“Bo?” Damn. She gazed at him with wariness and a slightly faster pulse. Could he suspect what she knew about Bo’s energy? Could she trust him?
Oswin’s expression revealed nothing, but his restless energy said her response was important. Now she was suspicious for real. “You’re wondering why they never found their bodies, too?” she demanded.
“I have reason to question the incident,” he admitted.
Chapter 2
Considering the explosive conversation she’d like to have about their brothers, Dorrie preferred a less public venue. She suggested that they meet in her father’s office, where she could also show him her office problem and pretend normalcy.
Did he have real actual evidence for his suspicion, something more solid than the feelings she wasn’t allowed to express?
Self-preservation warred with hope as she escaped to the relative safety of her Prius and hit the freeway. From his nest of all her worldly goods, Toto Three stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had. Maybe grief had finally wiped out her common sense. Was she seriously considering telling Conan Oswin her fears? She’d have to explain about feelings, and that was when the excrement always hit the oscillator.
She had only his chi to rely on, and she was notoriously bad at translating character from energy. Maybe if her mother had lived… But she hadn’t. Dorrie didn’t want to explain skulls and prior lives if Conan knew nothing about her past. She just wanted Bo back.
But her father had trusted Conan enough to allow him to install a complete security system protecting his favorite project. Her father was good at choosing ethical business people.
Her father would fire her if Conan reported that she was deranged. She’d spent the better part of her life walking this tight rope of using her gift while hiding who and what she was. She had to rely on her experience now. Bo’s life could depend on her. She prayed that she could imitate sanity while speaking of what most practical men didn’t want to believe.
She arrived at the office first and climbed out of the Prius into the familiar underground garage. She ruthlessly scraped her unruly hair into combs and pins and a damp chignon to become Business Dorrie. She dumped her billowing rain cloak into the driver’s seat, and checked to be certain her suit looked impeccable. She slipped out of the ratty clogs and donned a pair of heeled sandals she’d removed earlier.
Unfortunately, there was no way she could transform Toto Three into a briefcase to complete the authoritative image. The cairn terrier was too old to be abandoned in a car for long. Her father’s office would have to see this tiny piece of her—and her mother. She scooped the dog into her arms.
Watching Judy Garland’s Wizard of Oz movie every year with her mother was one of her fondest memories. Mama had bought the first Toto from a breeder who claimed the dog’s ancestor was the one in the movie.
Ever since, there’d been at least one cairn terrier in the house, and they’d all been named Toto. After her mother’s death, her dogs had been the one love that she could count on through the misery of trying to fit her oddities into high school and college life—and to live up to her father’s expectations.
She’d tried to love her big, boisterous father, but Ryan Franklin wasn’t a family man. When she’d guiltily offered to nurse him after his stroke, he’d pushed her away, counting on his son and heir to take over. With Bo gone…there was no one but his inadequate daughter.
The Franklin Foundation was a monument to her father’s success in real estate. He’d started by buying slum property in the sixties and selling it for billions in the booming nineties. After providing a comfortable retirement for himself—and nothing for his children—he’d plowed the bulk of his estate into the foundation to help the poor living in the slums from which he’d risen.
But money couldn’t bribe Mother Nature. The stroke that had felled him had left him wheelchair bound and Dorrie at his mercy. They’d been arguing over a problem at FF when he’d keeled over.
The instant Oswin’s sleek black car roared in, the energy in the garage shifted. As Conan swung open the car’s gull-wing door, masculine chi rolled around like high tide at a full moon. It was so strong, she couldn’t tell if it was positive or negative. She just felt it the way she felt the warmth of the dry garage, or the ocean breeze on a sunny day. Even her depression lifted beneath his move-it-forward energy.
His tall, broad-shouldered form unfolded from the dark piece of expensive German engineering. She tried to identify the car, but all her attention was diverted to the man. He stripped off his hoodie, revealing khakis, a black T-shirt bearing a surfboard logo—and high-maintenance biceps. She almost stopped breathing in awe.
As Conan approached with a long-legged stride, Toto yipped in greeting.
“Batwings?” she asked dryly, recovering her senses and nodding at the futuristic car.
“Batcar,” he agreed without missing a beat.
He took her elbow in a firm grip that shivered her right down to her toes. Security emanated from their contact, along with rock solid certainty. He was both tide and boulder. Amazing. Scary. Very sexy.
He gave Toto a grave look but didn’t attempt to make friends.
Business first, she mentally commanded. Missing family, empty stomach, and no home had no relevance to the matter at hand. “You’re familiar with our office?” she asked, walking toward the elevator.
“I met your father here, talked to a few employees, but I do most of my work off-site. I know what floor it’s on, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, steering her toward the one elevator that reached the upper story.
His touch seeped right into her bones. His energy intertwined dizzily with hers. She could barely see his face in the dim garage lights, and still she was physically attracted to him. That didn’t happen often. Men gave off aggressive energies she had difficulty relating to, so she usually kept her distance until she was certain they couldn’t hurt her. It made for less than intimate relations and certainly didn’t allow for instant attraction.
