Tall, Dark and Divine (23 page)

He said it so matter of factly, she could almost believe it. “My parents are school teachers. They live in Ohio.”

He smiled, and Annie added, “How old are you?”

“A lot older than you. But my perception of time is different. A day doesn’t feel like very much.”

“I’m noticing that, too,” Annie said, “the older I get. When I was a kid, a year felt like it was forever. Now it doesn’t.”

“And you’re only twenty-eight. Imagine what it’ll be like after a few thousand years.”

Imagine.

“So what kind of superpowers do you have? What can you do that a human can’t?”

“Pretty much the only thing I can do is make people fall in love,” Eros said. “That’s my gift and my job. And I need the bow and arrows for that.”

“Where are they?”

“I gave them to Dion. If he’s still outside, they’re there.”

Annie nodded. “Let’s go.”

“Really?” But he was already on his way up from the chair, French toast and champagne forgotten. He pulled a couple of bills out of his pocket and dropped them on the table—more than enough to cover the bill and tip.

“Yes. I love you, too. And I want to believe you. If you can prove it to me, I’ll marry you.”

He smiled. “Marry me, and I’ll prove it.”

“How do I marry you?”

“We go see Zeus,” Eros said.

“In the row house on Ditmars Boulevard?”

He nodded. “We bring a couple witnesses—Dion and Ari are outside—we tell him we want to get married, there’s a short ceremony, then we share a toast and it’s done.”

“No church wedding? No county clerk?”

“I don’t really exist,” Eros said calmly, putting a hand against her back to guide her across the lobby toward the outside, “so it’s difficult to do anything the normal way.”

“You exist.” And he was quite solid, thank you very much.

He grinned at her, as if he knew what she was thinking. Maybe he did. “You know what I mean. But let’s just worry about one thing at a time.” He stopped on the steps in front of The Plaza and looked around. “There’s Dion.”

Annie followed the direction of his gaze and saw the bartender from Dionysus’s Bar—or the god himself, if Ross was to be believed—hanging out by a park bench on the other side of the street, by the entrance to Central Park. A woman in an oversized trench coat with big sunglasses obscuring half her face was sitting on the bench, and it took Annie a few moments to recognize Ari under the disguise.

“I don’t see a bow and arrow,” she told Eros out of the corner of her mouth as they made their way across the street.

“They’re there. Next to Ari on the bench.”

Annie looked. There was nothing there.

“Morning, sweet cheeks!”

Dion greeted her with a wink as soon as they got close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice. “Don’t you look delicious today?” That dark gaze slid over her from top to bottom with blatant appreciation.

Eros growled. “Mine.”

Dion’s lips quirked. “I guess you’ve decided who you’re having,” he told Annie, his eyes alight with amusement.

“She’s not having Harry,” Eros informed him. “And she’s sure as Hades not having you.” He turned to the bench. “Whether she’ll have me remains to be seen.”

He scooped something up from beside Ari. Something that wasn’t there. Insanity on his part or inability to see it on Annie’s?

The truth was, she just wasn’t sure anymore.

“Not sure you want him, huh?” Dion asked.

“Not sure whether I belong in the loony bin,” Eros answered. “So we’ll see what I can do to convince her.” He glanced around. “Where’s Brita?”

“She took Harry home,” Ari said. “We loaded them into a cab as soon as we got outside. He was still unconscious. She didn’t know where he lived, so she said she’d take him to her place.”

“I’m not surprised. Not with what happened.” Although Eros didn’t look like he was paying a whole lot of attention. He was glancing around. Then he nudged her. “Okay, Annie. Pick someone.”

“Pick someone?”

“If I do it, you can say I planted him. If you do it, you can’t. So pick someone.”

“Fine.” She looked around, too. “The short guy with the red hair and plaid jacket and the skateboard.”

“And who do you want him to fall in love with?”

Annie looked around again. “The model type coming the other way.”

Eros arched a brow. “Not very challenging. He’ll probably notice her anyway.”

He had a point. “Turn it around, then. Make her fall in love with him instead.”

“No problem.” He moved to cock an invisible bow, his eyes narrow and focused on the woman on the other side of the street, undulating her way down the sidewalk on four-inch heels. A second passed. Annie could see when Ross let go of the arrow—invisible or imaginary—by the way he moved.

