Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic

by Patricia Rice

“You weren’t supposed to leave the house,” he said in what he thought were perfectly calm tones.

  Her eyes narrowed. “And you aren’t my boss. I don’t like being alone. I explored the town and met some really nice people. I’m going to feng shui a tavern if I stay here long enough.” Ignoring whatever energies he was giving off, she handed the sacks over to the kids and pointed to the bedrooms.

  Once the children were yelling in the back rooms, she crossed the narrow kitchen to where he was mutilating already mangled sandwiches. Standing on her toes and wrapping her arms around him, she kissed his cheek. “Relax, Geekboy, I’m not made of sugar and I won’t melt.”

  That didn’t ease his jumpy nerves, but it distracted them. Conan dropped the bread knife, grabbed her in a bear hug, and held her until his heart stabilized. “Leave a note next time. I almost called in helicopters.”

  Dorrie laughed and covered his jaw with kisses. He was in serious danger of turning to warm gush. He set her down on the tile floor and examined her unorthodox attire. “People didn’t think you were an escapee from an institution wearing that?”

  “They thought I was a nurse,” she said cheerfully, taking over sandwich duty. “They let me use their phones. I talked to Tillie, who will tell everyone in the office that I’m in police protection. She’ll probably also tell Zimmer I left her in charge, but I’ll let them battle that one.”

  She looked up sharply as if she could hear his thoughts. “And don’t tell me spies may have tapped Tillie’s cell phone, because that’s too far into paranoia for me to follow.”

  Conan took a deep breath and concurred. “I’ve never been responsible for anyone before. I’m on overload. Sorry.”

  She squeezed his arm reassuringly. “Sure you have. All those people who hire you? Who do you think is responsible for taking care of them? You. Just because you do it behind a bank of computers doesn’t mean you don’t carry the weight of their security on your shoulders. Lighten up, Oswin. Let me be me, and I’ll let you be you.”

  Dorrie wrinkled her nose and tried to remember if she’d ever said anything so asinine in her life, but the fact that this confident man had actually worried about her sort of spun her off course. Her father had expected her to be self-sufficient. And she had been. She just would have appreciated a little support once in a while, like now. Conan’s support gave her strength.

  She finished up the sandwiches, set them on the table with glasses of milk, and let Conan mull over her conclusions.

  His chi was off the charts tonight. She had to rein him in somehow.

  It was rather amazing that she could focus so well on Conan’s energy even though Alexis had claimed the bathroom, Chris was jumping up and down pounding on the door while holding the front of his shorts, and Brandon had worryingly disappeared.

  Maybe sex gave her an extra connection. She didn’t think it ever had before, but she’d been less experienced then. Or her previous lovers had been less highly charged than Conan. The man was a dynamo.

  Between them, they fed the kids, settled arguments over bedrooms, promised to hook up the Internet in the morning, and pried Toto out of several beds, several times.

  She put away her clothes and showered. Wrapping up in the robe and pajamas Conan had brought up in her suitcase, she emerged into a dark, empty bedroom. She’d expected to find him already there, waiting for her, but she realized that was a stupid expectation. Most men focused on sex. Rather than get involved, Conan sublimated his needs.

  She followed the light back to the front, where he had already rigged up her netbook to the house’s wireless network. He was tapping away at the keys and didn’t look up until she caressed his nape and peered over his shoulder.

  “You can’t run your business from here,” she said in disappointment, gazing at the huge directory of unanswered emails on the tiny screen. “You have to go back to the city and your office.”

  “That would make more sense, yes.” He reached behind him and pulled her head down for a swift kiss. “But I’m versatile and easily persuaded.”

  “And if I don’t tempt you with sex?” she asked, pulling away.

  “You’ll terrify me into wondering what you’re doing every minute of the day,” he admitted. “I do not—I repeat—I do not ever want to go through another day like this again. I’m not cut out to be a personal bodyguard to someone who regularly gets herself into positions that would kill anyone else.”

  “Until these past few days, I have not ever been in a position to be killed.” That was a blatant lie, but admitting to murder wasn’t high on her To Do list.

