Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  “Need a date?”

  Glancing down at the girl who’d spoken, he felt his brows arch involuntarily. He’d never seen anyone so young with so little of her original equipment unaltered. It wasn’t just the piercings in odd places or the tattoos in even odder ones. The stark black-and-maroon of her hair was as unreal as the startling dimensions of her breasts.

  “Beltane,” she added, giving him a once-over and liking what she saw. “It’s always a great party.”

  “Uh—no thanks,” he replied. “I have other plans.”

  “Serenity,” one of the boys warned. She turned, making a face as he went on, “No outsiders.”

  “He wouldn’t be an outsider, Scott, once he’s been inside,” Serenity retorted. Scott made an annoyed gesture with oddly singed and scarred hands. Nobody had to ask Inside what?

  Lachlan retreated back up the aisle of shelves, wondering if he ought to rethink his desire to have children. Nah, he’d see to it that they toed whatever lines he and Holly cared to draw—redheaded Irish tempers or no redheaded Irish tempers.

  A smile at the thought of a couple of smart and feisty offspring carried him out the store and into the brisk April wind. Then his stomach rumbled, reminding him he hadn’t yet eaten lunch. Fine dining at restaurants, and even finer dining on Isabella’s creations, had put ten pounds on him since Christmas. There was a box of nutrition bars waiting for him in his desk, but he needed something to wash down the taste of shrink-wrapped sawdust. So he stopped at Starbucks—and bumped into the blonde from the bookstore.

  “We meet again,” she said brightly, smiling up at him.

  “So we do.” He gave her his habitual once-over, liking the curves of her cheekbones and breasts, not so crazy about the odd green of her eyes, speckled with brownish flecks like a spring apple going bad. Besides, he’d developed an appreciation for peaches-and-cream complexions, and roses didn’t do it for him anymore. Neither did the just—shy—of—Sir Mick Jagger dimensions of her lips.

  “Twice in twenty minutes,” she went on. “Maybe it’s fate.”

  The accent was Southern, but not the right kind. Damn it, did Holly already have a ring through his nose and her initials tattooed on his ass? First the girl in the store, and now here was another good-looking female obviously attracted to him, and all he could think about was—

  “What do you think?” she asked more pointedly.

  “Who was it who said there are no accidents?” he asked, smiling.

  “Get some coffee and we’ll discuss it.”

  He wasn’t sure if the bleat of his pager was a welcomed interruption or a damned nuisance. Whichever, he had to answer the thing. A flip of a switch and a glance down at his belt—and he nearly yelped with delight.

  WYATT YOU’VE GOT MAIL

  “Well?” the blonde asked, invitation and more in her eyes.

  “Wish I could. Duty calls.”

  “Does it? How loudly?”

  “Very. But maybe I’ll trip over you again sometime,” he said by way of soothing her ego.

  “I’m sure you will,” she told him, winking.

  He watched her go, wondering how many different kinds of fool he could possibly be. Two weeks now that Holly had been in Europe, and two unmistakably interested women had flirted with him, and six months ago he would have blown off work for the afternoon and nailed the blonde to the mattress.

  It irked him that Holly could have that strong a hold on his body. And his mind. And especially his heart, he admitted at last.

  Bidding a reluctant farewell to his caffeine fix, he left the store. Now — where to find an online computer? It was too far back to the office, and he didn’t see any cybercafés in the area. Hadn’t there been a computer behind the counter at the bookshop?

  There had. As he pushed through the door once again into the wizard’s den, he held a brief debate with himself about secure lines and public places, but decided if this was the e-mail he thought it was, he didn’t have time to waste. Messages for “Wyatt” were few and far between. His other aliases — “McCloud” and “Dillon” among them—received many more hits.

  “You’re back,” the proprietor said, startled.

  “You have e-mail on that computer, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Can I borrow it?”

  “I don’t let customers —”

  Lachlan flashed his badge. “Federal officer.” Swinging around the counter, he punched buttons, wielded the mouse, and within two minutes was on his own Internet service. A few moments later, there it was: the message “Wyatt” had been anticipating for several weeks.

