“Then prepare to look at a whole lot of darkness tonight.”
“Who are these people?” she asked in alarm.
“Just be polite and be careful what you say.”
She fell silent beside him, for which he was both grateful and worried. In his experience, a brooding woman was never a good thing.
“Did you mean that thing about looking into a person’s soul?” he asked, curious.
She momentarily looked alarmed. “Nah. It’s just that people expect me to say stuff like that when I’m working in the shop. I slipped and fell into the eccentric mystical shop owner thing for a second. I apologize.”
“No apologies necessary.”
Was that relief in her voice? Not that he wasn’t experiencing the exact same emotion. There were things about his soul that he seriously didn’t need her to see.
Sure, most people kept secrets. And he did his best not to pry into them in real life or otherwise. After all, he had some whoppers of his own that he would prefer to keep buried.
No one must ever know that he was a fraud. That he was living a lie. The CIA must never find out he was running his own undercover op off the books during what they thought was an extended leave of absence. And Peter Menchekov and his cronies must never suspect that he was burrowing into their crime ring with the intent to find and take out their leader. He was a dead man if they even suspected he was not exactly who he said he was.
And Lissa... His motives for her not finding out that he’d been lying to her from the very beginning were purely selfish. She was the most fascinating woman he could ever recall meeting, not to mention sexy as hell. He still shuddered a little remembering what she felt like plastered up against him. And that kiss—he fell asleep thinking about it every night.
He steered the Ferrari to a stop in front of Menchekov’s opulent mansion. Tonight it was lit up like a freaking opera house, which was funny since the man couldn’t tell a tenor from a trombone.
A valet took his keys and left Max to escort Lissa up the steps. He ushered her into the foyer, and she looked around at the gaudy, mismatched antiques and florid decor. He had to suppress a shiver of distaste every time he set foot in this place. He missed his own spare and intensely elegant home.
Lissa leaned close to him, her breast brushing against his arm and sending his every sense onto high alert. She murmured, “This is wonderfully dreadful.”
He chuckled under his breath. “That’s one way to describe it. I might go straight to hideous.”
She smiled up at him and from behind unmoving lips murmured, “Behave.”
He mentally snorted. She was the one he was worried about behaving tonight. The people here would assume she had the same kind of psychic ability her aunt had apparently had. Whether real or imagined, it had the potential to cause serious trouble in this crowd.
Belief in the occult was a time-honored tradition in many Slavic cultures. And some of the people here tonight could emphatically not afford for her to pick around in their noggins and uncover secrets best left totally covered.
Lissa gasped beside him. He leaned down instantly, murmuring in her ear, “What’s wrong?”
“I...wow... Umm, that’s bizarre.”
“Talk to me, Lissa,” he said in burgeoning alarm.
“To put it in lay terms, I just felt a great disturbance in the life energies around me.”
At least she had the good grace to sound reluctant to say something like that. “What kind of disturbance?”
She turned into him, and his arms came up around her to hug her lightly. She spoke quickly, under her breath. “Someone here just reacted in violent shock to the sight of me. I have no idea why.”
“Is this person a threat?”
She frowned against his tuxedo jacket for a moment. “Not directly, but potentially he could become one. It’s definitely male energy. Look, I know this sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. I’m never wrong about this stuff.”
All undercover operatives developed finely tuned senses of intuition. They felt danger coming before it showed itself. They had uncanny knacks for finding and following people they could not see. They just knew when something wasn’t right about a place or a situation. Hence, he was not about to discount her declaration that someone in the room had just taken an extraordinary and not entirely innocent interest in her.
“I’ve got your back, Lissa. I won’t let anyone hurt you. And nobody would do anything here with all these women and outsiders present, anyway. You’re safe. I swear.”
“Stay close to me?” she asked in a small voice.
“Of course.”
She took a deep breath and straightened beside him, and they moved deeper into the crowded house.
Who had reacted so violently to her that it had triggered her internal alarm system like that? Someone who’d known her aunt maybe? Someone who’d been into the curiosity shop since she had taken over and recognized her? But if it was someone who fell into either of those categories, why the violent reaction to her? How was Lissa connected to the Russian mob, knowingly or unknowingly?
As he’d expected, many of the men present paused to take note of the unusual beauty on his arm. Lissa was not the least bit conventional with her pale skin and stark coloring. A certain dark vibe clung to her, a sense of mystery. The possibility of her being able to see into peoples’ hearts and minds, their pasts and futures, was exotic and unsettling. She was ethereal and strange, and she was arguably the most captivating woman he’d ever met.
Maybe that was what the nameless shocked person had reacted to. Unfortunately, his own gut told him there was more to it than the simple flesh impact of a beautiful woman walking into the room.
Peter, predictably, rolled in on them the moment he spotted them. “So. This is the new owner of Callista’s Curiosities. A pleasure to meet you, mademoiselle.”
Lissa’s hand tightened on Max’s forearm for a moment. Was this the man who’d zeroed in on her presence and unsettled her so badly?
He glanced down at her. She smiled politely enough and extended her hand to his boss. “Thank you for inviting me to your party, Mr. Menchekov. Your home is beautiful.”
