by Julie Leto
His choice.
***
“Look, I told the police everything I know. I have a date. So, if you’ll, like, leave?”
Cat and Ben exchanged doubtful glances. Finding Amber Stranton had been easy enough, but clearly, getting the coed to talk was something else altogether. Under other circumstances, Ben might have tried turning on the whole professorish-charm thing, but the strategy was useless with Cat around. She likely had no idea how intimidating other women found her. Even now, Amber couldn’t tear her eyes off the dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. Cat made Catherine Zeta-Jones look ordinary in comparison. So much like Mariah.
Funny how he’d managed not to think about his ex in more than a year, but the minute Cat stormed into his life, he’d been fighting memories of her all day.
They were nothing alike, really. Where Mariah was slim but devious, Cat was curvy and sly. Mariah preferred jumping out of airplanes, surfing onto fortified island hideouts and dodging hit men hired by foreign governments. Cat…well, he didn’t know what Cat liked. Besides keeping her nose in his business. Which, to be completely honest, he didn’t really mind.
Right now, however, her presence was a detriment to their mutual goal. They needed Amber to tell them more than she’d told the police about her cousin—which hadn’t been much. Under Cat’s scrutiny, Amber looked ready to crawl under a rock.
He stepped back, formulating a different tactic when Catalina’s entire demeanor shifted. She changed from a ballbuster to a sympathetic ear in the span of six seconds.
She snagged her bottom lip in her teeth and eyed Amber from head to toe. When she spoke, she softened her voice and laced her words with genuine concern.
“You’re not going to wear that on your date, are you?”
Amber glanced down at her cropped T-shirt and skintight jeans that flared at the calf. “Yeah. With these killer sandals I found at the flea market, but are totally awesome Choo knockoffs.” When her enthusiasm failed to infect Cat, it died a quick death. “Why? What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
She spun halfway around, trying to catch a glimpse of her backside, and then checked her front to see if something private was hanging out. Neither was the case. To Ben, she looked sort of cute, in the way coeds did. She wasn’t his type, but then he hadn’t had twenty-year-old preferences for a long time.
“Well, nothing’s wrong with it,” Cat said assuredly, sugared sweetness dripping off her words. “I think you’d look great in a potato sack with a drawstring. But, I don’t know. This is…” She waved her hand around Amber’s body and, then pressed her lips together tightly, as if trying to contain some salacious bit of fashion information. Amber stepped toward her and nearly grabbed her hand.
“This is what? Too slutty? Too casual? I thought about wearing this killer skirt I got from my ex-roommate, but it’s kind of dressy and I don’t want to scare him away.”
Cat took Amber’s outstretched hand and invited herself inside. “Well, where are you going? That’s always the first question.”
Amber exhaled noisily. Ben could practically hear the vibrations of her nervousness. “Movie. Dinner. Club afterward. The usual.”
Cat crinkled her nose and suddenly looked ten years younger. She was a chameleon who could think on her feet. And more than that, she was trouble with a capital T.
“Is this your first date?” Cat guessed, leading Amber into the living room. She sat on the couch and her new best friend instantly followed.
“Third,” Amber replied, her voice tremulous.
Ben stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
Cat clucked her tongue: “Then this definitely is way too casual. I mean, third date,” her voice dropped, and in an instant, images of hot, sweaty sex popped into Ben’s mind…hot, sweaty sex that had nothing to do with Amber and her unnamed third date.
“My roommate’s gone,” Amber said, suddenly panicked as she popped off the futon. “I have a couple of things. Do you mind?”
Cat’s grin oozed with graciousness. “I’d love to help out.”
Without a backward glance, Amber disappeared into her bedroom, shutting the door firmly behind her.
“How did you do that?” Ben asked, looking around the previously forbidden domain. For a young woman barely out of her teens, Amber was ridiculously neat. “Or perhaps I should ask, why did you do that?”
She rolled her eyes. “You want her to kick us out again?”
