Finder's Keeper (22 page)

Mia chose that moment to step out of the house, pausing on the porch to shake Valdez’s hand. She didn’t smile, but her cool competence seemed to put the effusive property manager at ease. It certainly soothed Chase.

“We’re still trying. Have any of the other finders had any luck? She’s running out of time here.”

“Nothing yet. Ciara’s been pulled into another federal investigation so it might be a while before it gets to the top of her queue.”

Chase cursed softly. He’d already visited all the pawn shops in the area—on the off chance Mia’s watch had ended up in one of them, but there were no gold watches of the size she described. He’d wanted to find it—by magic or logic. Wanted to be her hero, though she seemed to care more about his brain scans than the missing watch most days.

“How is Dr. Corregianni handling its absence?”

“Pretty well, all things considered. She’s running some tests on my ability, trying to figure out how I do what I do.”

“Is she?” Karma’s languid voice was suddenly very interested. “Tell her I might have some contacts who would be interested in funding an official study if she’s so inclined.”

“I’ll do that.”

Valdez retreated to the SUV he’d parked in the driveway and Mia started down the walk toward Chase, her face comfortingly expressionless, showing no reaction to the fact that he’d freaked out and fled.

“Give Mia my best,” Karma said casually. “Good night, Chase.”

He mumbled a response and pocketed his cell phone. There was no point in wondering how Karma had known he was with Mia. His boss’s instincts could be eerie, though she claimed she didn’t share the psychic abilities of her consultants.

As Valdez peeled out, waving out the window, Mia rested a hip against the hood of Chase’s car at his side.

“Enthusiastic guy,” Chase said, feeling uncharacteristically tongue-tied. “I had no idea furnaces were such a turn-on.”

“He is energetic.” Mia made a face, clearly sharing his opinion of the obnoxious property manager. “Once he figured out he couldn’t install the new furnace tonight anyway, even if you made a choice, he agreed to email you in the morning with estimates on various models and information on the tax rebates that apply for the energy-efficient ones.”

“Thank you.” Some first date. He jerked his chin toward the house. “I know how to show a girl a good time, huh? What woman can resist the old broken-furnace line?”

“Am I complaining? It’s not like you haven’t done anything to help me.”

“At this rate we’ll need a CPA to balance the books between us. See who owes who what.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said softly. “Crack jokes and be witty all the time. Not with me. I get that this sucks for you.”

He shrugged off her comment, feeling the inches between them like a glacial abyss. “I should stick around. Karma’s sending one of the ghost girls to check for haunting issues—apparently furnaces are a symptom—but I can call you a cab if you want. Or why don’t you take my car?”

He dug into his pocket for his keys, but Mia’s cool hand closed over his wrist, stopping him. Her brown eyes were piercing. “I’ll stay. Unless you don’t want me to.”

Something thick parked itself in his throat. Instead of speaking, he looped an arm around her shoulders and tugged her against his side. She looped her arms around his waist, burrowing close. Her icy fingers brushed his skin and he jumped, then held her tighter. “Jesus, you’re freezing.”

“Poor circulation.”

He caught her hands, focusing on chaffing them to warm her. Neither of them suggested waiting inside the house. He wasn’t ready to go back in and Mia wasn’t pushing.

She tucked her cheek against his chest. Even though she was the one leaning against him, he felt like she was the pillar holding him up. She may be slim nearly to the point of frailty, but she never bent. Her will was iron, firm and straight, propping him up when he would have wavered.

“So ghosts, huh?” Her tone was arch, clearly not talking about his specific ghosts, but the existence of spirits in general.

“Did your scientific brain just implode?” he teased.

“My scientific brain will wait until it has a chance to evaluate the evidence.”

The evidence arrived moments later on a Harley.

Jo Banks, Karmic’s premier ghost exterminator, climbed off her hog, yanked off her helmet to reveal her spiked blond-with-black-tips hair and flashed them a cheeky grin. “Somebody call Ghostbusters?”

Chase had only met Jo a handful of times, but he’d always enjoyed her mouthy sense of humor at the Karmic Consultants Christmas party. She certainly hadn’t mellowed since she hooked up with billionaire hotel-magnate Wyatt Haines. If anything, she’d become an even more unfiltered, unabashed version of herself. Her smile was just as wicked, but it came quicker now.

