by Laura Leone
Nick was gone in half that time. He had kept very few personal belongings here. And Diana had just made it abundantly clear that there was nothing of value for him in the House of Ishtar.
Chapter Seven
THE FOOL: Trump 0
Major Arcana
Meaning: A risk must be taken; an important choice is to be made.
Reversed: The choice will be wrong.
Two weeks later, Diana climbed the steps of a restored building in Algiers with extreme reluctance. When she reached the stained glass door with Tremain and Lowery Investigations written on it, she clutched her hand-woven straw purse nervously and paused as indecision—or sheer cowardice?—assailed her.
She took a deep breath and felt the way her heart was pounding. Her stomach churned with all the mixed emotions of seeing Nick again after what he had done to her, after the way he had used, humiliated, and betrayed her.
There was still time to turn back. No one inside the office knew she was here. She could still dash down those stairs and retreat to safety.
The realization that there was no safety for her, and especially none for Felix, stilled her feet as they poised for flight. She and her father needed a protector. Something was happening in their lives that they were unequipped to handle. Presumably a private investigator would know what to do.
Anyhow, she thought with a wave of fury, why should she be uncomfortable about this meeting? Nick was the one who should be ashamed of himself. Diana was embarrassed that she had grown to like and trust a lying scoundrel like Nick Tremain, even to the point of going to bed with him; but at least she had acted openly and honestly.
Straightening her shoulders with pride and bravado, Diana pushed open the door of the detective agency and entered the reception room. A fair-haired attractive man of about Nick’s age and an elderly woman wearing sensible shoes were conferring over a number of file folders. They both looked up.
“Can I help you?” asked the woman.
“Yes,” Diana said crisply. “I’m here to see Nick Tremain. I don’t have an appointment.”
“No problem,” the man told her. “I’m Peter Lowery, Nick’s partner.”
He extended his hand in a friendly manner. Diana just stared at him, making no effort to be friendly to Nick’s partner. He had undoubtedly been party to Nick’s subterfuge, after all.
“I’m Diana Stewart,” she said coldly.
Peter’s hand dropped to his side and his jaw sagged. He and the woman exchanged a worried glance.
“I’ll tell him you’re here,” the woman said quickly.
“Thank you, Mrs. Milne,” said Peter Lowery.
Diana’s eyes widened. Mrs. Milne? The sweet old lady who had given Nick Tremain a glowing character reference over the telephone after he’d first come to the House of Ishtar? Diana scowled. These people were shocking and shameless, the scum of the earth.
Diana encompassed both Peter Lowery and Mrs. Milne with a look of withering contempt as the secretary picked up the telephone and notified Nick that he had a visitor. Diana guessed that he was astounded by her arrival, since the older woman had to repeat her name twice.
Before Mrs. Milne had put the receiver back into its cradle, a door at the end of the hallway flew open and Nick stood there, staring at Diana with a stunned expression.
“Diana?” he croaked.
“You haven’t forgotten. How touching.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
The look on his face changed to one of suspicion and wariness. “What are you doing here?”
“Can we talk in private?”
He studied her as if that were a trick question. Finally he shrugged and stepped back from the doorway, allowing her to enter his office.
It was untidy, just as his room in the House of Ishtar had always been. The desk was covered with files, papers, and periodicals, pieces of his clothing were scattered about the room, and a number of his personal possessions—including an autographed baseball and a catcher’s mitt—added to the cheerful clutter.
“Have a seat,” he said uneasily. “Coffee?”
She stared at him.
He blinked. “Oh, right. No stimulants. Well, I’m afraid we don’t have any herbal stuff here.”
Diana lowered herself into a chair in front of his desk. He slouched into his seat and watched her with a veiled expression. An unexpected wave of concern swept over her. He looked tired and depressed, even through the air of crackling vitality that always surrounded him. And his cheekbones were a little more prominent than she remembered. Had he lost weight during the past two weeks?
A merciless iron fist closed around her chest and squeezed with cruel fingers. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t Nick look ugly and degenerate? Why couldn’t she feel revulsion when she saw his hands, his lips, his arms, when she remembered the way his body had felt, sliding rhythmically against hers, thrusting into her with a force and passion that had flooded her soul?
She swallowed and tried to think of something to say, something to change the dangerous direction of her thoughts.
Nick watched Diana with a carefully stony expression while he tried to control the impulses rushing through him. Upon hearing who awaited him in the lobby, he had flung the door open, wondering, hoping, praying that Diana wanted to patch things up, that she was prepared to forgive him.
One look at her face, though, had assured him that she would probably cut out his heart and feed it to Ishtar before she would excuse what he had done.
“So what brings you here?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level. Despite everything, he wanted to touch her so badly that he could feel his hands trembling. There were faint smudges under those fierce, cat-green eyes that had haunted and entranced him. Was she losing sleep the way he was? Were her days dreary and her nights fevered? Did she remember and still want, just the way he did?
