Enchanted Ever After (Enchanted, Inc. 9)

“Mimi?” Owen said.

Nita rose on her tiptoes and looked around us. “Really? Mimi’s here? I’ve heard so much about her, I’m dying to see her for myself. I kind of expect her to drip venom from her fangs when she talks.”

I grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “Shh, don’t do anything to draw her attention. I don’t want to have to talk to her.” I didn’t know what, exactly, Mimi might remember about our last encounter, which had ended with her being menaced by dragons. If she associated me with that, I needed to avoid her.

“But which one is she?” Nita wasn’t being any stealthier as she scanned her surroundings, but at least she wasn’t sticking her head above the crowd.

“Redhead at three o’clock,” I said.

Her eyes widened when she spotted Mimi. “Yeah, she looks high-maintenance.”

“You have no idea.”

“Owen? Owen Palmer? Is that you?” a voice called out. A female voice I didn’t recognize. My head snapped around to find the source before Owen reacted. It wasn’t that I was jealous or insecure. More like curious. Owen had a hard time talking to women—well, people in general—in social settings, so him running into someone he knew and didn’t work with was a very rare occasion. And, yeah, maybe I was a teensy bit insecure. There was a nasty voice in my head that kept asking me if I really thought I was worthy of a super-cute, wealthy, powerful wizard. I’d gotten better at shutting up that voice by reminding it that I’d more than pulled my own weight in the relationship, but that didn’t mean I didn’t worry the least little bit about women who fit into his world better than I did.

This woman was the kind who tended to feed that worry. She could easily have been a model who just happened to be at the festival for a photo shoot if she’d been about eight inches taller. As it was, she had the build and proportions of a model in a dainty, petite package. She was shorter than me, even in her high-heeled boots that were probably custom made, but she still made me feel short. Her willowy figure and proportionally long legs gave her the illusion of height, but when she kissed Owen on the cheek, she had to stand on tiptoes to do so, and he was on the short side of average height.

“How have you been?” she asked, whisking a shimmering curtain of golden hair back over her shoulder. Amazingly, it stayed put instead of falling forward again, the way my hair usually did. “It’s been ages, hasn’t it? Since graduation, I think. I hear you ended up at MSI.”

He just stood there, staring at her. He blushed a bit, but not enough to indicate that she discombobulated him in a big way. I got the impression he was trying to place her, which I found rather astonishing. What man would forget this woman? Maybe she’d changed a lot since he knew her.

“Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me,” she said with a trilling laugh. “You’ve changed more than I have.”

“Mattie Mayfair?” he said finally, squinting like he was trying to bring her into focus.

“Do you know who that is?” Gemma whispered to me.

“No idea,” I whispered back.

Mattie beamed, showing perfectly straight, white teeth. “Ah, I knew you couldn’t have forgotten me. But I go by Matilda now.” Clutching his arm, she turned to face the rest of us. “We were classmates at Yale. Though I was apparently less memorable to him than he was to me.”

Owen wasn’t beaming. In fact, he looked rather uncomfortable. I got the impression that the pleasure in the reunion was purely one-sided. “Mattie—er, Matilda, this is my fiancée, Katie, and my friends, Gemma, Marcia, Nita, and Philip. And you probably remember Rod.”

Her eyes widened slightly at the word “fiancée,” especially when she realized it applied to me. I suddenly felt dumpy, frumpy, and awkward. Rod spared me from having to come up with anything witty to say by stepping forward, his hand extended, so that she had to release Owen’s arm to shake it. “Good to see you again,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Oh, I went to work for the family firm, of course,” she said.

“Well, it was nice to see you, but we were on our way to meet up with someone,” Owen said.

She pulled a business card out of her designer handbag and handed it to him. “Do stay in touch.” He slipped it into his pocket without looking at it and gave her a noncommittal nod before taking my hand and heading out through the festival. I had to jog a little to keep from being dragged behind him. It took the others a few more seconds to join us.

“Okay, that was interesting,” I remarked. “I take it that wasn’t an ex-girlfriend.”

I felt the shudder that went through his body. “God forbid,” he said. “And I doubt I’d still be alive. She probably bites the heads off anyone who dares to break up with her.”

“So, not your favorite person.”

“She was a bit of a snob,” Rod, who’d caught up with us, said. “As in, she made the royal family look easygoing and down-to-earth. Then again, she might have more money than they do.”

“But isn’t t

he queen the richest woman on earth?” Nita asked.

“Okay, I’m probably exaggerating,” Rod admitted. “But still, she was old money and made sure everyone else knew it.”

“I always got the impression that she ran financial background checks before she deigned to speak to anyone,” Owen added. “She probably said more to me just now than she ever did the entire time we were in school.”

“You’ve moved up in the world since then,” Rod said.