Whoever the clients were, they had managed to rattle Laura. That was not easy to do. She held her position as receptionist for Promises, Inc., precisely because she was virtually unflappable. She was fiftysomething, poised, and efficient. Like everyone else on the staff with the exception of Celinda, she wore a gold ring on her left hand, signifying a Covenant Marriage.
Laura was accustomed to dealing with some of the most elite people in Cadence City, from wealthy business executives to politicians and media celebrities. If she was uneasy about the people waiting for her, Celinda thought, that meant there was a serious problem.
She glanced toward the seats in the small lobby. There was no one around. That was not a surprise, of course. There was rarely anyone in the small, expensively appointed space because Promises, Inc., went to great lengths to ensure that clients were never kept waiting in a public area. Discretion was everything when you operated the most elite matchmaking agency in the city.
Promises, Inc., worked only on referral. It did no advertising. There was nothing on the front door of the office or on the business cards that Celinda and the other consultants carried that indicated the nature of the business that was done behind the company’s elegant doors.
Laura followed Celinda’s glance toward the empty reception chairs. “I put them in your office.”
“Why me? Why didn’t you give them to one of the other consultants?”
“These two specifically asked to speak with you.”
Celinda sighed. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this. You’re about to drop the other shoe, aren’t you?”
“Obviously you are an amazingly intuitive woman,” Laura said dryly. “Neither of the two would tell me why they wanted to talk to you, but one of them carries a badge that says she is with the Cadence Police Department. Detective Alice Martinez.”
“Good grief.” Celinda stared at her, flabbergasted. “Probably not a potential client, then. It’s highly unlikely that a woman living on a detective’s salary could afford our services.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you. The man with her gave his name as Davis Oakes. He did not elaborate further.”
“Weird.” She did not know anyone by that name. She did not know any police detectives, either, for that matter. “And weirder.”
“I would have asked Ms. Takahashi to deal with them, but she’s at that charity luncheon today. She won’t be back until around three.”
Patricia Takahashi was the owner of Promises, Inc. The fact that Laura regretted not being able to get her involved spoke volumes about just how nervous the visitors had made her.
Celinda hoisted her large black tote higher on one shoulder. “Well, I suppose I’d better go see what they want.”
She started around the edge of the desk, heading for a short hallway lined with closed doors.
Laura looked at the oversized tote. “Where’s Araminta?”
“Napping. She had a big lunch. Unfortunately, it was not her own.”
“Oh, dear.” Laura’s smile was half-amused and half-sympathetic. “Another restaurant scene?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve explained to her that just because the food on someone else’s plate looks better than what I ordered, it does not necessarily follow that she can help herself to a stranger’s meal.”
“How nasty did it get?”
“Very nasty. The person whose meal Araminta swiped referred to her as a rat. I, of course, took offense on her behalf. The waiter got involved. Evidently there is a rule about bringing animals into restaurants unless they are companion animals.”
“I’ve heard that.” Laura’s mouth twitched a little. “One of those boring public health regulations, I believe.”
“I explained that Araminta was a companion, but by then things had become complicated.”
“How complicated?”
“In the general uproar and confusion that followed the reference to a rat, Araminta took a few sample bites from some of the other diners’ plates as well. A large person came out of the kitchen waving an empty garbage bag and a big pot. There was talk of catching Araminta in the pot, transferring her to the bag, and delivering her to animal control.”
“Oh, my.” Laura’s eyes danced. “Sounds like a circus.”
“Suffice it to say that we will not be going back to the Quik-Bite Deli anytime in the near future.”
She went down the hall to her office and opened the door.
The waves of strong, subtle psi power slammed right through her sturdy defenses, catching her completely off guard and rezzing all of her senses. Excitement and anticipation pulsed through her. The energy was unlike anything that she had ever encountered: dark, controlled, fascinating.
The hair rose on the nape of her neck. Beneath the fabric of her neatly tailored business jacket, goose bumps prickled her upper arms. A strange, unfamiliar sensation stirred within her. She felt as if she were about to leap off a very high diving board into a fathomless pool.
Get a grip. Okay, so one of the visitors was a particularly strong psi talent. No, not one of the visitors; the man. This energy was indisputably male.
The ability to resonate psychically with amber and use it to focus the brain’s natural paranormal energy waves had begun to appear among the colonists on Harmony shortly after they came through the Curtain to settle the new world. Something in the environment had begun to stimulate the latent ability in humans.
At first the talent had seemed to be little more than an intriguing curiosity. But when the mysterious energy Curtain that had made interstellar travel possible had closed without warning, trapping the colonists, the ability to pulse psi through amber rapidly became critical to survival.
Virtually everyone on Harmony gave off some degree of psychic energy. Most people generated low or medium levels of power, allowing them to use amber to operate a toaster or start a car engine. But there were some individuals—she was one of them—who could generate an unusually high degree of psychic energy.
