When I pulled myself back up from closing the safe, I was practically nose to nose with my father. “Iris McKinley wanted to see you.”
“Yes.”
He curled his nose in distaste. “I do hope you’re not expecting anything from that. You’re lucky she didn’t take your mother’s house from you. It would have been reasonable of her, since she bought the place.” At my clear surprise, his look of disgust slowly melted into a smirk. “Maybe she wants it back now?”
I stared back at him. It hadn’t occurred to me that my grandmother had bought the house. My mother hadn’t been in contact with her, so I’d always thought they were estranged. Why would a woman buy a house for a daughter she didn’t want to see? And now, even if she wanted it back, it seemed unlikely she would demand it, let alone get it, but I still wanted to go to the dinner even less than before.
Instead of admitting any of that to my father, I turned away and bit my tongue so hard it bled.
He hadn’t been a great father. He’d been cold, unfeeling, distant, and disinterested in me.
Until his death, however, he hadn’t been like this, cruel and malicious. Had something changed when he’d died, or was this simply the truth of him, how he acted when he didn’t rely on me to keep working for him for minimum wage?
I marched to the back and flipped the lights off, then on my way out, set the alarm and herded foxy to the door, locking it behind me and heading for home.
When Gideon appeared next to me, I half expected reassurances or comfort. I didn’t know why; he just seemed the type to offer that. Instead, he cleared his throat and asked, “Iris McKinley? Like the McKinleys of San Francisco?”
“Know them? Hate to inform me that my father is probably right?” I asked, trying to make it sound flippant and failing by a mile.
He shook his head and swatted a hand back in the direction of the store like my father was a fly he could get rid of. “Nah. Don’t know that much about them. Just that they’re mages. Powerful. Rich. And I don’t know if it’s important, but you’re not the first McKinley relative I’ve been called on to train. ‘Bout a hundred years ago, the convergence link was a young McKinley cousin.”
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. “You have to stop calling it that. Seriously.”
“If the word makes you think on sex so much, it’s been too long since you found yourself a special friend.”
That stopped me in my tracks, turning to stare at him. “Special friend? Crap, Gideon, I know you’re old, but you can say the actual words. That’s what words are for. Fuck buddy. Sex partner. Even ‘date’ would be better than ‘special friend,’ dude.”
And that, of all things, was what gave him pause. “Dude?”
“Just a slang word for men. No connotations other than that I’m kind of careless.”
He followed along when I continued walking. “Not what that meant in my day.”
“No, you said ‘special friend’ instead.” I answered, pulling my lip between my teeth and letting it back out slow.
“I thought we were talking about how dude meant man now. I never said I’d be your fuck buddy,” he answered, enunciating the last as though it were in a foreign language he was trying out, and he was worried about getting the accent wrong.
I started to respond with something appropriately snarky, but foxy leaned on me with all his weight, and I looked down to find him watching—oh, right. People were approaching us because we were walking down the street in opposite directions, and Gideon was a ghost.
That was like a bucket of cold water poured over my head.
Gideon was dead. We weren’t going to date. The most effort I’d put into flirting with a man in, fuck, maybe years, and he was dead. A therapist would have had a field day with the idea that I refused to flirt with anyone alive, but as soon as he couldn’t touch me, I was all about it.
Seeming to sense my mood, Gideon was quiet for the rest of the walk. A walk that was cut short at the very end, when we came up to the house and found my grandmother’s car already waiting outside. Dammit.
Well, hopefully she didn’t mind me in my black work pants. They weren’t nice, but at least they weren’t jeans today. That had