Sex & Sensibility (4 page)

“No.”

“But—”

“I’ll explain why when you get here.”

“When I—what?”

“Whatever your services cost, Ms. Nichols, I’ll double it. You seem to have information no one else does. Despite what Griffin has been saying to me for the last fifteen minutes, I want you down here helping us. Whatever you have, these visions or dreams or whatever bullshit they are, I want you here where you can tell me about them. Then maybe we can gather some clues to go on.”

Tessa’s mouth had been hanging open since
double it
. She closed it on
bullshit
.

“Mr. Singleton, I can’t just drop everything and drive a hundred miles to tell you about a vision if and when I get one. They’re sporadic. Undependable. They come when they want to. This is not pay-per-view.”

“Triple.”

“What?”

“Whatever you charge, I’ll triple it.”

“My normal consultation fee is twenty dollars an hour, but I’m not going to—”

“Fine. Sixty. Starting now. And clock your mileage down here. Bill me by the day, and I don’t care how many days it takes. Better come prepared for a week. I’ll see you in—” she heard a rustle and imagined him shooting back his cuff to look at his Rolex “—two hours. Any longer than that and I’ll send Knox up there to get you.”

Now,
there
was a happy prospect.

Tessa glanced at the worktable, which was piled with books and references and good intentions. She thought about her thesis. And her student loan. And the bills, sitting in their own little pile on the Formica counter. Sixty
dollars an hour times eight hours a day times seven days a week equaled—

Who cared what it equaled? Jay Singleton, one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley,
believed
her. Her, Tessa Nichols, at whom her sister rolled her eyes even as she was springing her from jail. He believed her, and to her dried-up self-esteem it felt like rain falling in the desert, sweet and cool.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “See you in two hours.”

From the private journal of Jay Singleton

She’s coming.

Money talks, there’s no way around it. Wall Street would laugh if they could see me now, but hey, everyone knows the stock market is half bluff and half juju anyway. Psychics probably use the art of probability with more skill than Alan Greenspan.

Bottom line is, I’m desperate. I have to do something, and if calling in a psychic is the only thing to do, that’s what I’ll do. Griffin will go ballistic, but it’s not the first time. I can handle Griffin—or anyone else, for that matter.

The only one I can’t seem to handle very well is Christina. It’s a good thing this diary is private and I wrote my own code to create it. Even when I die, no one will be able to hack into it and see what I was thinking. But I was talking about Christina. I remember the day she was born. Thirty-six hours nearly killed Barbara, but even she agreed the baby was worth it. Red and scrunched and squalling and absolutely beautiful. I was afraid to hold her. She was wiggly and wet and so noisy I thought I’d split an eardrum. But I’ll never forget it. I fell in love that day. Oh, I’ve loved women. I love Mandy, for God’s sake. But not the way I
fell for that baby. When she learned to walk and I’d get home at night, she’d come tottering toward me with both arms out…I’d fall to my knees, not to bring myself down to her level, but because they’d just gone weak with love.

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.

“Y
OU 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 perfect
ly 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.

“I understand about the—the unreliability of these vi
sions.” Muscles clenched in his jaw. “But I don’t tolerate unreliability in my people.”

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?”

I
F 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.