The simple fact was that he had failed to keep his marriage alive, the same way he had failed to see the kid with the gun in that darkened hallway. One had broken his heart and the other his body.
After that, who could blame him for having a healthy sense of self-preservation?
The phone on the end table next to his elbow rang, making him jump. He grabbed for the ice pack and settled it on his knee while he glanced at the clock. Late-night calls, in his experience, usually didn’t contain good news.
“Knox.”
“Hey, bro. Don’t you ever check your messages?”
Griffin cocked an eye at the digital display on the phone console. Four messages. “I just got home. What’s wrong?”
“Nearly midnight and you just got home?” Rhys sounded incredulous. “I heard that Jay Singleton was a slave driver and this proves it.”
“Not all of us have cushy programming jobs. Are you going to tell me what’s up or not?”
“Just wanted to let you know that you’re a proud uncle of a little girl, that’s all. Jess went into labor yesterday.”
“Geez. How come nobody called me?”
“Uh, rewind to original question about the messages.”
“I have a cell phone,” Griffin reminded his brother. “It’s good for times like this. So are baby and mom okay?”
“Healthy and tired and completely okay. Dad is a wreck and Tyler’s not sure about this girl business, but he’ll come around.”
“Congratulations, Rhys. I’ll come up and see you guys as soon as I can. What about Mom—is she there?”
“We wouldn’t be functioning if she wasn’t. She came up to Petaluma at the beginning of the week. She and Tyler have been having a great time. Plus I think I gained five pounds. I forgot how good her macaroni casserole is. So, what’s going on that you’re working eighteen-hour days?”
“Oh, the usual. Some internal stuff came up. Very hush-hush. Jay wanted me on it personally.”
“Uh-huh. You know, if you keep making his life easy you’re never going to have one of your own.”
Griffin snorted. “I have a life.”
“You have a case of social atrophy you’re calling a life.”
“Geez, you sound like Tessa.” Then he winced and resisted the sudden urge to smack himself on the forehead. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
“Tessa? Who’s Tessa? My God, is there actually someone lurking on the fringes of your sorry existence? A female someone?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing, huh? But I’m sounding like her. This means actual conversation has occurred. Spill, bro. Who is she?”
“Just someone I’m working with.”
“What kind of a someone? Blond, brunette, redhead? Beautiful, smart, solvent?”
“Blond, beautiful, smart, and an economic disaster. But on the plus side, she drives a ’66 Mustang ragtop.”
“My God.” Rhys sounded as if he was about to have an orgasm. “You have to bring her when you come up. No arguments.”
“I don’t know if things will progress to the meet-the-family stage. It’s just physical. And we’re working together, so even that’s out of bounds.”
“Bull.” Rhys’s scorn indicated ethics like that deserved to go the way of the dodo bird. “We need that car in the family. Don’t disappoint me.”
“Okay for you. You’re not the one going crazy.”
“If you’re going crazy, that means you’re over Sheryl. For which you’ll observe me on my knees thanking God.”
“Yeah, me, too. But I don’t know. Tessa’s—different.”
“Different how? Different like she isn’t a boring cop type, or different like she just got released from Vacaville?” he asked, naming northern California’s correctional and psychiatric institution.
How was he going to explain this? “She’s a sensitive. As in, she uses psychometry to find things or people.”
A long silence hissed down the line.
“Rhys?”
“I’m still here. My mind tried to wrap itself around that and started unraveling instead.”
“You really sound like her. Too bad you’re already married.”
His little brother, he of the genius IQ and the runaway mouth, ignored him. “And Jay has you working on something with her. And she’s beautiful and driving you crazy. I dunno, bro. Sounds like you’re on your own with this one.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Being on his own with Tessa was the whole problem.
11
WHEN TESSA WOKE, the sun was streaming through the window next to the door in brilliant squares, so she did a few yoga stretches in their warmth to start things off and put herself in a positive frame of mind.
She hadn’t dreamed about Christina, as she’d hoped when she’d shut off the light and gone to sleep in the girl’s bed. Instead, she’d dreamed about making love with Griffin—gee, what a surprise. He’d been just as delicious in her dream as he had been in her fantasy…and just as gone when she woke up.
Ah well, one had to take the bad with the good in this life, she thought philosophically as she walked over to the main house, let herself in through the kitchen door and went in search of coffee and food.
Jay was lying in wait in his office like one of those jumping spiders, and he popped out of his doorway as she crossed the foyer.
“Tessa. Can we talk?”
“Good morning to you, too,” she said.
“Oh. Good morning. In here.” He ushered her into the office and she spared a moment to wonder if he ever left it. Then she decided he must. He was wearing a different colored shirt.
Griffin was standing in his usual spot by the window and there they were in that annoying power triangle again. Tessa was just about to do something outrageous, like push a pile of paper out of the way and sit on the edge of the desk, when Jay indicated the chair she’d commandeered yesterday.
“Have a seat. Coffee?”