  He glanced up. “This Feng Li creep they’ve just let out of jail—is there any reason for him to come after you?”

  “Is he out for good?” she asked warily.

  “The original charges were only aggravated robbery and manslaughter, not murder. He’s out on probation pending another appeal. There’s some question about the DNA evidence and the competency of his lawyers.” Conan worriedly searched her face.

  Oh crap. Another trial? Could they do that? “Okay, then yes, there’s some reason for him to come after me, but not Bo or the kids.”

  He waited. Dorrie didn’t explain. Couldn’t, really, and nothing she said would change Li’s behavior if there was any chance it was him.

  Thankfully, Conan didn’t push her. She pressed a kiss to his hair in gratitude. “I’m only humoring you because my shoulder hurts and the kids need a place to stay.”

  Keying off the computer, Supergeekman frowned and rose to tower over her. “Let’s practice this humoring business somewhere more comfortable and less likely to attract curious children.”

  “You won’t stay,” Dorrie predicted. “By morning, you’ll have two dozen things to call you back to the city. The kids will make you crazy. I’ll make you crazy. You need your space. I get that. I don’t want to start relying on you.”

  “You worry too much.” He swung her into his arms and carried her back to the bedroom. “Or maybe you damned well don’t worry enough.”

  Dorrie had scarcely caught her breath before Conan was laying her across the sheets and leaning over her. Dealing with this man was like being caught up in the tide and carried by strong currents. She scarcely had the strength to fight him—or her own needs. Didn’t want to fight him.

  “You’ll leave,” she repeated, “but not yet.”

  ***

  Loud squabbling from the other end of the cottage woke Dorrie the next morning. She looked blearily for a clock, couldn’t find one, and judged by the gray light of the window that it was barely past dawn. Or cloudy.

  The squabbling increased. The muscled man beside her continued sleeping like a stone. She wanted to punch him awake. She wanted to snuggle into his incredible arms, touch him all over, and repeat last night’s awe-inspiring sex.

  She was better off separating the kids than relying on Conan.

  Maybe she needed to learn to be on her own.

  He stirred when she rose from the bed. She left him groping the pillow while she washed and donned black leggings and a long sweater from the bags Amy had packed for her. It apparently got chilly up here.

  She was so out of her usual space that she no longer considered anything odd. She had a man in her bed and kids in her kitchen and a killer might be after her, but serene energy flowed through the house. With no job to go to, she had no idea what she would do with herself. She might as well have been set down in a different universe.

  She put a leash on Toto, pulled Christopher away from his older sister at the computer, and asked him to walk the dog around the courtyard. Easily distracted, the six-year-old happily did as told, sticking his tongue out at his bossy sister behind her back.

  Eight-year-old Brandon, looking so much like his father that Dorrie wanted to cry, succumbed to the suggestion of food. From the looks of the kitchen, they’d fixed cereal when they got up, but she remembered that Bo used to be perpetually hungry.

  She left Brandon beating a carton’s wor
th of eggs and returned to Alexis with some idea that parents were supposed to be responsible for Internet content viewed by children. She shouldn’t have worried. Alexis looked up at her with disgust. “This thing is set so I can’t access any of the good sites.”

  Bless Conan. “I don’t think I want to know what the good sites are. Let’s fix toast to go with the eggs. Can you chop peppers?”

  By the time Conan stumbled from the bedroom—wearing jeans and work shirt, not his usual indecent morning attire—Dorrie had found a coffeemaker and coffee and the kids were scarfing huevos rancheros with hot sauce and toast.

  He took the coffee she handed him. Even while groggy with sleep, his focus was intense as he studied her. Nervously, she plated more eggs for him and pulled toast from the warming oven.

  “Shoulder?” he asked, taking the dish.

  “Aches. Took Advil.” She shrugged. “What’s the agenda?”

  “Keeping you alive and the kids safe.” After swallowing half a mug of coffee, he leaned against the counter and scooped eggs with his toast. “I need to check with the people I have on the case. You do realize I’m a computer security consultant and not a detective, right?”

