by Nora Roberts
Morgana opened the shop promptly at ten. Luna, her big white cat, slinked in between her feet, then settled down in the center of the room to groom her tail. Knowing the summer trade, Morgana went directly behind the counter to check the cash register. Her belly bumped gently against the glass, and she chuckled.
She was getting as big as a house. And she loved it. Loved the full, weighted sensation of carrying life. The life she and Nash had created between them.
She remembered how just that morning her husband had pressed kisses to that growing mound, then jerked back, eyes wide, as whoever was sleeping inside kicked.
“Jeez, Morgana, a foot.” He’d cupped a hand over the lump, grinning. “I can practically count the toes.”
As long as there’s five to each foot, she thought now, and she was smiling when her door jingled open.
“Sebastian.” Fresh pleasure filled her face as she held out both arms to him. “You’re back.”
“A couple of days ago.” He took her hands, kissed them soundly, then drew back, wiggling his brows as he studied her. “My, my, aren’t we huge!”
“Aren’t we just?” She patted her belly as she skirted around the counter toward him.
Pregnancy hadn’t dimmed her sexuality. If anything, it had enhanced it. She—as they say about brides and expectant mothers—glowed. Her fall of black, curling hair rained down the back of an unapologetically red dress that showed off excellent legs.
“I don’t have to ask if you’re well,” he commented. “I can see that for myself.”
“Then I’ll ask you. I’ve already heard you helped clean up Chicago.” She said it with a smile, but there was quiet concern in her eyes. “Was it difficult?”
“Yes. But it’s done.” Before he could say more, before he was certain he wanted to, a trio of customers strolled in to explore the crystals and herbs and statuary. “You’re not working here alone?”
“No, Mindy will be here any minute.”
“Mindy is here,” her assistant announced, bounding into the shop wearing a white catsuit and a flirtatious smile for Sebastian. “Hello, handsome.”
“Hi, gorgeous.”
Instead of heading out of the shop, or ducking into the back room as was his habit when customers filed in, Sebastian prowled around, fiddling restlessly with crystals, sniffing at candles. Morgana took advantage of the first lull to join him again.
“Looking for some magic?”
He frowned, a smooth, obsidian ball in his hand. “I don’t need visual aids.”
Morgana tucked her tongue in her cheek. “Having trouble with another spell, darling?”
Though he was very taken with it, Sebastian set the ball down. He’d be damned if he’d give her the satisfaction. “I leave the casting to you.”
“Oh, if only you would.” She picked up the ball and handed it to him. Morgana knew her cousin too well. “Here, a gift. There’s nothing like obsidian for blocking out those bad vibrations.”
He let the globe run from palm to fingertips and back. “I suppose, being a shop owner, you’d be up on who’s who in town at the moment.”
“More or less. Why?”
“What do you know about Sutherland Investigations?”
“Sutherland?” Her brow creased in thought. “It’s familiar. What is it, a detective agency?”
“Apparently.”
“I think I … Mindy, didn’t your boyfriend have some business with Sutherland Investigations?”
Mindy barely glanced up from ringing a sale. “Which boyfriend?”
“The intellectual-looking one, with the hair. Insurance.”
“Oh, you mean Gary.” Mindy beamed at her customer. “I hope you enjoy it. Please come back. Gary’s an ex-boyfriend,” she added. “Much too possessive. Sutherland does a lot of stuff for the insurance company he works for. Gary says she’s as good as they get.”
“She?” Morgana glanced back at Sebastian with a cool smile. “Ah.”
“There’s no ‘ah.’” He tweaked her nose. “I’ve agreed to help someone, and Sutherland is involved.”
“Hmm. Is she pretty?”
“No,” he said with perfect sincerity.
“Ugly, then.”
“No. She’s … unusual.”
“The very best kind. What are you helping her with?”
“A kidnapping.” The teasing light went out of his eyes. “A baby.”
“Oh.” Automatically she covered her own with her hands. “I’m sorry. The baby … Is the baby … Do you know?”
“He’s alive. And well.”
“Thank God.” Even as she closed her eyes in relief, she remembered. “The baby? Is it the one who was taken from his playpen, from his own backyard, just a couple of months ago?”
“That’s right.”
She took his hands. “You’ll find him, Sebastian. You’ll find him soon.”
He nodded. “I’m counting on it.”