  GODZILLA TODAY ONE THIRTY

  “Yee-haw,” he muttered, glancing at his watch. He had just enough time to get to Koronet Pizza in Morningside Heights, where the famous twenty-eight-inch Godzilla was created for worshipping fanatics. Logging off after deleting his tracks, he thanked the store owner and left a five on the counter. “That’s for your trouble.”

  One of the more enjoyable features of Lachlan’s job was helping to manage forfeited assets — everything from boats and cars and houses to jewelry, whole libraries of books, and fine art. The U.S. Marshals Service handled property forfeitures for the FBI, INS, DEA, and half the rest of the alphabet agencies. The fun part was that sometimes, if one read one’s target right, such items could be used to lure an otherwise canny criminal out of hiding and back into the tender arms of the law.

  In brief, “Wyatt” ran his own personal eBay.

  A couple of years ago, for instance, he’d located a fugitive arms dealer through the woman’s passion for Degas pastels. Through delicate and roundabout negotiations, “Wyatt” offered and she accepted a gorgeous suite of drawings. Of course, Lachlan had had to promise the property guys an arm, a leg, and the left lobe of his liver if anything happened to the art during the capture. But for a day and a night, the Degas drawings had resided in his apartment as if he’d truly owned them—almost as satisfying an experience as driving to another lure-and-lasso in the ’32 Duesenberg that a Venezuelan drug trafficker just had to own.

  Lachlan checked his watch again and slowed his stride a bit, not wanting to be early to Koronet Pizza. As he dodged lunchtime pedestrians, he thanked Whoever and Whatever that people let their greed get the better of their sense. He’d seen some otherwise sharp and ruthless felons turn into raving imbeciles over the prospect of possessing a particular jewel, a special sculpture, a mintcondition car. He supposed greed was one of the main reasons for crime to begin with — I want more, and I want it now. But when was enough enough?

  Contempt had a lot to do with it, too, he reflected as he stopped half a block from Koronet to watch for his contact. Contempt for authority, for other people’s intelligence and rights and property and lives — as if the world existed for the gratification of one person and one alone, and be damned to everyone else. Lachlan enjoyed demonstrating otherwise.

  While he waited, he used his cell phone to call the office, where Mrs. Osbourne gave him about half the usual grief over the mess in his filing cabinets before condescending to sort through it for the warrant he needed. It didn’t actually have to be in his hand when he made the collar; it just had to be excavated from his files. Because Judge Bradshaw wasn’t due back from a luncheon at Gracie Mansion until three, Pete Wasserman was available to run the warrant over to wherever Lachlan ended up—if, that was, he ended up in the presence of his real quarry.

  The woman he hoped would be his ticket there finally arrived: greed, contempt, and arrogance personified in one long, lean, nasty piece of work. She emerged from a black Cadillac limo, all leg, and glanced around the crowd of flawed humanity with active dislike. Lachlan smiled with pleasurable anticipation. Felicia Holton had a mane of well-kept brown hair, a stable of Andalusians, a ski-bum nonentity of a husband, and a grandpa whose birthday was coming up. Grandpa, known to his chemical company’s board of directors as Edward Reynolds Phippen IV, had been indicted on RICO violations and hadn’t been seen i
n public for the six weeks since the warrant had been issued. The FBI was convinced he had skipped the country to live on his gazillions somewhere in Europe.

  Lachlan had arranged that Mrs. Holton would know him by his beloved and much-maligned cowboy boots. It tickled him mightily to see her squinting down at the feet of every man she neared. He watched for a while, grinning, then smoothed his expression and ambled toward her, pretending he was looking for someone, too.

  Big brown eyes narrowed as she looked down, did not widen as she looked up. “Mr. Wyatt?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  A frown tainted her elegant face. “I have no time for games. Let’s go where we can talk.”

  “Suits me, honey.” He took her arm; she reclaimed it as if he were infected with several loathsome contagious diseases.