Mia frowned at the tall, stacked punkette the entire time Chase was briefing Jo on the situation, evidently not sure what to make of her. She kept frowning long after Jo had disappeared into the house, leaving strict instructions that they stay out here “lest things get wiggy.”

“She’s…”

“Not what you expected?”

“No. But I’d love to scan her brain.”

Chase snorted, recognizing Mia’s brand of compliment in the wistful comment. “Karma says she knows some people who may want to fund an official study on our talents, if you’re game.”

A look that was equal parts lustful hunger and greed suffused Mia’s face. “Seriously? Did you just offer me funding?”

“I take it that’s a big deal?”

“Researchers spend half our lives begging for money to do our work. To have someone
offer
…”

He grinned lecherously. “Do I get a finder’s fee?”

He hadn’t planned on kissing her. It wasn’t a conscious intention, but before he knew what he was doing, his lips were on hers, gently, slowly, a comfortable, familiar kiss unlike any they’d shared before.

The sweet hello of a kiss made him realize how strange their relationship was—like the scales balancing intimacy and chemistry were wobbling wildly back and forth but never finding true center. Until now. This kiss was equilibrium.

Mia rose up on her toes, kissing him back without urgency, and he settled in to enjoy the lazy conversation of it.

When she finally pulled back, neither of them were out of breath, but his heart was thumping erratically. Chase looked up at the house.

“Tonight was the first time I went inside since the accident.”

Mia arched in his arms to study his face. Chase didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to know what she saw. Instead he focused on the house.

“What was he like, your brother?”

Memories dusted themselves off and rose up. “He was honest, straightforward, really direct. You would’ve liked him.” He gave a soft huffing laugh. “But he couldn’t lie for shit. One time, when he was supposed to be watching me, we snuck into a neighbor’s yard to do flips on their trampoline. Mom hated tramps and had made us swear we would never go near it, convinced we would break our necks…” He trailed off, the memory startlingly sharp.

“What happened?”

“I did a triple flip and broke my arm.” He shoved up his sleeve, pointing to a small white scar on his forearm. “The bone punched right through. Toby puked all over the trampoline when he saw it. We ran home and by the time we got there I was about ready to pass out.”

“Shock.”

“Yeah, but I still had this great story about ninjas invading our yard and my arm getting broken defending our turf and all sorts of random bullshit I was sure my mom would buy. But Toby was a straight arrow. He called her, confessed everything and even offered to clean the trampoline. That was Toby.”

Once he’d started, the stories spilled out. Stories about his brother, about his parents, about Katie. He talked himself hoarse, wandering through memories he wasn’t even sure were wholly true anymore—too tempered by the fact of grief to hold the bite of reality. Mia listened and he just talked.

He hadn’t done that either. Avoiding the memories inside the house and inside himself, he hadn’t let himself grieve or move on. He’d just frozen in place trying to keep it from being true, stuck in denial. Was that the first stage of grief? The second? Whichever it was, he’d never gotten beyond it. Six years of stasis.

Then Mia happened.

He trailed off as Jo marched out of the house, dusting off her hands.

“Well?” he called out as her long strides ate up the walk.

“Zilch,” Jo called back. “Nada. Big fat nothing. You’re clean, Hunter. Not a single ghostie in residence and not even the lingering energy that there ever was one. Clean as a whistle.” She paused, frowning. “If whistles are really clean with all those people spitting all over them. Sounds unsanitary.”

Chase didn’t care about whistles. He was too busy being relieved his brother wasn’t trapped as a ghost in the house, in stasis as surely as Chase had been for the last six years.

Mia stepped away from him as Jo straddled her Harley.

“Ms. Banks? I was wondering if I might run some tests on you. On your brain, specifically.”

Jo snorted. “Honey, do I look like a lab rat to you?”

Mia opened her mouth to reply, but whatever she would have said was drowned out by the cough of the Harley firing up. Jo secured her helmet and roared into the night, off to wreak havoc on her billionaire boyfriend’s life, no doubt.

Mia spun back toward him, all but stomping her feet in frustration. “Damn.”

