THE RISK OF LOVE AND MAGIC

by Patricia Rice

  The dials lit up when she turned the key. “Freedom,” she murmured in relief. “Thank you.”

  “So, essentially you’ve been locked up in a loony bin most of your life, with no chance of being normal.”

  Nadine shot him a look of irritation. “The car isn’t big enough for both of us if you’re going to be overbearing and tedious.”

  The car wasn’t big enough for Magnus any way she looked at it. His head brushed the roof and his shoulders crowded her view, and she was entirely too aware of his proximity.

  “Tedious is what I am. Impulsive and unpredictable are who you are. I don’t think that changes. We just have to deal,” he told her. “Learn the controls first. They need to become habit, so they don’t require your attention when you’re on the road.”

  His calm reaction to her hyper insult eased her tension. “I really don’t like confinement,” she admitted rather than apologize. “If I ever have a chance, I’ll own a convertible.” She pulled levers to see what they would do.

  “Find a sedan with a bench seat in back and I’ll show you the value of privacy,” he said without a hint of a smirk.

  But she knew he was smirking inside. She shoved his big shoulder and tried not to blush. “Outdoors, under the stars, to heck with privacy,” she told him. “I’ve had all the privacy I can tolerate.”

  “I can handle that.” He eyed her hungrily, and the tension dissipated. The man had heated glower down to a science. Her gonads melted.

  Magnus showed her how to turn levers for different actions and pull back and forth or up and down on others. Nadine grasped the mechanics swiftly, but the Magnificent Hulk was too close, too much in her space, and her mind kept drifting. She could picture running her fingers over his biceps, and she didn’t want to smack him away.

  “OK, I’ve got all the important stuff,” she insisted when he put her through a list of commands. “I’ll worry about cleaning the windshields should I ever really drive.” She turned on the engine and admired its purr.

  “What we’ll be doing today is basic mechanics, not driving. A car is a two-ton bomb, a weapon of destruction. You have to learn to treat it with respect and know how to avert danger.”

  “You mean I can’t make it dance?” she teased. “Lighten up, Oswin.”

  “I can’t. I’m handing you the keys to escape and disaster,” he said gloomily. “I’m not the general. I can’t hold you prisoner, but I understand the temptation. Your head is full of dangerous information, and you’re an incendiary device rigged to explode.”

  “Nice analogy.” She attempted to back the car down the drive but had no idea where the rear bumper was. “Why don’t all cars have back up cameras?” she asked in frustration after several attempts ended up in the landscape gravel.

  “An experienced driver develops a sense of where their vehicle begins and ends. That’s what I’m trying to warn you about. You can’t just jump in the car and go.”

  “Damn.” She put the gear in forward, pulled back onto the pavers, then reversed and attempted again. “I’m a prisoner of my own ignorance!”

  “Some people are a prisoner of poverty. We all have our burdens to bear. Yours can be overcome with education. And even without that, all you have to do is produce your credit card and call a limo. Others aren’t so fortunate.”

  She gaped at him. “There is a brain behind that brawn, I knew it!”

  He sent her a look that sizzled all her nerve endings.

  “I could drive off and just leave you here,” he reminded her.

  “Me and my credit card,” she said cheerfully, finally maneuvering the car down the pavers to the street. “And you can’t do anything without me! I think I’ll let power go to my head.”

  He sat silently for a minute, watching her steer along the empty street. “What happens if you have a vision while driving?” he finally asked.

  Nadine cursed, hit the brakes at an intersection, and glared out the windshield. “Maybe they’ll go away once Vera and I are safe.”

  “How often do you have them?”

  “Only when there are naked thoughts flying around, and I happen to run into them, or someone directs them my way. It’s like when someone leaves open an unencrypted network. If I get close enough and I turn the computer on, I connect.” She turned at the side street and poked back to the house, shaken by his question. She couldn’t drive a freeway at ninety miles an hour and suddenly have someone inside her mind. She had freedom in her hands, but she was imprisoned by her own damned head. “I have good reason to stay isolated.”

  “Learning to drive is still necessary,” Magnus insisted. “Emergencies require taking risks. You need as much knowledge as you can acquire so you can adapt to whatever happens. Try to have someone with you prepared to grab the wheel, maybe. It’s a pity you have no one to teach you to block out broadcasts.”

  “What does Francesca do? She’s a pilot!”

  “Helicopter, not plane, and she always has a co-pilot with her. Still, she might know tricks. Education is important. We need to end this standoff with the general so you have an opportunity to learn.”

  Bleakly, Nadine let that truism sit there, unacknowledged.

  By the time they returned to their computers, Conan had conjured the ID of a nine-year-old girl named Lydia MacArthur.

  “Can her parents be traced?” Nadine asked anxiously when Magnus showed her the screen.

  “No. Conan will have found someone who died decades ago on the other side of the country. He’s building an on-line identity for her parents now. He’ll erase them when this is over.”

  Nadine studied the information. “I’ll fill in only the bare minimum on the genealogy site, just enough to catch someone’s notice, if they’re watching. We don’t need to give them everything at once,” Nadine said. “Most people are hesitant to reveal too much. When I monitored the site, I used to keep an eye out for new people and do my own investigating. I don’t know what anyone’s doing now.”

