Dorrie shuddered. “Even house arrest wouldn’t be enough. I don’t ever want to see that man’s face again, but he haunts me. I want to believe that it’s all over, but I can’t. That’s why I need to call my mother’s family.”
“Not computing,” he pointed out, but his curiosity level had shot up and his surliness disappeared.
Dorrie pushed a curl out of her face and wished she didn’t have to do this. Even she had difficulty believing in what she considered to be a legend, but she couldn’t ignore anything that might give them a direction. Her mother’s murderers might want revenge for what Dorrie had done, but there was no explanation of why they would be after Bo or his kids—unless all the crimes were related. Reluctantly, she pulled out the ancient family stories.
“My grandmother’s family came to the United States because they were being persecuted by communist scientists, decades ago,” she told him. “I don’t know the whole story, just the whispers I overheard when my mother was killed.”
“Like the California Malcolms.” he said unexpectedly. “You claim you and your brother have extraordinary talents. If all your family is gifted, the Chinese culture is more likely to accept that than U.S. scientists.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t compute either, but yes, I believe it was my family’s other abilities that the scientists wanted to manipulate. That long ago, they didn’t have satellites in orbit, so a human GPS would have been extraordinary. If Bo has that ability now, some predecessor might have had it. I assume a talent like that would be useful to a spy. But my family is dead honest. Spying would go against the grain. As did communism,” she added wryly. “They’re entrepreneurs. And they weren’t poor even then.”
“So your whole family fled Communist China back in the what…the fifties? Settled here, and managed to keep their other abilities out of the limelight after a few missteps.” Conan looked interested, not disbelieving.
His interest made it easier for her to continue. Dorrie poked at her lasagna, wishing she could believe that revealing her sins would save Bo. Instead, she feared it would put Conan off her forever. But it was better to do this now, before she came to rely on him too much.
“You’ve been prying again if you know about my family,” she said. “It will get you in trouble someday.”
He snorted. “I’ve pried into Homeland Security and I’m still alive. Quit stalling.”
His confidence was almost contagious. She took a deep breath. “I think my family feared the scientists or the Chinese government watched them even after they came here. I suppose persecution causes a form of paranoia.”
She paused, but Conan didn’t question her surmise, so she continued. “My mother was an extremely talented feng shui expert. I was told that she used to work with her family to protect their homes and businesses. They didn’t tell me that her purpose was to lead spies astray, but now that I’m feeling paranoid, I can guess it. I assume the rest of my family did the same for each other, in whatever ways their talents lay. But when Mei, my mother, married my father, she moved down here, away from her family’s protection.”
“I can’t imagine a feng shui expert would be of much use to the communists,” he said pragmatically. “And wealth is a shield of its own. She should have been safe. I thought it was an angry competitor who went off his meds and tried to rob her.”
“That’s the police theory and what the papers printed. Feng Li, the man they’ve just let out of jail, is half Chinese. He owned an antique shop, not an interior design firm. He claimed my mother hexed him, which is why the police think he’s nuts. All I know is that my mother refused to deal with him. I don’t know why, but I assume his chi was negative, at the very least. At worst, he may have been a communist spy. I was young, and Mei would have kept me away from bad energy, so I can’t objectively judge him after the fact.”
Conan got up and got more beers while he pondered this angle. “Still doesn’t explain why anyone would kill an interior designer.”
“No, and if he was off medication, then it’s possible her death really was entirely random, and he’s no further threat. I’ve had no reason to believe otherwise all these years. There are a few problems with that theory.”
Conan opened the bottle and set it down in front of her. “You’re going to tell me you were a witness, aren’t you?”
“I’m that easy?” she asked, rubbing her brow and not drinking. “I was there. I knew there were two men, not one. My father and his lawyer had the police keep me out of the papers. I didn’t even have to go to court because Feng Li’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon and the door and everything else. They just needed me to give them a name and they took it from there. The police had no evidence of an accomplice.”
