“Where am I taking you?” Oswin asked as they fastened their seatbelts.
“I don’t want to impose on friends without warning. Is there a Motel 6 nearby?” With that decision, she closed her eyes and tried to think ahead to tomorrow. Grief over Bo’s reported death had impaired her thinking, but she knew her finances couldn’t tolerate the expense of a motel for long.
She could call her maternal grandmother or cousins in San Francisco, but they’d ask questions she wasn’t prepared to answer. If they hadn’t picked up psychic vibrations of peril yet, then she didn’t need to bring them in. Her father would have another stroke if she moved up there. He thought all the Lings were crazy.
She must be growing used to her driver’s silence. Or her thoughts were too jumbled to notice. When Conan didn’t respond to her motel choice, she leaned the passenger seat back, wondering if she could summon enough courage to stay in the office after all.
It took a few minutes before she opened her eyes and realized he was heading down the coastal highway, where a room cost the earth and a few stars. “Where are we going?”
“You’re a client. I can’t leave you in an improperly secured building. We’ll discuss internal security in the morning.”
She ought to feel alarm, but Oswin still wasn’t exuding any negativity. The car was filled with that masculine energy she’d grown comfortable with too quickly. Except she knew the danger of his zigzag chi. He wasn’t what he appeared, and that much power inevitably led to tragedy. She should know.
“I can’t afford a coast hotel. It needs to be a cheap one,” she warned. “I’m not running up credit card debt if my father is about to fire me.”
“Why would your father fire you?” he asked, reasonably enough.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said satirically. “Because someone is robbing his beloved foundation on my watch? Because almost anyone else would be better than I am at running the place? And if he learns I’m not accepting Bo’s death, he’ll accuse me of my mother’s drama queen tendencies. I could be both homeless and unemployed by Monday.”
He snorted impolitely. “You are a drama queen. I’m taking you to my place, anyway. I’ve taken a personal dislike to thieves who trash good cars.” Her security consultant sounded grim.
She barely even knew the man, and he was taking her home? The techie wizard didn’t have a strong grasp of social dynamics, did he?
She cast him a sidelong glance, but he was driving with one wrist over the wheel as if he threatened mayhem all the time. He’d donned the stupid hoodie again, and he didn’t look old enough to be out of school, but she’d seen his gold-rimmed brown eyes. They held ages of experience, not to mention a lot of sun wrinkles. Dangerous, she reminded herself. But her hormones screamed I want. Obviously, she had some complex issues.
“A hotel,” she insisted. “And what makes you think a thief and the vandal are the same?” She couldn’t read any tension in his jaw. He just competently steered his space-age machine off the highway and into the entrance of a beach enclave—painfully jarring her back to earth.
The familiar guardhouse and street of mansions ahead caused her to lose track of his reply. He lived in her mother’s old neighborhood!
How she missed the house she and Mei had so carefully decorated for tranquility and success. Drowning in the wonderful memories of uncluttered spaces, polished bamboo floors, tinkling wind chimes, soothing fountains, and her mother’s spectacular red glass, Dorrie couldn’t protest.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Oswin was saying as he pulled his keycard from the security gate. “Trashing a car like that is an irrational act of hate. You may be dealing with someone mentally unbalanced.”
“Hate is never logical,” she said abstractedly as they cruised past houses she’d run in and out of as a child. “That doesn’t stop people from feeling it.”
“Unless you staged the tire-slashing yourself, I’m thinking your instinct to escape from the garage had a physical component that should be investigated,” he said without an ounce of inflection.
That dragged her back to the here and now. He actually believed that she might feel hate? Only her mother’s family recognized the power of chi.
“The forces of the universe are physical,” she said in distraction. It had been a long, disastrous day, and her brain obviously wasn’t functioning clearly or she’d be protesting his do-as-I-say attitude. She’d had enough of that from her father.
Conan pulled into the drive of a two-story glass and stucco structure that she didn’t remember. She stared up at it in puzzlement. “The Morrisons used to live here. This isn’t their house.”
“Yeah, the termites finally made their place uninhabitable. I bought the land for a ridiculous sum, and they retired to Arizona to be near their kids.”
A garage door slid open, and he steered the sleek car into its confines. “I needed space so I could open the doors on this baby. Germans apparently don’t have garages, or they live in caves.” He punched a button and the gull-wing car doors rose upward.
Dorrie looked around at the jumble of surfboards and other assorted sports equipment lining the walls. “I thought you were a techno-freak. You surf, too?” That probably explained the bulging biceps and rippling abs.
“Not as much as I used to, but it’s good thinking time when I have a chance. How much of this junk do you want to bring in with you?” He nodded in the direction of the trunk where he’d stored all her worldly possessions.
“My suitcase and my dog.” She ought to be arguing with his high-handedness, but she was simply too stunned.
Beach equaled home. The slap of waves half a block away wiped out any negative chi from the jumble of his garage. Maybe she’d be back to her old self in the morning.
Toto yipped to remind her of his needs, and she led him outside before Conan closed the garage. The rain had finally stopped, and she breathed deeply of the chilly evening breeze and let Toto inhale doggie gossip on the fireplug. Conan joined her, checking up and down the street as if he expected terrorists to leap out from around the corner.
