She realized she had just caught a glimpse of the Archer Glazebrook her mother had known. Three decades ago he would have been hard for any young woman to resist.
She hesitated. It was a mistake.
“Forty-eight hours,” Archer urged softly. “That’s all I’m asking. As long as you’ve come all the way down here, you’ll want to spend some time with Elizabeth, anyway. Just give me a couple of days to show you some of my ideas for the foundation.”
“You’re serious about establishing one, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” Clare said. “I’ll stay a couple of days. You can show me some of your plans. But I am making no commitments. Is that understood?”
“Understood.”
“Good-bye, Archer.”
A few minutes later she was behind the wheel of the replacement compact. On the way down the drive she glanced in the rearview mirror a couple times, contemplating the sight of the big house where her sister and brother had grown up.
. . .
Archer watched the little compact turn onto the main road. All his life he’d known exactly where he was going, he thought. His goals had been clear: money, success, power, the woman he loved and heirs to whom he could leave what he had built. He had acquired everything he set out to get, never questioning any of the decisions he had made along the way.
He was not proud of some of the things he had done in the past but what the hell. He wasn’t a saint. Saints didn’t put together financial empires. Saints usually came to bad ends.
He went back inside and stood looking out at the pool. As he had told Clare, it was not his habit to contemplate the past. He got through life by staying focused on the future. But he could no longer pretend that what he had come to think of as his Lost Year had never taken place.
He had been married to Myra for two years when the company he and Owen had worked so hard to get off the ground started to implode. The economy went south. Business was almost nonexistent. Bankruptcy loomed. Myra’s father, the senator, who had been dubious about the marriage from the start, was dropping heavy hints to his daughter about the wisdom of divorce.
To make matters worse, Myra had been upset when he told her he wanted to wait until the company was on its feet before they started a family. She became cold and withdrawn in bed. He was pretty sure she had begun to turn to Owen for sympathy and understanding.
Myra had dated Owen before Archer had succeeded in sweeping her off her feet. When things turned bad, he wondered if she regretted her decision.
Somewhere in the midst of that jumble of impending disasters, he had found himself on a business trip with his young, attractive head of accounting, Gwen Lancaster. Gwen was a strong parasensitive with a talent for finding the patterns in financial data that eluded most people. She was the reason he was on the business trip. Gwen had located a possible contract opportunity. If they moved fast and if Archer could convince the client to go with Glazebrook, Inc., it might be possible to avoid going off a financial cliff.
Archer had closed the deal, dazzling a reluctant client with a strategy for developing a high-end shopping mall.
That evening, alone together in the restaurant of the cheap hotel where they were staying, he and Gwen had toasted the future of Glazebrook, Inc. One toast led to another and before he realized it, he ended up telling Gwen that he was pretty sure his marriage was falling apart. Gwen commiserated with him. They wound up in bed together.
In the morning Gwen realized the enormity of the mistake even before he did.
“You called out her name,” Gwen said, looking at him in the cracked mirror over the dressing table as she put on an earring. She smiled wistfully. “You love her. You will always love her. Go back to her.”
“What about you?” he said, feeling helpless.
“I’m handing in my resignation, effective immediately.” She put on the other earring. “I can’t stay with Glazebrook now. We both know that.”
She rented a car and drove back to Phoenix rather than fly back on the same plane with him. He never saw her again, although he knew she had returned to her office long enough to clean out her desk. He heard through the rumor mill that she went to San Francisco to stay with an aunt while she hunted for a new job. He’d had no concerns about her finding a good position. Her talent for accounting was, after all, preternatural.
Myra had known the moment he returned what had happened, of course. She was a member of the Arcane Society, too, although she preferred to ignore that fact as much as possible. Her father, the senator, had been strict on that subject. He had taught his family that their connection to a group of people who actually believed in the paranormal had to be kept a deep, dark secret. Voters tended to be wary of politicians who claimed to possess psychic powers.
Myra had immediately made his worst nightmare come true. She filed for divorce. He spent the next several months crawling on his knees while simultaneously trying to kill the pain with work on the shopping mall project.
In the end Myra relented and came back to him. After the divorce was final, of course. She wanted to make her point.
They remarried, and nine months later Elizabeth was born. At about the same time the shopping mall project was completed on time and on budget. Glazebrook, Inc., was off and running, a fierce competitor in the high-stakes world of Southwest commercial real estate development.
He never looked back.
Until eight months ago that policy had served him well. But sometimes the past returns to slap you upside the head with a two-by-four.
Chapter Ten
Clare heard the unmistakable warble of her personal phone just as she went through the Stone Canyon security gate. She pulled over to the side, reached into her purse and retrieved her phone.
“Where are you?” Jake asked.
“Just leaving Stone Canyon in my shiny new rental car. Why?”
“Thought we agreed that I’d take you out there to make the swap.”