  She preceded him into the limo, careful of the swirl of tailored silk skirt—presumably to prevent giving the unwashed masses a look at a pair of truly aristocratic legs. Lachlan sat, stretching out his legs to rest his bootheels on the opposite seat, and hoped he was scarring the leather upholstery.

  A block later, he said, “So you want a little something from my collection.”

  “As we discussed in e-mail, the 1922 Roullet cognac.”

  “Fine. When do you want me to deliver?”

  “Now.”

  He spread his arms a bit—not enough to part his jacket and reveal his holster. “Does it look like I’ve got it on me?”

  “Then fetch it.”

  As if he were a dog ordered to retrieve the morning paper. Oh, yeah, this was going to be fun. “Why don’t you do it?” he suggested, taking a key ring from his breast pocket and sliding one off—key to a bike lock he hadn’t seen since college. “This goes to a P.O. box. There’s another key in that. Leave the money there and take the key to the Greyhound station on—

  “A bus station?”

  Had he invited her to get down and get funky with Serenity, Scott, and the Goths at the Annual Beltane Ball, she could not have been more shocked.

  “You might want to lose the limo first. The second key goes to a locker. That’s where the bottles are.”

  “Meanwhile you have the money and I could have nothing more than the key to an empty locker.”

  “Okay, leave the money in the locker when you’re sure you have what you want,” he replied with a shrug. “But I’ll be watching, so don’t try to stiff me.”

  She made a bored face. “Doubtless your next line is that you have powerful friends. We’ll go to my home. Then I’ll go to this post office box and so on.”

  He eyed her with no little amusement. “Doubtless your next line is that there’ll be a couple of guys with guns to watch me.”

  “Only one. If you’re playing fair with me, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh, I’m just all kinds of okay with this.”

  And he was. One guy with a gun he could handle; probably even two. Any more than that and he would have modified his plan a bit. But she was taking him right where he wanted to go: her home, where Grandpa might be hanging out in avoidance of his civic responsibility to appear in Federal Court. Even if Lachlan didn’t get that lucky, he felt sure he could find something that would indicate where Phippen was holed up.

  He regarded his hostile hostess, who sat as far from him as possible in the limo. Charming girl. No wonder her husband absented himself to whichever part of the world had the best skiing in any given season. The arctic circle would be balmy compared to this bitch.

  “Y’know,” he said casually, “if you like what you buy this time, I have a few more cases you might be interested in.”

  She didn’t even glance at him.

  “There’s a ’22 Baron de Lustrac I can give you a great deal on.”

  “Mr. Wyatt. Close your mouth.”

  As they drove uptown in glacial silence, Lachlan rehearsed the charges: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act violations involving the clandestine dumping of toxic chemicals into six different rivers. Pity he couldn’t deliver that case of twelve-hundred-buck bottles laced with a liberal sampling of Phippen’s industrial cocktail.

  He watched the city slide by and reflected that he liked being a deputy marshal much better than being a cop. The justice system had already decided that so-and-so was bad news, and all he had to do was serve the warrant and haul in the perp. No long drawn-out detective work to build a case, no weighing this evidence against that alibi, no hassling with the D.A.’s office over probable cause for a warrant. No crimes to investigate, no puzzles to solve — or, more likely, get an ulcer over because they were insoluble. Lachlan was content to leave the Sherlock Holmes stuff to people who got off on it; he much preferred exercising his analytical talents on ferreting out bad guys who had already been identified as bad guys.

  Of course, it all would have been much easier if he’d had Nicholas Orlov’s “come-hither” talent. Still, he didn’t do too badly.

  At last they arrived at a co-op building not far from Holly’s place. Not far in distance, anyway; in price, halfway to the moon. A private elevator from the garage floated skyward, finally decanting them into a grim gilded foyer. The promised big-beefy-with-gun materialized, listened to his employer’s instructions, and nodded — all without taking his eyes off Lachlan.