Max’s lips twitched. He caught the faintest hesitation before she uttered the word beautiful. She really meant to say garish. Horrid. Trashy. He put a supportive hand lightly on the middle of her back.
“Miss Clearmont, may I call you Lissa?” Peter boomed in an excess of joviality. “I feel like I already know you. I knew your aunt. Remarkable woman. You’ve got the look of her about you.”
Lissa’s spine stiffened against Max’s hand. “Oh? Were you a client?”
A cheery laugh from Peter. “You might say that.”
“You haven’t been into the shop since I took over. You should stop by,” Lissa replied politely.
“You share your aunt’s particular talents, then?”
“No two psychics’ powers are exactly the same, of course. And even among psychics, she was considered to be unique,” Lissa replied.
Nice evasion. She didn’t come right out and say whether or not she was psychic. He relaxed fractionally at how well she was handling herself with arguably one of the most dangerous men in the room. For Peter was nothing if not highly intelligent.
“Maybe you will give us a sample reading, Miss Clearmont?” He raised his voice to the crowd in general. “Who here would like to have their fortune read by a genuine psychic?”
Good Lord. She dared not give the whole room readings. Even if she was totally making up everything she predicted, slipping up and saying the wrong thing could be deadly. This crowd might be entirely funded by criminal money, but they obsessively played a game of pretending that all their wealth was legitimate. Privately he considered them the worst sort of nouveau riche pretenders. Which was probably a shade snobb
ish of him, given that his own parents had been cut from the exact same cloth as these people.
But, like a school of starving piranhas, this bunch would devour anyone who dared to expose the fiction of their place in society.
A general cry of approval went up at Peter’s suggestion that Lissa read fortunes. Crap, crap, crap. “No, Lissa—” he started.
“I’ve got this,” she muttered out of the side of her mouth.
“You have no idea—”
“Actually, I do,” she retorted, cutting him off.
Peter ordered one of the waiters to set up a table in the middle of the living room. A chair was brought for Lissa, and she settled into it while Max hovered anxiously behind her. She must not accidentally say anything to make these people think she saw their true professions. And yet he was helpless to stop her at this point.
For her part, Lissa opened her purse, pulled out a well-worn deck of tarot cards and began shuffling. The cards leaped in her fingers, flashing pictures not quite seen in a dancing fountain of color.
“Who’s first?” she said confidently.
A blonde woman stepped forward, giggling. Peter’s latest trophy wife. Max gave her two years before she was dumped for a new model. Menchekov liked them young, and she was starting to show a few years around the edges.
Lissa had the woman cut the cards and then expertly dealt a tarot layout. He caught the infinitesimal tightening of Lissa’s shoulders as she studied the cards, but then she smoothly launched into basically meaningless patter about examining life choices and lessons waiting to be learned.
Another woman sat down at the table, and Lissa predicted a grandchild within a year, which made the woman ecstatic and sing Lissa’s praises as a fortune-teller. After that, a line of people formed, waiting their turns eagerly to hear what Lissa saw in their futures.
She started to droop after an hour or so, and Max left her side briefly to fetch her food and something to drink. When he got back, Peter was seated at the table, and there was no sign of the tarot cards. Lissa was looking down at the man’s palm. A tiny frown of concentration knit her brow. She was speaking very quietly to Menchekov.
So quietly Max couldn’t hear her as he set down the plate and bottle of water beside her. Both she and Peter leaned back abruptly, as if some important agreement had been reached. The Russian nodded and rose to his feet, staring down at her as she turned her attention to the hors d’oeuvres Max had brought.
Peter glanced up at Max and jerked his head to indicate that his employee should come with him. He really didn’t want to leave Lissa.
She pulled a card from the deck, glanced down at it and then up at him. “I’ll be all right while you’re gone,” she said confidently.
Seriously? Because of a card she pulled randomly from a deck. He needed to have a talk with her about trusting her safety to random chance. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he murmured. “We have a little business to discuss. Don’t get in trouble while I’m gone.”
“I could say the same for you,” she replied a bit tartly.
What was that about? He followed Peter to the man’s office and was alarmed when the Russian closed the door behind him.
“Drink?” his boss offered.
“Sure. Whatever you’re having.”
Peter poured two neat whiskeys into crystal glasses and passed him one. He sipped at his while his boss tossed back the entire contents of his. Max picked up the decanter and refilled Menchekov’s glass. Peter downed that one, as well. Wow. Something had him rattled. What in the hell had Lissa said to him during that palm reading? Max poured him another double shot.
“She’s the real deal,” Peter announced.
“You mean Lissa?” he asked cautiously. Peter sounded none too happy about his declaration. And how did the guy know something like that, anyway? He’d just met her. “That’s good, right?”
“No. That’s bad. She will see things.”
“Well, yes. It is part of her job description. She does run a magical curiosity shop, after all.”
“Most psychic readers are rubbish. But that girl...she’s worrisome. She’s every bit as gifted as the old lady.”
“You mean the deceased aunt?”
