Who’s got my baby now? Is he hurting her?
No. Can’t think about that. I’ll go nuts if I do.
One hour and forty-five minutes to go. Come on, psychic. Get a move on.
“YOU DID WHAT?” Griffin stared at his employer, feeling as if his jaw had come unhinged.
“You heard me. I hired that Nichols woman.”
“As what, for God’s sake?”
Singleton shrugged and kept one eye on the flickering columns of stock market activity on his computer screen. “As resident psychic, consultant, whatever. Doesn’t matter. If she has information, I want it, and I want it here, where I can access it twenty-four/seven.”
Griffin bit back the urge to ask the man who paid his salary if he’d completely lost his mind.
“I didn’t know you believed in that stuff,” he said instead. Jay Singleton possessed the most ruthless intelligence Griffin had ever come across. Give him a piece of software and some financial projections and he could create a company out of nothing. But this?
“I don’t have to believe in it,” Singleton snapped. “I believe in results. She has more information than we do, so I want her here. I don’t care how she gets it, I just want it available to me.”
“She could be scamming you.”
“So you said. But why call me out of the blue when no one but this household knows what happened? The timing is too neat for it to be anything but what she says it is.”
“Someone in the house could have called her. They could be capitalizing on this, splitting whatever you’re paying her.”
Singleton shook his head. “Sixty bucks an hour isn’t enough to make it worthwhile. No motive.”
Griffin could think of a lot of people for whom sixty bucks an hour was plenty of motive. But his boss’s mind was made up, and that was that. Not only was he going to have to do without the resources of the police department, Griffin was going to have to tolerate a con on his own turf—at least until he could prove it.
He hadn’t been able to prove anything with Tessa Nichols last time, but this time he was going to succeed.
A CANDY-APPLE-RED 1966 Mustang convertible was made for one thing—well, okay, maybe two things. Tessa grinned at the curves of Highway 1 as the cliffs dropped away to her right and she let the car have its way with the road.
It had been a long time since she’d hit the highway and driven somewhere just for the sheer pleasure of it. Most of the time the Mustang sat in her parents’ storage box while they flitted from state to state. It wasn’t practical to own a car in the city—just the thought of parking on some of those hills was enough to make her shiver—but once in a while, on a brilliant late-summer day like today, a cruise down the coast was just what the doctor ordered.
As for the second thing…she’d just leave that one up to the universe.
At twenty minutes past the two-hour time designated by Jay Singleton—she couldn’t help it if she’d run into unseasonable beach traffic in Santa Rita—she pulled up to a big, black gate and checked the address Singleton had given her.
Yep. This was the place.
“Ms. Nichols?” the gatepost asked politely.
She blinked at it. Plaster. Ivy. No mouth.
Then she saw the camera and the speaker box. “Yes,” she said.
“We’re expecting you,” the voice said. “Please drive up to the house and someone will take your car to the garage.” The voice paused. “Nice ride, by the way.”
“Thanks.” She grinned at the camera. “Call me Tessa.”
“And I am Ramon.”
“Guardian of the gates?”
“Keeper of the cameras.”
“The eye in the ivy.” Tessa loved a word game.
Something buzzed in the background, and an angry voice she couldn’t make out said something that probably wasn’t nice.
“Mr. Singleton is waiting for you,” Ramon informed her in a tone considerably more subdued that it had been a moment ago.
“Thanks, Ramon. Talk to you later.”
The ten-foot wrought-iron gates swung open and Tessa let out the clutch and drove through. The driveway wound through a wilderness of scrub oak and native grasses. A tiny brown rabbit the size of a man’s fist hopped across the asphalt in front of her and she touched the brake gently. A covey of quail bobbed down the side of the drive and vanished into a bramble thicket shaded by fern. Tessa had to admit it wasn’t often you found a rich guy with the sense to live with an environment instead of imposing himself on it with acres of green lawn that would suck up more water than most small towns.
It wasn’t until she got to the house that she saw the terraced garden and the lawn that sloped away to the ocean. Okay, so he couldn’t quite resist the statement that the lawn made. But she gave him points for the rest of it.
The young man standing in the driveway tried to talk her into leaving the keys with him. “I’ll park it,” he promised her. “The garage is just over there, behind the trees.”
“No can do.” She smiled at him, but he was too nervous to smile back. “Nobody drives this thing but me or my dad. No offense. I’ll park it and be right back.”
“But Mr. Singleton—”
“Mr. Singleton can wait five minutes.”
In a moment she discovered that Mr. Singleton could not.
She’d just parked the car in a garage that was so beautifully appointed with wood trim and a spotless, grease-free linoleum floor that she would have cheerfully signed a lease and moved in, when a man strode around the curve. In his late forties, he was dressed in gray wool trousers, and a knotted tie hung carelessly from the neck of a white dress shirt. His thick brown hair stood on end, as if he’d run agitated hands through it, and a brown beard fairly crackled with belligerence.
Jay Singleton. He looked much angrier than he had in the newspaper photo.
