by Jayne Castle
“A brief affair, maybe,” Celinda said. “Not love.”
“Mind me asking where you got all those rules you put into your book?”
“I made ’em up.”
He gave her a quick, sidelong look. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Of course it is.” She turned serious. “The rules in my book are based on my own experience as a marriage consultant and the combined experiences of several of my colleagues whom I interviewed. Over time you see what works and what doesn’t.”
“One-night stands don’t work, I take it?”
“Nope.”
“Good thing we stopped where we did, then, last night, huh? Means there’s still hope for us.”
She stiffened and stole a quick look at him, wondering if he was teasing her. But Davis looked calm, even thoughtful.
She, on the other hand, was pretty sure that she was probably blushing all the way down to her toes. It was the first time the subject of that scorching kiss in the doorway had come up. She had begun to believe that they were both going to continue to pretend nothing had ever happened, that it might be better that way, given that the relationship was such a crazy mix of business and the personal.
“Last night was a little weird,” she said very carefully. “I’m not sure we should draw any conclusions from it.”
“You’re calling that kiss weird?” He sounded interested, not offended.
“Well, yes.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten half naked in a doorway before.” She was suddenly incensed for absolutely no logical reason. “I mean, anyone could have walked past.”
“Someone did walk past. A guy capable of summoning a doppelganger ghost. And another guy drove past, as I recall. Nearly flattened you.”
Back to business, Celinda thought. It’s better that way. Don’t let this get personal again.
They both fell silent for a moment. After a while, Celinda fed Araminta another cookie and thought about the hasty repacking she had done this morning before letting Davis take her suitcases down to the car. On a mad, inexplicable whim she had yanked the plain cotton nightgown out of a case and replaced it with the new, sexy green satin gown she had found on sale a month ago. She hadn’t even worn it yet. What had she been thinking?
Twenty miles later she stirred in her seat. “You know,” she said, “I’m not sure your theory about Araminta not wanting to be parted from her relic for long is going to hold up. We’re almost a hundred miles out of Cadence, and she isn’t showing any signs of agitation about being in a car that is driving very rapidly away from wherever she stashed that relic.”
“Who knows how a dust bunny’s sense of time and distance works?” he said. “She may have no concept of how far away from your apartment we are.”
“Hmm.” Celinda turned in her seat to take a closer look at Araminta. “You may be right. I think she’s sort of distracted.”
“By Max?”
“Yes. If you don’t get your relic back anytime soon, blame your Lothario of a dust bunny.”
“Max is not that kind of bunny.” Davis seemed genuinely insulted. “Trust me when I tell you that Araminta is the first female he’s shown any interest in since I met him six months ago. Furthermore, Max isn’t the only one who’s had a long dry spell.”
“You’re saying that you haven’t had a date in six months? I find that a little hard to swallow.”
“My engagement ended about six months ago,” he said quietly. “My business took a downturn at about the same time. I’ve been concentrating on rebuilding.”
“I see.” In spite of herself she felt a sharp pang of sympathy. Having a Covenant Marriage engagement end at the same time that your business hit some difficulties would have been tough for anyone. “I just assumed from the car and your clothes that Oakes Security was doing well.”
“The car and the clothes are left over from before things hit the skids.”
“Trust me, I know what it is to have everything you’ve worked for suddenly go south,” she said quietly.
The Phantom ate up a few more miles of near-empty highway.
“What about you?” he asked after a while. “Last night you said something about not having had a date in four months?”
“I’ve been busy, too. It wasn’t easy finding a new job, and after I got one, I devoted myself to proving to my new boss that she hadn’t made a huge mistake by hiring me.”
“Leave anyone special behind in Frequency?”
She thought about Grant Blair, the very nice lawyer she had been discreetly dating at the time of the disaster. “There was someone. It seemed promising for a while, but it ended badly.”
“Mr. Perfect?”
“No,” she said. “He was not Mr. Perfect.”
“What happened?”
“I told you, it ended.” She glanced at him. “Look, are you sure you want to get any deeper into this conversation? I thought men didn’t like to talk about old relationships.”
Davis shrugged. “I like to know what I’m dealing with. This guy you were seeing, would that have been Benson Landry, the hunter who’s slated to take over the Frequency Guild?
She was shocked speechless. It took her a few seconds to find her tongue. “You know about Landry?”
“I’m a detective, remember?”
She pulled herself together with an effort of will. “Benson Landry is not the man I was dating back in Frequency. Landry is a manipulative bastard. He also has a very scary parapsych profile.”
Davis’s eyes tightened at the corners. “Like the driver of the getaway car last night?”
Celinda blinked and then shook her head ruefully. Just like that, they were back to business again. “No,” she said, thinking about it. “Both men give off unwholesome vibes, but they aren’t the same vibes. The getaway driver is a powerful psi talent with an obsessive streak a mile wide, but he is sane.”
“Landry isn’t sane?”
“The last time I saw him, he was teetering on the edge of insanity. But the most frightening thing about him is that he passes for normal.”
