Finder's Keeper (8 page)

Chase swallowed thickly, for once struggling for words. “I couldn’t get a lock on it.”

Mia rolled her eyes so hard she nearly fell over. “Of course you couldn’t.”

Her accusation snapped him out of the strange place her most private thoughts had thrown him. He frowned down at her. “Don’t blame me, sweetheart. You were the one who wasn’t even bothering to think of it.”

“Yes, I was!”

“Stop it. You aren’t even a good liar.”

The death glare was back. “I don’t see what difference it makes
what
I think about.”

“I
told
you it made a difference. You have to focus. You have to want it badly. More than you want anything else in that moment.”

“I
do
want it.”

“Not badly enough.”

“I can’t believe you’re trying to make your failure my fault. Is this how you people do business?”

“Did you see
Pirates of the Caribbean
?”

“What? How does that—”

“Did you see the movie or not?”

“I saw it,” she snapped, turning to stalk toward her car.

Chase followed, almost stepping on the back of her sensible pumps. “Do you remember Captain Jack’s compass? How it couldn’t find shit unless it was what you truly wanted?”

“Yes. So?”

“Think of me as the human version of that compass. I can find any object, as long as it is what you want the most in the moment you touch me.”

She spun to face him, stopping so abruptly he nearly plowed into her. He caught her arms to steady her and she nearly fell again smacking away his hands. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“
That’s
the most ridiculous thing? You should get out more.”

“I think we’re done here.”

Chase rocked back on his heels. “You sure give up easy.”

“I have better things to do with my time than stand here indulging your fantasies. Like pursuing
legitimate
means of reacquiring my watch, rather than wasting my money on mumbo jumbo.”

“Shit, Mia, would it kill you to visualize the thing for five minutes? Think of it as an experiment. Controlled variables and all that shit.”

“Visualization isn’t scientific. I’ll draw you a picture.”

“Won’t help. Finding it isn’t about the item. It’s about
you
. Your connection to it. Your imprint on it.”

“My imprint,” she repeated, her tone so dubious it bordered on disgust.

“The things we value, the things we
need
, we tend to leave our psychic fingerprints all over them, creating a link with them. Sometimes even without ever coming into physical contact with them. That’s why I need you to want it. It tells me what kind of fingerprint I’m looking for and that lets me find your link.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It ain’t science.”

“No, it most certainly is not.”

She turned away from him, stomping a few feet before stopping and riffling through her purse with a frenzy that was all too familiar. She cursed under her breath and a big ole grin spread across Chase’s face.

Dr. Mia Corregianni couldn’t find her car keys.

For a moment, he hesitated. He didn’t want to crawl around in her innermost thoughts again. His little parlor trick was supposed to be a surface thing. He wasn’t supposed to see inside her soul like that and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to.
Don’t be a pussy, Hunter.

Chase reached out and brushed the bare skin at the back of her hand. A mimosa rush.
Get away from the goddamn surfer punk…find the damn KEYS.
That internal metal wire snapped taut with a twang, an image smacking hard into his brain.
That’s
what it was supposed to feel like. He pulled back his hand, dropping the connection.

“You put them in your coat pocket. And you left your coat inside.”

“I didn’t bring a coat,” Mia snapped, fiercely satisfied to prove him wrong. Then memory asserted itself and her spine jerked straight. “Shit. I did bring a coat.”

“Would you like me to get it for you?”

She glared at him, pivoting to stalk back inside. He couldn’t have
found
the keys. It was impossible. “You saw it earlier.”

“Nope. You just really wanted those keys.”

She grabbed the dark gray wool coat off the rack in the foyer and shrugged into it. He wasn’t psychic. He
wasn’t
.

“Left inner pocket,” he prompted cheerfully, earning another icy look.

She stalked back out the door, brushing past him. He trailed her into the parking lot.

“You’re something when you’re upset. You know that, Mia?”

“I’m not upset.”

