Just once, she thought, just once, she would like a little magic in her life. She believed magic was possible, on days when the sun shown through the clouds, on afternoons when rainbows dotted the countryside, on mornings when the light was so sharp it looked as if everything had been freshly made.
Not on a day like this. On a day like this, all she wanted was someone to come home to, a man to cook her meals and rub her feet, and laugh at the sheer strangeness of the day.
That was what she was thinking about as she exited the elevator into the bowels of the parking structure below her office building. The concrete structure smelled like gas fumes, and the lighting, even in the middle of the day, was a gray florescent that made her think of rain.
She rounded a corner, her heels clicking on the concrete, and saw a man sitting on the back of a 1974 Lincoln, holding a cigarette lighter in one hand, and a snake in the other.
The snake was alive, and twisting.
She swallowed, uncertain whether or not to keep walking. The man was gorgeous: long black hair, brown eyes, smooth skin the color of toffee. He wore a shimmery gray silk suit that accented his broad shoulders and long legs, and on his feet he wore cowboy boots trimmed with real silver.
Nora pulled her purse tight against her side. She would walk around the car and continue toward hers as if she saw nothing wrong.
"Who'zat?" A nasal male voice demanded.
"Probably someone on the way to her car." The responding voice was deep and smooth, soft and in control. Even without clear eyesight, Nora knew who spoke second.
A tiny man stood on the bumper of the Lincoln. The first man had slid across the hood to make room for the small guy. The little guy was perfectly proportioned, square with a pugnacious face, a nose that obviously had been broken several times, and powerful arms. He wore dark blue jeans and a t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeves.
"It'd be nice to have a woman," the tiny man said.
His companion smiled. The snake wrapped itself around his wrist. "Things are a bit different now," he said. "You can't just have any woman."
As he said that last, his gaze met Nora's. His brown eyes sparkled as if they shared a joke.
She wasn't in the mood to share anything, no matter how gorgeous he was. She had a video deposition to take, a lunch to grab on the run, and a court appearance at 2. She didn't have time for any of this.
"Excuse me," she said, and tried to hurry past them. The little man scurried along the bumper until he could extend his small arm in front of her.
"Who are you?" he asked in his annoying nasal voice.
She had had enough of their strangeness. She rose to her full five feet four inches (in heels) and said, "Nora Barr. I'm a lawyer." She added that last so that they wouldn't screw with her.
The tall man raised his eyebrows and looked at the little man. The little man shrugged. "Told you we needed a woman," he said.
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