“So there’s no chance that Landry was the getaway driver?”
She shuddered. “Absolutely none.”
“What about the other man, the one in the cap who fired up the twin ghosts?”
She shook her head. “Definitely not Landry. I didn’t get close enough to read his psi, but I could see enough of him to be certain. That man was tall and gaunt. Landry is built much differently.”
“Okay, so much for that angle.”
She looked at him. “What made you ask if one of those men might have been Benson Landry?”
“Just occurred to me that if one of them was Landry, we would have had an obvious connection to work with.”
“The obvious connection being me?”
“Yes.”
She made herself exhale slowly and evenly. She would not take it personally, she told herself.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said.
“Too late. I think I am taking it personally.”
“Look at it this way; it would have made things easier.”
“You mean from an investigative point of view?”
“Right.” He paused. “Okay, I can see where you might not want to be a connection in this case.”
She shivered. “Especially if it means being connected to Benson Landry. Look, as long as we’re talking about the case again, I want to go over the details of our cover story.”
“What about them?”
“I get that I’m supposed to pass you off as my date for the wedding,” she said, “but I don’t think you realize just how curious my family is going to be.”
“I’m not a big fan of fake details in cover stories,” Davis said, his attention on the highway. “They tend to trip you up. Keep it simple is my motto.”
“How simple?” she asked warily.
He moved one hand on the steering wheel in a slight, negli
gent gesture. “We met recently, hit it off immediately, and now we’re getting to know one another.”
“I assume you have parents?” she asked patiently. “Siblings?”
“Oh, yeah.”
There was an ominous ring to the words, a man admitting he had a nemesis.
“If you showed up at a family event with a mysterious girlfriend that you hadn’t ever mentioned, wouldn’t everyone demand to know more about her?” she asked pointedly.
“There shouldn’t be any problem if we just stick to the truth as much as possible,” he said, calmly insistent. “They want to know what I do for a living? Tell them I’m in the security business.”
“How did we meet?”
“In the course of an investigation. I came to your office to ask you some questions regarding a case I was working on. There was an instant attraction. We both felt the thrilling frissons of energy resonating between us. I asked you out, and you said yes. Simple.”
She looked at him in disbelief. “Thrilling frissons of energy?”
“I thought it had a romantic ring.”
She took another deep breath and tried again. “Look, my sister has arranged for everyone from both families to stay at a hotel in the Old Quarter tonight. The rehearsal dinner will be held there this evening, and after the wedding tomorrow, the reception will take place in the hotel ballroom.”
“So?”
“So, you do realize that you cannot share a room with me, don’t you? My father would come unhinged. My mother would cry, and my sister would be worried sick. No telling what my brother might do.”
“Your family doesn’t think you’re all grown up yet?”
“It’s not that.” She hesitated. “It’s because of what happened with Benson Landry.”
“The hotel room photographs?”
“Damn. I should have known. You found those, too?”
His mouth curved with wry apology. “I keep telling you, I make my living as an investigator. Finding out stuff is what I do.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I doubt that you had to dig too far to find those awful pictures. They were all over the tabloids in Frequency City. Benson Landry is a very powerful man in that town. The news that he was involved in an affair with me made headlines for nearly two weeks. It destroyed my reputation as a marriage consultant.”
“In other words, your family feels protective of you after what happened.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry about the hotel room situation,” Davis said easily. “I’ll take care of it.”
“How?” she demanded.
“It is precisely for situations such as this that the hospitality industry invented the concept of connecting rooms.”
She absorbed that. “I see.”
The landscape had altered dramatically. The rich, agricultural region around Cadence City, fed by the mighty Cadence River, had given way to the over one hundred miles of stark desert that separated Cadence from Frequency. The long haul was broken by the occasional truck stop where drivers could recharge the flash-rock engines of their vehicles and grab some really bad food.
Here and there along the highway, dirt roads veered off into the desert. Most of them were unmarked. Celinda assumed they led to abandoned ranches or homesteads. A couple were identified with faded signs indicating roadside attractions.
Her personal favorite attraction was the one located halfway between the two cities. It was announced every twenty or thirty miles by a series of billboards that had once glowed in the dark but had long since faded to a dull, pea green. The first one had appeared just outside of Cadence: Only a Hundred and Fifty Miles to the Haunted Alien Ruins. The one they were passing now advised, Thirty Miles to the Haunted Alien Ruins.
“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” Davis said after a while.
“Yes,” she said, aware that probably wasn’t going to stop him.
“What made you, a professional matchmaker, think that Benson Landry was worth the risk to your reputation?”
The question blindsided her.
She hesitated, on the verge of her customary answer. Just one of those things. Swept off my feet by a big Guild man. Landry was good-looking. Powerful. You know what they say about Guild men being good lovers. Thought I’d find out. It was a reckless fling that went bad when the tabloids got hold of the story, blah, blah, blah.