He lowered the bow. The invisible bow. Annie watched as, across the street, the young woman stopped as if struck, much the same way Brita had stopped earlier. Her eyes widened and her cheeks flushed as her eyes lighted on the young man with the red hair. She watched him come closer, and when he was almost there, she said something to him. They were much too far away to hear what it was, but he heard her and stopped. And flushed, too, when he got a good look at the woman who had hailed him.

Eros lifted the bow again.

“What are you doing?” Annie asked.

He glanced at her. “Making sure it’s mutual. It’s no good otherwise.”

He let fly another invisible arrow. The young man jerked.

All four of them watched the conversation taking place across the street. It didn’t last long. A few minutes, and then the short young man and tall young woman went their separate ways. But not before they’d exchanged phone numbers. As they walked away from each other, both of them turned and looked over their shoulders at least twice.

And Eros turned and looked at Annie. She blinked up at him, too overwhelmed for the moment to be able to speak. Then— “You really did that?”

“You watched me. But if you’re in doubt I can do it again.” He turned and lifted that invisible bow. And pointed it straight at Dionysus. Who took a step back and lifted his hands.

“Hades, no. I’m much too young to settle down with just one woman.”

Ari snorted but lifted her hands, too, when Eros turned the bow on her. “Not on your life. I don’t want to spend eternity in love with either one of you.”

He turned to Annie, who told him, “I’m already in love with you. But feel free to shoot me if you think it would help.”

He hesitated. She could see it in his eyes. But then he lowered the bow. The bow she was starting to almost be able to see. “No. If you love me already, that’s better.”

“I love you already. Whoever you are.”

Dion snorted. “What do you mean, whoever he is? He’s the fucking god of love. And when he—”

“Thanks, Dion,” Eros interrupted.

Dionysus grinned.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The man Eros and Dionysus swore was the Greek god of sky and thunder, father of gods and men and overseer of the universe, lived in a two-story row house on Ditmars Boulevard. It was small and tidy, tucked away in a row of other small and tidy houses some six or eight blocks from Annie’s apartment.

It didn’t look like anything special. And the woman who opened the door for them—middle-aged with thick, dark hair pulled into a heavy knot on the back of her head and a beautiful if severe face—looked like any number of other women one might meet on Steinway Street. At least until Annie looked into her eyes.

They were dark, set under heavy, straight brows, and they looked straight through and into her soul.

“Annie,” Eros’s voice intoned from far away, “this is Hera. Hera, Annie.”

Annie managed a curtsey. It had been decades since she’d curtsied, not since she was a little girl, but something about this woman seemed to demand it.

“Is he in?” Eros added.

Hera nodded and stood aside to let them into the house. It was dark and smelled of spices.

Dion and Ariadne followed them across the threshold, Dion with a grin. “Looking good, Hera. Not bad for five millennia!”

Hera gave him a stony stare. So stony, in fact, that Annie wouldn’t have been surprised to see Dionysus actually turn to marble. But that must be one ability Hera didn’t have, because the god of wine just kept grinning as if nothing was wrong.

Hera’s face softened a little when Ariadne came in. “Ari!” She switched into something that was probably ancient Greek, or maybe Cretan, if there was a difference. Meanwhile, Eros took Annie by the hand and pulled her down the hallway into a room on the left, where a man sat in an easy chair watching a soccer game on a big-screen TV.

He grinned in greeting. “Ross! Good to see you!”

“Likewise,” Eros said and pulled Annie up to stand beside him. “This is Annie. Annie, this is Zeus.”

She smiled tentatively and wiggled her fingers.

The father of the gods looked much like any other middle-aged Greek man in Astoria. Zeus looked to be about as tall as Eros, a bit broader in the shoulders and slightly thicker around the middle, but with the same short-cropped curly hair and olive skin. And it was easy to see what had allowed him to cut a wide swath through ancient Greece in the old days, seducing goddesses, nymphs, and mortals alike. He was handsome, charming, and exuded sex appeal, from the sensual set of his mouth to the twinkling dark eyes that examined her with appreciation.

“Another one?” he asked Eros.

Eros squeezed her hand. “This one’s the last one.”