Not that it mattered. He wasn’t looking at her so much as steering her. She had looked like a bag lady earlier, with mud staining her shoes and wearing rain gear. He’d seen her with her hair loose, so she wasn’t fooling him with the neat chignon. In the damp air, with coiled ringlets springing everywhere she must have looked like the wicked witch her employees called her. He probably thought she was crazy enough to need steering.
Even with Toto under her arm, she did not resemble innocent Dorothy. She wasn’t at all certain why her mother thought inky Asian hair with her father’s Irish curl in any way resembled Judy Garland.
“It’s almost five. People will be packing up for the day. We should be able to talk here.” Not that she had anywhere else to take him.
He took the key card from her hand and slid it into the elevator slot, then examined the card before handing it back to her. “Old tech on that card. You might request the building owner update it.”
“My father owns the building, and he’s had a stroke. Building security is not high on his priority list.”
He nodded acceptance but didn’t respond with fake sympathy. Life happened seemed to be his attitude. It was rather refreshing, actually.
Now that she had some semblance of light, she could see that Oswin’s blond-streaked hair curled slightly and fell in his face. The shaggy cut did not lend an air of competence. Neither did his casual attire.
But he’d come to her. That was so freaking unusual that she didn’t know whether to run and hide or savor the moment. Did he really believe their brothers were alive?
The elevator doors opened on the top floor where the foundation’s offices were housed. Employees glanced up and away as she led Conan down the hall to her desk.
“The Wicked Witch of the West has returned.” The whispered warning reached Dorrie’s ears as she led Oswin past rain-splattered office windows and gloomy cubicles, pretending she didn’t hear. See no evil, hear no evil, that was her motto.
Sun would help. Rain in Santa Monica just wasn’t normal, and everyone was on edge. Her heels clacked along the polished black-and-white tile. She despised heels. If office spies wouldn’t report everything she did to her father, she’d kick them off and go barefoot. The cold tile ought to be converted to carpet in a fiery orange-red to welcome good energy.
Square tiles in this sector of the bagua were totally repellant feng shui. Perhaps if she redecorated, the vibrations would improve. She could replace the dreadful metal blinds with translucent gold fabric shades over the floor-to-ceiling windows. Filtering sunlight made more sense than blocking it with room-darkening blinds. Of course, once the rains came, the fabulous view of blue Pacific was obliterated anyway.
Oswin stepped up to walk beside her, and the bad vibrations vanished. She glanced up at him in astonishment, and Toto licked her chin.
***
Walking past gray cubicles of employees on gray phones, typing away at gray keyboards, Conan watched the wild-haired gypsy of earlier straighten into a steel-spined automaton, clicking down the hallway like a soldier off to war. The uptight hair-do was atrocious, the boxy black suit belonged on a man, and her grim expression would have frightened the Terminator.
He’d almost sympathized with her earlier, with rain dripping off her coat and her garden sliding into the ocean. But in the fluorescent lighting and ugly black suit, her ivory skin sallowed, her thick-lashed, exotically-slanted eyes narrowed, and she looked more witch than gypsy. He’d heard the employees whisper behind their backs as they walked in.
Dorothea Franklin looked capable of eating small children alive—a Chinese predator. After the Librarian’s warning, he was looking for suspects everywhere. But how could this weird female possibly be connected to the helicopter’s disappearance? He was out of his friggin’ mind to have sought her out. But once he’d realized they had more than one connection, he hadn’t been able to resist.
He could have investigated Dorothea Franklin without ever introducing himself, but he’d needed to meet her. Unlike his brother Oz, Conan lacked imagination. He couldn’t envision how this Chinese piece of porcelain could be the danger to his family.
Except his nose for trouble was twitching, and he knew the Dragon Lady hid secrets. He was pretty damned certain those had been bones sliding into the ocean, and she hadn’t blinked an eyelash. He didn’t generally buy into stereotypes, but she was doing a damned good impression of inscrutability.
Although he was interested, Conan tried not to get caught figuring out what she hid under her boxy jacket. Checking out what went on under her hood should only involve her computers and would vastly complicate his life otherwise.
She stopped when a blond, plump cheerful female waved a stack of files, actually making the dragon smile. Okay, maybe she wasn’t a dragon. Dragons required heat. Dorothea Franklin was as cold as Mount Whitney in winter.
“You asked for these reports,” the cheerful blonde said. “And Jacko called to say he had a flat and could he take a rain check. A rain check. Honestly, Dorrie, you gotta get a man with a life.” She cast Conan a look of interest, but he wasn’t interested.
He preferred his women stacked, gorgeous, and indifferent to commitment. He’d bored the last one into leaving. All work and no play, she’d said, but his work was his play.
“I have no life, so John and I are well matched,” Miss Frosty retorted. “I’ll take a look at these this evening.”
His interest perked up at her indifference to her date. Damn, the woman wouldn’t stay categorized. Now she was about to add the stack of files to the dog she was already hauling around, as if accustomed to carrying everything herself.
Conan relieved her of the folders.
She glanced at him with surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there. Ouch. She frosted up immediately and returned to marching down the corridor to her corner office. Her phone was ringing as they walked in.
