by Ann Macela
“But I like you so . . . accessible.” He gave her immediate frown a friendly leer. “But all right. We’ll go by your place. I’ll clear the breakfast dishes. You get dressed.”
Francie climbed the stairs, walked into the bedroom, and realized this was the first time they had been apart, if you didn’t count trips to the bathroom and his excursion for bagels. But she had slept so hard, she hadn’t even known he was gone until he returned and waved a cup of coffee under her nose, so she didn’t count it.
She needed the break, she decided, as what she had told him about Walt came back to her. Talking about the scumbag hadn’t been as hard as she thought it might. Clay had given her just the right amount of support when she had finished. She almost had to laugh at what he considered the most important part of his support—that she wasn’t disappointing in bed. All that testosterone, indeed.
Remembering his offer to wreak vengeance on Walt did make her laugh out loud. His method had been the exact one she had thought of way back then, but she’d had no means to bring it about. Revenge on Walt didn’t matter now. She had Clay.
They still hadn’t talked seriously about the future, and she had thought he was going to bring it up at the table. She had felt abruptly unprepared for such a talk. She knew she wanted to be with him forever, so that wasn’t the cause of her qualms. It was more like she was waiting for something else to happen.
At that thought, her center tingled slightly. “Is that a yes?” she asked it as she hunted for her sneakers.
No answer, of course.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“By the way, what’s your schedule for this week?” Clay asked as they pulled into the parking area at her apartment.
Francie winced. She’d forgotten all about her previous plans. She might as well tell him all of it, she decided. “As a matter of fact, I intended to take this week off. I was going to leave town.”
“What? Why?” He looked first outraged, then a little hurt.
“Because I thought getting away from you would give me time to rest, to come to terms with the situation. I was originally going yesterday morning, but something kept holding me back, I couldn’t get organized, and then your sisters came over . . . and we know how that turned out.”
“Thank God for the ‘something.’ Must have been the good ol’ SMI at work.” He flashed a cocky grin at her. “I knew it was on my side all along.”
She gave him an oh-for-Pete’s-sake look and rolled her eyes. Soul mate or not, the man’s confidence could be downright annoying.
Walking up to the apartment after collecting the mail, they ran into Tamara carrying a load of laundry. The redhead’s eyes grew large when she saw the two of them together.
“Hi, Tamara,” Clay called out cheerfully.
Tamara marched right up to them. “Does this mean you two are back together? You’ve made up?” she asked, looking pointedly at their clasped hands and Francie’s wrinkled clothes.
Trust Tamara to come right to the point, Francie thought as she opened her mouth to answer.
Clay beat her to it. “Yep, we’re definitely together,” he announced with a big, broad smile.
“Great! I am so happy you worked things out,” Tamara said, with a big grin of her own.
“I’m sorry the situation with Brenner didn’t end better,” Clay said.
“He’s such a rat,” Tamara replied. “I’m just glad I don’t have to see him anymore.”
“Did you talk to Childress?” Clay asked.
“Oh, that’s right,” Francie interjected. “I didn’t tell you about it.” Or, she thought, about how their friendship had withstood the storm. She’d relate the story later.
“Yes, I did,” Tamara answered, then winked. “And I wouldn’t mind seeing more of him. That is one nice man. You wouldn’t happen to know if he’s married, would you?”
Clay laughed. “No, he’s not married. So, good luck.”
“Great. Look, I have to get this laundry done and then check in some inventory at the shop,” Tamara said. “Will you be around later?”
“Come over about five and we’ll go get some dinner,” Francie said.
“Sounds good to me,” Clay agreed.
“I’d like to hear how you took the sleazeball down. See you then.” Tamara headed for the laundry room, and Clay and Francie climbed the stairs and entered Francie’s apartment.
“I just can’t keep my hands off you.” Clay closed the front door and immediately took her in his arms and kissed her. By the end of the kiss, Clay’s hands were under her shirt, and they were standing in a rainbow again. They held onto each other for a while.
