“I realized it wasn’t the only problem.” Marguerite corrected. “She was taking on too many commissions and working too hard . . . at Rodolfo’s insistence. She’s much sought after with clients from all over the world. She usually has to refuse a good many of them, or book them years in advance she is so busy, but Rodolfo was insisting she could do more and should accept them all. He insisted she should “strike while the iron was hot”; the commissions might dry up one day and she should make all the money she could before that happened. He had her working around the clock . . . and all the while he wasn’t working at all.”

“Nice,” Jake murmured.

“Yes, well, while that was helping to sap her energy, the real problem, and what she was trying to hide was that he was terribly controlling and hypercritical. While he was insisting she should do all these commissions, he would then complain that she spent no time with him. He was also tearing at her self-esteem and independence and basically making her miserable. By the time she came to Toronto, he had demoralized her to the point that I don’t think she could have left him on her own, so . . .” She paused and avoided his gaze briefly, and then admitted, “I gave her a mental nudge to make her leave him.”

“Ah,” Jake murmured. It was all he could say. He’d never thought much of the way immortals tended to control the minds of mortals and make them do things they might not otherwise have done. The truth was, he didn’t like it. But in this instance, Marguerite’s heart had been in the right place at least.

“Here we are.”

Jake glanced to the side and sat back to get out of the way as their waitress arrived with their meals.

“Thank you,” he murmured as she set his plate in front of him.

“You’re more than welcome,” she said brightly, beamed at him, and then slipped away.

They were both silent for a moment as they tasted their food. As Jake had expected, his steak was amazing. But then it always was. It was the first thing he’d tried here and the last. He tended to stick with things when he liked them. Although, glancing at Marguerite’s quail, he now wondered if he shouldn’t try some of the other dishes here. It looked delicious too.

“It is delicious,” she assured him, and Jake grimaced, aware that she was reading his mind. While he too was immortal now, it was a new state for him and he knew most older immortals could read him as easily as if he were mortal.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

He shrugged with a wry smile. Swallowing the steak in his mouth, he asked, “So you prodded this Nicole and she left her Rodolfo?”

Marguerite nodded as she took a sip of her water, and then said, “It all seemed good at first. She left him and started divorce proceedings. She also started to see a counselor to try to undo the damage he’d done.” Marguerite smiled. “It’s working. Nicole’s becoming the happy, strong young woman she was before the marriage again.”

“But?” Jake prompted. If everything were going so rosy, Marguerite wouldn’t need his help.

“But there have been some incidents,” Marguerite said on a sigh, cutting viciously into her quail.

“Incidents?” Jake queried.

“Three gas explosions narrowly avoided.”

His eyebrows rose. “You think Rodolfo’s trying to kill her?”

Marguerite’s mouth tightened and rather than answer outright, she said, “He’s going after her money, hard. He’s claiming he left his country, friends, family, et cetera, to marry her and move to Canada and she is now abandoning him. No one’s buying it,” she added grimly. “He was actually let go before the marriage and suggested the move back to Canada himself. Besides, Nicole had arranged interviews for him with companies in his field here before he even landed in Canada. He refused to go though, claiming he wanted a career change. But then he didn’t look for work in any field, but lived off of her.”