Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic (6 page)

Besides, he was intrigued by her weird instinct about energy patterns that revealed someone hated her. She’d been awfully close to right, judging by the slashed tires. Could she also be right about Magnus? Could his brother still be alive? He couldn’t ignore the possibility that she might be right.

Dorrie didn’t heed his shout. She stalked down the path she’d made to the door.

Conan suffered this weird notion that if he let her walk out, she’d be right about the house ruining his relationships. Or whatever. He took the shortcut over half a dozen book boxes and stepped in front of the door before she could reach it. He might be bigger than she was, but with a kick like hers, he was seriously jeopardizing his balls by standing in her way.

She was inexplicably worth the risk. “I apologize for whatever I said wrong. The builder went bankrupt and never repaired his shoddy work, so yes, this place is a mess. But I’m the only one who sees it, and maybe Oz and his wife occasionally. And sometimes…”

Conan saw the steely look in her eye and refrained from mentioning women or his slacker friends. “I’m not trying to kill you. If you want to stay with my neighbors, fine, but let me go over with you. I have no way of guaranteeing that we weren’t followed.”

The pink in her cheeks disappeared again. “You really don’t think anyone would bother following us, do you?”

“It wouldn’t make sense, but I can’t be sure. Believe it or not, there is a security system on this house. The front door is a long story. I’ll call someone to board it up—”

She shook her head until her curls bounced. “This is where your
chi
enters. You must welcome it, not block it out. Do you have a screwdriver?”

Relieved that she’d returned to some semblance of reason, Conan located his toolbox beneath the plastic tarp and wetsuits he’d dumped in a corner. After living in the tiny cottage he’d owned before this, he loved having room to spread out. She didn’t have to look at him as if he’d just handed her an ax.

“The door needs rehanging,” she informed him, competently screwing the knob into place. “The latch won’t work.”

“No kidding, Sherlock.” He reached behind the metal shelf of sports equipment and punched his security panel with his code, turning it back on. “Try leaving now and the cops will be here in ten seconds. Does that make you feel safe enough?”

“Safety wasn’t my concern until you mentioned that we might have been followed,” she said dryly, tackling the rest of the room with her glare. “Is there even a bed down here and can you find it?”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor,” he admonished. “I have a water bed in the back room, an air mattress…” He looked around but wasn’t certain where he’d left that one.

“The water bed will do,” she said with a sigh. “Beggars can’t be choosers. Unbelievable. My father worked his way out of a slum just so his daughter could move into one.”

He stared at her in incredulity, and she grudgingly shrugged.

“Okay, so I’m sarcastic and I exaggerate occasionally. I’m depressed. I’m entitled,” she said.

It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde. She morphed from witchy CEO to petite fairy with a shrug of shoulders he wanted to hug. And he wasn’t a hugger. He liked that she was honest enough to admit her faults, but he was still wary.

“Do you have linens by any foggy chance?” she continued. “I’ll return the favor by rearranging your room according to feng shui principles that should improve your positive energy.”

Bitchy
petite fairy, he corrected. “I believe in feng shui about as much as I believe in astrology and space aliens. Return the favor by leaving my stuff alone, please.”

Shooting him a scowl, then abruptly lighting up like a chandelier, she dashed to the garage. Frowning, Conan watched. She rummaged through the boxes she’d stored in his trunk and produced a wind chime.
A wind chime
.

“What the hell are you doing with that?” he demanded. “I hate tinkling fairy bells.”

She marched back down the path she’d cleared as if he hadn’t spoken. Looking around, she settled on his fishing rod. She tied the chime to it and propped the rod through the metal shelves at the front door. She waited a moment, letting the tinkling tubes settle, then nodded in approval and turned to him in expectation. “A bed?” she reminded him.

Crazed. Utterly insane. But then, so was Pippa, and his brother seemed to tolerate his wife’s madness. All Conan had to do was give this woman a bed and keep her from playing in the street until tomorrow. Piece of cake—as long as he stayed five feet away so he didn’t notice her exotic scent and kept from watching the swing of her hips in that tight skirt when she stalked through his basement.

