by Jayne Castle
Amaryllis hesitated. “He wanted sole control of Lodestar?”
“The idea was that when the gang took control of the islands, I would be among the victims. I was supposed to be the dead hero. With me out of the picture, Jackson would take control. He planned to run Lodestar single-handedly.”
“But what about his deal with the raiders?”
“You’d have to have known Jackson to understand. He expected to win at everything. He was from a world in which Ryes always came out on top. He thought he could handle the pirates after he was in charge of Lodestar.”
“My God.”
Lucas met her eyes. “Truth is, it wasn’t a bad plan. He probably could have gotten rid of his so-called allies once he was in control. The pirates were loosely organized and undisciplined. They had few supplies. They couldn’t have lasted long without Lodestar assistance.”
“So Jackson Rye planned for the pirates to do his dirty work for him. Then he intended to turn on them once you were safely out of the picture.”
“That pretty well sums it up,” Lucas said wearily. “But the leader of the raiders had already figured out that Jackson was potentially dangerous. He never had any intention of allowing Rye to remain alive. He just used Jackson and then killed him.”
“The story was in the papers for weeks,” Amaryllis said slowly. “But I never heard that your partner had betrayed the company and all those people.”
“You didn’t hear about it because I kept it out of the news reports.” Lucas’s smile was cold. “Figured it wouldn’t do the company image any good.”
Amaryllis watched him. “Is that the real reason you hushed up the facts?”
“I’m a businessman at heart. I always do what’s best for the bottom line.”
“Mr. Expediency, is that it?” Amaryllis took a sip of coff-tea. “Know what I think? I think that there were a few other reasons why you decided to bury the truth.”
“What other reasons?”
“The Ryes and Miranda Locking. You didn’t want any of them to learn the awful truth about Jackson, did you? You tried to protect them all.”
Lucas’s expression was unreadable. “Like I said, it wouldn’t have been good for the company image.”
“I think it was very noble of you to protect his name and reputation,” Amaryllis said.
He gave her a derisive smile. “If you really believe that, you’re not nearly as smart as full-spectrum prisms are supposed to be. What I did wasn’t noble. It was pragmatic.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Definitely noble. But I must admit, I’m amazed you were so successful at concealing the facts.”
“As president and sole surviving owner of the company, I was in charge. I also had a couple of friends who helped me handle the situation. The reporters got the news I wanted them to get.”
“I see.”
Lucas swallowed the last of the coff-tea. “And if you still believe that I kept things quiet because I was so damn noble, there’s one other fact you should consider.”
“What’s that?”
“I mentioned that Jackson Rye took a companion with him the day he rendezvoused with the pirates.”
“Yes. You said he was killed, too.”
“That companion wasn’t a man. It was my wife.”
Amaryllis’s eyes misted. “I’m so sorry, Lucas. I recall reading that your wife also died during the initial raid. How terrible that she happened to be with Jackson that day at the camp.”
Lucas’s mouth curved in a bleak smile. “Are you always this naïve or do you have to practice?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dora and Jackson were having an affair. Now do you understand? She didn’t just happen to be with him that day. They went to the camp because she was sleeping with him, because they often disappeared together, and because she knew all about Rye’s deal with the pirates.”
This time coff-tea did splash over the edge of Amaryllis’s mug. She ignored it. Unable to think of anything to say, she reached out to touch Lucas’s hand with what was meant to be a fleeting gesture of silent sympathy.
Lucas caught her fingers before she could withdraw. He squeezed gently, just enough to convey a warning. “I don’t know why I told you the story. I’ve never told anyone else. I expect you to keep it confidential.”
“Of course.”
“Absolutely confidential,” he emphasized. “I don’t even want your boss to know. Understood?”
“Yes.” Amaryllis could have sworn that she felt another whisper of the cold wind she had sensed earlier in the museum corridor. “Understood. You have my word on it.”
“The word of a professional prism.” Lucas turned her hand over, exposing the inside of her wrist. He studied the veins that ran just beneath the skin as if they were lines on a map that led to some unknown destination. “If you tell anyone else what I told you tonight, I can make life difficult for you.”
Amaryllis looked into his eyes. In that moment she knew that the chill that filled the kitchen emanated from him. A dark fog seemed to be gathering beneath her kitchen cupboards. She was afraid to turn her head and look.
Lucas was doing this, she thought. She did not know how, but she knew that he was responsible. Anger blossomed inside her.
“Don’t you dare threaten me, Lucas Trent. I gave you my word of honor.”
“Sorry.” Lucas released her hand abruptly. “I’m in a lousy mood, and you’re catching the brunt of it. That’s not right. None of this is your fault.”
“No, it isn’t.” Surreptitiously, she waggled her fingers to make sure they all still functioned properly. The sensation of a cold wind blowing disappeared. She glanced at her kitchen cupboards and saw nothing but clean black-and-white tiles. “And I don’t appreciate being intimidated.”
“Something tells me there’s not much that could do that.”