“Oh, you’re livid. What I can’t figure is why. What’s so terrible about me having a little psychic gift? Why not let me try to find your watch?”

“Because I don’t
want
you to be able to find it!” She spun to confront him, flinging the words at him, and only when his eyebrows rose in surprise did she even become aware of what she’d said.
Shit
. Her anger sucked back in on itself like a supernova in reverse.

She didn’t want him to find the watch because then she would have to believe him. She would have to face the fact that he could. Mia leaned against her car door, trying to find her mental center.

She
loved
science. She loved knowing the why behind things, figuring out how all the pieces came together. Science was order and logic. It was everything good and solid in her world. It was the foundation upon which she’d built her life and she hated the idea of superstition threatening it. She’d spent her entire life defending science against the superstition that ran rampant in her family. She’d gotten to the point where she
needed
magic to be ridiculous. On an emotional level.

And that wasn’t scientific, that emotional need. When had she become so irrational?

“You’re right.” The words tasted sour coming out of her mouth, but she forced herself to say them anyway. “I can’t discount a hypothesis without testing it simply because I don’t like it and I don’t want it to work. That goes against every scientific precept I know.” Mia sighed, studying the grooves in the asphalt at her feet.

Fifteen minutes ago she’d told Karma that magic was just that which humanity did not yet have the scientific maturity to understand, but here she was being just as willfully ignorant as all those people whose beliefs seemed so foolish to her.

“True science doesn’t make allowances for what I want the results to be. I have to take my emotions out of this. Treat it like a proper experiment.” She had to really jump in with both feet. Yes, it was ludicrous and unbelievable to think he could psychically conjure her pocket watch, but maybe that was fitting, since the reason she needed it back so badly was pretty ludicrous and unbelievable.

She lifted her face, tipping back her chin and bracing for the worst. “I want to try again.”

Chase made a face. “I feel like the firing squad of your beliefs.”

“I don’t have beliefs. I have theories.”

He shook his head. “I don’t buy that. Science is a religion to you. It’s a belief system and you hold it just as sacred as most people do their God.”

She gritted her teeth, hating how true that statement felt. She didn’t want it to be true. Any more than she wanted him to be a real psychic. “Let’s do this.”

Chase hesitated. “Focus, okay?” he instructed. “Really think about the watch. Block everything else from your mind and just think about how badly you want that watch back in your hands, okay?”

“I can do that.”

“You got it? All focused?”

“I’m ready.” She extended her hand, the fingers held stiff.

Chase didn’t take her hand this time, just rested his lightly on top of hers.

Mia closed her eyes, pushing aside every thought but the watch. She pictured it in her mind, the damn thing that was causing all this trouble. If only her family didn’t put so much faith in a stupid collection of gears. If only they would ever forgive her for losing it. It hadn’t worked for her anyway. She didn’t know how long ago it had vanished from the safe, but she’d never had a time in the last year when she felt like her romantic prospects were looking up. She just wished her parents had never forced her to take a turn with the damn thing in the first place. She would so much rather have been left alone. Why couldn’t they just let her be happy alone? Not that she wanted to be alone. She wanted what Gina had, without having to be Gina to get it, but none of this would have happened—

Chase jerked back and swore. “You aren’t focusing.”

“I am!” Mia protested—though her focus had kind of deteriorated. He wasn’t listening, anyway. He was too busy pacing and rubbing his hands like Lady Macbeth.

“I’ve had tough finds before,” he muttered and she wasn’t sure whether the pep talk was for her or him. “I broke through them and I’ll break this one. We can do this. We just need to shake it up. Change…” Chase stopped pacing and spun to face her. “Tell you what. Let’s return to the scene of the crime. Sometimes reliving the experience of discovering something is lost will help trigger a stronger desire to find it.”

Mia hesitated. Instinct still demanded she just say
Sorry it didn’t work, have a nice life
, but Gina’s comments from the night before came back to her. She hadn’t meant to mock her family’s beliefs. She certainly hadn’t
intentionally
lost the watch. Giving this superstition a chance seemed only fair. A real chance. She’d follow it through to the end. If only to prove to herself that she wasn’t irrationally discounting a scientific possibility.

