“Neither of us were smoking, as far as I know. I just looked down at my hand, and it looked—hot.” No idea why she’d said that last part. She realized it made her sound insane, and quickly corrected herself. “He probably was smoking, now that you mention it.”

“Did you say your hand was hot?” He winced. “You do realize what you could be accused of?”

Witchcraft. He was talking about witchcraft.

It would have sounded completely crazy a few months ago, but the world had changed, ever since a group of mysterious men had been caught on American TV slaughtering people in a Boston park, before disappearing into thin air in a whirl of demonic activity. Now half of London was talking about witches and magic. For her part, Ursula had no idea how they’d disappeared, but she liked to believe magic wasn’t the culprit. There was enough shit to worry about without adding in a supernatural threat.

She loosed a sigh. “Look, all I said was my hand was hot. I have a fever. You know, I think I should go home.”

Rufus leaned back in his chair. “It’s not as crazy as you might think. Madeleine knows all about witches. She’s been doing a lot of research since the attacks. She works with a professor at UCL.”

“I’m not a witch, for God’s sake. I don’t even believe in them. And who is Madeleine?” His new girlfriend, no doubt. Poor lamb had no idea what she was in for.

“Never mind that.” He gave her his puppy-dog eyes. “Oh, Urse. Why is it so hard for you to get things right? Why do you always feel the need to mess everything up?”

Somehow when he was trying to be nice it was worse than when he was just an arsehole. “That’s what you think of me? That I can never get anything right?”

For a moment, he pressed his lips into a thin line. “You always look so lovely, and that’s an asset in my club, though tonight you haven’t even managed that. You’ve achieved remarkably little with your life. You never managed to get into uni. You nearly got evicted last month. Again.”

She gritted her teeth. “We talked about this when you dumped me, and I told you, those are both the kinds of things that happen when you’ve got no money.”

He leaned over his desk. “It’s just that you’ve got no plan for success. No goals. I’ve been building an empire, investing money—”

“Your father’s money.” Shit. She shouldn’t have said that out loud. It would hit a nerve, and that wasn’t good for her employment prospects.