"Shanna Swendson - Once Upon Stillettos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swendson Shanna)

date, and a depressing phone call from my mother, who remained convinced that I must be terribly
homesick living in the big city. Going to work allowed me to escape all that. It was a relief going to a
place where the weird was perfectly ordinary.

Well, there might have been one other reason for looking forward to Monday morning, and he was
waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of my building. Owen Palmer perfectly fit the definition of the
word "heartbreaker," without actually deliberately doing anything to break hearts or even knowing he
was doing so. He was incredibly gorgeous, incredibly brilliant, incredibly nice, and every indication was
that he'd filed me firmly in the "just a friend" category.

He was also an extraordinarily powerful wizard and a leading fighter in the magical war of good against
evil. That may sound sexy and romantic, but in reality I suspected it didn't make him ideal boyfriend
material. Besides, I was happy being friends with him. Really.

He greeted me with a smile. "Good morning, Katie. How was your weekend?"

"Good morning, yourself. And my weekend was okay." We fell into step together as we walked toward
the subway station.

"You had a date with Ethan, didn't you?" The office grapevine at MSI was possibly the best in history.
Or Ethan had told Owen. They were becoming pretty good friends. The casual tone of his voice when he
asked about my date with another man was yet another piece of evidence proving he had no interest in
me. Not that I was setting out to make him jealous, but would it have killed him to show the tiniest hint of
it?

"Yeah. It was nice. The date part was, at least. But there was some other stuff that got kind of strange."

"Such as?"

"I'll probably need to talk to you about it at work." If I was going to have to discuss certain aspects of my
dating life with him, I preferred to do it in a business capacity.

"Now you've got me intrigued."

"Trust me, it's not that interesting. Just something we might want to track. And how was your weekend?"

"Nothing exciting. I mostly rested."
"Good. You're not back working on counterspells, are you? The boss said you had to recover fully."
Owen had been more than a little drained and banged up in his last encounter with our nemesis. He still
had the faintest traces of a healing black eye, which stood out against his pale skin, and although he no
longer carried his left arm in a sling, he wasn't using it much.

"I'm being good, trust me. I can't afford to let myself get rundown right now."

And with that, we'd exhausted our conversational supply. We didn't really hang out together beyond
work-related situations. I didn't even know if we had anything in common. That didn't stop me from
wanting to sigh dramatically whenever I saw him.

But then I saw something odd enough to distract my attention from the gorgeous man at my side. You
see strange things on the streets of New York every day, and I see stranger things than most, but this