“No, but maybe this is a waste of time,” Ben supposed. He found Amber’s cell phone on the table near the tiny kitchen. He pressed two buttons and was scrolling through her address book. “I don’t want to sit here playing What Not to Wear when I could be out finding my father.”
Cat’s gasp scared the shit out of him. He slammed the cell phone on the table and expected to see Amber staring agog at him, caught in the act.
Instead, Cat arched her carefully sculpted eyebrows. “You watch What Not to Wear?”
Ben growled and retrieved the phone, causing Cat to laugh as if she’d just been told a hilarious joke. He gave up on the address book—too many names—and switched to incoming calls. Taking a notebook from his pocket, he jotted down the names and numbers of the dozen or so people who’d called Amber in the last twenty-four hours.
“Keep your khakis on, Professor.” Cat joined his cursory search, checking out the innards of Amber’s tiny backpack purse. “Our little fashion diva knows something. She has to. We’ll chitchat about clothes and men for a few minutes and she’ll be eating out of my hand. Just sit back and watch how it’s done.”
Cat didn’t disappoint him. Amber had the good manners to announce her oncoming fashion exhibition, so Ben and Cat both had time to stop snooping and take their seats for the runway show. Cat immediately went to work critiquing and offering suggestions that led them to Amber’s closet while Ben explored the kitchen and her laptop. Half an hour later, Cat had Amber looking older, more sophisticated and decidedly more desirable to a guy of any age, and when they walked the coed to her car, not only did they have the name and phone number of the so-called cousin who’d confronted Paschal on the quad, but they also had the name and addresses of the bar she’d met him at—information she had not shared with the police.
“Don’t tell T that I ratted him out, okay?” Amber begged as she popped her lime green PT Cruiser into gear. “I needed the money, okay?”
“So you took money from a stranger and passed him off as your cousin to set my father up?” Ben asked. Now that he had the information he needed, he saw no reason to be polite. Cat, however, stomped on his foot to get him to shut up.
“What?” he asked. “She did set Paschal up.”
“I didn’t!” Amber insisted. “Topher convinced me that he was a Gypsy himself. That he was working on some sort of family tree and needed Professor Rousseau’s help, but he wouldn’t take his calls. He thought if one of his students introduced him, he’d have an in. That’s all I. knew. He said he had information about this Valoren place that the professor would want. Then, after the professor turned him down, Topher got all weird. Really, really angry. I wouldn’t have helped him at all if I’d known what a prick he was.”
Cat leaned forward and patted Amber’s arm through the open car window. “Dr. Rousseau will be fine. You did the right thing by telling us the whole truth.”
Ben turned away, unable to watch as Amber peeled out of the lot without a care in the world beyond what kind of martini to order at dinner and if her shoes matched her purse. She’d led a man she’d now admitted was dangerous straight to his father, and he was supposed to care if she and her third date had a good time?
In silence, they headed back to his car. Ben opened the door for Cat. She slid by him with only centimeters to spare, and the attendant thrill of her clothes brushing against his removed a layer of anger from his body. Without Cat, he never would have finessed the information. She’d worked Amber with a cool style that had his blood simmering. Before she got in, he grabbed her by t
he shoulders and kissed her.
After a long, luxurious, luscious moment, she pressed a hand to his chest and pushed him back, but only a few inches.
“You don’t give a girl much warning, do you?” Her words came out in a breathless rush.
In her eyes, Ben witnessed a mixture of surprise, shock and, perhaps, pleasure? Well, damn. Of course she’d found the kiss pleasurable. Wasn’t like he was new to the art form.
When the corner of her mouth quirked up into a saucy grin, however, his mind flashed with images of Mariah. So cocky. So self-assured. So impossible to deal with.
“Maybe if I thought before I acted, I wouldn’t make such boneheaded mistakes,” he said.
“Kissing me was a mistake?”
“Without a doubt,” he muttered, gesturing her inside the car so he could slam the door on his foolish moment of weakness.