“You know,” Clay murmured, “we have to get control of this thing or we’ll never get anything done. All I want to do is take you to bed.”
“I’ve noticed,” Francie said, giving her hips just a little push into his.
“Have some pity, darlin’,” he groaned, “walking around with a permanent hard-on can be painful, not to mention embarrassing.”
Now, there was a picture, Francie thought, stifling a giggle, but she suggested, “Let’s try doing something to occupy our minds. You never did show me your computer spells. Turn on my computer while I change into clean clothes.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” He gave her a quick kiss and walked into her office.
By the time she joined him, Clay was playing Spider Solitaire, the hardest level with four suits. He was winning, of course.
“Do you have a spell active?” Francie asked as she pulled up the other chair. “I can never win this one.”
“Madam, are you implying I’m cheating?” he asked in a snooty tone.
“No, of course not,” she said hastily. She knew he wouldn’t do that.
“Good. We computer wizards are touchy fellows, you know.”
“Touchy-feely is more like it,” she scoffed.
“You’re right about that.” He gave her thigh a squeeze. “But no, no spell.” He won the game and closed the screen. “Now, let’s see what we can do.”
“Call up the program you loaded here when Kevin tried to hack.”
“Good idea.” He displayed the program.
Francie couldn’t help but jump when the code came on the screen. “Oh, my goodness.”
“What happened?”
She leaned toward the monitor, then sat straight up. What she was seeing didn’t change. “I can see . . . a sort of bluish glow around the text. It’s not strong, but it’s there. And it wasn’t when you showed me the program the first time.”
“Hmmm. I wonder if we have found your soul-mate enhancement,” Clay said. “Let’s try this.” He closed the program and returned the display to her regular desktop. He took his hands off the keyboard and reached down to lay one hand on the tower holding the computer’s processing unit. He concentrated for a moment, then snapped the fingers of his free hand.
“Oh, my goodness,” Francie said again as various windows opened and closed, programs began and ended on her monitor. Her word-processing application opened and displayed the last letter she had written, a spreadsheet showed a budget she and Tamara had created for the shop, and the project-management software exhibited the progress made on a task at work. Finally her e-mail in-box opened with the list of her most recent messages. She looked from the screen to Clay and back again.
“What do you see now?” Clay asked.
“The programs aren’t glowing, but you are! There’s a luminosity, sort of a flickering, around you and the tower. It’s a solid color, sort of a dark blue. This must be the spell aura you were talking about.”
“Okay. Now for something more complicated.” Without touching the keyboard, he closed all the open windows except for the Internet connection. “My computer is turned on at home, and I’m always connected to the Internet. First, we’ll access my machine . . . Here’s my desktop. . . And here’s the code for a little application I’ve been working on.”
Francie’s jaw dropped as the displays changed to match
his descriptions. “You can get in anywhere, into any computer you want to, can’t you?”
“Probably. Hacking as a pastime or for the hell of it has never appealed to me. I have much more fun doing it for money, testing my clients’ firewalls, or, conversely, catching people trying to hack them.”
She sat back in her chair and looked from the screen to Clay. What a talent to possess. No hacker, especially not an inept one like Kevin, would stand a chance against Clay’s abilities. His computing skills had impressed her before. Now . . .
She sighed in surrender. “After this demonstration, I have to admit, Clay, if I had given you the chance to show me what you could do with a computer, I probably would have believed you can work magic.”
A huge grin broke out on his face, and he punched both fists in the air. “I knew it! I knew that’s all I had to do. Daria and Glori tried to tell me differently, but I felt it, right here.” He poked his finger at his magic center, then leaned over and gave her a big, smacking kiss. “You’re definitely my soul mate, Francie.”
“Wait a minute,” she told him. If she let him get away with this, he’d be insufferably overconfident, not to mention arrogant, just like he was when they met. “What do you mean all you had to do? You could have broken it to me a little more gently, you know. Led me into it? Showed me the computer before you started talking about practitioners. I told you how I felt about the idea of real magic.”