Being a strong para-resonator, as powerful psychics were called, was almost always a double-edged sword. Her particular talent was the ability to read the paranormal energy rhythms and patterns given off by others. To her, human psi waves were as distinctive as faces.
Her para-rez ability was rare. She had never met anyone else who could do what she did. Then again, anyone who could read other people’s psi waves as accurately as she was able to read them no doubt kept quiet about the skill for the same reason that she did. Paranormal abilities were common in the population, but powerful and unusual talents were not, and very few people were comfortable around others who possessed such powers.
She knew that most people would find her particular psychic ability especially unsettling. It wasn’t mind reading, of course. There was no such talent. But her ability did allow her sharp insights into one of the most personal and private realms of an individual’s personality. The truth was, if you could read a person’s psi waves, you could tell a great deal about that individual’s strengths and—far more disturbing to the person—his or her weaknesses. It was human nature to not want to reveal weakness, not even to a relative or a lover.
Only the members of her family and her closest, most trusted friends knew about her talent. And even they did not know her deepest, darkest secret. She had understood intuitively, ever since her eighteenth year when she had unwittingly discovered exactly what she could do with her psychic ability, that she must never confide in anyone.
There was another major downside to her ability. She had been forced to develop mental shields in order to cope with the relentless tide of psi energy that lapped at her whenever she was around other people. Had she not been able to do so, she knew she would have gone mad.
But she had learned how to control her talent, and now it was informing her in no uncertain terms that the man waiting for her wasn’t just a powerful para-rez, himself; he was going to be the most intriguing, most exciting man she had ever met, the one who could rez all of her sen
ses.
So what was Mr. Perfect doing in the company of a police detective?
Assuming a proper, professional smile, she pushed the door open the rest of the way and walked into the room.
The man and the woman inside both rose from their chairs. The woman was establishing her authority. Celinda sensed that the man felt no need to do the same. He was just demonstrating that he been brought up with good manners.
“Celinda Ingram?” The woman offered an ID encased in a leather wallet instead of her hand. “Detective Martinez. I’m with the Cadence City Police Department. This is Davis Oakes of Oakes Security.”
Security. That didn’t sound good.
Celinda set the tote carefully on the floor behind her desk and then took her time examining the woman’s identification. She looked up and nodded once, cautiously polite. “Detective.” She switched her attention to Oakes. “Mr. Oakes.”
“Miss Ingram.”
His low voice rolled over her senses like a tropical ocean wave at night, darkly powerful and infinitely mysterious.
She braced herself for his touch. She had a feeling it was going to thrill all her senses.
It did. The skin-to-skin contact produced a strong resonating effect. Little tingles of excitement flickered up and down her spine. Yes, indeed, hormones on parade, just as she had anticipated.
She freed her hand as quickly as possible. This was no time to get distracted. She made herself concentrate on Alice Martinez, who had sat down again.
The detective was an attractive thirtysomething, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Her business suit was as severe as a uniform. The jacket of the suit was a tad lumpy on the left side. The bulge was a strong hint that there was a gun in a holster there.
Alice Martinez wore no visible amber, but Celinda sensed a distinctive psi pattern that indicated that she possessed some sort of fairly strong talent.
Mentally Celinda ticked off the reasons why a police detective and a man who worked in the security business might want to speak to her. It was a very short list. She suddenly went cold. The specter of fear that had become her constant companion during the past four months suddenly leaped from the shadows and wrapped icy fingers around her heart.
“Has something happened to someone in my family?” she whispered, her pulse skittering wildly.
“No.” Alice Martinez gave her a quick, unexpectedly reassuring smile. “This doesn’t involve any of your relatives.”
“Thank heavens.” The relief was so overwhelming she sagged a little against the desk. “For a minute there I was afraid…” She let the sentence trail off.
Davis’s eyes narrowed ever so faintly at the corners. She knew he had taken note of that brief moment of panic.
“Detective Martinez and I are cooperating in an investigation,” he said quietly.
She gave him a polite smile while she took stock. For years she’d known exactly what qualities she wanted in her dream man. She was a professional matchmaker, after all; she knew what to look for in a mate. The list was long and detailed: kindness, intelligence, loyalty, a strong sense of responsibility, the ability to make a commitment and stick to it, a capacity for love, the right attitudes toward money, children, and family obligations, etc., etc.
But until now she had never had a visual image of Mr. Perfect.
Her ideal man, it turned out, had hair as dark as a midnight sky and eyes of an unusual shade of silvery gray. His face was all hard edges and dangerously interesting planes and angles. He was of average height, but beneath the jacket of the dark business suit there was a lot of sleek muscle, especially in his shoulders.
