and he was chewing on it. He’d already managed to eat a corner of it, the one with the bar code.” Shaking his head with disgust, he added, “This was ten o’clock at night, the evening before I was supposed to fly back to London. I had to cancel the flight and arrange for a new passport. I was not a happy camper.”
“Oh, dear,” Ildaria murmured and then bit her lip to keep from laughing at the gloomy irritation on his face.
G.G. took another bite of his burger, chewed, swallowed and then said, “The worst, though, was the cashier’s check he demolished.”
“Cashier’s check?” she asked, her eyebrows rising.
G.G. nodded glumly. “A hundred thousand dollar cashier’s check. The down payment on this place when I bought it from Lucern. It was on the dresser in my hotel room. I had an hour before my meeting with Lucern and the lawyers, went to take a shower, came back out and he’d jumped on the chair next to the dresser, got a hold of the check and was curled up in the chair eating it like it was a dog bone.”
“Madre de Dios,” Ildaria breathed with horror.
“Yeah,” he said unhappily and then added, “Fortunately, he hadn’t eaten all of it and there was enough left of the destroyed check that the bank was willing to issue a new one. But I was sweating it until they agreed.” His mouth tightened at the memory. “I started calling him the hundred-thousand-dollar dog after that.”
“H.D.,” Ildaria breathed with realization.
“H.D. for short,” he agreed. “H.T.D.D. was a mouthful, and H.D. is close enough to his real name that he answers to it.”
“What’s his real name?” she asked with interest.
“Eddy.”
“Eddy?” she echoed. Teddy would have fit better. He looked like a teddy bear after all.
“Edward Simpson Guiscard on his registration,” G.G. announced. “Eddy.”
“So you’re G.G. Simpson Guiscard,” she said with a faint smile.
“Joshua James Simpson Guiscard,” he corrected quietly. “G.G. is a nickname. Joshua James Simpson was my birth name. My birth father was John Simpson, but he died when I was young and my mother remarried Robert Guiscard. Robert adopted me and Guiscard was legally added to the end of my name.”
“Ah,” Ildaria murmured, thinking Joshua was a nice name. It didn’t really suit the Mohawked and tattooed man beside her though. G.G. did.
“And you?” G.G. asked with interest.
“Me?” she asked uncertainly.
“What’s your full name?”
“Oh.” She blinked, and then blurted, “Angelina Ildaria Sophia Lupita Garcia Pimienta.” The moment the words left her mouth, she frowned and turned to stare blindly at the mirrored shelves behind the bar, wondering why she’d told him that. As a rule, she avoided telling it at all, or lied. The last two hundred years she hadn’t used Angelina at all. She’d gone by Ildaria and used Garcia because it was as common as Smith in North America.
“Pretty name,” G.G. said, and she turned back to him with surprise to see a faint smile tilting his lips before he popped the last of his first burger into his mouth and began to chew.
“I just go by Ildaria Garcia,” she murmured, feeling her tension slowly subside as she watched him eat. Some part of her mind was assuring her that it didn’t matter that he knew her name. It was fine. She was in North America now, far away from the Dominican Republic and the danger that revealing her name held there. Letting her breath out, she searched for something to say, and found herself asking, “So, how did a mortal end up owning and running not just one, but two nightclubs for immortals?”
G.G. shook his head, and swallowed the food in his mouth before pointing out, “You still haven’t told me why you dropped out of uni.”
Ildaria blew out a breath of irritation, but supposed it was only fair she answer his question if she wanted him to answer hers. Raising the drink he’d given her, she took a sip to give herself time to decide what to say. Her eyes widened with surprise when the taste hit her tongue. It was nice. Tasty. Sweet and fruity.
“Good huh?” he said with amusement, and she glanced over to see him grinning as he watched her face.
Ildaria nodded, and took another drink.
“So . . .” G.G. said as she swallowed and set the glass back on the bar. “You dropped out because . . .”
“I didn’t drop out,” she said at once. “Lucian insisted I should switch from night to day courses, but it’s too