A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (12 page)

He uncrossed his arms. “I guess not.” He shrugged. “But, um .
. . my uncle’s kind of . . . well, he’s had a lot of girlfriends.”

Ah. Dillon wasn’t warning her off, he was worrying about her.
That was unexpectedly sweet. He was a bit of a worrier, though. He warned her
about how fast she drove, the preservatives in her food, emissions from her
cell phone. Akira had never asked him about his death, because it wasn’t always
a safe topic with ghosts, but she did wonder how such a cautious kid had wound
up overdosing. Maybe he’d been more of a risk-taker before he died.

“Thank you,” she answered, before smiling at him. “Don’t
worry, I’m not a happy-ever-after type. I won’t start any great romantic
fantasies about him.”

Her phone shivered in her hand. She looked down.
Wish I
could.
Trapped in meetings
.

Darn. The pang of disappointment she felt was too strong.
Casual flirtation, she reminded herself. That’s all she was doing. Nothing to
feel disappointed about.

Need to see you, though. My office, 4PM.

Hmm, that sounded almost formal. Need, not want? Akira
wondered. Suddenly that little glimmer of anticipation was gone, replaced by a
twinge of anxiety.
OK
, she typed. Should she ask what about?

See you then.
His reply came too fast, and sounded too final. With a frown,
Akira slid her phone back into her bag. She and Dillon would just have to lunch
alone.

And while she ate, Dillon could fill her in on Zane’s past
girlfriends.

***

“Nothing.”

It was 4:02 PM, and Akira was standing in the
doorway of Zane’s office, unsure whether to interrupt. Grace was perched on the
edge of his desk, her back to the door, blocking Zane from view.

“Try again,” Grace ordered.

“Grace, nothing means nothing.” Zane sounded both
resigned and impatient.

Grace sighed and stood, tucking a piece of paper,
maybe a photograph, Akira thought, into a file folder. “Do you want her to come
here or do you want to go there?”

“Neither.”

“Lucas took the job, Zane. It’s done. You just
have to do it.”

“Or not,” Zane grumbled, before adding, “Talk to
them, tell them how unlikely it is that I can help. If they still want me, I’ll
fly up there tomorrow. And tell Lucas that his next job is going to be in
Antarctica.”

Grace reached over and rumpled his hair, saying
with a smile, “Lucas would love to go to Antarctica, sweetie. You’re going to
do have to do better than that.”

Zane pulled away from her. “I hate jobs like
this, Grace. Tell Lucas—oh, hey, Akira.” His motion had been enough to bring
him into her line of view. Akira gave him a tentative smile.

Grace glanced over her shoulder, spotting Akira,
and immediately turned and crossed toward the doorway. “I’ll let you know, but
you know they’re going to want to see you. Hi, Akira.”

Akira dipped her chin, acknowledging Grace’s
greeting, but feeling awkward about having interrupted them. “If you’re busy, I
can come back later,” she offered.

She had been surprised to discover that Grace was
Zane’s sister: the blonde woman looked nothing like her siblings. She’d been
even more surprised to learn that the woman she’d assumed was a receptionist on
her first day was actually the CEO of the business, managing day-to-day
operations since Max retired. Max was still involved as Chairman of the Board,
but Zane and Smithson—the heads of special affairs and research,
respectively—reported to Grace. Dillon claimed that she sat at the front desk
sometimes because it was how she started and she still liked it.

“We’re not,” Zane sounded grim, but Grace also
shook her head.

Reaching the doorway, she said quietly, so that
only Akira could hear, “Cheer him up if you can. Tomorrow’s going to be a rough
day.”

Akira glanced at her quickly. What did that mean?
What did Grace expect? But the blonde woman just squeezed her arm in passing
and continued out of the room. Akira stepped into Zane’s office. He was rubbing
his forehead, looking tired.

“Um, do you still want to see me?” she asked.
Should she be here? Grace’s orders to cheer him up notwithstanding, he didn’t
look as if he wanted company.

He looked up at her and smiled, but it was
strained. “Did I—oh!” It was as if a realization had struck, and his smile
turned into a full-fledged grin. “Yes, I do want to see you.” He waved at the
space behind her. “Check it out.”

Akira looked. The first time she’d visited the
playroom Zane called an office, Akira had laughed aloud.
It made so much more sense than the
barren cell he’d used for her interview.

On the fourth floor, it was a large L-shaped room that might
have been intended to be a conference room, or—if the complex had been built as
a private school, as she suspected—a combination science lab/classroom. Zane,
however, had turned one leg of the L into an arcade, with six old video games,
a foosball table, and an air hockey table. The second leg of the L was a living
room, with a comfortable couch, a couple of easy chairs, a huge flat-screen
television on the wall, and more video game consoles than she knew the names
of. Only the corner of the L looked like an office, with a desk, chairs, office
equipment, even file cabinets.

Now, though, in the space that she thought of as
the arcade, the foosball table and the air hockey table were gone, replaced by
a pool table. And not a trivial pool table—a real one, with ornate carved legs,
a mahogany finish, rich green felt—the type of pool table that cost thousands
of dollars. Her eyes widened.

“A pool table?” she asked. “That’s why you wanted
to meet with me?”

“Yep.” A slightly sheepish expression crossed his
face. “I guess I could have waited for next week at our usual time.”

Zane met with all the employees of the special
affairs division one-on-one, once a week, to assign new jobs, get updated on
the progress of their current jobs, talk about any problems, and so on.
Officially, that was. Based on her meetings with him,
Akira thought that meant he probably
spent a lot of time playing foosball or Halo.

“But what happened to foosball? I thought you
loved foosball.”

