Three Fates

to lift her voice over the music. “So streamlined and perfect. I wish I’d taken the ferry from Stockholm, but I was afraid I’d get seasick. Still, I’d have been sick on the Baltic Sea. That has to count for something.”
    When he laughed, she glanced up, flustered. She’d nearly forgotten she’d been talking to a stranger. “That sounds stupid.”
    “No, it sounds charming.” It surprised him that he meant it. “Let’s do what the Finns do at such a time.”
    “Take a sauna?”
    He laughed again, let his hand slide down her arm until it linked with hers. “Have some coffee.”
     
     
    IT SHOULDN’T HAVE been possible. She shouldn’t have been sitting at a crowded sidewalk cafe, under pearly sunlight at eleven at night in a city thousands of miles from home. Certainly she shouldn’t have been sitting across from a man so ridiculously handsome she had to fight the urge to glance around to be sure he wasn’t talking to someone else.
    His wonderful head of chestnut brown hair fluttered around his face in the steady breeze. It waved a bit, that hair, and caught glints of the sun. His face was smooth and narrow with just a hint of hollows in the cheeks. His mouth, mobile and firm, could light into a smile designed to make a woman’s pulse flutter.
    It certainly worked on hers.
    His eyes were framed by thick, dark lashes, arched over by expressive brows. But it was the eyes themselves that captivated her. They were the deep green of summer grass, with a halo of pale gold ringing the pupil. And they stayed fixed on hers when she spoke. Not in a probing, uncomfortable way. But an interested one.
    She’d had men look at her with interest before. She wasn’t a gorgon, after all, she reminded herself. But somehow she’d managed to reach the age of twenty-nine and never have a man look at her in quite the way Malachi Sullivan looked at her.
    She should have been nervous, but she wasn’t. Not really. She told herself it was because he was so obviously a gentleman, in both manner and dress. He spoke well, seemed so at ease with himself. The stone-gray business suit fit his tall, lanky form perfectly.
    Her father, whose fashion sense was laser keen, would have approved.
    She sipped her second cup of decaf coffee and wondered what generous gift of fate had put him in her path.
    They were talking of the Three Fates again, but she didn’t mind. It was easier to talk of the gods than of personal things.
    “I’ve never decided if it’s comforting or frightening to consider your life being determined, all before you’ve taken your first breath, by three women.”
    “Not just the length of a life,” Tia put in, and had to bite back the urge to warn him of the perils of refined white sugar when he added a generous teaspoon to his coffee. “The tone of it. The good and the evil in you. The Fates distribute that good and that evil justly. It’s still up to a man what he does with what’s inside him.”
    “Not preordained then?”
    “Every act is an act of will, or lack of it.” She moved her shoulders. “And every act has consequences. Zeus, king of the gods, and quite the ladies’ man, wanted Thetis. The Moerae prophesied that her son would be more famous, perhaps more powerful in some way, than Zeus himself. And Zeus, recalling just how he’d dealt with his own father, feared siring this child. So he gave Thetis up, thinking of his own welfare.”
    “It’s a foolish man who gives up a woman because of what may happen down the road.”
    “It didn’t do him any good anyway, did it, since Thetis went on to mother Achilles. Perhaps if he’d followed his heart instead of his ambition, married her and loved the child, showed pride in his son’s accomplishments, Zeus would have had a different fate.”
    What the hell had happened to Zeus? Malachi wondered, but thought it wiser not to ask. “So, he chose his own destiny by looking into the dark inside himself and projecting that on a child yet unconceived.”
    Her face lit at his response. “You could say that. You could also say the past sends out ripples. If you follow mythology, you know every finger dipped into the pool sends those ripples out, and they touch on those who come after. Generation after generation.”
    She had lovely eyes, he mused, when you got close enough to really look into them. The irises were a clear and perfect blue. “It’s the same with people, isn’t it?”
    “I think so. That’s one of the core themes of the book.