Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic (2 page)

“You knew this was a fault zone and you still lived here?” he asked.

Definitely curiosity there—stronger than his need for self-defense. A man like that would ask questions first and act later—intriguing but hazardous to her health. Did she sense an underlying grief, or did that just reflect her own?

Dorrie turned to observe the intruder, half expecting to see a policeman condemning the property and ordering her to leave.

Instead, she met the dark gaze of a sun-bronzed surfer. She barely reached his shoulder, but she was wearing flat garden clogs in the muddy mess that had become her father’s yard. With heels, she might look him in the…nose.

Quite a formidable nose, she observed, fighting a twitch of her lips. The bent hawk beak and his noncommittal expression prevented classical good looks, but his square cheekbones and jaw had character.

“My father believed the geologists who told him the cliff was safe.” With her ability to sense the earth’s energy, maybe she should have been a geologist, but science and math bored her. “And you are?”

Instead of answering, he was looking over her shoulder. “Is that a skull?”

Succumbing to fatalism, Dorrie watched the pepper tree give up its fight and tumble into the ocean. In a single fading ray of sunlight, glimpses of filthy white could be seen mixed with the roots. He must have amazingly good eyesight.

“You want to go out there and find out?” she asked defiantly.

“You’re not curious?” he asked.

“Not curious enough to send a policeman out on that crumbling cliff to look for old graveyards. Be my guest if you want to call the cops, but I’ll not be responsible if anything happens to one.” She could feel the earth moving as she spoke. She knew it would collapse sooner or later. The lovely tiled water fountain would go with it. If her father had only listened… But Ryan Franklin didn’t believe in woo-woo.

She didn’t know where she would go, but she couldn’t stay here any longer. Now that the tree was gone, she turned back to her car and her dog. Toto was old and slept a lot, but she didn’t like leaving him too long.

The stranger didn’t move. She donned her officious business face and glared up at him. “Did you want something?”

“Conan Oswin, of Oz Technology,” he said, not precisely answering her question.

“Oz, as in Wizard of?” The automatic quip showed how tired she was. She knew who he was. Her father had bragged about the brilliant computer genius security honcho he’d hired to protect the Foundation’s operating systems.

“Oz as in Oswin,” he said without smiling. “We installed your company’s computer security.”

Her
father’s
company. Hers, now, she supposed, with Bo gone. The horror threatened to overwhelm her. “Dorothea Franklin, but I prefer to be called Dorrie.”

“How did you know the house wasn’t safe if geologists didn’t?” he asked implacably, returning to their original conversation.

Curiosity could be a definite disadvantage, but deflecting the truth had become second nature. Dorrie avoided answering, even if she was unable to ignore the waves of testosterone pouring off him. “My father bought this property almost twenty years ago, presented it to my mother as an anniversary gift. She took one look at it, said she wasn’t building a home destined for disaster, and refused to set foot out of the car.”

His expressive eyebrows skimmed upward in surprise. “Bet your father was bummed. That’s one seriously expensive anniversary gift.” He didn’t bother pulling up his hood against the rain as he watched the rock escarpment in the neighbor’s yard inexorably slide downward. The wind lifted his thick, overlong sun-bleached locks. “How did you end up with the bad gift?”

She heard the amusement behind his gravity. There was that zigzag energy again. Despite his unsmiling expression, he was teasing her, which stirred her own long-denied hormones. This man had the solid muscle and stance of a lanky athlete, not the physique of a computer nerd.

“My father kept the house and custody of my older brother,” she told him, rather than ask if the firewalls in the Office From Hell required her attention and if that was why he was here. “My mother kept me and filed for divorce. My mother was high maintenance with a tendency toward drama, but that was partially in self-defense. If you’ve worked with him, you know my father is a bull-headed SOB. But after she was murdered, I ended up with him anyway.”

The earth groaned and shuddered, and Oswin caught her elbow, tugging her from the front walk of her crumbling home, back toward the road. Dorrie followed reluctantly. Her deteriorating real estate wasn’t the reason he was here, she was sure.