She smiled. “That’s funny, I don’t recall agreeing to anything of the kind. What I recall is getting a message telling me that you would pick me up and take me out to Stone Canyon. As it happens, I had breakfast with Elizabeth. She very kindly drove me out here.”
Silence hummed while he processed that. She couldn’t tell if he was irritated, amused or merely surprised to discover that she had paid no attention to his instructions.
“You don’t take direction well, do you?” he said eventually, sounding thoughtful.
“I’m usually okay with directions. It’s orders that I don’t take well.”
“How about invitations? Do you accept those?”
A light, fluttery sensation sparkled through her. She stomped on it immediately. She must not forget that Jake worked for Archer. She was dealing with not one but two strong-willed men, each with his own agenda. This was cowboy country and she was the tenderfoot from San Francisco.
“Depends on the invitation,” she said carefully.
“Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
Her mouth went dry.
“Still there?” he asked after a while.
“Yes.”
“Do I get an answer?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Jake said. “I’ll have a car service pick you up at that flophouse where you’re staying at five-thirty. It will take you close to an hour to get back out here.”
“Wait,” she said quickly. “I meant, yes, you get an answer. I didn’t say yes was the answer.”
“What is the answer?”
“Before I give it to you, will you swear on your honor as a consultant that this invitation is coming from you and you only and that you are not doing this because Archer asked you to do it?”
“My honor as a consultant?” He sounded amused. “I give you my word that I am inviting you to dinner because I want to have dinner with you. Not because your father asked me to entertain you.”
He sounded sincere, she thought. But when it cam
e to her type of paranormal sensitivity, nature had not allowed for the complications of modern technology. She had learned the hard way over the years that phones, e-mail and the other varieties of electronic communication rendered her talent unreliable.
Nevertheless, anticipation welled up deep inside. Some risks were definitely worth taking.
“All right,” she said. “Yes. Thank you. I’ll look forward to it.”
“So will I.”
She cut the connection. When she glanced in the rearview mirror before pulling back onto the road she was startled to see that she was smiling.
Then the horrifying truth struck her full force. She had not come to Arizona prepared for a date with a fascinating man. The only clothes she had with her were the severe black business suit that had been ruined by the dunk in the pool, two pairs of black trousers and two T-shirts.
She needed to go shopping.
. . .
Her phone rang again two hours later, just as she emerged from the stairwell into the deep gloom of the mall parking garage. It took some major scrambling to locate the device in her purse because she was clutching two shopping bags.
She finally got the phone open.
“Hello?” she said.
“It’s me, Elizabeth. Where are you?”
“At a mall.”
“You went shopping without me? How could you?”
“It was an emergency,” Clare said. “I got invited out to dinner tonight.”
“Who do you know down here except for me?” Elizabeth demanded.
“Turns out I know Jake Salter.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“Yeah, that was my first reaction, too,” Clare said. “I was sure that Archer put him up to it for devious reasons but Jake swears that’s not the situation.”
“Do you believe him?”
“He made the invitation by phone. You know I can’t trust my senses unless I am face-to-face with the person. Guess I’ll find out the truth tonight.”
“You know, this is all very interesting.”
“I certainly thought so.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that Jake Salter was your type.”
“Who knows what my type is?”
“Okay, there is that,” Elizabeth admitted. “Take notes tonight. I’ll want a full report in the morning.”
“Of course.”
“Did you find out what Dad wanted?”
“He plans to establish a charitable foundation. He wants me to run it.”
“You’re kidding. He hasn’t said a word about a foundation. Wonder if Mom knows.”
“He told me that the only person he’s discussed it with is Owen.”
“Well, that’s not surprising,” Elizabeth said. “After all their years together in business, he trusts Owen’s opinion on anything involving money.”
Clare started down the long aisle between rows of parked cars, trying to recall the precise color of her new rental. It was some silvery gray shade that was both exquisitely neutral and completely forgettable. Why didn’t they paint rental cars shocking pink or emerald green so you would remember them and locate them in alien parking garages?
“I’m not sure what the driving force is behind Archer’s decision to establish a foundation,” she said into the phone. “Like a lot of wealthy people, he probably thinks it’s a great way to be able to control his fortune even after he’s gone.”
“Sounds like Dad.”
“If that’s the case, I’ve got some bad news for him. A charitable trust or foundation has a way of taking on a life and an agenda of its own after the founder has passed.”
“Maybe he thinks he can control the future if he puts you in charge.”
“Maybe,” Clare said. She spotted a familiar-looking compact and started toward it.
“What are you going to do?” Elizabeth asked.
“My first inclination was to say not only no, but hell no.”
“Naturally,” Elizabeth said drily.
“Appointing me the director of his foundation is his way of making up for what happened in the past. That bothers me on some deep level.”
“That’s your pride talking.”