  “Can you find out?”

  She shrugged and tapped out access keys to the sticky Malcolm website she’d created and knew inside and out. “Nothing was happening last time I checked. I don’t dare take a look in the back door for fear someone is expecting me to do just that.”

  “It’s okay if they trace Lydia to this address and computer, but it’s best not to let them know it’s you hacking in their back door,” he agreed. Mad Max returned to fiddling with a mysterious circuit box that had arrived by UPS earlier.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not good at pretending,” she admonished.

  “This is the method you chose to reach the general. Learn,” he said without sympathy. “Once we have him, you’re free to be you.” His eyes crinkled at the corners when he glanced up at her. “I just hope the world is prepared.”

  His grin eased a tightly wound wire inside her, and Nadine turned back to her own website with less concern. “Positivity instead of negativity. I like that.”

  “Same as doing instead of thinking.” He returned to tinkering.

  “You have a strange idea of thinking then, if you equate it with negativity. I’m putting in your occupation as master dancer and choreographer when I’m ready to fill out the form.”

  He snorted but didn’t object. She liked that about him.

  She liked him too damned much. She needed to get the hell out before she ended up as another man’s appendage.

  Twenty-one

  Monday evening, Magnus finished installing his version of a spyware detector on the back of the house and began running wires for his next level of security.

  He fretted over Nadine’s implication that she felt trapped—with him—as she had with the general. Knowing how she felt—was damned uncomfortable.

  Thinking about that was negativity any way he looked at it. He’d rather put her in a car and set her free and be done. Since that wasn’t possible . . . He pondered some other action that might let her enjoy her new-found freedom.

  “S
omeone downloaded the latest info from the Malcolm website on Friday,” Nadine reported as he finished the wiring. “Lately, they’ve only been checking it on Fridays.”

  “Crap. You’re saying they might not find our bait for nearly a week?” So not what he wanted to hear.

  “Can’t say yet. Anything is possible. If Jo-jo chose my replacement from that Malcolm family tree, we could be up against anything.”

  “Employee archives are inaccessible?” He set up his laptop and connected the wireless to his new network.

  “Not totally. I set up a layered system of passwords, and someone has changed all of them in the servers I can locate. I’m running software on them now, but I suspect the vital servers have been moved. It will take a while to locate them. What are you doing?”

  He pushed a button and grunted at the screen. “Detecting. I’m playing with a new security system. It’s located a night vision scope on the bluff.” He swung the screen around to show her. “I’ll install the program and leave instructions for the guy who owns this place so he’ll know if photographers are up there.”

  She leaned over his shoulder, and his brain immediately clouded with the brush of her breasts. Damn, but he had it bad.

  “You think that’s paparazzi out there?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Nope, I think the general had someone trace your sister’s dog to this address, and he’s spying on the person he thinks was spying on him. The fact that the dog was taken to the vet and is no longer present hasn’t deterred him. The general is really and truly paranoid.”

  “Nothing new. Wow. You just put this together? Impressive.” She studied the red beam on the grid. “What do we do now?”

  “We can send security to take him down, but chances are he’s just hired help and won’t know anything. We can leave him up there and not give him anything to report—my recommendation. Once the minions discover we’ve entered this address on the website, we should get some action.”

  Magnus knew the action he wanted, but now he felt like he was taking advantage of a prisoner. He’d not exactly left Nadine many choices.

  “So we’re stuck in here until someone looks at the website again?” she asked with distinct dismay.

  “I think there are enough bushes and trees and umbrellas around the pool to conceal us, so we can go outside in that area. We have good security, but the balconies will be off limits, and if we drive out, we may have a tail.”

  She returned to the sofa she’d curled up on, and Magnus could see her shoulders slump. She wouldn’t nag or complain, but he didn’t need to be a mind reader to know she wasn’t happy.

  He tried not to compare her moods to Diane’s. Nadine had a right to be bummed about the situation.

  “We still have credit cards on our fake IDs,” he reminded her.

  She squinted at him questioningly.

  “Limo. We sneak out the pool area so he can’t see us. If we stick to the walls and shrubbery and make our way to the neighbors, we can make it look as if we’re emerging from a house down the road. Our spy can’t watch everyone.”

  Her eyes widened again. “We can pretend we’re the rich people down the road and order a limo? Majorly cool. Where would we go? Can we visit Vera? Or what about the Academy?” Her expression grew more excited. “Could we check out the Academy?”

  “I thought you’d want to go to Santa Monica or something.” He ought to just shoot himself in the head for thinking he’d guessed what she wanted. “We can’t let ourselves be seen near the school until we go through all the crap of applying and get permission to go in there.”

  “But we can’t go in,” she said in dismay. “Jo-jo would recognize us.”

  “No, we can’t go in. Conan will send his operatives with our cooked-up credentials. Your dancing master can really be one, if you like.”

  She ran her hands through her hair, spiking it. “Crap. I want this done and I want it done now. I hate doing nothing.”