If Bo and Conan’s brother weren’t dead, if they’d been kidnapped, if the military was covering up… Maybe terrorists should be feared. She shivered.
“You’ll freeze,” he said, too-observant as usual.
“I think I know when I’m freezing,” she corrected. “This is the first time I’ve felt grounded all day. Let me enjoy it.”
He intelligently shut up.
Once Toto had done his business and trotted at her heels, Dorrie reluctantly walked back to the house, studying the feng shui aspects of his exterior. “Where is your entry?” she asked in dismay, staring at the gaping maw of the garage in the stuccoed first story.
A bland white door marked the normal entry on the right, but there was no pathway leading up to it. Without light, she couldn’t tell for certain, but it appeared as if his doorstep was a wooden crate.
He shrugged. “I just go in through the garage. I’ve never got around to landscaping so there’s no walk to the front door.”
“You welcome chi through your garage?” she shouted in outrage, which proved she was nearly off the edge. He wouldn’t understand feng shui. “You’re shutting out people,” she warned, translating into pop psychology for his sake, “as well as good energy. Very bad for business and family relations.”
“Business is fine and our family doesn’t do relations.” He punched a button to close the garage and guided her toward the entry into the lower floor of the house. “I just need a place to work and a place to sleep and I’m fine.”
“Your family relations aren’t so great if your brother has gone missing,” she pointed out.
He glared. She shut up again and opened the door to his lower level. She couldn’t help it, she gasped in horror at the sight within. “Oh my heavens,” she whispered, “I think I’ll sleep in your car.”
He glanced over her shoulder and responded with irritation. “It’s not that bad.”
>
Toto howled and scampered between the jumble of boxes and discarded junk that was Conan Oswin’s home.
“Oh yeah, it’s that bad,” Dorrie whispered. “I’m amazed it isn’t your house sliding into the ocean. Energy this bad could bring down a helicopter.”
Chapter 4
Conan knew better than to introduce a woman to his bachelor retreat, but he hadn’t thought the uptight Miss Inscrutable would go berserk.
He was wrong. Staggering to the middle of his clutter as if she were fighting a fierce wind, dotty Dorothea abruptly clutched her chest and nearly fell to her knees. That was going too damned far to prove her instincts.
He should have paid attention when she’d mentioned her drama queen tendencies. The foot-kicking incident should have warned him, but his client had remained unnaturally calm after that. He was bad at reading people cues. How was he to know that behind that deadpan expression lurked the mother of all melodrama? She thought bad chi could bring down a helicopter?
Curls bouncing, she swayed, forced herself upright, and lurched urgently in the direction of his front entry, knocking her shins on boxes. Before Conan could do more than deactivate his security alarm, she kicked his prized Dewey Weber Performer surfboard off the door where he’d left it leaning.
He almost clutched his own chest as the board crashed into a set of metal shelves. Cringing at the possibility of dings in the polypropylene hatchet fin of the classic board, Conan tried to stay cool. He leapt over boxes and gear to catch his treasure and prevent it from completing its slide to the floor. Just as he grabbed it, the nutty prima donna collapsed against the door jamb, pale as a ghost, and rattled the door knob of the unused front entrance as if it were the only way out of hell. She shrieked when the knob fell off in her hand.
Oh, yeah, that was the reason he’d left the board there.
“Your career sector is unhinged!” she gasped, staring at the knob.
Career sector? She was the one unhinged. “A broken door is hardly reason for hysteria,” he muttered, propping up his trophy. He grabbed the loose knob from her and shoved it back into the hole. “Besides the board, I have an alarm.”
Unfastening the security latch that held the door in place, she mumbled something about “chee” and waved the open door, encouraging an ocean breeze to enter the musty room. Okay, so it smelled a little. He must have a bag of unwashed gym socks down here somewhere.
After taking several deep breaths, she left the door wide open, and scanned his organized chaos with an evil glint in her eye. Conan backed off a pace. The Librarian should have mentioned a Chinese whacko instead of a predator.
But his curiosity was too strong to stand in her way. What the devil was she about?
After studying the layout, his guest apparently regained her equilibrium. She determinedly straightened her shoulders and began shoving aside unpacked boxes of old clothes, comic books, and the dregs of his youth, blazing a trail across the room. He never used this dark lower floor. He preferred the upper, multi-windowed story and considered this room little more than a basement.
Dotty Dorothea apparently disagreed.
Her path led unerringly to the panel disguising the unfinished entrance to his inner sanctum. He’d sealed off access to the stairs by leaning his old Harley against it. Sometimes, simple security was the most effective. He figured any burglar discovering his unlocked door and willing to risk his security alarm would have to give up and flee before he found access to the upper half.
Not Dorothea. Wild curls escaping their clip, her face still pinched and pale, she looked as if she’d like to rip through the wall. Instead, she glanced with horror at the bike’s missing wheel, shoved it aside, and removed the plywood concealing the doorway.
