Page 36 of Agony

He placed a menu in front of me before he walked away, “Enjoy, Miss.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. I leaned back in my chair and started to scan the menu, not knowing how I was going to be able to afford anything more than a glass of water and some breadsticks.

“Neve?”

I looked up at the sound of the deep voice and almost dropped my menu.

“Jareth?” I asked.

He smiled and held a hand out. I got to my feet and shook his hand hoping he wouldn’t notice how hard I was shaking.

Addie was right; this man was damn sexy. Almond shaped, light blue eyes, fair perfect skin covered with scruff, and black straight hair that stopped below his ears. His eyebrows were naturally arched to give him a somewhat permanently serious look, but when he smiled, I was sure the moon would fall out of the sky just so the sun could see it too.

“Please,” he said, motioning toward my chair.

I sat down and continued to stare at him. How was it humanly possible to look like that? Did they grow such beautiful creatures in a laboratory somewhere and then unleash them into the world full grown?

“Thanks for meeting me on such short notice,” he said, taking the menu from the snotty host.

“Um. Yeah. Definitely,” I mumbled.

Read your menu. Just sit here and read your menu. Focus on that and maybe you won’t sound incompetent.

“I remember you saying that you had family in town so I felt bad about pulling you away from that,” he said in his smooth-baritone voice.

“She’ll be okay,” I said into my menu.

“Cool,” he replied.

A young girl came over and introduced herself as Mandy and said she would be our waitress. Jareth ordered a glass of Pinot and I told her I’d be fine with water.

“Hold on,” he said telling Mandy to come back. “I’m paying for this. Get anything you want.”

“Oh, um. Can I have a Cherry Coke then, please?” I asked. She nodded making a correction on her pad and walked away.

“When I said business lunch, I thought you knew that I would be paying,” he replied with a grin.

“Well this is my first ever business lunch,” I said with a nervous giggle.

“So I’m popping your cherry then?”

“Huh?”

“Your business lunch cherry,” he said with a laugh.

Oh. Oh I thought you meant … Focus, Neve. You’ve already got someone lined up for that job.

“Tell me what you did at Devil’s Den,” he said as Mandy placed our drinks down. He gave her a small wave and a smile to let her know we hadn’t even looked at the menus yet.

“I pretty much got assigned directors to assist. I worked with four; Max was my favorite. He wasn’t as demanding or dickish as the other three. I guess he noticed I was a little more comfortable being around him, so he fought to keep me,” I replied, sitting back in my chair.

“What do you consider ‘dickish’?” he asked, taking a sip of his wine and leaning back in his chair.

“You know what they do at Devil’s Den, right?” I asked. He nodded. “Okay well, the first director I worked with, Chad? He would have me, in the middle of shoots, clean up the male actors. I mean seriously, any reason they couldn’t just grab hand towels and do it themselves? I went home and cried myself to sleep. It was embarrassing and unnecessary.”

“I can see where that would be considered dickish. So what did you do about it?” he asked.

“Nothing. It was my first job since college, so I just kept my mouth shut. The next day when I went in, the same thing happened again. I got pretty numb to it after the third day. On the fourth day, I was moved to a different director, and finally I got shifted to Max,” I answered.

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