Accidentally Aphrodite (11 page)

“Sorry, Boss,” the man said. “I got all caught up in her excitement and I lost my damn shit.”

Khristos chuckled and slapped the round man on the back. “No worries. It’s all handled now. So, introductions are in order. Cupid, meet Quinn, your new boss.”

He held out a doughy hand in her direction. “Nice to meet you. Usually, I’m a better team player. Next time I’ll chill before I spill. Promise to do a better job of having your back.”

This
was Cupid? This gruff, unshaven man with a distinct New York accent was Cupid?

His eyes, sparkling blue and amused, set in a pleasingly round face, twinkled as he grabbed her hand and pumped it with a wide grin. “You’re wondering where my diaper is, right? Fuck if I can get rid of those damn pictures. Google Images has not been my friend. Hallmark cards either. I don’t know whose stupid-ass idea it was to cover my junk up with a diaper, but there you have it. Branded for life. Anyway, I hear we’ll be working together from now on. Nice to meet you in the flesh.”

Quinn’s mouth hung open, but she quickly snapped it shut when Nina slapped her on the back. “Say hello to the nice guy who shoots the arrow of luurve, Lite-Brite. It’s polite to fekkin’ make nice with your coworkers.”

She squared her shoulders and nodded. “I’m sorry. I was just surprised by—”

“Me without a diaper,” he finished for her on a chuckle.

Yep. Right on the money. “Ye…yes. But it’s nice to meet you, and my apologies for my premature match. It just felt so right.”

He held up his hands and grinned. “I get it. Love’s a powerful thing. Just ask your friend Nina here. She fought hard enough to make a WWE wrestler proud, but my arrow always wins out in the end. It’s like Khristos said, your aim was just off, but you’ll get better.”

Nina grinned and gave his thick neck a squeeze. “Good to see ya, C.”

Khristos gave Cupid a hard handshake. “Thanks for that save, buddy. If you hadn’t yelled at me to go left, we’d have been screwed. Couldn’t do this without you. Now
you
,” he said, turning to Quinn, “come with me.” He held out his hand to her.

She took it hesitantly, letting the warmth of it seep into her skin.

He led her to almost the exact spot where the photographer had posed Rolando and La-Tee-Shay and pointed to another couple just beyond the tree where she’d all but knocked them over.

He pulled her closer, forcing her to smell his yummy goodness mingled with the crisp air of fall. Quinn gritted her teeth to quell the butterflies flitting about the lining of her stomach and chalked them up to never having had a man as incredibly good-looking as Khristos so near.

“Look over there, Quinn,” he said, his tone hushed and gruff.

She followed the line of his finger and saw an elderly couple with their backs to them, probably in their mid-eighties, judging by their hunched figures and silver hair. The man sat on a thick plaid blanket beside the woman who was in a wheelchair, his hand, aged and gnarled, entwined with hers.

He looked up at the woman then; his gaze was tender, almost fragile, but the love shining from his eyes was so real it pierced Quinn’s heart. So real and so full of complete adoration, for the second time that day, her breath was stolen.

The woman leaned over the arm of her chair and smiled back at him. The profile of her face, silhouetted by the setting sun, was just as full of love when she pressed a kiss to his lips and cupped his jaw with a hand that had a dried carnation attached to its wrist.

Quinn’s heart melted right in her chest when the man rose and tucked a blanket just underneath the woman’s chin with such a fiercely protective gesture, her knees shook.

A tear stung her eye and her throat tightened. She gripped Khristos’s arm. “It was them, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he murmured. “They were your target. But you were only off by a hair.”

Her heart pounded as guilt pricked her very soul. “What would have happened if you hadn’t intercepted and saved the day?”

She knew she shouldn’t ask. The answer would likely haunt her dreams, but she had to know.

“You don’t really want to know, do you, Quinn? It’s all good now. That’s all that matters.”

“No. I really do want to know, to serve as a reminder of how I could blow this whole thing sky-high. Call me a masochist, but maybe it’ll keep me on my toes. Because I couldn’t bear it if these two people had ended up apart when they so clearly adore one another.” Her words hitched, forcing her to clear her throat.