“There’s something coming I’m not going to like.” Conan slid into the booth across from her and took her hands across the table.
Dorrie clung to his strength as she tried to find the words. “Remember, I was only twelve and hysterical. I watched two men break into my mother’s shop and shoot her. She didn’t have a chance. I was afraid I’d be next. I hid, but they’d heard me scream.”
She released his hands to slug back the beer when he still said nothing, forcing her to continue. “They came after me, and I used dim mak on them,” she said with finality, revealing the secret she’d harbored all these years. No one knew what she’d done.
Of course, only she was likely to know what dim mak was. Conan merely looked puzzled.
Reluctantly, she explained. “It was instinctive, like throwing up a shield to keep them away, except energy doesn’t work like that. At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. I just summoned all my fury and fear and the energy exploded like… an AK-47. Rat-a-tat-tat, boom, boom, boom. I was a hormonal teen, brimming with the emotional instability of all adolescents, not able to clearly judge right or wrong. I wanted them dead. I shot them as surely as they shot my mother. Screaming in pain, they ran. I hit them, no doubt about it.”
Conan shoved the table aside, lifted her from the bench, and settled her into his lap, holding her tight. Dorrie buried her face in his shoulder, but even his strength couldn’t ease the searing pain of the memory. She’d killed a man, just as surely as if she’d pulled a trigger.
“Quit shaking,” he ordered, driving his hand into her hair and kissing her brow. “It’s okay. Any of us would have done the same, if we had any clue what dim mak is.”
She chuckled at his perspective. “It’s a legendary ability. We speak of masters who can use it so that their victims drop dead a week later and no one knows it is murder. It supposedly takes decades of training to develop the mind skills necessary to kill. I did it without thinking. I’m a killer.”
“Your mother’s murderer went to jail. He’s not dead,” he reminded her. “Although dead would have been too good for him.”
“Masters can shield themselves, especially from someone as untrained as me.” She pulled back from Conan’s hold to meet his eyes. “Don’t you see, if I am right, that means Feng Li is not a half-mad antique dealer. He could have feng shui skills like my mother’s, making him a competitor, indeed. He may have dim mak skills like mine. He could very well come after me anytime he likes, unless they’re forcing him to take his medication.”
“C’mon, Dorrie. That’s all speculation. What happened to the other guy?”
“He’s the one who died,” she said, going limp again and resting her head on his shoulder. The memory was faded now, along with the anger and fear. “He was younger, possibly not as skilled. Perhaps with no skill at all. He came looking for me days after I went to stay with my father. I knew who he was, and I ran. I ran away from the house as a quail runs from its nest because I didn’t want him to hurt my father or brother or anyone else.”
Conan held her tighter, trying not to freeze in disbelief. He ached for her grief and fear. He wanted to punch out her father for not protecting her better. He suffered so many conflicting emotions that he thought he might internally hemorrhage
from trying to contain them.
But even his limited imagination could make the connections. “You led him to the cliff?” he asked in disbelief, letting her weight in his lap and her arms around his neck reassure him of a more pleasant reality.
She shrugged weakly. “I was hoping he’d run off the cliff. Instead, he shot at me with a gun, so I arrowed him with my fury again. He collapsed and died in front of my father’s gardener without my laying a finger on him.”
“Did an autopsy prove he died of dim mak?” he asked, forcing humor, because he knew what she would tell him next and still wouldn’t believe it.
“It might have been interesting to find out,” she agreed with a sigh. “But no, there was no autopsy. I was an hysterical basket case. The gardener was an illegal alien and didn’t want to call the police. We—the gardener and I—rolled him into the hole for the pepper tree the gardener was planting. And that was the end of that.”
Conan tried to process her story with the woman he knew. Drama queen hysterics, yes. Twelve-year-old imagination, sure. Illegal alien? Stranger things had happened. Dim mak? Not computing. Nobody had that kind of power except in movies.
