Page 60 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
Fuck me, I wanted to snatch the box back and hoard them for myself.
Instead, I leaned around him and met Arthur’s still-worried eye. “That is the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted in my entire life. That’s what you want to make for your shop?”
“Well, it’s the flavor I’ve been working on the longest.” He ducked his head, his pale skin blushing bright and just a little blotchy. It was the first truly imperfect thing I’d noticed about him, and it was also kind of adorable. “It’s a little...excessively avant-garde for most of the people back home. I once had an older lady tell me it was bad enough people were adding salt to caramels, and this was an abomination.”
“This is the best caramel in the world,” Davin told him. “And I don’t even like hot food.” As though to prove his point, he grabbed a second one and shoved it in his mouth, forcing me to retake control of the box from him. There had only been like six to begin with. I couldn’t have him eating the rest and forcing me to stake him.
“Seriously,” I told Arthur. “You figure out what you and your sister can do in rent and tell me. I’ll bet we could work something out. You need a place to show these to the world.”
Arthur was adorably modest about his accomplishment, talking about a handful of other flavors he’d been working on that involved his sister’s strawberry jam, a hazelnut cream, and a lime-coconut thing infused with rum that I was tempted to follow him home for.
After he left, still blushing and ducking his head, but thanking us like we were the ones who’d brought him heaven in a little white bag, Davin turned to me. “You could ask for a percentage of their profits, you know.”
I frowned at that. “That sounds dishonest. I don’t have any hold over?—”
“I mean as rent,” he corrected. “Ask them to pay you, say, fifteen percent of what they make every month. It lets them havea space that’s surely too much for them to afford now, but that they can probably grow into, without going broke trying to do it.”
And that? Well, it didn’t help me with the property tax issue my mother had dumped in my lap, but it would probably work well for Arthur and Amelia Agincourt, whose success I was starting to be quite invested in.
CHAPTER 25
Davin was gone.
Okay fine, not, like, forever. But he’d gone to pick up some things to set up the system for Doc that night, and that left me and Twist alone in the shop. Worse yet, I wasn’t allowed to leave, because we had yet another appointment set up to show someone the shop next door.
I really wanted it to be over already, if only so I wouldn’t have to deal with any more potential renters. They’d run the gamut from the fast food place with a reputation for funding insane anti-humanitarian legislation to the people who’d wanted to move in an escort service whose website had been very thinly veiled prostitution.
I’d seen the whole spectrum of humanity in the last few days.
While I wasn’t personally against drugs or sex work or...okay no, I was definitely against corporations trying to control the government to hurt people, but just because my general attitude on life was live and let live didn’t mean I wanted everyone living next door to me.
Was I being an elitist prick?
Maybe.
Still wasn’t interested in the sausage palace or whatever.
Though...maybe they should have gone into business with the hot dog place. Funniest crossover ever. I wondered if they would still have a glass wall for transparency’s sake.
I was sitting there at my desk, eating another one of the scones Arthur had brought, this one Davin’s way, just to see if there was any difference, when the door opened. I turned to look at who it was, hoping for Davin or Arthur or Amelia or hell, anyone who wasn’t trying to rent the damned building, but I knew the second I laid eyes on the guy that I was out of luck.
He was my ten o’clock, arriving early. He reminded me a little of the meth-smelling guy from a few days earlier, but in this case it was just in attitude, not in actual, physical smell.
He smiled at me, and the look practically oozed oil. I worried sometimes that I was inclined to accept lies from strangers, but this time? There was no danger of that happening.
I glanced behind the guy, making sure he hadn’t brought friends, because I half expected something untoward like “rent me the building or else.”
Still, I tried my best to smile at him. “Can I help you?”
“I’m your ten o’clock appointment,” he said, smile fixed firmly in place. How did he do that while talking? He stepped forward and handed me a card. A card with the logo of a very popular designer goods line. Then he took the chair opposite my desk without asking. “We’re interested in opening a shop next door. I understand there’s a kitchen, and we’re more than willing to pay to have the space renovated, as well as offer you a down payment that would cover replacing the kitchen equipment, if we were to leave and you wanted it put back.”
That was...absolutely ridiculous. He was talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, easily. I’d seen how much those industrial ovens cost, and it was nonsense.
On the other hand, my mother sometimes carried a purse with their brand name on it, and when I’d been trying to finda solstice gift for her a few years earlier I’d looked them up only to find that her purse at the time had cost more than my bike. If they were selling single purses for thousands of dollars, I supposed it made sense they had money to burn.
Plus Avalon was an upscale suburb of LA with a reputation for rich locals, let alone tourists. Frankly, I sometimes didn’t understand how regular people like me, Davin, or Arthur and Amelia managed to live there at all. Like all the regular folk living in Hawaii, where rent was also nutty and food costs were impossibly high.
He pulled some paperwork out of nowhere and started talking about details without even pausing long enough for me to give an opinion. After a second, he pointed to a number at the bottom of the page that once again made me think I was hallucinating.