“That’s what you said last time, too.” The god of thunder looked beyond them to Dion, just coming through the doorway on their heels. “Dionysus.”

“Zeus.” Dion’s voice was cautious, just as Zeus’s had been. Maybe Ross really had told her the truth about Hera and Silenus and Dion’s childhood. And the resemblance between the two men was easy to see: the square jaw, the straight brows, the powerful build.

At this point, she wasn’t entirely sure what to think. About any of it. Back there in front of The Plaza Hotel, Eros had seemed to do what he said he could do. Two very unlikely people—a short, geeky redhead and a tall, willowy, drop-dead-gorgeous woman; two people she had pointed out—had taken one look at each other and exchanged telephone numbers, right there on Central Park South. Something had definitely happened to them, and she had a hard time believing it was coincidence. Ross couldn’t have known she’d pick those two. She’d done her very best to pick the two least likely people she saw.

And he didn’t act like he was insane. The others didn’t, either. They’d answered all her questions in a very matter-of-fact way. There’d been nothing strange about any of it, and no red flags…other than the fact that they claimed to be the old Greek gods of Olympus—and Crete, in Ariadne’s case—living it up in New York as bar owners and matchmakers and—God save her—private investigators.

And now here they were, in what was supposed to Zeus’s house, to see if he’d marry them.

On the upside, if it all turned out to be an enormous, elaborate joke, she wouldn’t really be married after all. Not in the eyes of the law. There’d be nothing to keep her from packing up her belongings and heading back to Ohio.

Only Ross.

Yes, dammit. Because, God help her, in spite of everything—in spite of that fact that he might be as nutty as a fruitcake or might be having a grand joke at her expense—she wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of her life with him. Whoever and whatever he was.

“We want to get married,” Eros said.

Zeus looked at him. And at Annie. And at Eros again. “You said that last time, too. We both know how that worked out.”

“It wasn’t real last time,” Eros said. “This is different.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Ross clenched his fist, the one that wasn’t holding her hand. “It was the damned arrow, okay? This time it isn’t.”

Zeus lifted a brow. “Come again?”

“The arrow. I poked myself with the fucking arrow and fell in love with Psyche. This time I fell in love without the arrow. That means it’s real.”

“Who told you that?” Zeus asked, interest coloring his voice.

“Brita.”

“Ah.” Zeus’s lips quirked. “The fair Britomartis. Where is she?” He looked around, as if hoping to see Brita appear out of nothingness.

“Taking care of a mortal I had to shoot,” Eros said. “Twice.”

“Had to?”

“Long story. I accidentally shot her, too, while I was at it. Annie and I want to get married.”

“Yes,” Zeus said, “I heard you the first time. Give me one good reason why I should marry you again? I told you last time it wouldn’t last.”

“It lasted three thousand years!”

“Yes,” Zeus said, “but three thousand years isn’t very long, is it? I should know. I’ve been married a lot longer than that.” The look he shot at the door intimated that they hadn’t all been happy years, either. Or even happy centuries.

“I’ll give you a reason,” Dionysus said, and his father turned to him, wariness in his eyes. “If you don’t, I’ll tell my evil stepmother about that mortal you were cozying up to in the bar last week. Remember her? Pretty young thing with brown hair and long legs? A kindergarten teacher?”

Zeus’s eyes flashed. “You threatening your old man, boy?”

“She came back last night looking for you,” Dion said. “And if you don’t marry Ross and Annie, I’ll slip Hera her name, address, and phone number on my way out.”

Zeus stared at him in a way that made Hera’s look from earlier seem almost loving, but Dion didn’t even flinch. “So,” he said, “what’ll it be?”

Zeus turned to Eros. “You sure this is what you want? You just escaped three millennia of ball and chain.”

Ross’s voice was steady. “I’m sure.”

“You?” Zeus looked at Annie. She nodded, not entirely certain she could trust her voice.

“Speak up!”

“Yes.” Her voice wobbled, and she had to take a breath and clear her throat. “I’m sure.”

“Fine.” He waved a hand. “You’re married.”

Ross smiled. Annie blinked at him. “That’s it?”

“What did you expect, girl?” Zeus barked. “Thunder and lightning? Confetti raining down?”

He waved a hand, and on the television screen, there was a deafening clap of thunder, and then rain pelted the soccer field.