“A man died in front of you,” he said in acceptance of that much, hugging her tighter. “You’d just suffered a traumatic event. You were hysterical, rightfully so if you recognized the bastard. But at the very worst, whatever you did was self defense. He’d come to kill you, the witness. He deserved to die, but if he’s dead, then he’s not your problem now.”
She punched his shoulder, but it was a weak punch. “It doesn’t matter what you believe. My mother’s family is paranoid enough to believe there are more killers where those came from. The Lings will come down and surround Amy and the kids with their special abilities, and they will help us find Bo. I hope.”
“I still don’t see how a couple of crazies have anything to do with your brother.” Conan didn’t know what to believe, but he knew, even if he didn’t believe, she did. And what a person believed made a difference.
Right now, he was so desperate that he wanted to believe his witchy woman could call up superpowers and return their brothers from the dead.
He trusted logical action more. “As you said, one’s dead and the other is under surveillance, if not bars. Let’s go after the clown in your office first. He’s an easy target.”
“I may have used dim mak on the shooter in the office,” she protested. “He could be dying right now. He was just a kid!”
“And he shot you, so he deserves whatever happens to him. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Consequences. Quit playing the blame game. Not your fault!”
Apparently irritated with his reaction, she struggled to escape his arms, but he was tired of restraining himself. Her sexy bottom was rubbing right where he needed her, and the lovely breasts pressed into his side stimulated much more pleasant ideas than trapping thieves. He ran his hand under her sweater and stroked her nipple and decided she needed a little recreational sex, too.
“Let’s test that cunning bed,” he murmured, standing and carrying her through the damned narrow aisle, mocking her earlier admiration for Oz’s tin can.
She kissed his jaw as if she approved of this diversion. Or needed it as much as he did.
His phone rang. He wanted to ignore it, but Dorrie instantly stiffened. She’d be worried about the kids. This thinking about others business had its disadvantages.
With a sigh, Conan snapped open his cell. “This had better be good.”
“Pippa and her mother have been expanding your genealogy research,” Oz said without preamble. “Did you know that our Oswin ancestor took one of their California Malcolms to China before World War I and raised his kids there?”
Chapter 26
Dorrie tried to untangle herself from Conan’s arms when he clipped his phone closed, but he held her even more tightly.
“You’re probably a Malcolm,” he said, in a tone that sounded as if she might have a fatal disease, before dropping with her to the wide bed tucked into a niche at the rear of the RV.
Dorrie didn’t want to hear about Malcolms. She wanted oblivion. She’d recited her worst nightmare, and Conan hadn’t run screaming in the opposite direction. So maybe she was crazy, and he didn’t care. The fantasy of an attractive, brilliant man wanting her as much as she wanted him miraculously wiped out painful memories, for the moment.
She’d never particularly had body issues because she’d always lived inside her head. Her body had always been more or less irrelevant—until now.
Conan made her mind go away and her body sing. Every cell hummed by the time he’d kissed his way from the top of her head to her breasts and shimmied off her sweater. His talented fingers plucked her strings with the same assurance as they stroked his keyboard.
She had to drive her hand into his hair to hold him steady so she could return the favor. He moaned and greedily sank into the kiss, forgetting all his practiced moves while she rubbed her breasts against him.
Once she had their chi synchronized, their actions were effortless and purposeful. Even her shoulder stopped aching. Clothes melted to the narrow strip of floor. Dorrie entwined her limbs around Conan’s longer, more muscular ones, deriving pleasure simply from his strength.
The yin and yang of male and female made perfect sense in this context. She could fit inside his energy instead of being put off by it. Conan welcomed her, enveloped her, until she absorbed him and he became a part of her. As one, they burned brighter and more fiercely. All the fireworks she’d ever known exploded in a brilliant fireball behind her eyes when they came together.
