Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  But she was something else. Not stunning by any means. He had seen his fair share of stunning women, and he knew that Hannah was not that type. He couldn’t even imagine her dolled up or glamorous. It wasn’t her. But there was such a sweet, pure beauty about her. It was a soft, warm type of beauty, and it shone out of her eyes in a way that intrigued him.

  They took their order over to a table at the far end of the café, sliding into a booth. Liam took his coffee and removed the top, blowing lightly on the burning hot liquid before taking a sip. It was strong and bracing, just how he liked it.

  “Do you often have that effect on women?”

  Liam glanced up at Hannah, whose sandwich was sitting in front of her while she studied him, her fingers laced together on the table. “What effect?”

  She arched an eyebrow at him.

  “Yes,” Liam said, deciding to be honest. After all, he was about to tell her all sorts of things, so what difference did it make to be honest? “I do, actually.”

  “I’m sure,” Hannah said, reaching for her sandwich.

  It was Liam’s turn to lift an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

  “What does it mean that I look like a teacher?”

  He held his hands up, not eager to get into that discussion again. “Nevermind. You keep your assumptions and first impressions, and I’ll keep mine.”

  Hannah nodded her head in agreement, chewing thoughtfully. “Okay, I’m going to make five guesses about you, and you can only say yes or no—no explanations.”

  So far, this meeting was not going at all according to the way he had imagined it. He had thought that he would walk in, sit down with some big, burly guy in an office, explain what he thought was going on, be challenged, and questioned, and dismissed, and then go back to work determined to put the whole thing behind him. Instead, he was sitting in a café with a pretty young woman, and she wanted to guess things about his life.

  “I like to get to know my clients,” Hannah said. “It’s not just about whatever it is you came to talk to me about. We’ll get to that, definitely. But it’s better if I know something about you first, and I like to think that I’m good at reading people.

  “All right,” Liam said, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his chest. He was curious to see if she would be able to peg him. “Go ahead then.”

  Hannah nodded, sipping her drink. “Okay. First guess. It’s an easy one, but I’m just getting warmed up. You’re in a high-powered career. An executive. A financial advisor. A lawyer.”

  Liam pressed his lips together, narrowing his eyes at her. “Okay. Yes.”

  Hannah smiled. “You don’t have a girlfriend, or a fiancée, or a wife, but you’re hardly what you would call …single.”

  Smiling slightly himself, Liam nodded. “Yes.”

  “You have an adventurous hobby that you spend a lot of money on, even though you don’t always have time for it.”

  Now Liam was starting to get impressed. The first two weren’t hard guesses, considering he had already told her that he had a certain effect on women, and he was wearing traditional business clothes. He thought about his garage, which was stocked with rock-climbing equipment that he rarely got to use because of his schedule. “Yes.”

  “You have family, but not nearby. Not in this state. And you have one or fewer siblings.”

  Liam leaned back, so that his chair tipped back on two legs. “Yes.”

  Hannah nodded, satisfied with herself. “Last one. You’re a dog person.”

  Dropping the chair back onto all fours, Liam leaned forward, a gleam in his eye. “No.”

  “Then we have a problem,” Hannah said, picking her sandwich back up and taking another bite. “I don’t take clients who don’t like animals.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like animals,” Liam said, pointing at her. “I just said I’m not a dog person. If I had to identify myself with a domesticated animal, it would be with cats over dogs. I like their sass. And I like that they’re tidy. I like dogs, but I’d get a cat before I got a dog. So. You’re wrong.”

  Hannah chuckled, shaking her head. “All right, well four out of five isn’t bad.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said, leaning back again. “Actually, it’s downright creepy.”

  “I’ve been in this business long enough to know how to read people,” Hannah said, shrugging a shoulder. “Is it really that strange that a private investigator and security agent would know such things?”

  Liam shook his head. “No. I suppose it isn’t. But since you do know so much, why don’t you tell me why I’m here?”

  Hannah picked up her napkin, dabbing at the corners of her full lips with it before clearing her throat. “Okay, I will.”

  If she got this one right, he’d do whatever she said because clearly she would be on a completely different level.

  “You’ve brought your problem to me because you’re not sure of yourself. You think you have a problem, and you might even think that you know what it is, and why it’s happening. But you’re not sure because you might also just be going crazy. Nobody else will believe you, most likely. But you’ve heard about or read about the Rockwell Agency, and you know that we have a reputation around town for taking cases that are just a little bit strange. You’ve heard the whispers, and maybe you even know someone whose case we handled. At any rate, you feel safer coming to us because—what’s the harm? If we laugh you out of the office or out of the café, all you did was waste an afternoon. It’s not like you went to the police and reported something outlandish—something that might have uniformed officials laughing at you, or even worse, making note of you. If you’re a lawyer, you probably know those police officers, and you can’t have them thinking that you’re crazy or paranoid, now can you?”

  Liam stared at Hannah, shaking his head back and forth, as she read him like an open book. He had no idea how she had picked up on all of that just from sitting across from him in a public place for ten minutes. But it was clear that he had come to the right place for help. If she knew all of that, then she could figure out what was wrong with him in a heartbeat.