Khristos turned to face her, his eyes, glinted with amber flecks, searching hers. “If I hadn’t intercepted, Bart would have lost his courage for the second time in their lives and Alice wouldn’t be wearing that carnation around her wrist—one he’d dried and saved all these years. That was her engagement ring, so to speak.”

She clenched her fists and eyes together to keep from crying out an apology to them. “What do you mean by the second time?”

“Bart and Alice knew each other a long time ago. They were almost married straight out of high school, but Bart was drafted and her father didn’t approve of him anyway. Alice’s father made that very clear to Bart. He told Bart he’d kick her out of the house and she’d have to fend for herself while Bart was serving in the military overseas.”

Parents, they could really suck. No one got that better than she did. “How awful.”

“So instead of proposing the way he’d planned, he let her go rather than ask her to choose between him and her family. He feared her father really meant what he said and she’d be left with nothing.”

Her heart ached for them. “Wow. Talk about a painful sacrifice.”

“The sacrifice of real love.”

“What happened to them all that time in between?” All that lost time.

“In the interim, of course, each moved on and married and had families. They hadn’t seen or heard from each other since their high school graduation. Until their fifty-third high school reunion just this past year, where they reunited and fell in love all over again.”

The romantic in her was all ears—ears and floaty hearts and bouquets filled with colorful flowers. “So what’s that got to do with chickening out
again
?”

Khristos’s face softened, the hard lines easing. “Bart’s dying, Quinn. He has another year, maybe two to live, but he was afraid to burden Alice with the news. Her health is fragile, too. Both families are against them marrying, and Bart almost let his children’s wishes run roughshod over the last bit of happiness he’ll have before he leaves this earth. Today, he was going to break off their relationship. If Cupid hadn’t hit him with that arrow, he might have missed a second opportunity to say to hell with the naysayers and propose to the woman he’s loved for more than fifty years who doesn’t give a fig, as she says, that they only have a little time left—Alice just wants them to spend it together. Bart just needed a nudge in the right direction, and you’ll learn to feel that over time. It’ll become instinct.”

A rush of warmth stung her heart—one she desperately wanted to fight, but Bart and Alice were living proof that, at least for them, true love did exist. They’d proven real love could weather fifty years.

“What would have happened if Bart hadn’t proposed today?”

“They both would have died brokenhearted.”

Quinn gulped, hard, loosening the scarf around her neck. She needed to understand the dynamics of this, the repercussions if she mistakenly did something wrong. Knowing she could muck this up made her all the more determined to get it right in the future. So there’d be no Bart and Alice’s left in her clumsy wake.

“So the earth won’t stop revolving if a match isn’t successfully made, yet, I feel like there’s a ‘but’ attached to that.”

He rolled his wide shoulders, but his eyes were shadowed. “Most times not, but sometimes, one match sets off a chain reaction that can reverberate for lifetimes to come. This time, it was just two people who want to finish out their lives as partners. And sometimes, Quinn, that’s just as important as procreation of future world leaders.”

Quinn swallowed hard again, her chest so tight she almost couldn’t speak at the near disaster Khristos had saved them from. “Thank you,” she whispered at him.

He looked down at her and smiled, that warm, easygoing, “don’t worry about me having my liver eaten straight from my gut night after night while I’m tied down to a boulder” smile and squeezed her shoulders. “That’s why I’m here, Quinn. To help you learn when the timing is right.”

She fought another rush of tears—for Bart and Alice and the time wasted apart all those years due to a disapproving parent, and for the sacrifice Bart was willing to make to be with the woman he loved no matter what anyone else said.

Khristos cupped her jaw, and lifted her chin. “C’mon. We’ve been out here for hours. Let’s go back to your place and have some dinner, and then we’ll give it another try. You just have to loosen up and interpret the varying vibes of matchmaking.”

She moved a step back, because having him so close made her lungs scream for air. “If I get any looser, I’ll end up matching armed robbers to bank tellers. You’re not wrong when you say this feeling I’m supposed to get needs some honing. All I could hear was two heartbeats, and the crashing of them in my ears was so loud, I just figured…” She shrugged, still horrified by her near mishap.

Khristos grabbed her hand again and chuckled as he led her back to Nina and Ingrid. “You know when we really need to worry?”

She blanched. “When?”