“I decided it was time for a change,” he
answered, standing and moving out from behind his desk. He paused next to her,
their shoulders almost brushing, and she looked up at him. He was admiring the
table, his smile still playing around his mouth, but he looked down at her as
if he felt her gaze, and his lips quirked. “And you did say you’d play pool.”

“I did?” she questioned. “When did I say that?”

Every time they met, he tried to convince her to
play some game: foosball first, but then usually a video game. And every time,
she declined.
She’d been
trying to keep their meetings professional. Lately, though,
as their relationship slipped over the line into personal anyway, it had been
getting harder to resist. At their last meeting, she’d been laughing when she
said no to bowling on the Kinect.

“It was when you got all huffy about Ms. Pac-Man.”

Akira thought back. That had been weeks ago. “Huffy?
Just because I told you it was sexist to think I’d like Ms. Pac-Man better than
Halo?” The words might have sounded challenging, but he’d be able to hear the smile
in her voice.

“Grace does, Nat does. I wasn’t being sexist,
just generalizing from experience,” he defended himself mildly, crossing to the
rack of pool cues. “And if you remember, you said . . .”

“I said that girls might like Ms. Pac-Man, but
that physicists like pool,” Akira interrupted him, joining him by the rack and
eying the cues, before picking up one that looked about right. She hefted it
carefully, checking its weight and grip before putting it back on the rack and
picking up another one. “I remember.”

“Does this mean you’re going to play pool with
me?”

“Oh, yeah,” Akira answered, lashes down, covering
her eyes. “Eight-ball work for you? Call shot, open break?”

Yes, she was definitely going to play pool with
him. And not just pool. The sizzle running through her veins told her that her
impulsive streak—the one that brought her to Tassamara in the first place—had just
made a decision.

The only question left was how direct she was
going to be about acting on that decision. And she thought maybe the answer was
very direct. Cheer him up? Yeah, she could do that.

Zane didn’t know it yet but their casual
flirtation had just been upgraded.

***

Zane had been happier about finally finding a
game that Akira would play before she killed him six games in a row.

“Best, um, seven out of thirteen?” he offered,
leaning against the pool table with a sigh. She laughed. She’d taken off her
light sweater a while back, revealing a black tank top, and he wished he could
blame all of his losses on the distraction her dark curls brushing against her
almost bare shoulders had caused him, but when it came to pool, she was out of
his league. She’d even let him break that time, but it made no difference. “Or
maybe some Halo?”

“You ready to start shooting me?” she asked, a
half smile curving her lips as she finished racking the balls.

“Only virtually,” he drawled. Actually, shooting
her wouldn’t be his first choice. Watching the way she moved around the table
for the past hour, the concentration on her face, the graceful way she held the
cue—and oh, hell, yeah, the curve of her ass as she bent to make a shot, the
shadow down the neckline of her shirt—he really wanted to touch her. To taste
her. To lift her up onto the edge of the table and take her lips and feel her
legs wrap around him and pull him close.

But he knew he couldn’t rush her. She was wary
and cautious and even though he’d kept Max away from her, refusing to allow him
to try to pressure her into communicating with his dead, Zane still wasn’t sure
she wouldn’t just run away one day.

“Physicists ought to be good at Halo, too,” he
pointed out. “Pool isn’t the only game where angles matter.”

“Oh, pool definitely isn’t the only game
physicists are good at,” Akira replied, placing her cue back in the rack.

“Oh, yeah? What other games do physicists like?”
He was watching her, more attention on her legs than on her words, trying to
imagine what they looked like under her pants, what they’d feel like if he
could touch them.

“Sex.”

He blinked, eyes shooting up to her face. Had she
just said that?

“Chemists think it’s all about chemistry,” she
said, crossing to him, taking the pool cue out of his hand, taking it back to
the rack and putting it away, then returning, even as she continued talking.
Her words were casual, conversational, but there was a hint of breathlessness
in her voice that told him they were more than theoretical.

“Hormones and pheromones. Some peptides, a little
oxytocin, vasopressin, and that’s the whole story. But what do they know?
Really, sex is all about physics.”

She was standing in front of him, looking up at
him, and whatever she saw on his face, it was right, because she took his hand and
with a little smile, started tugging him with her to the other side of the
room.

He followed, saying huskily, “I don’t know. The
chemistry seems to be working fine for me.” His jeans were abruptly feeling
constricting, as she pushed him down onto the brown leather couch.

“That’s because we haven’t started playing with
physics yet.” She retreated to the office door, and locked it, then turned back
to face him. “You have no professional objections to playing my game in your
office, do you?”

The mischief in her smile told him that she knew
exactly how unlikely that was. “Not in the least,” he assured her.

“Oh, but—” she paused and bit her lip.

No, no, no, he thought fervently. Don’t change
your mind.
The attraction he’d felt the day they’d met had deepened over
the past weeks: something about her mix of fragility and determination, her
stubborn fearfulness, caught him like no one else ever had. He wanted to tease
her, to protect her, and to make love to her, sometimes all at the same time.

“I didn’t really come prepared for, um, this type
of game,” she continued. “Are you—do you—would you happen to have . . . ?” She
tucked her hair behind her ear and tilted her head to the side, looking at him
as if hoping he’d read her mind, her cheeks turning slightly pink. “My game
requires approved protective gear.”

Oh, hell. He tried to remember if he’d ever had a
reason to bring condoms to work and then realized that the travel kit he kept
in his desk for quick trips might be stocked. Standing, he crossed to his desk,
opened the bottom drawer, found his bag, and rummaged through it, all the while
acutely aware of her eyes on him, and of his heart racing. Ah, there.

Holding up the foil wrapper, he said, “Is this
what you’re looking for?”