Page 49 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
Truthfully, I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. Before the last two seconds, I couldn’t have named three poets. Mostly just Emily Dickinson. Or Shakespeare. He’d been a poet as well as a playwright, right?
Who the fuck knew?
Everyone in the room with me, apparently.
“So. Tea shop. Sandwiches and, like, pies?”
“Cakes,” Davin corrected. “Maybe tarts. If you’ve never left the States, you’ve probably never seen anything like it. I’m not certain there’s a market for it here.”
Arthur, who had seemed to vacillate up until that moment, frowned. “There’s something for everyone at a tea shop. Amelia makes excellent cakes. Coffee, even, if people must.”
Tea, though? Not coffee? I wasn’t sure that would sell in the US, but they had my attention.
Davin went to open his mouth again, but I grabbed my desk chair and slid it in front of the waiting room ones they were sitting in. “What kind of sandwiches?”
“Does that actually matter?” Davin asked, and when I turned to look at him, there it was, bemusement.
“Of course it matters. You know you like food as much as I do. You want the good stuff right next door.”
He leaned his head to the side, lips pursed and eyes saying that he definitely agreed, even if he wasn’t quite willing to say it aloud.
“But this is an expensive location,” Arthur broke in. “And...we were going to pay the rent from my income, but it seems”—his cheeks pinked, and he stared at the floor—“it seems that the job offer I got before we arrived has dried up somehow, so I no longer have the ability to fund it.”
“Auntie left us enough money to get started,” Amelia said, reaching over to pat his arm consolingly. I suspected that it constituted some huge breach of protocol, but he didn’t pull away. “We’ll just have to be very careful.”
This was painful.
I would feel bad asking them for any rent, let alone the kind of rent the sweatshop people had offered. But also, I needed a lot of money. I had to pay the taxes on the building somehow, and unless Davin and I made a lot more money than I expected to, most of it was going to have to come from that rent.
“Besides,” Amelia said, her voice going snippy, “if they won’t follow their own country’s laws, you hardly want to work for them. It wasn’t even what you want to do with your life. If you work in the tea shop, you could make your chocolates like you’ve always wanted.”
His what?
“Your what?”
Arthur ducked his head again, cheeks fully red at this point, and I was worried he might die of embarrassment. “It’s nothing. I just...as a child, I used to make chocolates. It was just a lark. Nothing I?—”
“Everyone always loved Arthur’s chocolates,” his sister interjected. “He never wanted to be a personal assistant to some rude old CEO anyway.”
Ouch. That sounded kind of awful.
I looked at the dog, wanting nothing more than to ask his opinion. I always trusted animals’ opinions more than humans. Or vampires.
He seemed to read my mind, because he gave a little bark, and—“He makes the best Sunday roast, too. Ought to serve that at this shop of theirs. Make a fortune that way.” He shot a suspicious look at Twist, then looked back at me, even as Amelia was trying to shush him. “You don’t seem so awful. They could work with you. Not like that bastard Fearson, firing the poor lad over missing his leg. Wasn’t his choice to have it blown off.”
I blinked for a moment, staring at the dog, then looked at Arthur in shock. Yes, I did glance down at his leg, but it just looked like a leg in a pair of pants to me. Two matching shoes, and he’d walked into the shop just fine.
Also, wasn’t it entirely illegal to fire someone for a disability?
Though they’d have to prove that was why, first, and if it had been some rich CEO, well...I wasn’t so naive I thought that was likely to come out in their favor.
“Bannie,” Amelia exclaimed. “Calm down. I know you like them, but people get nervous when you go barking like that. I’m so sorry. He really isn’t being mean. He just wants to chat, you see.”
“It’s fine,” I denied. “He seems like a friendly fellow to me.”
To prove my point, I offered the dog my hand.
Amelia beamed. Davin stiffened, strain on his face like he was worried I was about to be savaged by a creature smaller than the coffee maker he’d thrown away. Even Arthur seemed a little concerned.