And I’ll bet it would take a heck of a lot to intimidate you, too, she thought. “Look, don’t be too hard on yourself just because you put your trust in the wrong people. It happens to everyone. Even prisms make mistakes like that.”
“Even prisms, huh?” Amusement flickered in his gaze. “That certainly makes me feel a lot better. You ever make that kind of mistake?”
She reflected fleetingly on her relationship with Gifford Osterley. “Even me. Being a prism doesn’t guarantee perfect intuition, you know.”
“Amazing. I would never have guessed.” Lucas’s lashes lowered slightly, just enough to veil his eyes. “Who was he?”
Amaryllis was so irritated by his undisguised condescension that she considered showing him the door right then and there. But she felt a niggling sense of guilt at the thought of throwing him out. He had, after all, just spilled his guts to her. That couldn’t have been easy or simple for a man like him. He obviously regretted the indiscretion already.
It occurred to her that telling Lucas one of her own small secrets might make him feel that the scales had been balanced. Perhaps that would put him in a better mood when he received the bill in a few days. One of Clementine’s many axioms rang in Amaryllis’s head: A happy client is a repeat client.
“His name was Gifford Osterley,” Amaryllis said quietly. “We worked together at the university until I left six months ago. He’s a full professor. Next in line to become head of the Department of Focus Studies.”
“Prism, I take it?”
“Oh, yes. Very strong. Practically a full spectrum.”
“Not quite as strong as you, then?”
A trickle of unease went through Amaryllis. “I am a full spectrum, after all.”
“How could I forget?”
She cleared her throat. “At any rate, Gifford and I were involved, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I can figure it out.”
She frowned. “It was serious. We talked about marriage.”
“A nonagency marriage?” Lucas gave her mockingly scandalized look. “You? I don’t believe it.”
“Don’t be
ridiculous.” Amaryllis set her teeth. This was what came of trying to be sympathetic and kind to Lucas Trent. He had no ability to appreciate her generosity of spirit. “We would have registered with an agency when the time came, but we both expected that the counselors would have declared us a good match.”
“Do I hear a touch of prism arrogance here?”
“I suppose you could say we were a little arrogant,” Amaryllis admitted grudgingly. “We are both very highly trained prisms, you know. We thought we knew what we were doing.”
“Yeah, I saw all your fancy degrees.”
“Gifford has even more than I do.”
“Hooray for him. So what happened with you and Osterley?”
“I discovered that Gifford had a relationship with an attractive talent who worked as his research assistant.”
“He was sleeping with her?”
Amaryllis looked down at her unfinished coff-tea. “Yes.”
“How did you find out?”
“The hard way.” Amaryllis swallowed. If there had been a mirror in the kitchen, she knew she would have seen her face go from pink to red. “I blundered into a focus session in one of the labs and discovered Gifford and his research assistant together.”
“Focusing on something other than academically important psychic matters, I take it?”
Anger, pain, and embarrassment fused within Amaryllis. The image still burned in her mind whenever she recalled that traumatic afternoon. “They were having sex on Gifford’s desk, if you must know.”
Lucas’s eyes glinted. “His desk, huh?”
“Yes.” Amaryllis raised her chin, the better to look down her nose at him. “I would have thought it would have been extremely uncomfortable, but they appeared to enjoy it.”
“I take it you’ve never done it on a desk?”
The last remnants of Amaryllis’s charitable inclinations dissolved. “I’m glad you find it amusing. I certainly didn’t.”
Lucas’s expression relaxed. “I’ll give you the same advice you just gave me. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It wasn’t your fault that you fell for the wrong guy.”
“I felt like such a fool,” she whispered.
“Well, at least you weren’t downright stupid about it.” Lucas paused. “Unlike me, you didn’t think you were so smart you could just skip a marriage agency altogether.”
Amaryllis stared at him. “You mean you didn’t use an agency when you got married the first time?”
“Hell, no.” His mouth curved faintly. “I was an islander. I knew how to take care of myself. I’d been running a successful company since I was twenty-four. I could find jelly-ice in the heart of the jungle. I was rich and getting richer. I figured I could choose my own wife without any help from the experts.”
“What happened?”
Lucas looked away for a brief moment. When his eyes met hers again they were unreadable. “The same thing the experts say usually happens when people choose their own spouses. I screwed up big time.”
“That is so sad. Were you very much in love?”
“Sure.” Lucas gave her a laconic look. “People who run off to get married always think they’re in love, don’t they? Why else would they run off?”
“I don’t know.” Amaryllis looked down at her hands. “My parents ran off together shortly after I was born. But they didn’t get married. They couldn’t. My father already had a wife.”
Understanding lit Lucas’s eyes. “I see.”
“They were both killed in a storm on the way to the Western Islands. I was with my aunt at the time. Everyone thinks my parents intended to start over under a new name and send for me when they found work.”
“I’m sorry.” Lucas hesitated. “So you were left… alone?”
She smiled wanly. “You may as well use the right word. I was illegitimate. One of the things that attracted me to Gifford was that he didn’t seem to care about the fact that I was a bastard. Some people do, you know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“But to answer your question, no, I wasn’t alone. My mother’s people took me in.”