* * *
It just so happened that Mel was at that very moment in the process of typing up a bill for Underwriter’s Insurance. They had her on a monthly retainer—which kept the wolf from the door—but in the previous few months she had had some additional billable expenses. She also had a fading bruise on her left shoulder where a man supposedly suffering from whiplash and slipped discs had popped her a good one when he’d discovered her taking pictures of him changing a flat tire.
A tire she had herself discreetly deflated.
Bruises aside, it had been a good week’s work.
If only everything were so simple.
David. She simply couldn’t get David out of her head. She knew better—had been trained better. Personal involvements meant you messed up. Thus far, she’d only proven that rule.
She’d canvassed Rose’s neighborhood, questioning people who had already been interviewed by the police. And, like the police, she’d come up with three different descriptions of a car that had been parked half a block from Rose’s apartment. She also had four markedly different descriptions of a “suspicious character.”
The term made her smile a little. It was so detective-novel. She’d certainly learned that life was much blander than fiction. In reality, investigative work consisted of mountains of paperwork, hours of sitting in a parked car fighting boredom while you waited for something to happen, making phone call after phone call, talking to people who didn’t want to talk. Or—often worse—people who talked too much and had nothing to say.
And, occasionally, there was the extra added excitement of being pushed around by a two-hundred-pound gorilla in a neck brace.
Mel wouldn’t have traded it for a mountain of gold dust.
But what good was it, she wondered, what good was making a living doing what you loved, and having the talent to do a good job of it, if you couldn’t help a friend? There hadn’t been so many friends in her life that she could take Rose and Stan for granted. They had given her something just by being there, by sharing David with her. The connection to family that she’d always done without.
She would have walked through fire to bring David back to them.
After tossing the billing aside, she picked up a file that hadn’t been off her desk in two months. It was neatly labeled David Merrick, and its contents were miserably thin.
All his vital statistics were there—his height and weight and coloring. She had his footprints and his fingerprints. She knew his blood type and was aware of the tiny dimple on the left side of his mouth.
But the reports didn’t say that the dimple deepened so sweetly when he laughed. It couldn’t describe the engaging sound of that laughter, or how it felt when he pressed that soft, damp mouth to yours in a kiss. It didn’t say how his pretty brown eyes sparkled when you lifted him high over your head to play airplane.
She knew how empty she felt, how sad and frightened. Just as she knew that if she multiplied those emotions by a thousand it wouldn’t come close to what Rose was living with every hour of every day.
Mel opene
d the folder and drew out the formal studio shot of David at six months. It had been taken only a week before the kidnapping. He was grinning at the camera, his pudgy chin creased in a smile as he clutched the yellow bear she had bought for him on the day he’d come home from the hospital. His hair had begun to thicken, and it was the shade of ripening strawberries.
“We’re going to find you, baby. We’re going to find you and bring you home real soon. I swear it.”
She put the picture away again, quickly. She had to, if she was to have any hope of proceeding in a calm and professional manner. Mooning over his picture wouldn’t help David any more than hiring a psychic with a pirate’s mouth and spooky eyes would.
Oh, the man irritated her. Irritated her from the top of her head down to the soles of her feet and every possible inch between. That look on his face, that not-quite-a-smirk, not-quite-a-grin set to his mouth made her want to plant her fist there.
And his voice, smooth, with just a whisper of an Irish brogue, set her teeth on edge. There was such cool superiority in it. Except when he’d spoken to Rose, she remembered. Then it had been gentle and kind and unflaggingly patient.
Just setting her up, Mel told herself, and stepped over a pile of phone books to get to the doorway, where a refrigerator held a monstrous supply of soft drinks—all loaded with caffeine. He had just been setting Rose up, offering her hope when he had no right to.
David would be found, but he would be found by logical, meticulous police work. Not by some crackpot visionary in six-hundred-dollar boots.
She was just taking an angry swig when those boots walked through her door.
She said nothing, just continued to lean in the doorway, the bottle to her lips and her eyes shooting tiny green darts. Sebastian closed the door marked Sutherland Investigations behind him and took a lazy look around.
As offices went, he’d seen worse. And he’d certainly seen better. Her desk was army-surplus gray steel, functional and tough, but far from aesthetically pleasing. Two metal file cabinets were shoved against a wall that would have benefited from a coat of paint. There were two chairs, one in a lurid purple, the other a faded print, on either side of a skinny table that held ancient magazines and was scarred with sundry cigarette burns.