  She knew that. She’d just placed ridiculously high hopes on a man who had more confidence than she did. “I don’t think the foundation can afford detectives.”

  “That’s my job—finding the right people and sending them in the right direction. In this case, we have too many directions, and I need my equipment to work them out. And I need you and the kids safe while I do it. Can you manage not to leap off any more cliffs if I return to the city?”

  Dorrie thought about it. She didn’t want to scare this loner by admitting that she liked working with him. So she dropped that angle and pursued another. “I’m not the stay-at-home mom type. I need something to do, too.”

  He glanced at the two dark heads and one light one happily bent over decorating their toast. “Coulda fooled me. Okay, I’ll call Oz, find out if there’s someone who can tutor the kids for a few days. I’ll send you computer leads to follow. No city.”

  That wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted, but it was better than nothing. She refused to ask if he was returning later.

  Frighteningly enough, it just might be time for her to establish her independence.

  Chapter 22

  Later that morning, Dorrie finished hanging a lovely oil painting in the entry of the Blue Bayou tavern. The image of a cypress-lined waterway—the painting from which the tavern got its name—provided ideal energy flow from outside to in.

  Her injured shoulder ached from the effort, but she had to keep the kids and herself occupied while waiting for Conan’s calls. If he called.

  She stepped down from the chair to check on Alexis’s progress in applying a white primer to the front door. Her niece wore her shiny black hair rippling down her back, tied back in red yarn, and had her tongue caught between her teeth as she concentrated. The girl was growing up too fast. Dorrie hated for Alexis to feel as if she wore the weight of the world, as Dorrie had at almost that age.

  Lizzy, the tavern’s owner, dripped purple paint from her brush as she gauged her progress on the stripe they’d penciled and taped to the wall in the prosperity corner behind the bar.

  “If purple will make me rich, why can’t I paint the whole place purple? Shouldn’t that make me even richer?” With specks of paint in her auburn hair and a man’s shirt smocking her buxom figure, Lizzy looked about as professional as Bo’s boys tugging red tablecloths over the battered wooden tables along the perimeter of the room.

  “No, only in the prosperity corner,” Dorrie said patiently. She’d had these sorts of arguments with Bo over the years, although he’d mostly been teasing. She missed him in ways she hadn’t expected, and her heart yearned for the dad these wonderful kids had lost. Dammit, she wanted to help Conan find Bo. All the feng shui in the world wouldn’t bring him back without human assistance.

  “We want to welcome the flow of positive energy through the front door,” she explained, “and let it spread like water through the building. You enrich the energy by applying purple where you need the power of wealth, but you don’t want to unbalance your life with material things. One shouldn’t trap chi.”

  No more than she should be left stranded and trapped with no outlet back to her life, Dorrie thought, frustrated.

  “I could add sparkly paint,” Lizzie’s unnamed friend suggested, while covering a bare bulb with a perforated white tin lantern to add metal to the creativity sector on the far wall.

  No one had introduced Dorrie to the new arrival. Apparently Lizzie expected everyone to know her. The newcomer was about the same age as Dorrie and Lizzie. She had a striking face that ought to be memorable—wide mouth, punk-cut red hair, and daunting cheekbones, with blue-green eyes that had to be contacts. And her denim overalls with sparkly rainbows on the bib fit right into the redecorating project.

  She also generated a strong “other” energy, as Dorrie had learned to call it, an energy she had learned to trust. So, for now, she didn’t question.

  “Sparkles are for toddlers,” Lizzie argued, ignoring the fact that her friend wore them. “A tavern needs to be a place where men are comfortable.”

  “Men are not comfortable with purple,” her friend said with laughter.

  Dorrie wondered if she had any friends she’d feel comfortable laughing at. Maybe Tillie, but Tillie had always been too aware of their social differences. Dorrie hadn’t had real friends since she’d left public school, when her father had transported her to the world of the uber-wealthy.

