by Candace Camp
With a grin and a twirl of his bowler, he popped the hat onto his head and left. Alex, a smile lingering on his lips, perched on the edge of Con’s desk, long legs stretched out in front of him, and thought about his dreams.
He didn’t recall the one last night, but he’d had enough of them the past few weeks to know what transpired in it. He was always lying on a narrow bed in a dark, cramped room, alone and not knowing where he was, and gripped by a cold, numbing fear.
The nightmares had started after the time he and Con had visited Winterset, their brother Reed’s home in the country, when the two of them, out walking with Reed’s future wife, Anna, had come across a farmer who had been killed. Both he and Con had been shaken by the sight, but Alex was the one who had lost his breakfast. Alex had returned to the house to bring Reed’s help, while Con had stayed with Anna by the body. He had never admitted to anyone, even Con, how relieved he’d been to get away from the bloody remains.
Oddly, though, the nightmares that had disturbed him in the weeks afterward had not been of the dead farmer, but of the time almost two years earlier when Alex had been kidnapped and held prisoner in a small dark room.
He had been scared at the time, of course, but he was used enough to getting in and out of scrapes—though it was more frightening, admittedly, when Con wasn’t there to share the experience. Alex had kept his wits and managed to escape, and in the end, Kyria and Rafe and the others had come to his rescue. It had been an exciting story to tell and he’d basked in Con’s envy of his adventure, but then, after his experience at Winterset, he had begun to dream about it again.
It had passed, of course. Indeed, it seemed to have marked the beginning of his odd ability. The Morelands were given to such oddities—significant dreams and strange connections to an unseen world, their habit of falling fiercely, immediately in love.
So it had not been a complete surprise when Alex started to experience flashes of emotions and actions when he gripped an object—though it had seemed most unfair that Con had not been burdened with a similar peculiarity. Con, naturally, would have been thrilled to have it.
Alex had learned to hide his ability from everyone outside his family, and he had also learned to control it so that he wasn’t overwhelmed by, say, witnessing a murder that had happened years earlier when he happened to lean against a wall. As his control over the ability increased, the nightmares had lessened and finally ceased.
Until recently. The ones he had now were not exactly the same, for in the recent ones he was a man, not a half-grown lad, and the room where he lie in darkness seemed different—darker and colder and smaller. But the fear was the same. No, it was worse, for woven through it now was a soul-deep dread, an icy terror.
Impatiently, Alex pushed himself up from the desk. What was he doing lounging about here? Over the years he had used his ability to help Con with some inquiries. It was one of the reasons that the agency had acquired an impressive reputation, particularly in finding missing persons. But his assistance was a carefully guarded secret. It was difficult enough making a reputation for oneself as an architect, given his aristocratic background and his family’s eccentric reputation, without adding something as unusual as working for an agency that often dabbled in occult matters.
But with Con gone, there was no reason for him to be here now. He should go to his own office and work on his own business, as he had told Con he was about to do. Sitting here was not going to solve the mystery of his uneasy feelings or his disturbing dreams.
Alex had reached the open door when suddenly his lungs suddenly tightened in his chest. He was flooded with anxiety, even fear, but he knew it was not his own; he was feeling the backwash of someone else’s emotions. He felt, moreover, a…presence. There was no other way to describe it. The sensation was so strong that he actually glanced around the empty office, as if he would find someone standing there. Of course, there was no one.
What if he turned out to be like his grandmother and started talking to ghosts? He tried to separate this sudden burst of emotion from his own, to analyze this new awareness. It was similar to the “twinness” he shared with Con—a knowledge that someone was nearby, an understanding that the person was in trouble. But he had never felt such a thing before, except with Con. And he was certain that this was not coming from his twin. It was…different.
He stepped out into the hall and looked over the railing onto the lobby of the floor below. As he watched, the door opened and a short man entered. The newcomer crossed the entryway and climbed the stairs. And as he moved, the sensation moved with him. This man—or perhaps he was only a boy, for he was rather small—was the presence Alex felt.
The visitor reached the top of the stairs and started down the corridor toward him. The small man was dressed oddly—well, not oddly, really, for his suit was unremarkable. But he wore a workingman’s cap with a gentleman’s suit, and nothing seemed to fit him. His feet galumphed along, seeming too big for his body. His jacket was outsized, hanging loosely on him, the sleeves obscuring his hands, and his trousers were rolled up at the hem but still pooled around his ankles. He wore the cap pulled down almost to his eyes, hiding his forehead and shadowing the bottom part of his face.
He hesitated when he saw Alex, then started forward again determinedly. Alex watched him walk, and as he drew nearer, the whole sense of the man’s wrongness coalesced into a thought.
“You’re a girl!” Alex blurted out. He knew at once that he had made a misstep, for his visitor let out a little squeak and took a step backward. “No. No, wait, please don’t go. May I help you?”
She pulled off the concealing cap, revealing a cloud of black curls that fell just below her ears. Without the cap, he could clearly see the delicate chin, the heart-shaped face, the big, deep blue eyes. And his entire insides dropped straight to the floor.
“I’m looking for the Moreland Investigative Agency.”
“That’s me. I mean, I’m Mr. Moreland. Alex, Alexander Moreland.” He realized that he was babbling and he forced himself to stop before he started explaining about his brother and the agency and Olivia, who had started it, and everything else that came into his head.
The woman was beautiful. More than that, his feeling of connection and his uneasiness were both centered on her. How could he be so tied to a stranger, to someone not even in his own family? Oh, Lord, she wasn’t a relative, surely?
He was certain of one thing—he could not let her slip her away. So he pulled together the remnants of his aplomb and inclined his head, sweeping his arm out toward the open doorway in a courtly gesture as he said, “Please, won’t you come in?
Her smile was shy, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks; both things, he realized, were charming. She walked before him into the office and sat down in the chair facing Con’s desk. Alex was careful to leave the door open, not wanting to alarm her, and took a seat behind Con’s desk as if he belonged there.
He wasn’t really lying to her, he told himself. He was Mr. Moreland, even if not the one she sought. “Now, please tell me how I may help you, Miss—?”
“I—I came here because…well, I asked the driver at the station where I should go. He said the Moreland Agency was the best in the city at finding someone,” she said, twisting her cap in her hands and ignoring his implied question about her name.
“We will certainly do our utmost to help you.” He opened the top drawer of the desk and was relieved to spot pencils and even a pad of paper. He set them on the desk and prepared to take notes, hoping that he looked like he knew what he was doing. “Now. Who is it that you wish to find?”
She gazed back at him gravely and said, “Me.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Candace Camp.
ISBN-13: 9781488024115
An Unexpected Pleasure
First published in 2005
This edition published in 2018
Copyright ©
2005 by Candace Camp.
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