He had a distinctly worried look on his face, but she wasn’t going to stop now. She was on a roll. “You might also have brought in Daria and Glori earlier. Their dragon and panther business definitely caught my attention, but the clincher was when Glori cured my headache.”
“I know, darlin’, I apologize. I’m just impatient, especially when it comes to you.” He said the last with a big grin. “Besides, it doesn’t matter now. We’re together.”
She shook her head. It was clearly going to be impossible to crack his rock-hard confidence. That was okay. He’d soon learn, if he didn’t know it already, he couldn’t run over her. “All right,” she responded, “then what else can you do, oh great computer wizard?”
“Just watch this.”
They stayed on the computer for the rest of the afternoon, jumping around the Internet, playing games, showing each other their favorite Web sites, and discussing the merits and demerits of various computer gadgets.
Finally Clay leaned back and stretched. “Wait until we get back to my place where we can play some of these games together on my network. I want to try out Conundrum on my machine.”
“The gamesters are going to explode from ecstasy when they see your office,” Francie grinned. They’d probably adopt him into the group on the spot.
The doorbell rang.
“Oh, my goodness, Clay, look at the time,” she said. “It’s almost five. I’ll bet that’s Tamara. You turn off the machine, and I’ll let her in.”
“Okay,” he replied.
Francie rose and walked to her front door. She spied Tamara’s red hair through the peephole and threw the door open wide. “Hi!”
Kevin and Tamara stood in the doorway. He held a gun to her head. “Hi to you, too,” he snarled.
Francie, feeling like a bucket of ice water had just been poured down her back, looked from Tamara to the man behind her.
Kevin pointed the gun at Francie. “Back up, away from the door.”
Francie backed up into the apartment until she was stopped by the couch. “Tamara?” she asked.
Tamara, her face deathly pale, whispered, “I’m sorry, Francie.”
“Shut up and get in there, bitch!” Kevin ordered Tamara and pushed her over the threshold. Standing slightly behind her, he kept one hand on her shoulder and used the other to point the gun at the back of her head.
Francie kept her eyes on the twosome. Maybe she could maneuver them deeper into the living room, and Clay could attack Kevin from the rear. She had to alert Clay somehow, but nothing came to mind.
She didn’t get the chance to do anything because Clay came around the corner from the hall at that moment.
“What’s going on?” The question died on his lips when he saw Brenner.
Kevin kicked the door shut behind him. “Oh, good, the big, bad computer hacker is here,” he said in a snide falsetto, then dropped into his normal range. “Just the man I wanted to see next. I should have known all of you were in it together.”
“What do you want, Brenner?” Clay asked in a low, lethal tone.
“Want? I want payback. You cost me my job and five thousand dollars.”
“Why aren’t you in jail, Kevin?” Francie asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. Think, woman, think. Distraction, that was it. She had to distract him somehow so Clay might be able to jump him.
She moved slightly to the left to increase the distance between herself and Clay. As she would in basketball, she assumed a guarding posture, a slight crouch, hands spread and out in front, weight distributed, but ready to move in any direction. She glanced at Clay, who moved forward, then stood in the deceptively relaxed posture he had used just before he exploded in a drive to the basket in their game.
“You two don’t move,” Brenner said, pressing the gun harder to Tamara’s head as he turned to face Clay.
Tamara moaned and squirmed at the pressure of the gun.
Kevin gave her a shake. “Damn it, hold still!” He looked from Clay to Francie and back again. “I’m out on bail. I’m getting out of here, and I need money. You’re going to get it for me.”
“Why should we do that?” Clay asked.
“Because I’m going to hurt someone if you don’t,” Brenner said. “I was going to shoot Tamara, but I think Francie’s a better target since you’re here. Bigger, too.”
“You won’t get any money for sure if you do that,” Clay told him.