“Believe it or not, I need your professional services,” she said, managing to make the statement sound like an insult.
“You need a private investigator?” He didn’t try to mask his astonishment. That was about the last thing he had expected her to say.
“Yes.”
“I... Diana, why me? I must be just about the last man in the world you want handling your private problems.” Would she say she trusted him? Would she say she had reconsidered?
“You are,” she agreed tersely.
So much for vain hopes. “Well? Why me? There are plenty of private investigators in New Orleans.”
“Yes, but they’re very expensive.”
“Someone told you I come cheap?”
“No. But considering your current troubles, I thought...” She let the words trail off; her implication dangled unpleasantly between them.
He sighed. “So you know about that?”
“I know that you will probably lose your license soon for mishandling the case of a prominent New Orleans family. It wasn’t that hard to find out, once I started checking up on your background.”
Nick shook his head, considering all the things he might say and discarding them, one by one. “We’re in a bad position, Diana,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t take on any new clients. Especially not cut-rate ones,” he added, feeling a little animosity of his own.
“What’s more,” Diana went on, “I think you owe it to us. After what you did to us.”
Nick didn’t know what to say to that. In a sense she was right. He had let things become personal, and his conscience about the Stewart case wasn’t clear. But Diana had hurt him. She had thrown him out without even giving him the chance to explain—and she’d done it when he had needed her most. And all on the basis of a tarot card! That was the part that was the hardest to bear. Claude Bouvier should have had the Stewarts certified insane rather than investigated for fraud.
“Is that the real reason you came?” he asked tiredly. “Because you think I owe you something?”
He saw the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes and her nervous sideways glance. He wondered what it meant. “D
iana?” Was there something else? Was he a fool to try once more? “Isn’t there another reason you came here?” he prodded hopefully.
She fiddled with the hem of her gauze skirt. “Felix insisted,” she muttered at last.
“What?”
“He... um...” Diana rubbed her palm across her flat stomach in a gesture that drew his hungry gaze. He remembered doing that, too. He remembered how smooth and firm she was, how responsive, no matter where he touched her. “Felix is in danger, Nick. There’s no doubt about it. And he insists that the cards keep telling him that you’re the only one who can protect us.”
Nick felt as if she had punched him in the solar plexus. The damned cards again. “You’re here because the tarot deck says you need me?”
Diana looked at him with wounded eyes. “And you pretended to believe! ‘I was called here,’” she mimicked. “All those long conversations you had with us about yoga and astrology. How could you have been so condescending?”
“It’s my job,” he snapped impatiently. “And you were the one who kept insisting that you didn’t believe in the tarot and the stars. Or have you forgotten?”
“I don’t! I mean, I haven’t! I never did!” She uttered an explosive sound of exasperation. “I didn’t even want to come here today! But my father insisted, and he’s in trouble. He was so kind to you! Don’t you even want to know what’s wrong?”
That made him feel guilty. It was true. Felix had been kind to him, and it was disturbing to think that the astrologer might be in real trouble. “Of course I want to know what’s wrong,” he said more calmly. “Tell me about it.”
She licked her lips. He wished she would stop doing that. “Well, within days after... after you left our place, Felix started receiving threatening notes.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“They were brief, no more than a sentence or two. Each one told him to stop interfering in people’s lives, or he would suffer for it. They were anonymous, written on ordinary typing paper, typed by a poor-quality typewriter with smudgy letters.”
“How many has he received?”
“Three altogether. The last one arrived four days ago.”
“Can I see them?”
“No. He, uh, gives them to Jora Lemon to burn.”
Nick frowned. “Who’s Jora Lemon?”
“She’s the psychic who helped expose your real identity.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Seeing her brows swoop down ominously, Nick held up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. Why, for the love of God, is she burning the evidence?”
“So she can see something in the fire.”
“What?”
“See it psychically,” Diana clarified. “Physically, she’s more or less blind.”
Nick sighed. “All right. So that evidence is destroyed. Have there been any other warnings?”
“Don’t you want to know what Jora saw in the fire?”
“No, of course not.” When she tried to interrupt, he got impatient again. “Diana. Just get on with the facts.”
“Well, there have been three events of disturbing violence.”
That alarmed him. “Have either of you been hurt?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Last week, Felix was nearly run over by a car at dusk, right outside of our house. They didn’t have their headlights on, and they didn’t honk or stop to see if he was all right. Then a few nights ago, we came home from Jora’s to find that someone had vandalized all the tables and chairs in the courtyard, spilling paint and glue all over everything and breaking what they could.”
“Did you report this to the police?”
“Of course. They were very polite to us, but it’s clear that they don’t know who did it, and they’re not going to catch him.”
“You said there were three incidents?”
“Yes.” She shifted nervously in her chair. “Last night someone threw a brick through the window of Felix’s study, while he was meditating. It missed his head by inches.”
