us though, I did grab her by the waist. It felt incredible to touch her like that, and to my astonishment, she didn’t even wait for me to pull her in. She leaned up against me and smiled at Chance and Anya.
“I’m Lacey!” she said. “Noah’s fiancée.”
Anya scowled at her, but the two women shook hands.
“How many Instagram followers do you have, sweetie?” I asked Lacey.
She looked up at me with the most perfect confusion.
“You were about to hit 500,000, weren’t you?”
“Uh huh,” Lacey said, nodding. “500,000. That’s right.”
“Ah,” Chance said, smirking. “Anya has ten million.”
“Wow,” Lacey said, doing a much better job of acting surprised than I did. “That is so many followers!”
“Russia is big country,” Anya said, “but now I have a lot of fan in America and Europe. Even in China. Chinese men like Russian woman.”
“I see,” Lacey said.
“You are very lucky woman, Lacey. Noah is very powerful. Both in money and in muscle.”
I caught Lacey stifling a laugh, but Chance was not laughing.
“Oh, my God, I still can’t believe I’m talking to Chance Charter!” Lacey said. She held her hand out, and he took her hand and shook it with a big shit-eating grin. “You wrote the Archmage of Mars! I can’t believe I’m meeting you in real life!”
I finally started breathing again. I thought I was going to have to be in the driver’s seat here, with Lacey barely able to keep up, but within a few seconds of meeting this asshole, she had perfectly assessed the situation and started fixing it. I was fucking impressed.
“Well,” Chance said, “I’m just a normal guy. I just happened to write a book that sold over 400 million copies worldwide. No big deal.”
He smirked and fucking reached up with both hands and gripped the edges of his jacket, and he struck some kind of pose. I had no idea what it was supposed to be, but he looked like the dumbest piece of shit I’d ever seen. I wanted to punch him, but I needed to get him to sign a contract with us and sell us 50 million more books.
“Wow,” Lacey said. “400 million! That’s such a big number I can’t even fit it in my head.”
Chance laughed. “Let me tell you, it doesn’t fit in my bank account either. I had to get several offshore accounts, and I had to diversify my assets across various stocks and mutual funds, of course.”
“That’s so interesting,” Lacey said, “why don’t we get a table?”
I snapped and grabbed one of the waitstaff. I slipped him $500, and soon enough we had our own private table in the big asshole section of the bar, complete with a $1000 bottle of vodka.
“Did you read The Archmagi of Mars?” Lacey asked Anya.
“I do not read children’s book. Only history. Non-fiction.”
I noticed Chance visibly wince when Anya called it a “children’s book.” I tried to jump in. Lacey had been doing all the heavy lifting, and she needed a break.
“They aren’t children’s books,” I said. “We’ve published them, and we’ve got the numbers. Over 70% of the readers are adults.”
“Yes,” Anya said. “Adults are like children now. Do not worry, Chance, you still make money. It doesn’t matter if it’s children book or real book.”
Lacey leaned in. “You know what the coolest part to me was? In book one? When Voltar shoots the magic nano-beam at Kari, and it puts that lightning bolt tattoo on his arm.”
“It was a scar,” he said, “not a tattoo. Still, yes, that was a very excellent scene.”
“How do you think of stuff like that? I mean, where does creativity like that come from?”
Lacey leaned forward, showing even more of her perfect cleavage, and if I didn’t know for a fact that she was bullshitting him, I’d think she were for real. Chance was all puffed up as he explained how he totally thought of the lighting bolt idea. As if he hadn’t just brazenly stolen almost every detail—and slightly modified it—from Harry Potter.
We all took a shot of Vodka together.
Lacey started coughing before she even got her glass back on the table.
I leaned in toward her. I was just going to whisper something to her, but I found my hand wrapping around her and squeezing her waist. She didn’t push me away.
I whispered into her ear. “You good to drink?”
“Uh,” she whispered back to me. “Yeah, it’s just stronger than I’m used to.”
I called the waiter over.
“Get her one of those pink things,” I said, pointing at something