But for some reason she found herself wanting to tell him what had really happened. After four long months of keeping the secret to herself, of thinking that she could and would keep it for a lifetime, she was suddenly overcome with the urge to confide in a man she had only just met.
It was his psi-vibes, she thought. She trusted Davis in a way she had never been able to trust any man.
Still, there was danger in revealing her secrets.
“Yesterday you told me that one of the things you offered your clients was confidentiality,” she said cautiously.
“Yes.”
“Does that extend to other people involved in a case that you happen to be investigating?”
“Depends. My policy is to protect the privacy of everyone involved unless it conflicts with my number one priority.”
“Solving the case?”
“It’s what I do, Celinda.”
She twisted around in the seat to look at him. “What about me? Can you guarantee that you’ll keep my secrets?”
“Yes. Unless it keeps me from doing my job.”
“What happened to me in Frequency City has nothing to do with recovering the relic.”
“Then I’ll keep your secrets, Celinda.”
She watched him for a moment longer and then settled back into the seat. She believed him, she thought. But what if he didn’t believe her? She would look delusional, at the very least. Worst-case scenario, he might conclude she was a pathological liar.
Ice trickled down her spine. She folded her arms very tightly around herself. Araminta suddenly hopped down onto her shoulder and made small comforting noises. Celinda unwound her arms, reached up, and patted her gently.
“I never for one moment believed that Benson Landry was worth the risk to my reputation,” she said eventually. “Just the opposite. I think of him as a man out of a nightmare.”
Davis gave her another one of his enigmatic looks. “So how did you wind up in bed with him?”
“That’s easy. He drugged me.”
Chapter 14
DAVIS FELT AS IF HE’D TAKEN A BODY BLOW. “WHAT THE hell?”
“I knew he was dangerous the moment he walked into my office,” Celinda continued in that same too-even tone.
“He was a client?”
“No. I never accepted him as one. Never signed a contract. Never took his money.”
“He wanted you to match him, and you refused?”
“Landry’s positioning himself to take over the Frequency Guild when the current Guild boss retires. There’s the usual power struggle going on. As I’m sure you’re aware, very few Guild chiefs retire willingly. Most of them have to be forced out of office by their Councils. Harold Taylor has been in ill health for some time. It won’t be long before he either dies or has to step down. He can’t hold on to his power base much longer.”
“And Benson Landry is waiting to make his move,” Davis said.
“He’s not just waiting, he’s actively preparing. Part of that preparation is finding himself a suitable wife. Guild bosses are almost always married.”
“Old tradition,” Davis agreed. “There are reasons.”
“Landry wanted me to find him a match for a Covenant Marriage. Being the arrogant SOB that he is, he had a long list of requirements, of course.”
“Let me hazard a guess,” Davis said. “He wanted someone who was beautiful, rich, and who came from a wealthy, well-connected Guild family.”
“If that was all he wanted, I’m sure he would have done his own matchmaking. Everyone knows that the members of powerful Guild families usually marry people who are also from other high
-ranking Guild families. The marriages aren’t based on compatibility and love. They’re more like old-fashioned political alliances designed to cement power. You don’t need a professional matchmaker for that. You use lawyers, accountants, and personal connections.”
“You’re right.” Davis considered that for a moment. “As the guy in line to take over the Frequency City Guild, Benson Landry could have his choice of brides from among the most powerful Guild families.”
“Unfortunately, Landry has set his long-range objective on more than just control of the Frequency Guild. He wants to move into politics. I think he plans to use the Guild resources as a power base to fund and operate his campaigns. He wants to become a senator.”
“Are you serious?”
“Entirely.”
“No Guild boss has ever been able to get elected to such a high office. I don’t think any Guild exec has ever gotten further than a position on a city council.”
Celinda’s smile was very cold. “Probably because by the time a man gets to a position of power within the Guild, he has acquired the kind of record that would not stand up to close scrutiny by the media. It would be like a mob boss deciding to run for public office. Too many dead bodies buried around town. Guild bosses usually have to be content to manipulate powerful men from behind the scenes.”
Davis told himself he was under no obligation to defend the Guilds. But, damn it, his ancestors had fought at the Last Battle of Cadence when Guild ghost hunters had been all that stood between the megalomaniac Vincent Lee Vance and his hordes of crazed followers. People tended to forget that the desperate, struggling colonies would have fallen under the tyrannical rule of an insane despot if it hadn’t been for the Guilds. Pride ran strong in his blood.
“I won’t deny that a certain amount of power brokering goes on in the Guilds,” he said. “But that’s true of the rest of society as well. People who have power tend to use it. Sort of goes with the territory. And it takes a certain degree of ruthlessness to get to the top of any organization. You don’t really believe that any of the city-state senators or the other members of the Federation Council, let alone the president and vice president, are as pure as untuned amber, do you?”
“Of course not, but they don’t usually come to the job with all the baggage that a Guild boss would bring to it. Even if a high-ranking Guild exec was a model of respectability, he’d still have to overcome the public image of Guild CEOs. Let’s be honest here. They have some long-standing PR problems.”