Nick rested his feet on the edge of his desk and leaned back in his favorite thinking position. He didn’t like the sound of any of this. The Stewarts were obviously being harassed, and sooner or later one of them was bound to get hurt. It would be bad enough if it were Felix, but if anything happened to Diana...
He already had one possible suspect, but didn’t want to jump to conclusions. “Do you have any idea who might be behind these notes and incidents?”
Diana leaned forward, wide-eyed and serious. “Felix says it’s someone connected to Mrs. Bouvier.”
Nick was startled. “How does he know that?”
“I’m not sure. He sees it in his readings.”
“Oh, for the love of—”
“Listen to me,” she snapped. “He’s been seeing it since before we met you. He says that a relative of Mrs. Bouvier will bring chaos and turmoil into our lives. That’s why, when you first came to the shop, I thought you might somehow be connected to her.”
Nick felt a little ill. Some of his distress must have shown in his face, he realized, because Diana vaulted out of her chair and braced both hands on his desk, studying him with an alert and suspicious expression.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she exclaimed. “That’s the connection! You were sent by a Bouvier!”
“That’s confidential,” he said weakly.
“Oh, come off it. I know you’re being sued for disreputable practices. How much can a little thing like client confidentiality mean to you?”
“Now just a damned minute,” he began.
“If I’m your client now, don’t you think I deserve to know if your last client hired you to harass us?”
“He didn’t hire me to harass you! What do you take me, for?”
“I take you for a meat-eating, beer-guzzling, skirt-chasing, gun-toting private eye who lied to me every step of the way. Even in bed.”
“I was going to tell you!”
“When?” she challenged.
“As soon as you came back upstairs that night.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before we, uh, got so tangled up?”
“I meant to, but I lost my head.” He reminded her, “You did, too.”
Diana drew in a sharp breath. Still leaning over his desk, she could see the fine lines around his eyes, the velvety sheen of his dark curls and the long-boned strength of his hands, and she remembered too well how he’d felt and sounded and tasted in her arms. She sat down again with a graceless thud.
“I think we’re getting off the subject,” she said hoarsely.
He looked at the floor. “Maybe you’re right.”
“The point is, if a relative of Mrs. Bouvier’s did hire you, that has a bearing on my problem, now that I’m hiring you. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, I do, Diana,” he agreed wearily. “But for perfectly logical deductive reasons, and not because your father’s tarot deck says so.”
“Well, then. Who hired you?”
Nick stared at her for a long moment. He might have told her because he cared about her and Felix, because his relationship with them had already gone beyond professional boundaries. He might have told her because Claude Bouvier had forfeited his rights by threatening and denouncing the agency and refusing to pay his bill. He might have told her because, former client or not, Bouvier was now a suspect.
But her nasty cracks about his professionalism stung. He was caught in the middle again, just the way he had been ever since meeting her. So he was going to do this by the book.
“Before I break my former client’s right to confidential treatment, Diana, I’m going to ascertain if he is indeed our primary suspect.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“I agree,” he interrupted loudly, “for my own reasons, that my former client is the logical place to begin my investigation. However, I’m not violating my professional ethics without reasonable evidence of his culpability.”
“What professional et
hics?”
“Don’t push me,” he warned.
Diana glared at him. “You were eager enough to violate your professional ethics with me.”
“Why did you even come here, then?” She was making the hurt as fresh and raw as it had been two weeks ago.
Diana’s lips trembled. She scowled and pressed them together, then cleared her throat. “I told you. Felix keeps saying you’re the only one who can help us. You’re our destiny.”
“He still thinks that?” Nick asked curiously. At least Felix was apparently prepared to forgive him.
“He keeps turning up the Knight of Swords—a young man of courage and skill. It symbolizes heroism. He says it means we must turn to you for help, that you will be our champion and protector.” Diana avoided his eyes.
Unable to help himself, he asked quietly, “Does he know about us?”
“I don’t know.” Diana straightened her shoulders. “Anyhow, there’ll be nothing more to know. From now on, it’s strictly business. Understood?”
He shrugged noncommittally. She was kidding herself if she thought they could just put it behind them. It hadn’t been an accident or even a momentary capitulation to desire. They had made love with more intensity than he had ever experienced, and the memory was burning inside both of them too hotly to be ignored. He could see it in her eyes, her gestures, her nervousness.
They had both known what they were doing, and had known what would happen between them from the beginning. It wasn’t chance or coincidence. It was destiny.
The moment he realized what direction his thoughts were taking, Nick could have slugged himself. Not only was he getting to be as dippy as the Stewarts, but hadn’t he just decided to conduct himself on this case as the epitome of professionalism? Why the hell couldn’t he control himself around this temperamental, illogical, exasperating woman? It was the height of Hollywood silliness for a PI to contemplate making love to his client five minutes after she had hired him.
“All right,” he said, sliding out of his chair. “I’m going to have a word with Peter, then I’ll go back to the House of Ishtar with you.”
“Wait a minute,” she said as he started to leave the room. “How much will this cost me?”