“So you get your sense of drama from your mother?” he asked with a hint of irony. “Wouldn’t it be preferable to have conversations about murder in a less spectacular place than one uprooting bones?”

He was patronizing her. She’d zap him, but she could see his point. She must look like a drowned rat too stupid to come out of the rain, but he’d probably never watched his life wash away in a sea of mud.

“I didn’t ask you out here.” Although, she
had
been on the verge of calling the company he represented to uncover the problem at the office. “I don’t even know that you are who you say you are. You could be a thief waiting to steal from empty houses for all I know.”

She knew from his
chi
that he wasn’t lying and that he was someone far more powerful than a thief, but a normal person would be suspicious. She was used to pretending to be normal. She shoved thick hanks of wind-blown curls out of her face.

He flipped open an expensively thin leather folder and produced his ID. On his government security photo, he looked like a nerd with dark-framed glasses and a serious expression. The sexiness was all in her reaction to his
chi
apparently.

“I’m here because I believe we have something in common. Your brother crashed on the same mission that took out mine.”

“Bo?”
Damn.
She gazed at him with wariness and a slightly faster pulse. Could he suspect what she knew about Bo’s energy? Could she trust him?

Oswin’s expression revealed nothing, but his restless energy said her response was important. Now she was suspicious for real. “You’re wondering why they never found their bodies, too?” she demanded.

“I have reason to question the incident,” he admitted.

Considering the explosive conversation she’d like to have about their brothers, Dorrie preferred a less public venue. She suggested that they meet in her father’s office, where she could also show him her office problem and pretend normalcy.

Did he have real actual evidence for his suspicion, something more solid than the
feelings
she wasn’t allowed to express?

Self-preservation warred with hope as she escaped to the relative safety of her Prius and hit the freeway. From his nest of all her worldly goods, Toto Three stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had. Maybe grief had finally wiped out her common sense. Was she seriously considering telling Conan Oswin her fears? She’d have to explain about
feelings
, and that was when the excrement always hit the oscillator.

She had only his
chi
to rely on, and she was notoriously bad at translating character from energy. Maybe if her mother had lived… But she hadn’t. Dorrie didn’t want to explain skulls and prior lives if Conan knew nothing about her past. She just wanted Bo back.

But her father had trusted Conan enough to allow him to install a complete security system protecting his favorite project. Her father was good at choosing ethical business people.

Her father would fire her if Conan reported that she was deranged. She’d spent the better part of her life walking this tight rope of using her gift while hiding who and what she was. She had to rely on her experience now. Bo’s life could depend on her. She prayed that she could imitate sanity while speaking of what most practical men didn’t want to believe.

She arrived at the office first and climbed out of the Prius into the familiar underground garage. She ruthlessly scraped her unruly hair into combs and pins and a damp chignon to become Business Dorrie. She dumped her billowing rain cloak into the driver’s seat, and checked to be certain her suit looked impeccable. She slipped out of the ratty clogs and donned a pair of heeled sandals she’d removed earlier.

Unfortunately, there was no way she could transform Toto Three into a briefcase to complete the authoritative image. The cairn terrier was too old to be abandoned in a car for long. Her father’s office would have to see this tiny piece of her—and her mother. She scooped the dog into her arms.

Watching Judy Garland’s Wizard of Oz movie every year with her mother was one of her fondest memories. Mama had bought the first Toto from a breeder who claimed the dog’s ancestor was the one in the movie.

Ever since, there’d been at least one cairn terrier in the house, and they’d all been named Toto. After her mother’s death, her dogs had been the one love that she could count on through the misery of trying to fit her oddities into high school and college life—and to live up to her father’s expectations.

She’d tried to love her big, boisterous father, but Ryan Franklin wasn’t a family man. When she’d guiltily offered to nurse him after his stroke, he’d pushed her away, counting on his son and heir to take over. With Bo gone…there was no one but his inadequate daughter.

