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He had a point. I couldn’t think of a lie that came close to explaining it, so I tried for partial truth. “You know that I’m the human servant to Jean-Claude, Master of the City, right?”

He nodded, eyes uncertain, as if this was not the start of the conversation he’d expected.

“Well, there’s been an interesting side effect. Trust me when I say that you’ll want Nathaniel here if things go wrong.”

“How wrong are they going to go?” he asked.

“If I take him into my office, just lock the door and make sure we aren’t disturbed. No harm, no foul.”

“Why would you need privacy with him? What side effect? Is it dangerous?”

“None of your business. You wouldn’t understand even if I told you, and it’s only dangerous if I don’t have someone with me when it happens.”

“When what happens?”

“See first answer,” I said.

“If it’s going to disrupt the office, then as manager I need to know.”

He had a point, but I wasn’t sure how to tell him, without telling him. “It won’t disrupt anything, if Mary keeps everyone away from the door until we’re finished.”

“Finished?” he said. “Finished what?”

I looked at him. I tried to make it an eloquent look.

“You don’t mean . . .” he said.

“Mean what?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, opened them, and said, “If I don’t want your boyfriend sitting in the waiting room, I sure as hell don’t want you fucking him in your office.” He sounded outraged, which was rare for Bert.

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that,” I said.

“Why is this a side effect of being a human servant to the Master of St. Louis?”

It was a good question, but I was so not willing to share that much with Bert. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“I would say you’re making it up, but if you were going to pull some elaborate joke on me, it wouldn’t be this.” That one comment proved Bert knew me better than I thought.

“No,” I said, “it wouldn’t.”

“So you’ve become like a what, a nympho?”

Trust Bert to find just the right thing to say. “Yes, Bert, that’s it, I’ve become a nymphomaniac. I need sex so often that I have to take a lover with me wherever I go now.”

His eyes went wide.

“Calm down, boss man, I’m hoping today will be the exception, not the rule.”

“What made today different?” he asked.

“You know, Mary told me to report to your office as soon as I hit the door. Before you could have possibly known that I’d brought my boyfriend with me, or worn a black skirt that is shorter than you would like. So you didn’t call me in here to discuss my wardrobe or my love life. Why did you want this little meeting?”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you can be very abrupt?”

“Yes, now what’s up?”

He sat up straighter, all professional and client-worthy again. “I need you to hear me out before you get upset.”

“Wow, Bert, I can hardly wait for the rest of this little talk.”

He frowned at me. “I turned the job down, because I knew you wouldn’t take it.”

“If you turned it down, why are we discussing it?”

“They doubled your consultation fee.”

“Bert,” I said.

“No,” he put a hand up, “I turned it down.”

I looked at him and knew my face said clearly, I didn’t believe him. “I’ve never known you to turn down that much, Bert.”

“You gave me a list of cases that you wouldn’t handle. Since you gave me the list, have I sent anything your way that was on it?”

I thought about it for a second, then shook my head. “No, but you’re about to.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“They won’t believe what?” I said.

“They insist that if you’d only see them, you’d do what they want. I told them you wouldn’t, but they offered fifteen thousand dollars for an hour of your time. Even if you refuse, the money belongs to Animators, Inc.”

When I said we worked like a law firm, I meant it. That meant that this money went into the kitty for everybody. The more we made, the more everyone made, though some of us got a higher or lower percentage of our fees. We’d based it on seniority. So my turning down money didn’t just hurt me or insult Bert anymore, it affected the bottom