It was a beautiful day today, and Khaat was off this afternoon because she had worked late the last few nights, preparing for a business meeting where she had hoped to woo the affections and pocketbooks of some wizarding businessmen in hopes of gaining more funding for her latest pet project at St. Mungo's. The fourth floor, one floor below where her office was, held the tightly controlled psychiatric department, which had always been limited to adult patients. However, it had become apparent that there was sometimes call for a controlled psychiatric unit for minor aged patients. The fourth floor was large enough, and so Khaat was hotly committed to raising the funding to build a wizarding state of the art child and adolescent psychiatric unit. The pediatric unit was housed down on the third floor, but sometimes there was a child or a teen that was so ill that it was not safe nor appropriate either one to put them in the pediatric unit. Placing them in the adult unit on the fourth floor was always a risk too, so she wanted a separate department for them on the fourth floor because that floor already had the safeguards in place to handle it, and had more than enough room to absorb such a unit. She had had a breakfast meeting at Sparks with them, and over a gourmet breakfast bar, she had presented her idea and a wants list, complete with estimates of the costs it would take to construct, and statistics on why it was so very necessary. It remained to be seen how successful the presentation had been if some cash started flowing her way.
In the meantime, though, she had apparated home, picked up Abbey, and she had taken her to Abbey's favorite Diagon Alley place, Flourish and Blotts. Abbey dearly loved storybooks with pictures, and, even at three, she would sit completely engrossed in her storybooks, without a single peep. Her grandparents, Robert and Kate, who were voracious readers themselves, knew that the best gift to give the toddler was a stack of storybooks. Khaat had decide to take Abbey out in the sunshine and to start with a trip to the bookstore.
It had taken a huge arm twisting to get her bodyguard out of his black suit, which he still wanted to slip back into when they were out, but today, she had gotten him to shift and to go much lower keyed today, in jeans, with a white polo and a bomber jacket. She had not bothered to change from her meeting, so she was still dressed to the nines. They went into the bookstore, with Khaat holding onto Abbey's hand, and the tot launched like a rocket away from her mother to race to the storybook section of the store. Khaat was going to run after her, but as she did, someone tripped on the doormat and raised it up, causing Khaat to catch the heel of her stiletto on the mat. Marcus had steadied her and then he had crouched down and snapped the heels off each of her stilettos. Standing, he handed the broken spikey heels to her. He absolutely hated her addiction to tall heeled shoes because he saw them as a safety risk, causing a constant small power struggle between them. She'd wear a pair of shoes, he would snap off the heels, and eventually, she would use a reparo to reattach them until the next time he broke the heels off.
"I liked those shoes," she sighed.
"Those were sculptures," he told her. "Now they're shoes." She cast him a look that was supposed to look stern, but instead it had come off much more like the amusement she was truly feeling. Because he went bloody everywhere with her when she left home, they were close, and they got along like best mates. To most people, they very likely would not have recognized that he was bodyguard, but since the emergence of James Blood, who still plagued her on a regular basis, Robert had done his research a few years back, and Belby's name had come to the top of the list. Belby had started his career as an auror, advanced to espionage in the Unspeakable department, and then, when the Bulgarian minister of magic had run into security problems, somehow Marcus had been loaned to the Bulgarian minister for personal protections duty. He had served there for several years, and he had risen to be considered to be very good at his job. Wooed away from Bulgaria, Belby now lived at the Quinn estate with Khaat and her family, and her three year old daughter, Abbey, was the only person who could get away with calling Belby "Marky."
They followed Abbey back to the storybook section where she was on the floor and she was already making a pile of books she wanted. Marcus cast her a smile of pure amusement and then wandered a short distance off to be within eyesight and earshot if things went sideways, but not needing to be close enough to overhear conversation and such. Khaat was letting Abbey dream of having every new storybook in the store while Khaat looked for a new mystery book. That lasted until Abbey seemed satisfied with her pile of books left them on the floor, and dashed around the corner to look at some of the adult coffee table books that, she had discovered, also had some outstanding pictures. The little girl with her long blonde hair and her mother's honey brown eyes had absolutely no fear, and when she saw someone in that same aisle, she went up to them and, in her own Hail-Fellow-Well-Met style had spoken up.
"Hi! I'm Abbey. I'm this many!" She had showed three fingers on one hand, and a bent index finger on the other to show she was three. And a half. The half was especially important to her.
"Abbey," Khaat sighed, a trifle frustrated, and she scooped up the storybooks and followed her around the store's tall bookshelf.
by 
