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  Khristos barked a laugh, his head falling back on his shoulders, revealing a strong neck, thick with cords of muscle. “That’s right! That was one helluva play you made, too. Talked about it for days.”

  Nina slapped him on his broad back while an astonished Ingrid and Quinn stood frozen and watched. “So what’s goin’ on here, man? Ingrid tells me Boobs McGee is Aphrodite? Seriously? Like she didn’t have big enough rose-colored glasses sitting on that snooty nose of hers? What in the ever-lovin’ hell have you done, Khristos?”

  Khristos stood back and jammed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Me? I didn’t do a thing. She did. She nicked the apple with her teeth, and you know what that means.”

  Nina lifted her dark sunglasses and rolled her eyes, the strip of zinc oxide beginning to melt on her nose. “The golden one? Aw, duuude.”

  Khristos threw up his hands. “Honest to God, I look away for one minute and bam. It’s partially my fault. I was a little distracted—”

  “With a hot, leggy blonde, no doubt?” Nina asked, her grin facetious as she moved to the shade beneath a column.

  Khristos rolled his eyes, but his face split into a gloriously handsome grin. “I tried to tell her not to touch it, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  Quinn knew she should speak up, say something in her defense, but she still wasn’t over the fact that Nina knew this man.

  “What the hell was the apple doing here in the first place?”

  Khristos looked up at the column and shrugged. “I only set it down for a minute. We had some kind of weird tremor, right, Quinn? Maybe a mini-earthquake?” he asked her. “And it fell on the ground and she grabbed it up.”

  Quinn’s mouth dropped open.

  Khristos shook his head. “Never mind. She’s still a little shell-shocked. You know, the whole body change? I know it’s a delicate subject with women, but as I explained earlier, you know what the gods were like back in the day, right? Ample bodies and lush curves were all the rage. Anyway, the apple fell from the column and then, well, you know the rest.”

  Nina nodded then nudged Quinn with her shoulder. “Did he tell you not to touch the apple, doofus?”

  Quinn frowned, not liking the ugly guilt she was experiencing. “Well, yes…but I thought he was nuts. I mean, I thought maybe the apple was some rare artifact he was trying to steal. I tried to get it away from him, but in our struggle, I nicked my tooth on it. I thought by keeping it from him, I was saving all of Greece!”

  “See?” Khristos said, hitching his angular jaw in her direction.

  Nina nodded, her next words laced with typical Nina sarcasm. “Job well done, Indiana Jones.”

  Oh, blame, blame, blame.

  Nina brushed her hands together as if she were over this. “Then we’re good to go. And thank Christ, too. I thought I was going to have to spend another piece of my damn eternity codling one more cockadoodie whiny woman. But you can take it from here, right, Khristos?”

  Wait. Nina was just going to leave her here with her big, big boobies and an utter stranger-slash-alleged-god who said he had to teach her how to be Aphrodite?

  Aw, hell no.

  She was terrified of Nina. Every time she ran into her when she and Ingrid had a study date, she literally shook in her shoes and avoided her like the plague or, if forced into her company, sat quietly as Nina scowled at her.

  But what if Khristos wasn’t being completely honest, like Ingrid said? What if, even though he knew Nina, she didn’t really know-know him? Did you ever really know a person? Wasn’t it true that when serial killers were revealed, all the people who knew them in their everyday lives were all in total shock because they never suspected a thing?

  Nina was a beast, but she was the beast Quinn knew, and if something went awry, she wanted the vampire on her side.

  Which meant—let the begging and scraping commence.