“No, it’s just, what with…” He stopped, switching his attention to Mandy, who was eyeballing him like a cat that’s just spied the last bowl of cream. I half expected her to lick her lips in anticipation.

This time I did yank off my cap and slapped it down on the reception desk. “Mandy, why don’t you order some more bandages? Janet said she was running low.”

My office manager didn’t seem in any big hurry to get back to work, so I picked my cap up and strode around the counter. “My office is back here. Might as well get on with it.”

Mr. Six Four, Peter Arpada, according to his application, managed to tear himself away from the reception desk and followed.

By the time we reached my private space, I’d regained a sense of calm. It wasn’t that I was sensitive about being short, for an Amazon anyway. It was just that not many people pointed it out. Which, come to think of it, brought a question to mind. He didn’t know I was an Amazon.

“Why did you expect me to be tall?” I blurted the question out before he had a chance to sit in the chair recently deserted by bad candidate number two.

“Oh, I don’t know.” He unzipped his portfolio and began flipping through pages. “The name, I guess, and the tattoo thing. I just expected someone different.”

He smiled, and I tried hard to keep my face stern. There was an insult in there somewhere, but it was hard to focus on it under the full power of his pearly whites. I decided to let the whole height thing go and just work on marking him off my list as fast as I could.

“Let’s see what you got.” I held out my hand.

I should have been warned by the confident tilt his head took as he slapped the leather case into my hand, but I wasn’t. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw inside.

“These are…nice,” I murmured. Nice my ass, these were killer. Not to be completely egotistical, but I hadn’t seen anything this good outside of my own shop, created by me. I flipped to a wolf head, done in portrait style, then quickly moved to the more abstract stuff. The colors were especially good choices; pausing on the image of a woman’s arm with a Celtic dragon wrapped around it, I frowned.