“I realize that. And after spending the past two hours doing some serious retail therapy and running myself deeper into the black hole of credit card debt, I’ve had some second thoughts.”
“Clare, that’s wonderful. I love the idea of you running the Glazebrook Foundation.”
“Not about taking the director’s job,” Clare said hastily. “I know that wouldn’t work. Archer and I would be at loggerheads every minute. But I’m thinking of setting up my own security consulting agency.”
“Really?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. But if I do go out on my own, the Glazebrook Foundation could be my first client.”
“Okay, that works,” Elizabeth said. Enthusiasm vibrated in her words. “Either way, you’ll be spending a lot more time down here in Arizona. We’ll be able to see more of each other.”
“I like that part, too,” Clare agreed.
She stopped in front of the silvery gray compact she had been closing in on. The upholstery was blue. She was pretty sure it should have been beige.
“Damn,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’ve lost my car. There are a zillion silver cars in this place.”
“Light colors are popular for cars in Arizona,” Elizabeth said. “They reflect the heat. You know, if you’re having dinner with Jake tonight it means you’ll be here tomorrow.”
“I told Archer I’d stick around for forty-eight hours.”
“Fantastic. Let’s do the spa thing tomorrow afternoon. It’s short notice but I’m sure I can get us into the Stone Canyon Spa.”
Clare did not doubt that for a moment. Very few people in Stone Canyon said no to a Glazebrook.
“Sounds great,” she said.
“Call me in the morning with that report on your big date,” Elizabeth reminded her, and ended the call.
Clare dropped the phone back into her purse and started down another aisle of almost identical vehicles.
She wondered if she was on the wrong floor. Belatedly it dawned on her that there was an unlocking device attached to the key chain the rental agency had given her.
She fished around inside her purse again and came up with the keys. She punched the unlock button.
Two-thirds of the way down the aisle in which she was standing, taillights flashed in response.
“About time,” she muttered.
Clutching the shopping bags and her purse, she hurried forward.
A car engine revved violently in the shadows behind her. Unease trickled through her. She had not noticed anyone in this section of the garage. It was unnerving to realize that there was someone in the vicinity and she had not been aware of it. This was how innocent people got mugged in parking garages, she thought. They failed to pay attention to their surroundings.
Calm down. Whoever he is, he’s in a car. He’s not trying to sneak up on you. He’s just heading for the exit.
The vehicle’s engine roared.
She glanced back over her shoulder.
A massive, late-model SUV was bearing down on her. Behind the heavily tinted windows, the driver’s face was only a dark silhouette.
Shock flashed through her. The SUV was not slowing down. The driver evidently didn’t see her. Probably had his sunglasses on in preparation for heading out into the intense midday light. Or maybe the idiot was talking on the phone.
The possibilities flashed through her mind in an oddly serene, orderly manner, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening; as if she were not standing directly in the path of an oncoming vehicle.
“Oh, shit.”
Adrenaline kicked in. Instinctively, she tightened her grip on the shopping bags and purse and rushed toward the side of the aisle.
The SUV abruptly swerved toward her, as though in pursuit.
&nb
sp; Teens gone bad, she thought.
She dropped the bags and flung herself into the narrow crevasse between two parked cars, fetching up hard against a fender. The vehicle’s alarm went off, blasting her eardrums.
Beep, beep, beep. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
The SUV thundered past, missing by inches the front bumpers of the two cars that shielded her. It turned the corner at the far end of the aisle, tires squealing.
Clare waited, feeling like a cornered rabbit. What would she do if the SUV came back? Could she make it to the stairwell?
Mercifully, the hungry growl of the big engine faded. The SUV was heading for the exit.
Hands trembling, heart pounding, she looked for the fallen shopping bags and her purse.
The good news was that, although the dress had spilled out onto the concrete floor, it was still safely encased in its plastic sheath. The strapless bra she had bought to go with it was also safe. The shoes had tumbled out of the box but there was only a small mark on the left sandal.
She found her purse lying next to the front wheel of one of the cars that had given her shelter.
Collecting her belongings, she took a steadying breath and trudged toward the rental car. When she was safely behind the wheel she made certain the doors were securely locked. Then she sat quietly, waiting for her nerves to settle down.
It took a while before she felt calm enough to drive. She hadn’t experienced this kind of edgy shock and raw fear since that night six months ago when she went to Elizabeth’s house and found Brad’s body; the night she wondered if she had been the intended victim.
Chapter Eleven
The chauffeur eased the big car to a smooth stop in front of the house. Clare studied the expensive-looking residence through the window of the vehicle. The house had been done in the Spanish colonial villa style, complete with red tile roof, that was so popular in this part of the country.
An exquisite little thrill, part warning, part excitement, flashed through her.
“I assumed you were taking me to a restaurant to meet Mr. Salter,” she said to the driver. “This is a private residence.”