She slammed the car door shut and hefted her wheeled suitcase—used once prior to this, since she hadn’t inherited her parents’ urge to ramble—out of the backseat.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said in a voice pitched just on the near side of a yell. “Robin gets paid to park your car and take your bag in.”
Tessa snapped the handle of the suitcase out to its full length and trundled past the convertible Jag and the two BMWs in the other spaces. “Well, as I explained to Robin, nobody drives this car but me and my dad. I’m perfectly capable of parking it. Nice garage. If you ever want to rent it out, call me first, okay?”
He stared at her as if she were insane, while she matched his long stride easily on the return journey up the driveway.
“And now that you’ve parked it, maybe you’d care to explain why you’ve kept me waiting for half an hour?”
Tessa glanced at the watch she’d put on because technically this was a paying gig and a person should make the effort to appear businesslike. “Oh, did I?”
The guy looked as if he was going to bust a gasket.
“If we’re to have a successful partnership,” he said with careful enunciation, “don’t keep me waiting.”
Tessa stopped at the bottom of the fan of stairs that formed the entrance to the Spanish style house. “Mr. Singleton, if you don’t mind me saying so, you need some serious vitamin B therapy. Your stress levels must be off the charts.”
“I do not need vitamin B therapy. What I need is my daughter back and for people I’m paying to do a job to show up and do it when I ask them to.”
Did he always grind his teeth when he spoke? Up close and personal, she saw that his eyes were light brown, the color of a good, strong cup of tea.
Strong. Powerful. With the patience of a hypoglycemic crocodile.
“I want you to get your daughter back, too. As I explained on the phone, you can pay for the job but it’s totally up to the universe whether I actually get a vision or not. It’s not something I can control, and it certainly isn’t going to produce results just because you want it to.”
This, it appeared, was not the right answer.
Tessa shifted her stance, putting her weight on one foot and cocking her hip. “A, I am not unreliable, since I’m here when you requested I be here. And B, I am not one of your people. I’m offering you my abilities out of the goodness of my heart, but I can leave the same way I came. I don’t operate according to your schedule, Mr. Singleton. I need to be in a safe, nurturing environment where all I have on my mind is opening myself up to finding your daughter. If you’re going to rant and rave every time I open my mouth, this is not going to be a success. Do I make myself clear?”
Odds were good that no one had spoken to Jay Singleton in such a way since, gosh, maybe his fourth-grade teacher.
But hey, she was in the right. It was perfectly true that she needed to focus, and being yelled at every time she forgot his schedule was going to spoil that focus. Did the guy want to find his daughter or not?
She waited, her calm gaze on his infuriated one, until his mouth stopped working and he could speak.
“I am this close to firing you,” he finally managed to say past clenched teeth, holding his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart.
“I see that,” she said cheerfully. “But do me a favor and think about the vitamin B, okay?”
IF HE COULD JUST get through the next ten minutes, Griffin figured they could turn the girl over to Mandy to stick in a room somewhere and then he could get on with finding Christina. He heard raised voices out in the driveway but resisted the urge to step to the door to see what was going on. He wasn’t going to dignify her presence here with that much attention.
The door to the office swung open and the girl walked in, Singleton right behind her.
She flinched, as if she felt the force of his animosity, and then her gaze swung to his and locked.
Her wide-set blue eyes were filled with a mix of defensiveness, pride, and determination. Blond hair had been permed at some point, giving it a ripple that stopped at her chin, where it was cut in a bob. Her jeans hugged her in a way that drew a man’s attention to her hips and thighs. The plain white T-shirt under her denim jacket was probably meant to hide the curves under it, but it was no match for his skills at observation.
Now he knew why he’d remembered her. He’d felt this same jolt of attraction, this unexplainable urge to touch, when he’d watched her sitting on the bench in booking.
What a shame she had to be a fraud.
“I understand you two know each other.” Singleton crossed the room and stood behind his desk in the position of power. “I also understand the circumstances weren’t the best. I don’t want to know the details. Whatever they were, you leave them at the door. Starting now, you focus on my daughter.”
Griffin stayed where he was, to the left of the desk, leaving the woman in the middle of the carpet facing their joint scrutiny.
But somehow, she didn’t look marooned or uncomfortable. “Fine with me,” she said. She walked between them, hips swaying gently, and chose a wing chair by the window, which shrank their triangle, inverted it, and allowed her to invade the sacred space behind the desk. He watched Jay discipline himself and not order her back to the rug like a disobedient puppy.
“Officer Knox,” Tessa greeted him from her chair, as if the last time they’d met had been at an ice-cream social. She kicked off her slip-ons and tucked her feet up under her. A square of late-afternoon sun shone on her hair, lighting it and emphasizing the soft color of her skin. She settled into its warmth like a contented cat, and Griffin had a sudden vision of himself on his knees in front of the chair with his face in her lap.
God, where did that come from?
He shook off the image and took refuge behind cold formality. “Not anymore. It’s just plain Griffin now. I invalided out a few years ago.”
Some people would have said, “I’m sorry” or asked for details. Not this woman. She merely nodded and left his business to him.
Which was fine. He didn’t want her in his business. Didn’t want her in his head.
Didn’t want her.