“When you mistake some indigestion for true love. That’s always an epic disaster.”

As their hands swung between them, and they crested the small hill to see Nina and Ingrid chatting with Cupid, Quinn barked a laugh, her head falling back on her shoulders. “Note to self, no spicy food until my craft is perfected.”

Khristos chuckled, too, the vibration of it settling in her ears, warm and easy.

And that was just a little nice.

Chapter 7

“A
re you ready, Quinn?”

Content from one of the best meals she’d had in a long time, Quinn nodded and hid a burp. Though the warmth of the beef stew Darnell the demon had made had since dissipated in her stomach, the sentiment behind it hadn’t.

When they’d arrive back at her house, it was full of people. A man named Archibald, dressed formally in a black suit, silver vest, white shirt and ascot, had waved them to a long table wedged into her tiny living room that had magically appeared in her absence.

On it were bowls and spoons, and napkins folded into small swans. Archibald had apologized for the lack of proper cutlery, but he’d made the trip all the way in from Staten Island at Wanda’s request and decided a more formal place setting would only deter him from his duties—which was to ease Quinn’s load.

He’d greeted her with the same kind of warmth Wanda and Marty had, whisking her off to a place at the table, where he’d poured her a glass of wine and said, “Do rest, Miss Quinn. Goddess work is hard work. Matchmaking must be fraught with pitfalls sure to test the merits of one’s heart, and surely you’re exhausted from your first day out? Now, we’ve taken care of everything. Supper simmers as I speak, and your sheets are freshly laundered and pressed, awaiting your weary head at days end. I’ve watered and fed Buffy and Spike, whom, if I do say so myself, are a delightful couple, even though guilt burdens my heart, as I was Team Angel. And please, don’t trouble yourself until you’ve settled into your new role in life. I’m at your service for as long as needed.”

And then he was off, calling to Darnell—who was in the kitchen making fresh bread—to ensure he’d taken butter out of the fridge so that it would soften enough to spread in time for dinner.

“Quinn?” Khristos interrupted the pleasure brought by the memory of all these strange new people, sitting at a table she didn’t own, all eating together. They’d laughed and chatted and passed bowl after bowl of food, all while she’d watched in silence.

Yet, secretly, she reveled in their friendships and wondered why she’d spent so much of her time with her nose in a book instead of forging friendships of her own.

Because books never left you. That’s why. It was as plain as the nose on her face she had hang-ups where relationships were concerned. Fictitious families never let you down—all you had to do was turn the page for the happily ever after. In the end, the heroine never fell in love with the wrong hero the way Quinn had done repeatedly like some broken record.

Rather than create real-life connections with real-world struggles, she stuck her nose in a book and ignored everything else to the point of isolating herself with her ridiculous expectations.

It wasn’t absurd to think Igor should have been faithful. It was ridiculous to have turned him into something in her mind he absolutely wasn’t interested in being. Hindsight, and the past few days had taught her that.

But she was done with that. Everything she did from here on out was going to be steeped in realism so real, they’d dub her the realest Aphrodite ever.

Khristos grabbed her hand from across the table of the diner they sat in and squeezed it. “You in there?”

Her eyes were heavy now, but she’d had that feeling again shortly after they’d eaten, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t indigestion. That feeling had led them here, to a diner, where, with Khristos’s guidance, she’d pinpointed the difference between an urgent need to match and the quest for a true match.

If what she felt was what Khristos described, then the unsuspecting couple was somewhere in this vicinity, though the diner was almost totally empty.

She snatched her hand back, almost knocking her coffee over. No more hand holding. No more warm fuzzies and crushing on Greek gods who liked leggy blondes. Real people who wanted realistic things didn’t let men like Khristos into their realms of possibility.

“Sorry. I’m just tired, I think. That stew was amazing, and I overate.”

“No joke. But that’s not even the half of it. Wait until Arch breaks out his pancetta-crusted tilapia. Nothing compares to that man’s cooking.”

She found herself wishing she’d be around long enough to do that. After Khristos was gone, and everyone left to go off and continue leading the lives she was coming to envy, it would be just her and Buffy and Spike again. That felt cold and lonely compared to the warmth these people had thrust upon her in such a short time.