Simply Irresistible by Kristine Grayson Read Free Book Online

am at work. And secondly, your stupid errors might be drawing the wrong kind of attention. So I will be there as soon as I can get the pilot to fly north. And when I arrive, you will not call me Mom.”
    Stri laughed. “Okay. But I’m only doing what I do.”
    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said and hung up. She stuffed the cell phone in the pocket of her red suitcoat, and leaned against the galley wall.
    She hated it when he was right. He wasn’t named Strife for nothing. She had done that deliberately, hoping he would cause trouble, and he always had. She should have expected nothing less.
    Next time, she’d send in a trusted minion. If there was a next time.
    Stri was right about a few other things. Eris should pop in. But she was traveling with an entire bevy of reporters and news cameras. Disappearing from a jet in mid-flight was not a good idea in these circumstances.
    But she would have to come up with some reason for diverting the plane. If there wasn’t a news story in Portland, Oregon, she was going to have to make one up herself.
    She hated doing that. Those stories usually ended up going on forever until she was so sick of them, she wanted to make them disappear—which, of course, she couldn’t do.
    Maybe it wouldn’t matter this time. She was so close to the Fates that everything could change. And once she had gotten rid of them, the most important step in her plan would be complete.
    That was what she had to focus on, not her piddly little international corporation. Sometimes she got so focused on the details, she forgot about the important things.
    Like controlling the world—not just through the media, but in all things.
    Including magic.
     
    Dex sat up in his darkened bedroom, dislodging three sleeping cats and his familiar, an Irish wolfhound named Sadie. She stretched out in his warm spot. His Siamese cat, Nurse Ratched, was sitting on his nightstand, purring. She never purred.
    “You woke me, didn’t you?” he asked her.
    As if in answer to his question, she jumped on his lap and demanded to be petted. He did so absently, remembering the dream he’d forced himself to wake up from.
    He’d been dreaming of kittens, millions of abandoned kittens that someone kept leaving in his store. Every time he turned around, there were more kittens, and he finally realized that not only were they being abandoned, they were reproducing right in front of him.
    Asexual reproduction, like worms did. The kittens weren’t exactly dividing themselves in half, but they were doubling, like some computer program gone amok.
    He realized that the doubling was going to go on until there were more kittens than space on the Earth—and just as the panic set in, the Fates appeared.
    They were pounding on his front door and begging for his help. Yet it wasn’t his help they wanted. He got the sense that somewhere, in this horrible place, there was something good. There was some-owe good.
    And even though he wanted to refuse the Fates, the kittens pulled the door open, sucking him into the trap….
    That was when he’d forced himself awake to find Nurse Ratched staring at him in the semidarkness. He glanced at the alarm clock—an old analog model he hadn’t changed since the 1950s. Seven-thirty. Too late to go back to sleep, too early to open the store.
    He stretched and slid back under the covers. Ratchy kept purring and butting his chin. She was hungry. So was he.
    Time for his day to begin. Even though he didn’t want it to. Even though he had a feeling that that dream was some kind of warning.
     
    *
     
    Somewhere in the middle of the Fates’ explanation of the magical world, Vivian broke out another box of chocolates. Dark chocolate imported from Switzerland this time, the good stuff, the stuff she’d been saving for a particularly hard day.
    This, she knew, was going to be that day.
    All four of them still sat at her dining room table, picking over the chocolate and drinking too much tea.
    The car