  That was probably her own fault. After her mother’s murder, she’d been too self-conscious to relax around people who wouldn’t accept her peculiarities.

  She didn’t have to be that shy child or obedient daughter here. The relief was so immense, she could almost forget kidnappers. Almost. She wanted to stay wary of her surroundings, but she kept forgetting with the comfortable atmosphere.

  “Laugh if you like.” Lizzie pointed the paintbrush at the nearly antique cash register. “But Dorrie walked in here, warned there was a bad energy star over my cash register, and sure enough, when we moved it, the bottom was rusted out and the bar beneath it was rotted. Water from a leaky pipe has been running under there for ages.”

  “Symbolizing money leaking away,” Dorrie explained, turning to address the more difficult center of a tavern. She needed yellow to work with the purple. A flat square metal table…a card table maybe?

  “And then Aunt Dorrie moved the cash register to the purple corner,” Alexis said with excitement, “and we framed a dollar bill to hang over it, and—”

  “And the bank called to say I could have the loan I needed to update the kitchen,” Lizzie finished with equal excitement. “They’ve been dragging their feet forever. Dorrie moves the cash register, and voila! Money flows again.”

  “I need a room of my own so I can paint it purple,” Alexis declared, untangling Toto’s leash from a table leg before returning to her paint brush.

  It would be fun if Bo’s daughter had some of her grandmother’s feng shui abilities, but it was too soon for Dorrie to tell. Her nephews and niece exhibited low level other energies, but she didn’t know them well enough to understand what abilities they might represent. She’d like to spend more time with them.

  “If feng shui really worked, everyone who practices it would be millionaires,” the red-haired stranger scoffed. “You were just lucky.”

  “Yeah, well I can use more of that kind of luck,” Lizzie declared.

  “It is more a state of mind,” Dorrie said pragmatically, looking around for a table that wasn’t wood. “If we think positively about the problems that concern us, work toward improving them, the chi picks up that energy and is intensified. I sometimes think there is almost a psychic or spiritual element to it, as if we’re sending brain waves to others, jarring them into action. Or perhaps we connect with our guardian angels, who call in help.”<
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  In triumph, she located a metal folding table leaning against a wall. She wasn’t aware the conversation had died until she had the table set up in the tavern center. She noticed the silence first, the zigzag energy next. It looked like she was lousy at this self-protection business.

  She glanced up and saw a more polished version of Conan standing in the back door, accompanied by a blond boy a little younger than Christopher. Even Toto seemed to be watching the newcomers with anticipation.

  “Psychic element?” the man who had to be Conan’s brother asked. His hair was styled but naturally sun-streaked, lighter than Conan’s. He flashed even, professionally whitened teeth. His nails were manicured but his tan appeared natural—not from hard labor in the sun but because he had the wealth to enjoy leisurely days by a pool. And he exuded the same zigzag energy as Conan. At least she knew how to identify him.

  Dorrie nodded acknowledgment of his question but didn’t answer it. “Mr. Oswin. I believe you brought the delicious bagels the other day?”

  The red-haired woman laughed. “Conan guards his cave like a ferocious bear. Oz can’t resist baiting him.”

  Enlightenment, at last. Dorrie considered the tall, red-haired woman. “So you must be the mysterious sister-in-law who heaves Conan in pools?”

  “He told you that, did he? Conan isn’t known for his communication skills.” Finishing the light fixture, she stepped down and held out her hand. “Pippa Oswin, pleased to meet you.”

  “Dorothea Franklin,” she introduced herself tentatively, aware Pippa’s tall husband was still studying her. “Conan seems to have me in protective custody, but I get bored doing nothing.”

  “And what is our intrepid nerd doing while he abandons you here?” Pippa’s husband held out his hand. “Dylan Oswin, but call me Oz.”

  “As in wizard of?” Dorrie couldn’t help asking. A lifelong fascination with the movie apparently had her following a yellow brick road, but these Oswin males weren’t cowardly lions.

  He flashed a white smile. “I make no claims to superpowers. Like the Wizard of Oz says, I’m a very good man but a very bad wizard.”