“Yes.” He paced his office for a moment and then stopped to stare accusingly at Max. “What if the niece picks something out of my brain that’s confidential?”
“No problem. Don’t let her do any more readings on you.”
“You don’t understand. She’s the kind of seer who visions will come to whether a person is standing in front of her or not. That girl’s freaking powerful—I’m telling you.”
Peter didn’t seriously believe in all that psychic powers tripe, did he? Max was severely tempted to ask the man why he was so sure about all of this mumbo jumbo and Lissa. The guy wasn’t sharing everything he knew about the girl. Had Peter talked to one of the mysterious higher-ups about Lissa? Maybe one who’d known Callista well?
Max asked cautiously, “Do you want me to have a talk with her? Suggest she stay away from poking into your business...you know...psychically?” He tripped over the last word a little. It was hard to believe he’d just said that aloud.
“Would you?” Peter tossed back the last of his latest shot. “Be subtle about it, though. If you make a big deal over it, then she’ll be bound to poke around and try to find out what I’m trying to hide.”
Which begged the question, what was the guy trying to hide so hard?
“I’ll take care of it, sir,” Max declared, since Peter seemed to expect some kind of response.
The Russian jumped up off the leather sofa and paced the office restlessly. “If I’d had any idea how good a psychic she is, I never would have let her near me.” He swore luridly and waved his whiskey glass around in agitation. “What if she picks out faces from my brain?”
The memory of Lissa sketching that girl’s face the night of her mugging flashed into his mind. Was that not a random drawing as she’d claimed? Was it possible Lissa had plucked that image from her attacker’s mind? No sooner had the questions occurred to him than he discounted them impatiently. There was no such thing as psychic power. The drawing had been exactly what Lissa said it was—just a random face. A way to blow of stress after a scary event.
“Do you have any idea how much trouble I would be in if your girlfriend starts seeing the faces in my head?”
He opened his mouth automatically to deny Lissa being his girlfriend, but Peter talked over him heedlessly, caught up in his own thoughts.
“The big boss would kill me in a second.” Peter shuddered. “I don’t even want to think about how he’d do it.”
This was the second time Peter had mentioned a big boss, and Max’s gut leaped. Was Peter finally letting down his guard and trusting Max enough to let him penetrate the organization even more deeply? Was this the break he’d been waiting for? He spoke soothingly to the Russian. “The big boss would never take some crazy psychic chick’s word over yours. You’re a smart and loyal employee.”
“I dunno. I’ve been on thin ice with him since that mess last year with the Who Do Voodoo club getting robbed and then raided.”
“That mess happened way below your pay grade,” Max responded disdainfully. Of course, he refrained from mentioning that his own sister and her fiancé were behind the investigation and raid that had closed the club and relieved its management of nearly a half-million dollars in cash.
“The big boss says we need this girl’s shop to stay safe and not get busted up. We lost an information drop there in last weekend’s break-in, and the boss doesn’t want it to happen again.”
Max was startled. This was the first he’d heard of a dead drop being stolen. Was that why Lissa’s store had been trashed? To cover up a theft? It seemed like a rather extreme tactic, when shoplifting something o
r just intercepting the dead-dropped item would have been so much easier and drawn so much less attention.
“What was stolen, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m happy to keep an eye on future dead drops if I know where they’re stashed in the shop.”
“A voice recorder was lost. It had a recording in it of sensitive information pertaining to an ongoing business deal.”
Had the bug that Lissa had found actually been placed in the shop for someone else to pick up? Or...holy crap...had the recording actually been made in the shop of a conversation that happened within the range of the recorder? As soon as the thought occurred to him, he knew it to be the truth. Someone had been set up to be recorded inside the shop. The store was much more deeply entangled with the mob’s operations than he’d begun to imagine. Which meant Lissa was in a great deal more danger than she knew.
“Speaking of the break-in, do your police contacts have any idea who vandalized your girlfriend’s place?” Peter asked.
He let the second girlfriend reference slip by uncorrected. Now that he thought about it, the closer Peter thought Lissa was to Max, the less likely he would be to kill her out of hand. At least that was what Max hoped.
He answered his boss’s question. “Beyond the obvious? Julio’s gang marks were spray painted on the walls, after all. But as for the individuals who actually broke in and trashed the place? No. The police have no identities. They’re convinced it was retaliation for Julio’s arrest by members of his gang. It could have been any of dozens of thugs.
“The police are convinced it was three young men. But that’s about all they’ve got. Traffic cameras in the area showed their faces to be covered with bandannas. They came and left on foot.” He omitted the part where the cameras were his and the footage the police had provided by him.
“That sounds like Julio’s boys. Bunch of...” Peter devolved into foul Russian epithets.
When the tirade wound down, Max commented grimly, “Whoever it was had better hope the cops catch them first. Because if I get my hands on them, I’m gonna mess them up real bad.”
He expected the Russian mobsters above his pay grade shared the sentiment. It was one of the few perks of working for an organized crime syndicate. They did protect their own. Peter flopped onto the leather sofa and sprawled on it, squinting up at Max.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2016 Box Set Page 52