  Magnus sympathized, but he refrained from saying just give me Jo-jo’s address. She’d made her point clear there. Conan was following up on the Palm Springs reports but hadn’t verified that the general was in residence. Distracting Nadine seemed reasonable, even if it required limos.

  “There’s a nightclub in Santa Monica with a good local band. If you’re confident that your connection with Vera is secure, you could see if she’s available to meet us there. But she’s behind a week on her studies. Don’t be surprised if she can’t,” he warned. “By the time we get there, it will be pushing ten, even if we hurry.”

  “We can’t get a limo that fast,” she protested.

  Magnus raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know Oz very well, then.”

  Finally, hope appeared in her eyes. “You think we can really go to a nightclub and be safe?”

  “Would I suggest it if I thought otherwise?” Well, yeah, probably, because he was a desperate man, but he didn’t think his expectations were unreasonable.

  “Then, yes, please! See if we can find a limo. Anything is better than sitting here, waiting.” She leapt up, kissed his cheek, and raced for the stairs before he could grab her.

  Damn, Conan was going to kill him.

  ***

  Nadine hurriedly pulled on the one dress she’d bought in her shopping spree. It didn’t have spaghetti straps or flounces, but it had a halter neckline and a full skirt in a simple blue. She glared at her curly hair, grabbed some gel, made it stand up. Then she took the scissors and began whacking off curls in a disorderly pattern so it didn’t lie flat or curl but looked as if it had been blown askew by an airplane propeller. That worked.

  She hadn’t bought make-up but whoever lived here had a closet full of it. She just borrowed an unopened tube of lipstick. And some shoes. She couldn’t dance in sandals.

  She knew it would be impossible to summon a limo in the half hour she’d taken to get ready, but she danced down the stairs anyway, eager to be out of the house.

  That startled her. She hadn’t minded sitting in front of a computer day and night when she was a teenager. She’d loved that she was safe in her basement from the pain of unguarded thoughts, safe from any kids who laughed at her. She’d loved the freedom of cruising the internet.

  She’d only learned to be wary of computers after she’d started doubting the wisdom of what the general was doing with his psychic experiments.

  Gazing on the magnificence that was Magnus waiting in the atrium, Nadine thought maybe he was a large part of her need to get away from the monitor.

  He’d changed into a crisp white shirt that he’d rolled up to the elbow. He wore it with the collar open, exposing his bronzed chest, and the tails tucked into form-fitting jeans. She salivated and almost told him to forget the limo.

  “We have maybe ten minutes to perform our disappearing act. The limo will meet us at the end of the street.”

  “Did my jaw just drop?” she asked. “You’re a magician, right?”

  He caught her arm and steered her through the darkened family room. “Oz is the magician. I’m the mechanic, remember? He called a friend in the neighborhood with a chauffeur. I’m installing the same night vision detector software in the guy’s house in exchange for the use of car and driver. It all works out.”

  “And I suppose you’ve invented an invisibility cloak while you were waiting?” She watched him set a timer that hadn’t been there earlier and didn’t even bother to ask.

  “Still working on invisibility,” he said without a hint of humor. “Until then, we stick to shadows.” He donned a black blazer over his white shirt, turned his gaze to her blue dress—and stopped talking.

  Nadine poked his chin up. “I am not the only female in the world with mammary glands. Do I need to wear something darker?”

  “No, ma’am, I like what I see just fine. But if you fall out of that dress while we’re dancing, I won’t be responsible for the consequences.” Over her shoulders, he dropped a dark raincoat.

  Nadine shrugged it on rather than
try to hang on to it. “Okay, lead on, Sherlock.”

  They slipped out the sliding doors. Magnus performed some magic feat with the security alarm, then guided her along the dark cabana to the towering hibiscus hedge on the far side of the pool.

  He located a narrow wooden gate in the wall behind the hedge and opened it. She bit back a gasp of surprise when the house suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree, and a blast of music blared from outdoor speakers.

  “How did you . . . ?”

  He covered her mouth with a finger and peered around the gateway. He dragged her through the opening to a narrow alley running along behind the property. A security light overhead that should have come on, didn’t.

  “I pulled the breaker on the light,” he whispered.

  He halted, gauged the distance to the next security light, and dragged her along the wall. “Cross to the other side. There’s no light there.”

  They dashed across the dark alley to open brush.

  In minutes, they’d found the street intersecting with the alley and sauntered down it, hand in hand, just another couple out for an evening stroll.

  They waved at a father and his kids walking up from the beach, just as if they belonged there.

  Heart racing, Nadine clung to Mad Max’s big hand as they reached the main road and saw a low-slung sports car waiting for them. “That’s not a limo,” she murmured worriedly.

  “No, that’s Oz’s love of classic cars. Late model XK-E coupe with twelve cylinders would be my guess. He doesn’t know people with mere Bentleys or Cadillacs. My back aches just looking at it.” He leaned in the open passenger window. “Looking for passengers?” he asked.

  “I’m yours for the evening,” the driver said.

  “Santa Monica, then, and keep an eye out for anyone tailing us.” Magnus held the door so Nadine could climb into the leather interior.