Once she’d located the center of the house, her cheeks regained color. She whirled and glared at him accusingly. “Are you trying to murder me?”
Conan shoved his hands into his pockets and returned her glare. “Are you trying to wreck my security system?”
“This…” She pointed at his roomful of toys with revulsion. “This is what you call security? Are you insane? If nothing else, you have to be killing yourself. Your chi is totally blocked and moldering. Your health has to be deteriorating. It’s a wonder you’re not bankrupt. And we will not go near what you’ve done to your relationships with this kind of…of…” She couldn’t seem to find the appropriate word. Or curse.
“I take back anything I may have thought about your rationality,” he countered. He was enjoying defrosting Miss Frost too much to be angry, but there was no point in letting her know that or she’d button up her shirt and put on that hideous jacket again. “This is my basement. This is what I store in basements. I’m perfectly healthy and my relationships are the same as they’ve always been. And the fact that I own this house proves I’m not bankrupt.”
Although since moving in here, his finances had been dwindling, but the economy was bad. People weren’t hiring. Even the government wasn’t offering lucrative contracts like it once had. His blocked front door had nothing to do with the damned economy.
“We have just gone through a Five Yellow Star period, a Death Star year, the entire country is floundering, and you’re deliberately blocking all your positive energy! The lack of sheng chi in here is so severe, you might as well have filled your home with carbon monoxide.”
Dragon Lady was cute when she looked dead serious. “Death Star year?” he inquired innocently. “Does it involve dead suns or Star Wars?”
To her credit, she didn’t heave anything at his head. Getting smacked for his annoying habits had become boringly predictable.
“You’re trapping bad energy and sucking out anything good. That wall needs to come down.” She pointed at the plywood concealing his staircase with the distaste he would give to a heap of dog shit. “I am not working with anyone who lives like this. I know your neighbors. I’ll stay with them. You’re fired.”
She grabbed her dog’s leash and stalked for the front entrance. The broken front entrance.
“You never hired me!” He ought to let her go. He had access to her computers now and really didn’t need her help. But she’d suffered one of the worst days he’d ever heard of, and maybe she was justified in being a little unhinged. He couldn’t let a madwoman run loose in the streets.
Besides, he was intrigued by her weird instinct about energy patterns that revealed someone hated her. She’d been awfully close to right, judging by the slashed tires. Could she also be right about Magnus? Could his brother still be alive? He couldn’t ignore the possibility that she might be right.
Dorrie didn’t heed his shout. She stalked down the path she’d made to the door.
Conan suffered this weird notion that if he let her walk out, she’d be right about the house ruining his relationships. Or whatever. He took the shortcut over half a dozen book boxes and stepped in front of the door before she could reach it. He might be bigger than she was, but with a kick like hers, he was seriously jeopardizing his balls by standing in her way.
She was inexplicably worth the risk. “I apologize for whatever I said wrong. The builder went bankrupt and never repaired his shoddy work, so yes, this place is a mess. But I’m the only one who sees it, and maybe Oz and his wife occasionally. And sometimes…”
Conan saw the steely look in her eye and refrained from mentioning women or his slacker friends. “I’m not trying to kill you. If you want to stay with my neighbors, fine, but let me go over with you. I have no way of guaranteeing that we weren’t followed.”
The pink in her cheeks disappeared again. “You really don’t think anyone would bother following us, do you?”
“It wouldn’t make sense, but I can’t be sure. Believe it or not, there is a security system on this house. The front door is a long story. I’ll call someone to board it up—”
She shook her head until her curls bounced. “This is where your chi enters. You must welcome it, not block it out. Do you have a screwdriver?”
<
br /> Relieved that she’d returned to some semblance of reason, Conan located his toolbox beneath the plastic tarp and wetsuits he’d dumped in a corner. After living in the tiny cottage he’d owned before this, he loved having room to spread out. She didn’t have to look at him as if he’d just handed her an ax.
“The door needs rehanging,” she informed him, competently screwing the knob into place. “The latch won’t work.”
“No kidding, Sherlock.” He reached behind the metal shelf of sports equipment and punched his security panel with his code, turning it back on. “Try leaving now and the cops will be here in ten seconds. Does that make you feel safe enough?”
“Safety wasn’t my concern until you mentioned that we might have been followed,” she said dryly, tackling the rest of the room with her glare. “Is there even a bed down here and can you find it?”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor,” he admonished. “I have a water bed in the back room, an air mattress…” He looked around but wasn’t certain where he’d left that one.
“The water bed will do,” she said with a sigh. “Beggars can’t be choosers. Unbelievable. My father worked his way out of a slum just so his daughter could move into one.”
He stared at her in incredulity, and she grudgingly shrugged.
“Okay, so I’m sarcastic and I exaggerate occasionally. I’m depressed. I’m entitled,” she said.
It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde. She morphed from witchy CEO to petite fairy with a shrug of shoulders he wanted to hug. And he wasn’t a hugger. He liked that she was honest enough to admit her faults, but he was still wary.
“Do you have linens by any foggy chance?” she continued. “I’ll return the favor by rearranging your room according to feng shui principles that should improve your positive energy.”
Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic Page 4