“Yes, I understand, I’ll look up the file myself,” she told the caller while Conan wandered the room, examining photos of her father with Hollywood stars, Los Angeles politicians, and local sports heroes. If she’d taken over for her father, she’d not changed his bland walls.
He watched over her shoulder as she typed in her password and opened her desktop. Shit, she hadn’t even changed her father’s password. He’d looked it up in case he had an opportunity to log in. Security conscious the lady was not.
She sent whatever file had been requested, then opened another folder.
“Here are the files I’ve compiled on the crash.” She rolled her desk chair back so he could peruse the screen. “News stories, replies to my inquiries, nothing substantial. No one who worked with Bo wants to tell me anything. Do you have anything more concrete about your brother?”
Not bothering to find a chair, Conan took over the keyboard before she gave permission. He’d set up the firm’s security. He knew how the system worked. He plugged in his thumb drive and began backing up her file on her brother, while adding his remote access.
“You could be downloading all the company’s documents right now,” she cried in outrage, watching over his shoulder—or around his arm, since her Medusa hair barely reached his chin and she couldn’t see over him. “I just wanted your opinion, not an invasion of privacy!”
“I have the highest government security clearance available to a civilian,” he retorted, typing the keyboard with the speed of familiarity. “Your father did his research when he hired me.”
“I’m supposed to trust you, just like that?” she asked.
Every once in a while, she had a voice filled with flowers, and then she pulled this Miss Frost bit. Conan rubbed his nose and wondered if his headaches meant his brain was cracking.
“Why not be a little more blunt?” Disregarding etiquette, he appropriated the desk chair she’d abandoned and began digging through the computer server’s guts. “If you can’t trust the government, who can you trust?”
“Since I’m not believing their report that my brother died in a helicopter crash, that might be a clue,” she retorted sarcastically.
“Point taken. Is there something in these files that tells me your reason for not believing an official report?”
“Instinct,” she replied. “Their bodies were never recovered. They were on a top-secret project. Do you even know what you’re looking for?” she said, diverting the topic. She was damned good at diversion, he’d noticed.
“If it’s got anything to do with computer security, I can tell you the problem without asking. But helicopters are out of my bailiwick. I need to follow up your notes. Until now, I haven’t been looking into the crash. We need to talk more about why you are, but right now, you need dinner. I could be here a while and your stomach growling is a distraction.”
Conan knew he ruffled feathers. But he’d never quite learned how to play social games. If Daddy’s girl could accuse him of theft, he saw no reason to be polite in return—unless there was a possibility of sex. As much as he admired her black curls and exotic eyes, he didn’t have time or patience for women with split personalities.
When she didn’t smack him upside the head or rip out his hair, Conan glanced sideways in suspicion. She was punching numbers into her cell phone, probably calling police. He admired the determined set of her rounded jaw. Most of all, he admired her silence. He returned to work.
He was deeply immersed in tracking her brother’s last emails when she murmured into the phone. He was completely lost to his surroundings by the time the pungent scent of black beans and garlic roused him from his search. The dog trotted obediently at the lady’s heels, not even barking at the delivery person—another breach in security if she allowed unsecured personnel access to the floor. She should have met the delivery guy downstairs in the secured foyer.
To his surprise, looking through her glass office wall, he realized the place had emptied while he was absorbed in
the computer. Nice. Less distraction.
Continuing to work, he tried not to watch as she unpacked cartons of scrumptious-smelling Chinese food on a desk outside her cubicle. His nose could detect fresh garlic and tell the difference from cheap soy. Surely she didn’t intend to eat all that herself? Women ate like birds, and she wasn’t much bigger than a sparrow. His own stomach was reminding him that he probably had forgotten to eat since breakfast…or maybe since last night’s pizza.
He could scarcely concentrate on the reports scrolling before his eyes. She had produced heavy cardboard plates while he wasn’t looking and was now loading one with Chinese broccoli and noodles. One of them. There was a second plate sitting there. But she didn’t invite him to share.
Was this his punishment for mentioning her stomach? Passive-aggressive, much?
She unpackaged chopsticks and calmly began picking at broccoli leaves while he attempted to dig through files of computer history. He could swear he smelled Lychee tea. No one had the ability to distract him as this woman did. Why the devil was he doing this to himself?
Because she had bones in her garden and thought it odd that the bodies of their brothers hadn’t washed up on shore. And because the Librarian had warned him about Chinese predators, and Dorothea Franklin was the only live Chinese clue he could find. Gypsy woman hadn’t looked like a predator, but Dragon Lady did.
When she opened a box of boiled shrimp in garlic sauce, he couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “Cantonese?” he asked without looking up.
“Good nose,” she replied with just a hint of humor. He could be mistaken about that. She still didn’t invite him to share.
She was tormenting him with food instead of smacking him. He understood the reaction. He wasn’t exactly an agreeable, polite sort. With a sigh, Conan shoved back his chair and crossed the room to examine the packages without being asked. He’d grown up in a household of men. Aggression, not politeness, was second nature to him.
Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic Page 2
