Rhys’s phone suddenly buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out, with a frown, muttering, “Ah, bugger it all.”
“What is it?”
“Something’s gone tits up at work,” Rhys said, not taking his eyes off his phone as his thumbs moved frantically across the screen.
There was a cold sensation in the pit of Vivi’s stomach all of a sudden. “Is it because of all this?” Is it because of me?
“’Course not,” Rhys replied immediately, glancing up briefly to flash her a smile. “Shite happens in the travel business.”
He was lying. Vivi knew that. For one, he wasn’t very good at lying, his eyes somehow giving him away, and two, she knew that part of Rhys’s magic involved luck. What better skill to have when you planned trips for people? If something was going wrong, it was because of the curse, which meant it was indeed because of her.
Rhys would be totally fair if he blamed her, but instead, he was trying to make her feel better.
That was also just deeply unfair.
“Mate!” he said brightly into the phone, posture tense even as his voice was all charm and ease. “Heard you’ve run into a sticky wicket.”
Sticky wicket? she mouthed at him, and he rolled his eyes, shrugging as he shifted in his chair.
“No, no, not a problem at all,” Rhys was saying even as he was frantically searching her desk for something.
Vivi handed him a pad and pen, and he gave her a thumbs-up as he leaned down to scribble across the pad.
“I can absolutely get that all sorted for you, not a problem.”
For the next ten minutes, Vivi sat at her desk and watched as Rhys somehow transformed from the louche, carefree charmer she knew into the most competent man on the planet.
Phone calls were made. Notes were written out. More phone calls, and then several emails. At one point, he rolled up his sleeves and sat there across from her, phone pressed to his ear, elbows resting on his widely spread thighs, and Vivi nearly swooned.
When he was finally done with all his calls and emails and texts and who knew what else, Rhys flopped back against the chair, slouching so low that his head rested against the back of it, and Vivi did not take a flying leap from her chair to straddle his lap, which really showed a lot of restraint on her part, she thought.
Still, something must have shown in her face because he looked at her curiously.
“What?”
Shaking her head, Vivi cleared her throat and reached for the least sexy thing she could think of, a copy of her syllabus.
“Nothing.”
Chapter 17
“A ghost,” Gwyn said, looking back over her shoulder at Vivi. They were at Something Wicked, but Gwyn had hung up the closed sign as soon as Vivi walked in, and was now restocking the shelves of leather journals and grimoires.
Nodding, Vivi leaned her elbows on the counter. “A ghost.”
“The Casper kind.”
Vivi shook her head. “Way scarier than that, trust me.”
As briefly as she could, she told Gwyn about what had happened at the library, adding, “But the bigger problem—”
“There’s a bigger problem than a freaking ghost?”
“Mmm-hmm. The college witches are involved now.”
Now it was Gwyn’s turn to roll her eyes. “Those weirdos.”
The witches who worked at Penhaven had always kept themselves apart from Vivi and her family, probably because most of them were transplants, and, Vivi suspected, because they didn’t like the store. Lord knew they’d never set foot in it. They were too serious, too academic about magic for that sort of thing.