However, after he’d slid into the driver’s seat, she wasted no time reintroducing the topic. “In my experience, it’s the things we think we know that usually get us into the most trouble.”
He snorted. “You think you know more about trouble than I do?”
“There’s a very good chance,” she replied.
Though he opened his mouth to speak, he thought better of engaging in this conversation and opted for silence instead. Catalina Reyes clearly knew a great deal about a lot of things, but when it came to trouble, anyone with the last name Rousseau had the market cornered.
“So, now we know that Amber’s fake cousin is a drifter named Topher Pyle who can’t afford a decent pair of shoes, according to her, but he can spare two hundred dollars to pay a college sophomore to introduce him to her professor,” Cat recapped.
“What we don’t know is why some low-life is interested in my father.”
“Or Valoren. Maybe this Pyle guy really is Gypsy.”
“Or maybe he’s just lying through his teeth.”
“For a place that’s supposed to be so secret, an awful lot of people know about it,” Cat commented.
“Too many fucking people,” Ben muttered, tamping down his anger at Paschal. Maybe if his father had told him a thing or two about the place, Ben wouldn’t be operating so blindly. Maybe if he knew…something…he’d be closer to finding his father before he died.
“Well,” she said softly, “at least the information isn’t readily available.”
“If Topher Pyle really had information about Valoren, my father would have helped him in exchange for it. I think that’s a lie. That punk must be working for someone—someone who knows about Valoren and believes in it as much as my father. Question is, who?”
Cat pulled her cell phone out of her purse. “Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who.”
“You don’t think so?”
After pressing a speed-dial button, she gave him a jaunty wink. “You’re in luck, Ben. You want your father back and so does my friend. My rich friend. Whether its ransom or payoffs, we’ll get Paschal back. You just have to trust me.”
“I have so far,” he griped.
“Have you?” she shot back.
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Well,” she replied, settling into the seat as if they were going on a long, leisurely drive rather than on a hunt for the man who might have taken his father, “it was to me. I was just wondering about you.”
Ben didn’t reply. Anything he might add or deny would only bury him deeper in a personal maelstrom he’d rather not confront. Because the truth was, he did trust her.
And the only thing trusting a beautiful woman had ever gotten him was hot sex—nearly always followed by a brush with death. With a resigned shake of his head, he realized he was probably—and hopefully—heading for both with Cat.
Nineteen
“Hold my calls.”
Jacob barked the order over his shoulder, knowing his assistant would comply whether or not he made eye contact. He tossed his briefcase by the door, removed his jacket and stalked around the office, his skin on fire. No, not his skin. His brain. He glanced at his watch. He had five minutes. Five fucking minutes. What was he going to do?
Five minutes ended up a generous estimation. Five seconds later, an alarm sounded from his computer. Incoming message. He didn’t move. Narrowing his gaze, he tried to see if his monitor revealed the source of the alert, but the twirling crown that comprised the Crown Chandler logo continued to spin against the dark screen. E-mail? Interdepartmental instant message? Or what he’d been dreading—a highly encrypted message from the kid who held his future in his hands.
He checked his watch again. He’d said noon, right? Noon?
The console beeped again, and this time, the automated voice on his computer announced the source: Incoming conference call notification.
Reluctantly, Jacob moved toward his desk. He reached for his mouse, hesitating before the vibration of his touch activated the machine. What was he going to say?
The third beep jolted him to action. He straightened his tie, then boldly pressed on the mouse.
Keith Von Roan’s face filled the entire screen. Round, light eyes with girlish lashes. Smooth forehead and cheeks, but acne pocked the skin along his jaw-line. A strip of fuzz over his top lip was mistakenly considered a moustache. His lips moved, but no sound came out. Jacob scrambled to adjust the volume.
“…flight didn’t suck?”
