for some awkwardness in the workplace. For one thing, she'd never approved of me seeing Danny, and it wasn't just that he and I were on the borderline of the whole "employees shouldn't date other employees" policy. The magazine I worked for didn't have a big enough staff to justify a full-time on-site IT person, so we contracted with an outside company to handle our computing issues. That was how I'd met Danny in the first place — he'd come in to handle the upgrade of my older- generation iMac to a Mac Pro machine with a cinema display.

Maybe I was starry-eyed over my fancy new computer, and that was the reason I'd agreed to go out with Danny in the first place. But as time dragged on and it became patently obvious this was a relationship that was going nowhere fast, Jacqui had become more impatient with the situation.

"Dump him," she'd told me only a few weeks earlier, after he'd blown off yet another date. "I'll just have IT Solutions send someone else over here when we need service."

I pondered the surreality of getting dating advice from my boss, then shook my head. "I don't mind," I said. "We always knew it was going to be casual."

She gave me a dubious look. "If I were you, I'd stop wasting my time," she said. "You think you have all the time in the world, and then boom! You're thirty-five and wondering where all the good men went."

Harsh experience motivated her, I knew; she'd spent almost ten years in one relationship, always thinking that eventually they were going to get married, and then one day he'd come home and told her he thought it wasn't working out. Maybe Nina had the right idea. On the surface, women did seem to be a lot more reliable.

"So now you can dump Danny," Jacqui said, sounding very pleased with the universe.

"I don't know about that," I protested. "I've only been out on one date with this guy."

"One date, which just happened to be on your birthday?"

I didn't bother to reply. I knew she was going to read whatever significance she wanted into that particular fact.

"And then he sends you flowers the next day?" She pushed her glasses back up on her head and gave me a piercing look. "Where did he take you?"

"The Little Door," I said with a sigh.

"A-ha!" She looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary. "So what's this guy's name?"

"L-Luke," I replied. After all, he did tell me to call him that, even though I was having a hard time thinking of him as anything except the Devil.

"Luke what?"

Well, that was a good question. He'd never given me a last name. "I'd rather just leave it at Luke for now," I said.

For a minute, I thought she was going to keep prying, but maybe something in my expression told her she wasn't going to have any luck. "That's all right — you can keep your secrets if you want. But he sounds like a keeper to me."

Her comment made me want to burst out laughing. Somehow, though, I managed to maintain a straight face.

"He is very thoughtful," I said after a brief hesitation. That much was the truth, at least. Jacqui gave me another penetrating look, and shrugged. "Kick Mr. Koslowski to the curb," she pronounced, then departed, leaving me to stare at the roses and wonder exactly what I'd gotten myself into.