“Your aunt and uncle?”
“Yes. And the rest of the Larks, too. They were all kind and loving. I couldn’t have asked for a better family.”
“What about your father’s people?”
Amaryllis poured herself another cup of coff-tea. “They prefer to pretend that I don’t exist.”
“Figures.”
A short silence descended. It lasted just long enough for Amaryllis to again regret having invited Lucas in for coff-tea. What on St. Helens had gotten into her, she wondered. She had just told a virtual stranger some of her most deeply held secrets. Not all of them, but more than enough. She had turned into a blathering idiot. And all because she’d felt sorry for a client.
It was time she went back to behaving in a more professional manner.
She glanced pointedly at the clock. “It’s getting late.”
“So it is.” Lucas got to his feet with a surprising show of reluctance. “I’ll be on my way. Thanks for the coff-tea.”
“You’re welcome.”
He smiled wryly. “And the sympathy.”
Amaryllis softened. “I know it must have been a difficult evening for you.”
“I’ve had worse.” He scooped his jacket off the stool and started for the door.
Amaryllis trailed after him. “Lucas, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”
He turned around with unexpected swiftness. “Yeah?”
“That other talent you detected tonight,” she began slowly.
Something that could have been disappointment flashed in his eyes. The next instant it was gone. “What about him?”
“When I sensed him through you, I realized that he was very powerful. But I couldn’t identify the type of talent he was focusing. I’ve never come in contact with any psychic energy of that nature. It was very subtle but very strong.”
“He was good,” Lucas agreed without much interest.
“Well, you’re the great detector,” she challenged. “Could you tell what sort of psychic power the person was focusing?”
Lucas looked amused. “You didn’t realize who the talent was?”
“No.”
“I can’t be absolutely certain, but given the situation, I’d stake next year’s profits that it was Madison Sheffield.”
“Sheffield.” Amaryllis was astounded. “Senator Sheffield?”
“The next governor of our fair city-state, or so everyone claims. I guess you could say he was working the room.”
“Are you serious?”
Lucas eyed her thoughtfully. “You really didn’t understand what was going on, did you?”
“No, I did not. When I work with a talent, I can sense what he or she senses. You have the ability to detect other talents, so naturally I picked up the other talent in the room at the same time you did. As I told you, I also picked up the echoes of the other prism.”
“You said the prism’s style of working felt familiar.”
“It was. I would swear that whoever it was trained at the same place I did, the Department of Focus Studies at the university. I could feel Professor Landreth’s influence.”
“Who is Landreth?”
“He was the head of the department for years.”
“The name sounds familiar.”
“Probably because of the newspaper articles that were written about him after he was killed in a hiking accident last month. It was a terrible tragedy.”
Lucas nodded. “I remember something about it now.”
“He was a brilliant man.” Amaryllis spoke forcefully because Lucas did not seem overly impressed with just who and what Professor Jonathan Landreth had been. “He contributed enormously to our understanding of the focus link and how it works. More importantly, he wrote the Code of Focus Ethics. His death was a great loss to the profession and to research.”
“Uh huh.”
“It was a great personal
loss for me, as well.” Amaryllis’s teeth clamped together again. “He was my mentor. I admired him enormously. I miss him.”
“I’m sorry.” Lucas looked as if he didn’t know what else to say. “Well, I should be on my way.”
“Wait, you didn’t tell me what sort of talent Senator Sheffield was focusing.”
“From what little I got before he burned out his prism, I’d say that he was generating pure bat-snake oil and charm. In other words, charisma.”
“Charisma?” Amaryllis repeated, uncomprehending.
“It’s a politician’s stock-in-trade.”
“But charisma is not a psychic power.”
“What would you call it?”
“I don’t know.” Amaryllis waved one hand in a small, vague gesture. “A personality trait or something, I suppose. But not a psychic talent.”
“Power is power.” A smile came and went at the edge of Lucas’s mouth. “Regardless of whether or not it’s been documented and studied by the experts.”
Amaryllis pursed her lips. “I’m not sure about this. I don’t think that it would be ethical to focus charisma, assuming it’s a form of psychic energy. Especially if the talent was a politician.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your problem. So what if the guy was focusing with an intent to convince people to vote for him and to donate to his campaign fund? That’s what politics is all about.”
Amaryllis was not mollified. “But if charisma can be focused for those purposes, it would be an act of deliberate misrepresentation or fraud or something.”
Lucas looked amused. “Welcome to the real world, lady.”
She scowled. “Doesn’t it bother you that a very high-class talent in Sheffield’s position is using his abilities to con people?”
“He’s a politician, Amaryllis.”
“But he was using an academically trained prism to focus.”
“So what? I used one tonight, too.”
“But Sheffield’s prism should know better than to become involved in an unethical use of talent. Professor Landreth drilled the Code of Focus Ethics into all his students.”
“No kidding.”
“There are standards in my profession,” Amaryllis snapped. “And the prism who was working with Sheffield tonight may have violated them.”