You’re making progress, girl. “Thank you.” She sat in the wing chair and pulled her feet up under the gauzy purple skirts of her sundress, and Jay poured her a cup of coffee from the pot on the sideboard.
“Griffin says you saw something last night. Care to brief me?”
Calmly and in as much detail as she could, she told him everything she could remember. When she got to the part that involved Griffin’s hands and body and what they’d been doing to her dreams all night, she stopped and took a fortifying sip of hot coffee. A quick glance in his direction told her he wasn’t about to clue in his boss on that part, either. He straightened and looked at nothing in particular on the other side of the room.
“Griffin says the sign is probably the Super 8 logo,” she finished.
“Which narrows the field to about fifty places within a day’s drive of here,” Griffin added helpfully.
“So you two think it’s not a kidnapping?” Jay rubbed his eyes.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t sleeping in his office, but it was clear he wasn’t sleeping much anywhere else. This had to be hell on him. She resisted the urge to reassure him that they were doing the best they could. No point belaboring the obvious.
“We’ve had no ransom demand and it’s been twenty-four hours,” Griffin said. “And Tessa’s information seems to indicate there’s an older man she’s infatuated with, to the point that she has been trying to get his attention for some time. Now that she’s succeeded, they seem to have gone somewhere for a tryst, or…something.”
“It’s the ‘or something’ that concerns me.” Jay’s voice was grim. “No matter how old he is, he’s got the maturity of a thirteen-year-old if he doesn’t make some effort to let us know where she is and that she’s okay.”
“Which is why we’re going to stay with them,” Tessa put in. “And then you can go and bring her back.”
“Kicking and screaming, if necessary,” he agreed. “So, what’s our next move? Sit around and wait until the universe sends you another sign?”
“No,” Gri
ffin said dryly before she could answer. “Since we’ve agreed it may not be a kidnapping, we change our plan of attack. Does Christina have her cell phone with her?”
“As far as I know. We’ve called it about every hour, but she’s got it turned off. It goes straight to voice mail.”
“I need to see the bill. If she’s been calling him, we can find out who he is.”
“All her bills come to me.” Jay hunted through one of the piles. “Here’s one. How recent is it?”
Griffin tore it open and scanned it. “Damn it. It’s the right month, but there are no call records. What’s with that?”
“She probably gets them online,” Tessa said. “That’s how I do mine. It saves pages of trees that way.” She smiled at them.
“Where’s her laptop?” Griffin asked.
“In the cottage.” Jay waved a hand at his electronic command center. “But why not use mine?”
Griffin shook his head. “If she’s logging on to the phone company’s site, the cookies identifying her will be on her laptop.”
Tessa snagged a muffin off the sideboard and followed Griffin outside, coffee mug in hand. “Even if you do find her records, how are you going to figure out which one might belong to this guy?”
“Process of elimination, to start. Then I call in a few favors.”
“With whom?” They crossed the patio to the cottage.
“I still know a few people downtown.”
“Or I could just call my sister. She’s hooked into every system known to man.”
With his hand on the doorknob, he glanced back at her. “Good,” he said briefly. “We’ll do that.”
She blinked. Wow. She’d actually said something investigatorlike, something that had been accepted at face value. No sarcasm, no dismissal, and no begging someone to listen to her.
How about that.
The laptop was sitting in a shelving rack in the walk-in closet. Griffin plugged it in and booted it up. Then he stopped.
“What’s the matter?”
He waved at the screen. “She’s got the damn thing password protected. I can’t even get to the desktop.”
“Can’t you—I don’t know—hack into it or something?”
He shot her a look. “Can’t you lay hands on it and get a vision?”
Uh, okay. Point taken.
Tessa gazed around the room. What did people use for passwords? Family names, nicknames, nouns, verbs, names of animals, names of pets—
“What’s the elephant’s name?” she said suddenly, zeroing in on the stuffed elephant she’d taken from between the pillows and put on the nightstand.
“Huh?” Griffin glared at the laptop as if it would yield the password simply by process of intimidation.
“The elephant she had on her bed. What’s its name?”
“How should I know?” He flipped out his cell phone and pressed two buttons. Fleedeep.
“Yeah?” Jay’s tinny voice responded.
“What’s Christina’s elephant’s name?”
“What elephant?” Jay sounded completely lost.
“Here, give me that,” Mandy’s voice said in the background. “Griffin?”
“Still here.”
“I don’t know, either. You mean that stuffed toy on her bed, right?”
“Right. Who would know?”
“What about Lucia?” Tessa asked.
“Who?” Jay said in the background.
“Lucia,” Mandy said. “My domestic assistant.”
Was that what they were calling housekeepers these days? There was a scuffle as Mandy went to get Lucia, and then the girl herself came on the walkie-talkie.
“The elephant’s name is Cleo, Señor Knox,” she said.
“Hang on.” Griffin typed the name into the password field and in a second the desktop opened up in all its glory. “Bingo. Thanks, Lucia.” He shut the cell phone and put it back in his pocket. “Now, then,” he said to the laptop, “spill.”