He took her to the back room, the one that was a true cellar since it backed up against the hill rising behind it. He had friends who liked living like vampires, and this was their favorite cave. Well, that’s what they’d said. They hadn’t been around lately, but he’d been busy.

Dorrie refrained from commenting about his decor beyond a long-suffering sigh. At least she didn’t freak when he flipped on the switch to reveal a real bed and mattress. He opened the closet and showed her a stack of sheets. He didn’t mention that an ex-girlfriend used to do his laundry, hence the stacked sheets instead of snarled linen mountains.

“Shower is to the left,” he gestured at another door. “The cleaning service leaves my stuff alone but keeps the bathrooms clean.”

“If I don’t fire you, I’ll have to revise your contract to cover service beyond the call of duty. You really think someone could have followed us?” she asked anxiously, examining the limestone and granite bathroom with approval.

No, he didn’t, but he didn’t want to send a helpless nutcase out on the streets either. “Let’s take no chances until we have some leads on your tire-slashing scuzzbucket. I’d rather spend my evening digging into your computers than digging you out of a ditch.”

Conan knew his sister-in-law’s mother had ended up in a ditch, crippled for life, because scuzzbuckets thought she had some kind of weird ESP. Out of caution, he needed to check his genealogy charts to see if Dorothea Franklin was somehow related to Pippa’s weird family.

“Thanks, I think,” she offered.

She looked so defeated, Conan suffered another of those unlikely urges to reach out and hug the witch. In a family of men, punches were more likely to be thrown than hugs.

“Do you need anything else? Shampoo, toothpaste, whatnot?” he asked, eager to escape back to the cold components of computers before she unhinged the well-oiled machinery of his mind.

Almond-shaped eyes regarded him with curiosity. Maybe she could read minds. Whatever, she seemed satisfied with what she saw.

“No, a place to lay my head is all I need, thank you. This was very generous of you. I apologize for my hysteria.”

Oddly, Conan missed the fit-throwing drama queen. The enigmatic expression she hid behind might look natural, except he knew it was a mask, and he missed the spark of passion that lit her face when she was being real.

He left her making the bed and took himself upstairs so he could rummage through her office computers over the phone lines.

Settling into his desk chair, he swore when his cell rang and a text from the Librarian scrolled across his screen.

Chinese cellar danger.

Conan flung his phone where his futon should be. This time, he emailed Oz to warn him the Librarian was back and to keep his head down. He didn’t need a mysterious harpy messing with his well-ordered life.

His semi-well-ordered life. Even as he sent the message, he felt the walls of his personal fortress crumbling like the cliff in his guest’s garden.

He wanted Magnus to be alive bad enough that he would put up with the Librarian and crazed Chinese witches until he learned the truth.

After a miserable night’s sleep, Dorrie dragged out of bed Saturday morning when Toto began prancing anxiously, his nails clicking on the tile floor. The room needed a carpet. She’d tossed and turned half the night until she’d finally given up and rearranged the bed. The damned man had set every piece of furniture on the wrong wall.

Being a human divining rod for energy was not all fun and games. Come to think of it, she only enjoyed her gift when she was decorating. Even then, creating harmony in a place like her father’s office was a lost cause. Too many conflicting energies gave her a headache, and if someone had just had a fight with their significant other, their negativity flooded the cubicle farm.

If she had a thief who hated her on the staff, she could no more track him down by energy than she could by numbers. She wasn’t psychic.

She knew Conan Oswin thought she was crazy. She’d learned to expect that. There were times when she doubted herself. After all, he had apparently been living happily in this house that she swore should have killed him. Yet she was the one facing the loss of her home.

He could have at least painted the walls, she thought glumly, splashing water on her face to wake up. Everything was as beige as his limestone tile.
Chi
energy needed fire and light.

Sometimes, only the memory of her mother’s confidence that she was talented sustained Dorrie’s belief in herself. Bo’s talent had been so much easier to accept—he could tell his location within a degree of latitude and longitude, even blindfolded. A GPS could prove him right.