“Let’s go back to my place,” she said, hitting the button to unlock her car. “The safe is there. Will your bike fit in the trunk?”

This time it was Chase who hesitated, his eyes shadowed, but only for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”

Chase jerked his hand away from Mia and slammed the door in his mind, trying to shake off the murky swell of her intangible desires—and the disturbing intimacy they caused. “Ooookay,” he muttered, slumping against the wall beside the safe, the acidic bite of her mimosa taste still lingering in his mouth. “That didn’t work.”

He’d had clients who had mixed motivations and had a hard time focusing on the item they wanted, but this was the first time it was as if she resented both the item and the method of retrieving it. He couldn’t break through the walls she’d constructed within herself against magic—though she didn’t seem to be consciously resisting anymore. At least that was a step in the right direction.

“What am I doing wrong?” Mia grumbled.

“You don’t actually want to find the watch,” he told her.

“Yes, I do!”

He held up his hands in surrender. “Easy on the death glare, honey. I come in peace, remember?”

“I
do
,” she insisted, a little less violently. “I need it.”

“You might need it, but you don’t want it. And your mixed feelings about the damn thing are making me dizzy.”

“I’m
trying
.” Mia slumped to her closet floor. “It’s just hard to turn off thirty-four years of hating the damn thing long enough to actually want it back.”

Thirty-four
. Wow. He would have pegged her a decade younger than that. Though he guessed multiple Ph.Ds didn’t come much younger.

He crouched next to her. “You wanna talk about why you hate it? Purge a little before we try again? Maybe tell me why you need it if you’d just as soon drop it over Niagara Falls?”

“A hundred and fifty years,” she groaned. “It’s been passed around my family for a century and a half and no one has ever lost it. How can I face my parents after I tell them I lost the single most important piece of our family history? They all know I think the legend behind it is idiotic. They all know how hard I’ve tried to avoid being its caretaker, even for a day, and now this? They’ll think I’ve done it on purpose. They’ll think I
wanted
it to be lost forever just so they would stop talking about it.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did, but I didn’t do it intentionally!”

Chase took her hand, just for comfort, keeping his gift firmly locked down. “Look, I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear, but maybe you aren’t the best person for me to be using as a guide. There’s something different about the read I get from you. The intangibles…the emotional static of what you want… It’s louder with you and I’m picking up on more of your thoughts.”

“You’re reading my mind?” she asked, her skepticism clear.

“In a manner of speaking. I don’t want to invade your privacy.” Or experience the jarring intimacy of the connection any more than absolutely necessary. “Is there someone else in your family who might have a more pure relationship with the watch who would be willing to—”

“Oh God, no! They can’t know it’s missing.
No one
can know.”

“Just one person. Someone who can keep a secret.”

Mia snorted out a humorless laugh. “You clearly haven’t met my family. Secrets aren’t a concept they understand.”

“Are you sure? No one trustworthy? “

“Let’s keep that as a last resort. Or maybe right
after
the last resort on our list of options. Okay?”

“Deal. So we have to find a way to make you actually want it back.”

“I told you I’m trying. I don’t know what else I can do.”

“Maybe we should visit your family. When you’re around them, you’ll probably want it more than you do right now. Use your guilty conscience against you.”

Mia moaned. “I can’t. I’m terrified that they’ll know as soon as they see me. Like I have
I lost your precious family heirloom
tattooed on my face.”

“Sounds painful. I was thinking of getting a tribal tattoo on my face, but I don’t like needles.”

She shot him an incredulous look before being distracted by her pocket ringing. Mia flinched. “That’s my mother. I’ve been ignoring her all day. She’ll just keep calling until I pick up.”

“So answer it. Maybe she’ll make you want the watch back really badly. Just grab my hand if you’re feeling particularly desperate and I’ll try to get a read.”