On the wall behind them, as out of place as an elegant woman in a waterfront dive, was a lovely watercolor of Monterey Bay. The room smelled inexplicably like a spring meadow.
He caught a glimpse of the room behind her and saw that it was a tiny and unbelievably disordered kitchen.
He couldn’t resist.
Tucking his hands in his pockets, he smiled at her. “Some digs.”
She took another drink, then dangled the bottle between two fingers. “Have you got business with me, Donovan?”
“Have you got another bottle of that?”
After a moment, she shrugged, then stepped over the phone books again to snatch one out of the refrigerator. “I don’t think you came down off your mountain for a drink.”
“But I rarely turn one down.” He twisted off the top after she handed him the bottle. He skimmed his gaze over her, taking in the snug jeans and the scarred boots, then moving back up, to the tipped-up chin, with its fascinating little center dip, all the way to the distrustful dark green eyes. “You certainly look fetching this morning, Mary Ellen.”
“Don’t call me that.” Though she’d meant merely to sound firm, the words gritted out between her teeth.
“Such a lovely, old-fashioned name.” He tilted his head, baiting her. “Then again, I suppose Mel suits you better.”
“What do you want, Donovan?”
The teasing light faded. “To find David Merrick.”
She was almost fooled. Almost. The simple statement sounded so sincere, so keenly honest, that she nearly reached out. Snapping herself back, she sat on the corner of her desk and studied him.
“It’s just you and me now, pal. So let’s cut to the chase. You don’t have any stake in this. I humored Rose because I couldn’t find a way to talk her out of going to you, and because it gave her some temporary comfort. But I know your kind. Maybe you’re too slick for the obvious con. You know the sort—send me twenty bucks and I’ll change your life. Let me help you obtain money, power, and great sex for only a small monetary contribution.”
She gestured with the bottle, then drank again. “You’re not the small-change sort. More the beluga and Dom Perignon type. I suppose you get your jollies by going into trances around crime scenes and spouting out clues. Maybe you even hit a few from time to time, so good for you. But you’re not going to get your jollies out of Rose and Stan’s unhappiness. You’re not going to use their little boy as an ego boost.”
He was only mildly annoyed. Sebastian assured himself that he didn’t give a tinker’s dam what this smart-mouthed green-eyed bimbo thought of him. The bottom line was David Merrick.
But his fingers had tightened on the bottle, and his voice, when he spoke, was entirely too soft.
“Have me all figured out, do you, Sutherland?”
“You bet your buns I do.” Arrogance came off her in waves as she sat on the corner of the desk. “So let’s not waste each other’s time. If you feel you’re owed something for hearing Rose out yesterday, bill me. I’ll see you get what’s coming to you.”
He said nothing for a moment. It occurred to him that he’d never had the urge to throttle a woman before. Excepting his cousin Morgana. But now he imagined closing his hands around Mel’s long, tanned throat. And he imagined very well.
“It’s a wonder you don’t stagger with that chip on your shoulder.” He set the half-empty bottle down. Then, pushing impatiently through the chaos on her desk, he unearthed a pencil and a sheet of paper.
“What’re you doing?” she asked when he cleared a small space and began to sketch.
“Drawing you a picture. You seem like the kind who needs visuals.”
She frowned. Watching the careless way his hand streaked over the paper, she frowned deeper. She’d always envied and resented people who could draw so effortlessly. She continued to drink, telling herself she wasn’t interested. But her gaze continued to be pulled back to the face emerging from the lines and curves he made.
Despite herself, she leaned closer. Somewhere in the back of her mind it registered that he smelled like horses and leather. Sleek, groomed horses, and oiled leather. The deep purple of his amethyst caught her eye. She stared at it, half-hypnotized by the way it glinted in that twist of gold on his little finger.
Artist’s hands, she thought dimly. Strong and capable and elegant. She reminded herself they would probably be soft, as well—accustomed to opening champagne or undoing a lady’s fancy buttons.
“I often do both at the same time.”
“What?” More than a little dazed, she looked up and saw that he had stopped drawing. He was simply standing, closer than she’d realized. And watching.
“Nothing.” His lips curved, but he was annoyed with himself for probing. He’d simply been curious as to why she’d been staring at his hands. “Sometimes it’s best not to think too loudly.” While she was chewing that over, he handed her the sketch. “This is the man who took David.”
She wanted to dismiss the drawing, and the artist. But there was something eerily right about it. Saying nothing, she walked behind her desk and opened David’s folder. Inside were four police sketches. She chose one, comparing it to Sebastian’s work.