  “Yes,” he said. “An old woman has ruined my life, and I think she’s out to destroy me.”

  Chapter 5

  Hannah

  “An old woman,” Hannah repeated, picking her sandwich up again. From the look on Liam’s face, he was taking this very seriously even if it sounded a little silly to her. She took it seriously, too, because experience has taught her that it didn’t matter how outlandish something sounded—it was probably true. And anyway, she had heard far worse. “Start from the beginning, and tell me who the woman is, what she did, and how your life has been ruined.”

  Liam took a sip of his drink. “My life isn’t ruined, but it’s not going well, either. Last year, for a few weeks, I dated this girl. Her name was Trinity Calhoun.”

  Hannah thought the name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t remember where she had heard it. “Okay …”

  “It was casual. Nothing serious at all. We saw each other a few times a week—she often stayed over on the weekends. But I was upfront with her, and she was on the same page about what kind of relationship it was. It wasn’t long before we just kind of went our separate ways. No animosity. No breakup. No anything.”

  Hannah nodded, although she wondered if anything was ever quite that simple. She thought of her time with Alex, and she thought about how hard the breakup had been. Of course, they had been serious. At least, she’d thought they were serious. So, it was different in that respect. But she just couldn’t imagine sharing a bed with someone, even just a couple of nights a week, for multiple weeks, and not starting to get attached. So, had Trinity Calhoun really been so nonchalant about things ending between her and gorgeous, successful Liam?

  “I didn’t give it a second thought,” Liam said. “For months and months, I just went about my life, as usual. Then, almost two months ago, I was sitting in my favorite bar, and this old woman comes up to me.
I’m talking a really, really old woman. Like really old.”

  “I understand that she was elderly,” Hannah said, covering her mouth, as she took another bite of sandwich. “Then what?”

  “She accused me of using Trinity,” Liam said, shaking his head. “Well, she didn’t say her name, but I have a friend who did some research for me and figured out who the woman was. That night she just said that I had used her granddaughter. And that I had stolen money from her.”

  Hannah set her sandwich down, dusting some bread crumbs from her fingers. “Did you?”

  “Of course not,” Liam said. “I make good money. I’m a lawyer, by the way. You were right about that one. And I certainly—certainly—do not need to be stealing from my casual companions.”

  “Your … what?”

  “My casual companions,” Liam said. “That’s what I call it when a woman is more than a one-night stand but isn’t a girlfriend.”

  Hannah decided not to delve any deeper into that. She would just tuck that away in her mind to make sure that she didn’t get any ideas about this guy. She wasn’t interested in being a casual companion to anyone—or a one-night stand for that matter.

  “Okay, so you didn’t steal from her,” Hannah said, “but this older woman says that you did, and …”

  “And she put a curse on me,” Liam said with a straight face. “I mean, it must have been. I don’t know what else it could have been, honestly. She said I was always going to be mediocre. I would never achieve success. And that’s what people say to you sometimes, you know? You don’t take it personally. Bitter people will say that you’ll never succeed in life. But this woman—she meant it. And things changed all of a sudden, especially at my job. I started getting negative feedback on my work. My motions are all getting dismissed. I’ve lost all of the cases that have gone to trial or arbitration—even those I shouldn’t have lost. Everything has been breaking. My phone. My fridge. My tires blew. Everything. I swear—what she said is coming true.”

  Hannah contemplated that for a moment, using the excuse of finishing off her sandwich to buy time while she decided how to respond. On the one hand, nothing that he said was conclusive. People had slumps at work. They had random occurrences where things broke—even multiple things over the course of a few weeks. After all, some people have always said bad luck comes in threes. There was nothing about what he had said to make the conclusion that this old woman had cursed him at all.

  But Hannah knew that was perfectly possible. Perhaps the average person wasn’t aware of it, but curses were reasonably common things. Any witch or warlock could perform a curse—it didn’t take a sorcerer with immense power. What she was curious about was how he knew about curses, and what had made him decide that his perceived bad luck was connected to this old woman’s words. “So, you believe in curses?”

  “No.”

  Hannah tilted her head. “Well, then doesn’t that solve your problem? Just a run of bad luck?”

  Sighing, Liam looked around the place. “No—I don’t believe in curses. If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have laughed at you. But …I don’t know how to explain it any other way. The night that the old woman came up to me—her name is Winnifred, by the way—the night she came up to me, I had a feeling. It just came over me. Like apprehension. I’ve had a lot of people say a lot of things to me over the years. Disgruntled clients. Law professors. Women. All of the above have said things to me about never amounting to anything. It’s never been like this. It’s never …felt like this.”

  There was a lot of validity to what he was saying, so Hannah nodded. “Okay, so, in your gut, you feel like there’s some sort of curse on you?”

  “Yes,” Liam said, looking at her without really, fully looking at her. “And I heard … I mean …I read …that your agency deals with such things. That you’re open to what we might call …alternative explanations.”