The Franklin Foundation was a monument to her father’s success in real estate. He’d started by buying slum property in the sixties and selling it for billions in the booming nineties. After providing a comfortable retirement for himself—and nothing for his children—he’d plowed the bulk of his estate into the foundation to help the poor living in the slums from which he’d risen.

But money couldn’t bribe Mother Nature. The stroke that had felled him had left him wheelchair bound and Dorrie at his mercy. They’d been arguing over a problem at FF when he’d keeled over.

The instant Oswin’s sleek black car roared in, the energy in the garage shifted. As Conan swung open the car’s gull-wing door, masculine
chi
rolled around like high tide at a full moon. It was so strong, she couldn’t tell if it was positive or negative. She just felt it the way she felt the warmth of the dry garage, or the ocean breeze on a sunny day. Even her depression lifted beneath his move-it-forward energy.

His tall, broad-shouldered form unfolded from the dark piece of expensive German engineering. She tried to identify the car, but all her attention was diverted to the man. He stripped off his hoodie, revealing khakis, a black T-shirt bearing a surfboard logo—and high-maintenance biceps. She almost stopped breathing in awe.

As Conan approached with a long-legged stride, Toto yipped in greeting.

“Batwings?” she asked dryly, recovering her senses and nodding at the futuristic car.

“Batcar,” he agreed without missing a beat.

He took her elbow in a firm grip that shivered her right down to her toes. Security emanated from their contact, along with rock solid certainty. He was both tide and boulder. Amazing. Scary.
Very
sexy.

He gave Toto a grave look but didn’t attempt to make friends.

Business first, she mentally commanded. Missing family, empty stomach, and no home had no relevance to the matter at hand. “You’re familiar with our office?” she asked, walking toward the elevator.

“I met your father here, talked to a few employees, but I do most of my work off-site. I know what floor it’s on, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, steering her toward the one elevator that reached the upper story.

His touch seeped right into her bones. His energy intertwined dizzily with hers. She could barely see his face in the dim garage lights, and still she was physically attracted to him. That didn’t happen often. Men gave off aggressive energies she had difficulty relating to, so she usually kept her distance until she was certain they couldn’t hurt her. It made for less than intimate relations and certainly didn’t allow for instant attraction.

Not that it mattered. He wasn’t looking at her so much as steering her. She had looked like a bag lady earlier, with mud staining her shoes and wearing rain gear. He’d seen her with her hair loose, so she wasn’t fooling him with the neat chignon. In the damp air, with coiled ringlets springing everywhere she must have looked like the wicked witch her employees called her. He probably thought she was crazy enough to need steering.

Even with Toto under her arm, she did not resemble innocent Dorothy. She wasn’t at all certain why her mother thought inky Asian hair with her father’s Irish curl in any way resembled Judy Garland.

“It’s almost five. People will be packing up for the day. We should be able to talk here.” Not that she had anywhere else to take him.

He took the key card from her hand and slid it into the elevator slot, then examined the card before handing it back to her. “Old tech on that card. You might request the building owner update it.”

“My father owns the building, and he’s had a stroke. Building security is not high on his priority list.”

He nodded acceptance but didn’t respond with fake sympathy.
Life happened
seemed to be his attitude. It was rather refreshing, actually.

Now that she had some semblance of light, she could see that Oswin’s blond-streaked hair curled slightly and fell in his face. The shaggy cut did not lend an air of competence. Neither did his casual attire.

But he’d come to her.
That was so freaking unusual that she didn’t know whether to run and hide or savor the moment. Did he really believe their brothers were alive?

The elevator doors opened on the top floor where the foundation’s offices were housed. Employees glanced up and away as she led Conan down the hall to her desk.

“The Wicked Witch of the West has returned.” The whispered warning reached Dorrie’s ears as she led Oswin past rain-splattered office windows and gloomy cubicles, pretending she didn’t hear. See no evil, hear no evil, that was her motto.

The
chi
energy shivered along her skin. Bad vibrations everywhere.