  The marshal considered. He could probably take the guy without breaking too much of a sweat. All the same, the muscles beneath this man’s brown silk suit made Lachlan glad he was carrying the Glock. Sloppy of them not to pat him down, but after all he was just a dealer in rare wines of shady provenance. And he wasn’t disposed to point out their carelessness.

  After Lachlan told Mrs. Holton the location and number of the post office box, she departed. He found a side chair that looked as if it wouldn’t swallow him whole — he had his doubts about the vast orange sofa over in the corner—and sat himself down to wait.

  After about five minutes, he looked over at the muscles and offered, “Nice place.”

  No response. Just that flat, constant stare.

  “You with a personal protection agency, or freelance?”

  He might as well have been speaking to the gold-veined marble walls.

  After another few minutes, Lachlan stood up. “I gotta pee.”

  The hulk moved, one thick finger pointing to a door. Lachlan sauntered toward it, and glanced over his shoulder to find himself escorted as soundlessly as his own shadow.

  “You gonna help me hold it?” he asked genially, and pulled open the door.

  It was slammed shut behind him. No sense of humor, he told himself, ignoring the bathroom’s lavish appointments—more gilt and way too many mirrors—in favor of biting back a whoop of delight.

  There was a connecting door.

  Locked, of course.

  Not for nothing had he run with Mike de Corona and his crowd in the fourth grade. There wasn’t a lock on the Lower East Side that Mike couldn’t open, and Lachlan had been his star pupil. The guys at the Police Academy and the Marshals Academy had been suitably impressed. Out came the little leather case of tools, and a few seconds later the door was open.

  He jammed the other door lock with a wad of tissues, flushed the toilet, and left the water running in the sink. The connecting door led into a blue country French living room so overdecorated that his teeth hurt. Padding softly across a rug three inches thick, he listened at another door.

  Someone was taking Italian lessons. “— a table, please? Potremmo avere un tavolo, per favore?” said a woman’s taped voice. After a brief pause for the student to repeat the phrase, the tape went on, “By the wiindow — Protremmo avere un tavolo vicina alla finestra?”

  Lachlan hooked the leather case of his badge onto his jacket breast pocket so the shiny five-pointed star was clearly visible, shifted his body slightly to confirm the presence of the Glock at his side, and opened the door.

  “ … sulla terrazza?”

  The sitting room was painted a vile shade of green. It had be
en fitted out with a hospital bed and various medical equipment, including an Amazon of a nurse currently absorbed in a thick paperback novel. Hunched over a desk, working with a magnifying glass under a mini-klieg light, was a small, skinny woman Lachlan was delighted to recognize as Samantha Knightly — Sam the Sham, inevitably, to her customers—forger of everything from birth certificates to stock certificates. And lounging on a brown leather sofa, wearing a crimson brocade dressing gown while listening to his taped Italian lesson on a boom box, was a man whose face, half-wrapped like an unfinished mummy, sported a magnificent crag of a nose between two black eyes.

  “É compreso il servizio?”

  Lachlan had heard of several felons who’d had substantially more than a nip-and-tuck done for reasons of disguise, and had once arranged a new nose and chin for a protected witness, but he’d never actually seen somebody in the throes of recovery before. He decided on the instant that whenever his own face started to sag, he’d let it. Gladly.

  “I’d like a spinach omelet. Vorrei una frittata di spinaci.”

  “Edward Reynolds Phippen—,” Lachlan began.

  The man glanced up, scowling with majestic white eyebrows. There wasn’t a line on his black-and-blue face or a wrinkle around his bruised eyes, for all that he was pushing eighty.

  The nurse lifted her gaze from her book, and screamed. Startled, Samantha looked around myopically and dropped her pen.

  Lachlan smiled pleasantly. “Hiya, Sam. Put your glasses back on and stand up, away from the desk. Good girl. Mr. Phippen, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain —”

  “What kind of seafood do you have? Che genere di frutti di mare avete?”

  “Who the hell let you in?” Phippen roared, the effect slightly spoiled by the muffling bandages.

  “—silent, Lachlan finished, shaking his head.

  “ — do you recommend? Cosa consiglia?”