“Don’t worry. She’ll do it if Karma asks her to.”

“She makes a good point. About the whistles. The human mouth is a cesspool of bacteria.”

“Is it any wonder I can’t help wanting to kiss you when you talk about cesspools in peoples’ mouths?” He opened the car door. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”

He closed the door after her and rounded the hood, taking one last look back at the house. Maybe he’d call Brody in the morning. Let him set up a meeting with a realtor. Maybe it was time.

Chase slid into the car beside Mia.

No more stasis.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Father Knows Best

“Mama?” Mia let herself in through the kitchen. Her call echoed back through the house, the complete silence convincing her the house was empty.

Crap.
She’d hoped to catch her mother at home. Teresa had called again this morning, in tears because their mother had apparently scheduled a series of appointments with various fertility specialists—making her stance on the adoption very clear even though she and Teresa still weren’t speaking.

Mia was the last person to be nominated as family diplomat, but she’d found herself agreeing to act as Teresa’s ambassador to their mother just to stop her sister’s sobs. She’d taken a late lunch and driven over to her parents’ place, rehearsing the piece of her mind she planned on giving her mother the entire way. She’d worked herself into as much of a state of righteous indignation as she’d ever felt, perfectly aware that she was using Teresa’s situation as an excuse to pick a long overdue fight with her mother.

Now the empty house taunted her.

“Mimi?”

Or maybe not so empty, but the voice that called from the den was a hesitant baritone, not her mother’s strident alto.

She wandered past the infamous pantry to the one room that hadn’t been touched when her parents renovated and tucked her head inside her dad’s man cave. “Hi, Daddy.”

Franklin Delano Corregianni sat in the battered recliner her mother wouldn’t allow in any other room of the house, surrounded by wood paneling and books on all sides. A twelve-inch television was on in one corner, but he had his back to the basketball game replaying on it. He was a wiry man with thinning hair and a face that would always be called
distinctive
before handsome, but just seeing his unflappable calm had always soothed something uneasy in Mia. It did the same today, her anger retreating as her father waved her into the room.

“Is something wrong?”

Not surprising he would think so. Mia never left work during the day. Even on the weekends, she was more likely to be in the lab than anywhere else. A trait which now seemed myopic rather than dedicated.

“I was hoping to catch Mom at home.”

“She’s at one of her lunches. Save the Owls? Or maybe Thursday is Feed Africa.” He shrugged. Both of her parents had retired a couple years ago, but while her father had buried himself in all the books he’d never had time to read, her mother had vowed to leave no charity volunteerless. It would have been noble if Mia hadn’t suspected she mostly went for the gossip.

“She’s probably telling the entire neighborhood how Teresa’s insulted her by deciding to adopt.”

He tipped his head to the side slowly. “Your mother wants you girls to be happy.”

“But only if what we do matches her definition of what will make us happy.”

“Mia.” The scold was soft, but all the more effective for the lack of emphasis.

She flushed, ashamed of the negative words, but refusing to haul them back. Her gaze flicked to the stylish straight-backed chair stationed so the arm brushed her father’s recliner. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t her father’s style. Her mother’s chair in her father’s room. They were so different, they should have been incompatible, but that chair spoke to how they’d accepted one another’s differences. If only her mother could be so accepting of her children…

“Mama thinks adoption is wonderful for everyone else in the world. Why can’t she be happy for Teresa?”

Her father closed the hardback on his lap—something about the fall of the Roman Empire—and nodded her toward the overstuffed love seat. The cracked leather creaked as she perched on it.

“Your mother doesn’t want to believe Teresa has given up.”

“Adopting isn’t ‘giving up’ and even if Teresa has decided not to throw any more energy at trying to conceive a biological child, it isn’t Mama’s choice.”

“No, but it is hard for her to accept all the same. Give her time.”

“She’s upsetting Teresa. I don’t see why we have to give Mama time when it’s
Teresa’s
life we’re talking about.”

“Is it?”

Mia felt a flash of anger, so unusual in her father’s presence that it gave her pause. “This isn’t about me or my relationship with Mama.” She sighed, her eyes flicking back to the empty straight-backed chair. “How do you do it? You’re so different…” Like she and Chase. Polar opposites in so many ways.