His was more detailed, certainly. The witness hadn’t noticed that little C-shaped scar under the left eye or the chipped front tooth. The police artist hadn’t captured that expression of glittery panic. But, essentially, they were the same man—the shape of the face, the set of the eyes, the springy hair beginning to recede.
So he has a connection on the force, she told herself, trying to settle her jumping nerves. He got hold of a copy of the sketch, then embellished it a bit.
She tossed the sketch down, then settled in her chair. It squeaked rustily wh
en she leaned back. “Why this one?”
“Because that’s the one I saw. He was driving a brown Mercury. An ’83 or ’84. Beige interior. The backseat’s ripped on the left side. He likes country music. At least that’s what he had playing on the car radio when he drove off with the child. East,” he murmured, and his eyes sharpened to a knife edge for just a heartbeat. “Southeast.”
One of the witnesses had reported a brown car. Nondescript but unfamiliar, parked near Rose’s apartment. Several days running, he’d said.
And Sebastian could have gotten that information from the police, as well, Mel reminded herself. She’d called his bluff, and he was just pushing buttons.
But if he wasn’t … if there was the slightest chance …
“A face and a car.” She tried to sound disinterested, but the faintest of tremors in her voice betrayed her. “No name, address and serial number?”
“You’re a tough sell, Sutherland.” It would be easy to dislike her, he thought, if he couldn’t see—feel—how desperately she cared.
What the hell. He’d dislike her on principle.
“A child’s life is at stake.”
“He’s safe,” Sebastian said. “Safe and well cared for. A little confused, and he cries more than he did. But no one’s hurt him.”
She felt the breath clog up in her lungs. She wanted to believe that—that much, if nothing more.
“You’re not going to talk to Rose about this,” she said steadily. “It’ll drive her crazy.”
Ignoring her, Sebastian went on. “The man who took him was afraid. You could smell it. He took him to a woman somewhere … East.” It would come. “And she dressed him in Oshkosh overalls and a red-striped shirt. He was in a car seat and had a ring of plastic keys to play with. They drove most of the day, then stopped at a motel. It had a dinosaur out front. She fed him, bathed him, and when he cried she walked him until he fell asleep.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Utah.” He frowned a little. “Arizona, maybe, but probably Utah. The next day they drove, still southeast. She’s not afraid.
It’s just business. They go to a mall—someplace in Texas. East Texas. It’s crowded. She sits on a bench. A man sits beside her. He leaves an envelope on the bench and pushes David away in his stroller.
“The same routine the following day. David’s tired of traveling and bewildered by all the strange faces. He wants home. He’s taken to a house. A big stone house with old, leafy trees in the yard. South. It feels like Georgia. He’s given to a woman who holds him and cries a little, and a man who holds them both. He has a room there, with blue sailboats on the wall and a mobile over the crib of circus animals. They call him Eric now.”
Mel was very pale when she managed to speak. “I don’t believe you.”
“No, but there’s a part of you that wonders if you should. Forget what you think of me, Mel. Think of David.”
“I am thinking of David.” She sprang to her feet, the sketch clutched in her hand. “Give me a name, then. Give me a damn name.”
“Do you think it works like that?” he tossed back. “Demand and answer? It’s an art, not a pop quiz.”
She let the sketch float back to the desk. “Right.”
“Listen to me.” He slapped his hands down on the desk, hard enough to make her jolt in reaction. “I’ve been in Chicago for three weeks, watching some monster slice people to ribbons in my head. Feeling his glee while he did it. Using up everything I am, everything I have, to find him before he could do it again. If I’m not working fast enough to suit you on this, Sutherland, that’s too damn bad.”
She backed off. Not because she was afraid of this sudden burst of temper. Because she saw something in his face, some trace of his weary horror at what he’d been through.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Here are the facts. I don’t believe in psychics or witches or things that go bump in the night.”
He had to smile. “You’ll have to meet my family sometime.”
“But,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “I’ll use anything, any resource. Hell, we can use a Ouija board if it’ll help get David back.” She picked up the sketch again. “I’ve got a face. I’ll start with that.”
“We’ll start with that.”
Before she could come up with a suitable response, the phone rang. “Sutherland Investigations. Yeah, it’s Mel. What’s going down, Rico?”
Sebastian watched her attention sharpen, saw a slight smile tug at her lips. Why, she is pretty, he realized with a kind of annoyed surprise.