“It’s nice to hear that the company man isn’t entirely a thing of the past.”
“When you’re dealing with inherited job skills, it’s more likely. I suppose you could inherit a head for figures or a talent for art or music, but when the skill that makes you right for a job is a genetic trait, you get multiple generations in the same job. I’m one of the few outsiders in the company in a job that nobody in my family had before me. At least, as far as I know.”
I remembered that he’d said he was an orphan who didn’t know who his parents were. Although I was curious about his background, I didn’t know if that was a touchy subject for him, so instead I said, “I guess you, Merlin, and I are in the same boat, then. He’s not technically an outsider, since he was the founder, but he doesn’t really know anyone else in the company.”
“That’s one of the reasons he was brought back. We didn’t know if we could trust our previous leadership. We needed someone above suspicion with no ties to the current employees.”
I was dying to ask him what he meant by that, but we’d reached the subway station, where a platform full of rush-hour commuters wasn’t the best place to talk about magic.
I used to hate riding the subway at rush hour, but since I’d started commuting with Owen, I’d learned to like it a lot better. He could reach the overhead bar, and since I couldn’t, he’d hold me steady with an arm around my waist. I had a feeling that was the only way I’d ever get contact that intimate with him, so I had to enjoy it where I found it. Standing like that with him made me remember every romance-novel cliché I’d ever read about weak knees and pounding pulses, while it didn’t seem to affect him at all. Reason number seven-hundred sixty-eight why I was pretty sure he didn’t feel about me the way I felt about him.
I felt a pang of disappointment when we lurched to a stop at the Union Square station and shoved our way to the doors. My daily time with Owen had nearly come to an end. I’d have to wait until the next morning when I emerged from my building to see him again.
Oh boy, did I have it bad. I thought I’d talked myself out of the crush that ate Cleveland, but no matter how many pep talks I gave myself about how an ultrapowerful wizard of mysterious parentage might make a great fantasy-novel hero but would probably make a lousy boyfriend for a girl like me, and no matter how many clues I found that proved he saw me as nothing more than a friend, the next time I saw him, it started all over again. If I didn’t know for sure that magic didn’t work on me, I’d have suspected him of using one of Rod’s attraction spells.