Jacob slid into his chair. Keith was only nineteen. A kid. So why was Jacob sweating bullets underneath his starched cotton collar? Try as he might, he couldn’t muster the superior attitude he’d perfected with everyone else. Keith knew too much. And soon, Keith would have more clout and cash than even Alexa. Jacob wasn’t a fool. Guys like him stayed on top by hitching their future to the star that would rise the highest—not to the one who would burn out from messing with shit she didn’t understand.
And if all progressed as planned, Keith Von Roan would soon be at a zenith.
“Flight was great,” Jacob responded. “No turbulence, great mimosa.” He prayed the words came out with his practiced lackadaisical air rather than reflecting his heightened nerves. “What more can a man ask for?”
Keith nodded absently, his eyes downcast as he typed away on his keyboard and fiddled with his mouse. Probably playing another round of World of Warcraft. “I don’t know,” the kid mused, his hands still flying. “I’d rather have limitless power before concentrated orange juice and cheap champagne.”
Jacob rolled his eyes. Clearly, the kid had a lot to learn about living large.
Keith looked up, and instantly Jacob popped his expression back into enthusiastic agreement. “Of course.”
“So, are we any closer?”
We? Some we. Jacob was doing all the work. Jacob was putting his fortune on the line so the kid could take over as leader of the K’vr. The death of the previous Grand Apprentice had split the group into two factions—one led by Keith, catering to those who believed in blood succession, and the other headed by Farrow Pryce, whose money and power lured an equal number of followers. Jacob, who had plenty of money and power on his own thanks to the Chandler legacy, had chosen to ally himself with Keith. Though Farrow had more experience, Keith had the bloodlines. And if Jacob had learned one thing after his mother had married into the Chandler family, it was that blood counted above all else.
Jacob pretended that someone had come to the door of his office. The gesture bought him a few moments to think. How much did he want to tell his eventual lord and master? For the longest time, Jacob’s loyalty to the K’vr had been his sole focus. The group had formed centuries ago, solely for the purpose of obtaining the supernatural power once wielded by Lord Rogan, a European nobleman who’d discovered an ancient source of magic in his vast and varied travels, though the power had ultimately destroyed him.
But until now, the K’vr had never been so close to obtaining their goal. And before yesterday, Jacob had also never been manhandled by a ghost. He’d known at that moment that he’d found what hundreds of followers befo
re him had failed to discover. The magic he’d once thought only a pipe dream now loomed larger than he’d ever imagined. And he was at the forefront of the search. Because of his cunning. Because of his sacrifices. Not due to some pimply kid who’d had the luck to be born to the right father.
“I believe we’ve made great progress,” Jacob replied.
Keith’s bushy eyebrows rose high over those feminine eyes. “Can you verify that the castle still possesses the magic bequeathed to me by my uncle?”
More like great-uncle, nine times over. Lord Rogan had lived in the eighteenth century, his tale chronicled by his younger brother, a minor landowner, who’d used his brother’s reputation as a formidable sorcerer to keep his tenants and serfs in line. Even after Lord Rogan’s mysterious disappearance after he’d traveled from London to a Gypsy enclave tucked into a corner of what was now Germany, Lukyan Roganov continued to spin tales of his brother’s magical prowess. Possessing a few tricks of his own, he’d rallied a collection of followers, who had, through the centuries, become known as the K’vr. The group’s goal from the very beginning had been to retrieve the reported source of Rogan’s great power. Trouble was, none of them knew what the source was.
But the discovery of Rogan’s castle, reported to have been built by the sorcerer shortly before his disappearance, had become their strongest clue.
Yet even the nineteen-year-old heir to the Roganov legacy knew not to get his hopes up. The key to Rogan’s magic was, to the K’vr, as equal in legend, lore and legacy as the Holy Grail to Christians—and just as elusive. Even though Jacob had been initiated into the group only five years before, his extensive knowledge of the occult had helped push him to the forefront of the search. And with the Chandler family’s resources behind him, he’d found more than any other devotee before him.
“I cannot verify that the source exists there, but I highly suspect it does. I actually entered the hallowed halls myself yesterday.”