Even after they’d taken everything from each other, their energies weren’t depleted, but peaceful and braided together to make a stronger whole. Conan rolled over to take his weight off her, and Dorrie clung to his shoulders, turning with him. They fell asleep like that, wrapped in each other’s arms.
The intimacy was so easy, Dorrie rolled naked out of bed during the night for a glass of water, and returned to find Conan aroused and waiting for her. With a freedom she couldn’t ever remember experiencing, she climbed across his hips and took full advantage of his offer.
He filled her completely, satiated her, then held her in comfort as they drifted back to sleep. Now that she no longer harbored her guilty secret, mindlessness worked beautifully. Even Conan’s zigzag energy calmed, and he slept soundly.
The shrill shriek of a phone drew them blurry-eyed from their cozy cocoon in the gray hours of dawn. Dorrie blinked awake and wiggled her bare bottom into Conan’s erection. Ignoring the phone, he obligingly caressed her breasts, mumbling about voice mail.
But the ring was no sooner cut off than it began again. Cursing beneath his breath, Conan rolled over and grappled on the floor for the phone. Dorrie explored his broad, bronzed torso in retaliation.
She wanted to shut out the world and hide in here. If she allowed herself to wake, a dozen problems would raise their ugly heads, and she didn’t want to confront them.
Conan found the phone, flipped it open, and swung his long legs out of bed, cursing at caller ID.
Dorrie sighed and watched his bare buttocks retreat down the hall to the tiny bathroom. The Terminator was back.
Borrowing a long white robe she found in the closet, she was in the kitchen by the time Conan returned, fully dressed. She tingled with pleasure when he lifted her hair and kissed her nape, but she realized that his formidable mind had moved on to the day ahead. She could expect no morning-after sentiment from this man, although she appreciated the kiss.
“Oz received a text message from the Librarian,” he said, as if that made sense to her. “It’s just a number.”
“Like forty-two? The answer to everything?” she asked, humoring him. “Who is the Librarian?”
“Don’t know.” He gulped the glass of juice she handed him and then examined the coffee maker. “She’s helped us before. We think she’s trying to help Malcolms. Ergo, if you’re a Malcolm, she’s you
r friend, too.”
“Sending numbers without explanation doesn’t sound helpful.”
“The Librarian is so far beyond weird that it’s like playing charades with a chimp to deal with her messages. We have no idea who she is, but you’ll have to trust me on this. She’s been very helpful. And irritating.”
She ground the coffee beans and handed them over. “I don’t suppose it could be several numbers and they’re GPS coordinates?”
“We should be so lucky. I need to see the actual message and try to trace it, but Oz says it just reads thirty-five, numerical, not spelled out. I need you and your family to stay safe up here. I understand if you want to call your grandmother, especially if they are Malcolm descendants. But I’ll need to warn Oz and Pippa. They have reason to avoid strangers.”
“TMI,” Dorrie protested, not ready to process his brother’s problems without caffeine. “Let me have some coffee first.”
He added water and hit the coffee machine’s power button. “I need my equipment. Legal or not, I’m going into that offshore account. Once I find where the money is going, I’m setting a trap. I want that son of a bitch taken down. Once the freak in your office is nailed, we’ll figure out if he’s related to the shooter.”
He stuck a mug under the coffee stream before it could hit the pot.
“I want to go with you,” she said mulishly. “The kids have Amy. I can call Grandmother Ling and ask for just one or two discreet guards. FF is my business, and I need to know what’s happening.”
He narrowed his eyes and glared at her while sipping the coffee piping hot. “If you’re the target, you’re not safe.”
“If I’m the target, maybe they won’t come up here hunting Amy,” she retorted.
“No one knows we’re up here. If I need you at the office, I’ll let you know. For now, I’m just on the computers. Stay here. Keep Amy company. Entertain your grandmother. Decorate the town. Whatever. I brought you a cell phone. I’ll stay in touch.”
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