Christina evidently put a lot of faith in her system password. Once they logged on, she had everything set up to open automatically, including the phone company’s site.
“Holy cats.” Tessa looked at the screen over his shoulder. “How many calls can one teenager make?”
The scent of his cologne intensified, as though his body temperature had risen. He might be trying to maintain his businesslike demeanor, but she knew how men’s bodies worked.
“If Daddy’s paying the bill, the sky’s the limit.” He shifted uneasily, and she took pity on him and straightened. He cleared his throat. “There are a lot of repeats, though. Grab a pen and write these down.”
As it turned out, only thirteen numbers made up the four screens’ worth of calls. Griffin ruled out the Boston exchanges right away, as well as the Pebble Beach Golf and Country Club.
“It’s these ones in the local area codes that are interesting,” he said, pointing to the last half a dozen on her sheet of note paper. “Let’s see what we come up with.”
Her sister, Linn, had told her about the part of her job that involved making undercover calls. Obviously this was a skill they learned in the academy, because during the next ten minutes, Griffin played the part of a surfer, an Ivy League freshman, and a bookstore clerk as he called one number after another. Four of them were Christina’s girlfriends. One was the admissions office at UC Santa Rita. “Dad will be glad to hear about that,” Tessa murmured. The last two numbers rang through to automated voice-mail systems with no personalized message.
“Interesting.” Griffin closed his cell phone and indicated the two numbers. “Can you give those to your sister and ask her to do a subscriber check?”
Tessa wrote subscriber check in careful script on the paper and nodded. “We just might get lucky.”
He shut down the laptop, but made no move to go. Instead, he slewed around on the edge of the bed and put the laptop aside. “Look, Tessa, I want to apologize for last night.”
Apologize? After triggering all those lovely dreams? “I hate when guys say that,” she said.
“I want to make it clear that I was following instructions I believed you were giving me while you were having the vision.” He paused. “It’s also clear that I enjoyed it a little too much. I took advantage of you and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
There was nothing quite as annoying as having a man say he enjoyed it but it would never happen again. He might be able to say the words, but his body told her differently. Why fight it? She had to make some effort to turn his thinking around. A little mutual pleasure wasn’t something to apologize for. It was something to appreciate. She just didn’t think he saw it that way. “Accepted,” she said.
A silence fell, as if he expected her to say more, and she heard the gulls calling over the boom of the breakers in the distance. And the more subtle, internal call of woman to man.
Then he asked, “So, how much awareness of the real world do you have when you see…things?”
He sounded as if he honestly wanted to know. You had to respect a guy who could admit he didn’t know everything. Maybe the sun pouring through the cottage’s windows was what had inspired this moment of clarity.
“I kind of lose track of my body.”
His eyes traced her from neckline to sandals, and it happened again—that feeling of heat, as if his gaze had laid a physical hand on her body. Her nipples tightened under the thin bodice of her dress.
And he saw her reaction. He swallowed again.
The poor guy was trying to have a sensible conversation. Maybe he wasn’t as interested as she in the invisible give-and-take of attraction. Or maybe he was just better at blocking it out. She hadn’t really verbalized what happened when she saw things to anyone before. Most people got weirded out or didn’t care.
“My consciousness is so much in the world of the vision that there aren’t any cycles left to spend on where my body is or what it’s doing.” She looked at him while he tried not to look at her. “I haven’t come on to an
yone before, though.”
It seemed to be very important that he get the laptop closed properly because he pulled it onto his lap. “That’s okay. Happens to me all the time.”
She grinned. “I bet. You’ve totally got that Viggo Mortensen wounded-warrior thing going.”
He looked up, his face a little blank. “What?”
“Never mind. So what did I do?” As if she didn’t know. But sometimes if a guy had a hang-up about something, it was better to talk about it.
“You kind of backed into me and then took my hands and, um…”
“Put them on my breasts.”
“Uh, yeah.” He bit his lower lip.
Is there something there you want to hide? she thought wickedly. “And you enjoyed it.”
“Yeah. Like I said, I’m sorry.”
“Why is that something to be sorry for? I wasn’t sorry.”
She thought he might follow up on that, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry I touched you without your permission.” He glanced up. “Your conscious permission, that is.”
“But my unconscious was all systems go. I would say that ought to tell us something.”
“Like what?”
She was about to tell him exactly what, with maybe a demonstration or two, but something held her back. Maybe it was the expression in his eyes—as if a deep, dark chasm had opened up at his feet.
“Like my unconscious needs to see a shrink,” she said instead, smiling as though it was a joke and giving him an easy way out.
He took it without hesitation and got up. “Getting back to reality, we have a job to do. Let’s concentrate on that.”
“Sure. Whatever you say,” she said, noticing with some disappointment that he no longer needed the laptop to shield himself from his reaction to her.
“I’ll go update Jay.”
“And I’ll call my sister.”
And weren’t they just being all civil and totally avoiding what both of them wanted, which was to throw each other down on the lavender velvet bedspread and kiss each other into oblivion.
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