“Oh, yes, I will, and it will give me a great deal of satisfaction to put a bullet in Miss High-and-Mighty.” He shot a glance at Francie. “Oh, yeah, I know how much you don’t like me, how you don’t think I’m good enough for Tamara, how you tried to sabotage what we had going. The fact that you worked for Brazos made my idea perfect.”
He turned back to Clay. “And if you’d helped me like you were supposed to, I’d have taken over my idiot boss’s job in a flash.”
“Brenner, you’re a stupid son of a bitch,” Clay said, shaking his head, an expression of absolute disgust on his face. “You’re such a lousy hacker, Brazos caught you in the act before they ever called me in. And if you’re as bad a salesman as you are with computers, then NatChem was just looking for an excuse to fire you.”
“Bullshit,” Kevin retorted. “NatChem loves me. I’ve been their top salesman for years. The new manager they brought in—he hates me, the jealous bastard. He’s the one who gave me that bunch of losers for a sales team and no help with our competitors. I had great plans for kicking him out—plans you and this blond bitch here ruined. Now I want some money, a lot of money.”
“Just how do you expect us to get it?” Clay asked. “It’s Sunday, the banks are closed.”
“We’ll hit every ATM we can find. That’s how.”
“You’re crazy, Brenner,” Clay replied. “I’m not giving you a cent, and neither are Tamara or Francie.”
The two men glared at each other and traded more threats and refusals, but Francie paid little attention. They had to get the gun away from Kevin, but he was practically screwing it into the back of Tamara’s head. If she jumped him, it would probably go off. What could she do to distract him?
Damn the man! What a slimebucket! What an idiot! To think he could come in here and order them around, gun or no gun. The more she thought about it, the angrier she became. As she stared at Kevin, she could feel the heat of her anger rising.
Heat. Fire. That’s what she would like to do to Kevin—burn him good. What she wouldn’t give to be able to cast the flamma spell Clay had been trying to teach her. She’d charbroil the scumbag to a crisp.
Or maybe just a small piece of him. How nice, how satisfying it would be, to set Kevin’s nose on fire. To place a little spark of red-hot energy right on the end of its rounded tip.
Her SMI center began to tingle slightly, then turn warm.
How dare Kevin pull a gun and hurt Tamara! How dare he threaten Clay! There was no way on God’s green earth she was going to let the bastard get away with it. She wished she could literally send him to hell. Let the damn man rot in all the devil’s flames till he roasted.
Her center grew warmer still as Kevin’s next words brought her attention back to what he was saying.
“Cut the crap, Morgan. You’re going to do what I tell you or else . . .” He grabbed Tamara’s hair and jerked her head back. Tamara cried out. “Or else, I’m going to hurt somebody,” Kevin snarled.
She had to do something, Francie decided. Where was all this magic when she needed it? What had Clay told her? To focus on the spot where she wanted the flame? She squinted her eyes and concentrated her gaze and her mind as hard as she could on the end of Kevin’s nose. She could feel heat building inside her, right under her breastbone. The tingling transformed itself into a feeling of excitement, then exultation. The joy and the heat grew exponentially into a rapturous conflagration inside her. She was on fire!
“Flamma!” she cried and flung out her right hand, its finger pointed directly at Kevin’s nose.
A tiny white-hot flash of flame appeared exactly where she was pointing.
“Aaaahhh! Shit!” Kevin yelled. He pushed Tamara away to bat at his nose with his free hand.
Clay jumped forward, knocked the gun out of Brenner’s hand, and punched him in the mouth.
Francie couldn’t see if the blood that spurted put out her flame, but she wasn’t going to take any chances on Kevin. She cocked her arm and waded in.
Clay’s blow threw Brenner backward. He hit the door, rebounded, and ran right into Francie’s fist, which she buried in his stomach. He bent over with an “Oof.”
“You jerk!” Screaming with rage, Tamara jumped on Kevin’s back and started pummeling him about the head and shoulders.