She missed her older brother, even if he’d seldom been around. He’d stayed with their father after the divorce, and had been in the military by the time their mother died. But Bo hadn’t scoffed at her redecorating as her father had.

She pulled a jacket on over the sweats she’d slept in, disabled the door alarm using the code she’d seen Conan use, and took Toto for a brisk walk in the cool morning air. She inhaled the crisp ocean breeze and replenished her deprived energy. Worrying about herself was nonproductive.

She had to think about Bo. Except she couldn’t think. Why would the government say the helicopter crashed if it hadn’t? If Conan couldn’t help her, where else could she turn?

And if what she suspected about the theft of FF’s money was true, she had still another problem she didn’t know how to solve. What if her father’s foundation was dragged into the media because she’d hired the wrong people or looked the wrong way?

She wondered if her life could get any worse. Then she returned to a house that spilled bad vibrations and almost guaranteed failure. Conan was a walking Five Yellow Disaster Star.

She soaked her head in a steamy shower rather than think about it and used the dryer to pull her frizzy hair straight, pinning it firmly into place.

It was the weekend, but she had nowhere to go except the office. She needed to study the financial statements. She didn’t know how much she should tell her father. It would only spike his blood pressure, but at some point, if money really was being misappropriated and not misplaced, she’d have to report it to the police.

First, she needed to call AAA about her tires and be at the office when the repair truck arrived. She hoped by then that Conan would be up and have a plan prepared for hacking government websites to find out what they weren’t telling her about Bo’s accident.

Donning an Ann Taylor power red suit and setting out the food she’d brought for Toto, Dorrie let curiosity and hunger spur her up the stairs to the second level. At the top, she gazed in dismay at her host’s spectacular—slovenly—living quarters.

How could he
live
like this? The view of the ocean out the two-story windows was superb, magnificent, even. He needed a cozy table and welcoming chairs where he could enjoy his morning coffee and enjoy the view. Instead, he had practically obliterated the space with a makeshift computer desk spilling paper and components, a futon buried in magazines, and equipment and files scattered everywhere.

She wanted to close her eyes and feel her way to the kitchen rather than see any more, but she’d be a wall of bruises if she tried. Unable to resist deflecting some of the bad energy, she moved a flamboyantly red oil painting to the room’s prosperity corner and some red candles into the reputation sector, and she felt better immediately.

Conan would be able to find Bo much easier with positive
chi
working for him. And because she couldn’t tolerate such a blatant bad arrow, she scooted his work chair to the far side of his table desk so he would face the entrance, moved his wireless keyboard, and swiveled his monitor to the new position. All his paperwork would be upside down, but he’d figure it out.

Except for the grubby coffeemaker, the granite-and-stainless-steel kitchen looked as if it had seldom been touched. Scrubbing out the machine and relocating it to a corner better situated for metal and boiling water, she set a pot cooking and rummaged for milk and cereal. She could cook, but it didn’t interest her, and she wasn’t about to send nest-making vibes.

She rolled her eyes at discovering a television in the refrigerator door, but she turned the local news on mute. Leaning against the counter, eating her cereal, she watched the film of her father’s street being shut down until officials could check the damage from the mud slide. She didn’t need the text scrolling across the screen to tell her she wouldn’t be returning home soon.

Conan stumbled out when she’d reached her second cup of coffee. He was wearing drawstring jams and an unbuttoned blue work shirt, an interesting contrast of play and work clothes. After an uncharacteristic episode of staring, Dorrie dragged her gaze from his tanned, washboard abs and pretended to watch television. Computer geeks shouldn’t look like sun-burnished beach bums, but she’d seen his sports equipment. He was an athletic geek. Who owned his own company. She couldn’t imagine how.

She tried not to wonder what it would feel like if he held her against that admirable chest. Most of her boyfriends had spent way too much time at desks.

“I called one of the neighbors and they can drop me off near the office,” she said, trying to sound casual, as if she were used to bumming rides and beds. “It’s convenient that you live in my old neighborhood.”