“Let me tell you how this is going to work,” Singleton continued.
“I thought we already went through that.” Tessa smiled at him, and even with all his defenses up, Griffin was taken aback at the sheer wattage of that smile. A deep dimple dented her right cheek and he felt his distrust waver.
All good cons had a great smile, he reminded himself harshly. Look at Ted Bundy.
“Yes, you made your position perfectly clear,” Singleton said in a tone that told Griffin he wasn’t over it yet.
“And what was that?” Griffin asked. Had that been the discussion in raised voices outside? Now he regretted his noble impulse not to eavesdrop.
“I just asked for a nurturing environment that would create a state of mind where I’m open to a vision,” she said. “I also educated Mr. Singleton on how these things work.”
“And how do these things work?” he asked. He’d bet his next paycheck she’d be rapping on tables and channeling Shirley MacLaine before the day was over.
She gave him a level glance. “Officer—Mr. Knox, that attitude is not helping. You may be a skeptic, but I’ll ask you to keep your opinions to yourself while I’m here.”
Spine. The lady had spine under those curves.
“I just asked how they worked. I need to be educated.”
This time her gaze was a little scornful, a man-to-woman kind of look that made him realize he didn’t want to admit weakness of any kind in front of her. “I have no doubt about that,” she said in an innocent tone that communicated somehow that he was hopeless where women were concerned and probably hadn’t had a date in ten years.
Ten months was more to the point, but—
Wait just a minute, here!
“I’m going to need a quiet place where I can work,” she went on smoothly, turning to Singleton as if she hadn’t just zinged Griffin right between the ribs. “And I’ll need to spend a little time in your daughter’s room, getting impressions of her, looking at pictures, that kind of thing. Once I’m in a state of openness, I’m able to tolerate very few interruptions, so I’ll ask that your schedule impact me as little as possible.”
“Ms. Nichols—”
“I won’t isolate myself completely, of course. Contact with you and your household is necessary, so I’m fine with eating with the family or whatever.”
This was too much for the control freak on a tight leash inside Jay Singleton. Griffin braced himself.
“You’re welcome to eat with us,” Singleton said in a hushed tone that told Griffin he was holding back a shout. “But as far as all this time alone, that’s not possible.”
“Why not?” Tessa inquired.
“Because I need some way of recording this information, of compiling it into a data set that we can use. I can’t have you wandering around the house talking to yourself. What if we miss something?”
“Oh, I’ll report in,” Tessa said. She shifted so that her knees now pointed at Griffin. “And my memory is very good.”
Singleton shook his head. “Not good enough.”
She slid her feet off the chair and planted them on the floor. “We already discussed—”
Singleton rode right over her. “Every time you get data—a vision, voices in your head, whatever—I want someone there to hear it. And that someone is going to be Knox, here.”
“What?” Both of them turned to stare at him.
Singleton nodded at Griffin, who glared at him. “You two are going to be joined at the hip. Griffin, I want you to take down everything she says, every detail, every description. All of it, no matter how nonsensical. We’re talking 24/7. If she wakes up with a nightmare in the middle of the night, I want you there to listen. If she goes into a trance over her granola, you’re going to write it down. Every time you get material, I want to know about it right away.”
<
br /> This was the most ridiculous waste of time Griffin had ever heard of. Not to mention completely unethical. “I’m not going to—”
“What do you mean, 24—”
Jay’s glare was furious enough to silence them both. “If we can get a jump on this character before he makes his ransom call, we can get Christina out of this before any harm comes to her or my ex-wife finds out she’s gone. Clear?”
“No.”
All Tessa’s warm sensuality chilled as she got out of the chair and stalked to Jay’s desk. Which was good. Griffin didn’t need that to think about on top of this latest happy news.
“I told you what my abilities were, and what I need to be successful. Having him—” she flung a hand to the side to indicate Griffin without looking at him “—in my room at night, for God’s sake, is not going to give me the environment I need.”
“I don’t care about your goddamn nurturing environment,” Jay snapped. “I care about getting my daughter back, and right now you’re holding us up!”
“Fine.” She collected her handbag from the floor and tossed a smile at him as she headed for the door. “It’s obvious you don’t need me that badly. I quit. And I won’t even charge you for my time or the mileage down here.”
The flush of angry color had reached Jay’s forehead—a sign his temper was about to blow. “Griffin, stop her!”
Accordingly, he ambled toward the door and reached out to take the girl’s arm. She spun and his fingers grazed her skin.
“Going to try stuffing me in a police car again?” she asked with a dangerous light in her eye. He wouldn’t put it past her to swing that handbag or stomp on his instep if he tried to get physical.
A sudden vision of her struggling in his arms, her breasts crushed against his chest and her thighs pushing against his, send a flash of heat searing through him.
“No.” He stepped back to where it was safe, out of her space. “But don’t go.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You don’t trust me and he won’t listen. How successful can this be?”
She was right on both counts, but it wasn’t his job to say so. “Think of it from his point of view,” he said in a tone too low for Jay to hear. “He’s frustrated, things are out of control, and he’s terrified. Give the guy a break.”
Sex & Sensibility Page 4