  Hannah nodded again. “Yes. That’s true. But something tells me that you’re not just here because you’ve been down on your luck for a few weeks. There’s something else.”

  “She was killed.”

  “The old woman?”

  “No,” Liam said. “Trinity.”

  It came back to Hannah now, where she had heard the woman’s name. There had been an article about her the other day, and the article had implied that she had died under unusual circumstances. Hannah had even considered following up on the case by calling one of the friendlier cops in the Baton Rouge police force to determine what they knew about the situation. She remembered that Trinity had been quite young.

  “Oh, yes,” Hannah said, shaking her head, sadly. “Terrible. I read about that. God, I’m so sorry. Casual companion or not, that must have been difficult news.”

  Liam nodded. “It was, yes. But …I couldn’t help but think one thing. The grandmother already thinks that I stole from Trinity, and she knows she put a curse on me—if she put a curse on me. I’m concerned that she’s going to assume that I’m the one who killed Trinity. And if she cursed me to mediocrity for supposedly stealing, what’s she going to do if she thinks that I killed the poor girl?”

  Hannah sat with her drink in her hands, holding it to her, but she almost forgot she was holding it at all. Her mind was thoroughly focused on what he was saying, and she was testing all of the possibilities in her mind. His fears weren’t entirely unfounded, but nor were they totally rational either. There were so many things that could be happening here, and she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

  “So, nothing has happened yet,” Hannah said, just making sure that she was hearing him correctly. “Other than a few things breaking and some cases going badly …nothing has actually happened, right?”

  Liam’s expression became shuttered, his defenses going up. “No. No, I guess it hasn’t.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” Hannah said, gently, resisting the urge to reach out across the table and touch his arm. With another potential client, she would have done exactly that, but she knew better than to get too familiar with Liam. He was used to very specific relationships with women, and she didn’t want him getting any ideas about her. “You’re right about our agency. We do things differently. Curses—that’s nothing new or shocking to me. I don’t think you’re crazy, and I don’t necessarily think you’re wrong.”

  His expression softened slightly again, although it was hard for a man with such a strong, angular jaw and chiseled cheekbones to look soft in any way.

  “I’m just not sure you’re right yet,” Hannah said. “It’s a bit of a logical leap, if you know what I mean.”

  “But you think curses are real.”

  “I know they are.”

  “And you deal with them?”

  “More often than you would think.”

  “And you know how to cure them.”

  Hannah smiled, slightly, shaking her head. “Now that—that depends on how the curse was placed, and what the curse is meant to do.”

  “It’s meant to ruin my life,” Liam said, with no small amount of indignation.

  “Why are you not at work this afternoon?”

  The question was abrupt—purposely so. It threw Liam off, though he recovered quite quickly. “I’ve only stepped out for a few hours. I’ll go back to the office when we’re done.”

  Hannah nodded, picking up her napkin and dusting off her hands, then dabbing off her mouth. “I’m coming with you. I’m going to shadow you for the next twenty-four hours, and at that point, I’ll decide whether or not I think that there’s a curse that’s been placed on you.”

  Liam’s eyebrows lifted, and he smirked slightly. “Did you just invite yourself to hang out with me tonight?”

  Rolling her eyes, Hannah stood up and began to gather their dishes and trash. “You should know one thing about me, Liam. It’s a very important thing to know about before we progress any further along this client-investigator relationship.”

  “What’s that?” Liam asked, standing
and taking the plate from her hands to put it away himself.

  “I don’t believe in casual companions, and I’ve never had a one-night stand,” Hannah said, walking with him over to the trashcan and dropping off her napkin and throwing away her cup. “I’ve never had a one-night stand in my life. I don’t think they’re wrong—not at all. But they’re not for me. I don’t do casual, and I don’t flirt with people I’m not interested in.”

  Liam was still smirking down at her. “Uh-huh?”

  “So, don’t start with me.”

  “Start what?”

  She gestured to him, flicking her finger up and down in his general direction. “This.”

  “What?”

  Hannah put her hands on her hips and gave him a look. “You know what I mean. Yes, we’re going to spend the evening together, but only—only—so that I can determine if there’s a curse on you.”

  Liam shrugged a shoulder, folding his arms over his broad chest, as he looked down at her with that same, knowing grin. “Okay, Hannah.”

  “Ms. Reese.”

  “Okay, Ms. Hannah Reese.”

  Hannah shook her head at him. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 6

  Liam

  Liam sat at his desk, tapping away at his keyboard and concentrating, his brow furrowed, as he followed the map of the words appearing on his screen. It was late afternoon, and the March sun was beating in through the windows that made up the back wall of his office. His office was on the nineteenth floor, the city of Baton Rouge spread out below him. He could see down on other people’s roofs. One building had a garden on top of its roof, and another had a parking lot there. One red convertible was always parked in that parking lot, and there were many afternoons that Liam had looked over to his left, down on that convertible, and wondered if he needed a cherry-red midlife crisis as well—even if he was only in his mid-thirties and a bit young for a midlife crisis.