It dawned on her that he had not taken his seat again. Instead, he stood quietly in that centered, controlled manner that seemed to characterize everything about him.
“As Detective Martinez told you, I’m with Oakes Security.” He handed her a card.
She glanced down and read the fine print. “It says here that you’re not exactly with Oakes Security. You’re the president and CEO.”
His mouth curved faintly at one corner. “Yeah, that, too. Oakes is a private consulting firm. We specialize in corporate security.”
“I see.” She was more mystified than ever. Nevertheless, she made an effort to appear intelligent. “Corporate security. That would be the expensive version of a private investigator?”
“The very expensive version,” he agreed neutrally. “In the same way that a matrimonial consultant is a real pricey version of what most people call a matchmaker.”
Okay, no mistaking the icy sarcasm in that comment.
She smiled coolly. “Pricey is right. But we only do Covenant Marriages here at Promises, Inc. The way we look at it, the stakes are high, so our fees should be, too.”
The marriage laws had been relaxed slightly in the past two centuries, but they were still extremely stringent. There was a lot of talk about loosening them up, but everyone knew that, realistically speaking, that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
The rigid rules governing marriage had made sense two centuries ago when the colonists had found themselves marooned on Harmony. Survival had been the first and most important objective. The philosophers, social scientists, and political leaders who had framed the new Constitution had known that the key to keeping the fragile flame of civilization alive was the family unit. They had, therefore, cemented the sanctity of marriage in both law and tradition, ensuring that families remained intact regardless of the price that had to be paid.
The laws applied to everyone. Society put just as much pressure on gay people to form Covenant bonds with their partners as it did on heterosexuals.
The institution of the Covenant Marriage was a contract that, with very few exceptions, could be severed only by death. Getting out of a CM was a legal and financial nightmare that very few could afford.
But the Founders had also understood the need to provide an alternative for those who were not ready to undertake the commitment of a lifelong marriage. The Marriage of Convenience was a legally recognized arrangement that had to be renewed at regular intervals. It could be terminated by either spouse at any point unless a child was born into the marriage, in which case the contract was immediately converted into a permanent Covenant Marriage.
Families frequently encouraged their offspring to experiment with Marriages of Convenience before entering the far more stringent Covenant Marriage. Most Marriages of Convenience were, in reality, short-term affairs. Tradition afforded such arrangements an aura of respectability, however. MCs were several notches above what was often referred to as shacking up.
There were matchmaking agencies that worked with people seeking Marriages of Convenience, but Promises, Inc., was not one of them.
“Do you give refunds if the match proves to be a bad one?” Davis asked, gravely polite.
This definitely sounded personal. He was challenging her for some reason.
She went behind her desk, sat down, and folded her hands on the surface. She rezzed a bright, professional smile for him.
“Do you get paid regardless of whether or not you solve the case?” she retorted.
He raised dark brows a little, acknowledging the hit.
Alice looked faintly amused. Satisfied, even a little exhilarated by her successful parry, Celinda turned back to her.
“What is it you want from me, Detective?”
“Mr. Oakes is pursuing an investigation on behalf of his client,” Alice said, businesslike now. “This morning, in the course of that inquiry, he came across a dead body. We in the Cadence PD have an interest in that sort of thing.”
Celinda swallowed hard. The small sense of triumph she had just experienced evaporated in a heartbeat. Davis had discovered a dead person, and now he and the detective were sitting in her office. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.
“I see.” A fresh wave of alarm swept over her. “Are you here because you think I knew the victim?”
“Good question,” Alice said. “His name was Alvis Sh
aw. He was a longtime drug addict and small-time thief. Rez any bells?”
“Good grief, no,” Celinda said, shocked. “I assure you I’m not acquainted with anyone who meets that description. What in the world brought you to my door?”
Davis’s silvery eyes were as unreadable as mirrored sunglasses. “I found Shaw’s body in the alley just outside a small, low-end antique shop that specializes in cheap colonial knockoffs. The name of the place was Jackson’s Old World Finds.”
Startled, Celinda unclasped her hands. “I was in that shop yesterday afternoon.”
“I know,” Davis said. “The owner of the shop showed us a receipt for an object that you purchased from him.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that have to do with Mr. Shaw’s death? The item I bought wasn’t valuable. The owner couldn’t even remember when or where he got it. He said it had probably come in with some things he picked up in an estate sale. He only charged me five dollars for it.”
“There is a possibility that Shaw’s death is connected to the object you bought,” Davis said.
“What? That’s impossible.” Horrified, Celinda leaped out of her chair, seized her tote, and placed it gingerly on top of her desk. She rummaged around inside. “I’ll show you, it’s just a chunk of old red plastic. Probably a knob or handle from some Colonial-era machine. It’s pretty, but I don’t see how it could be valuable. I bought it as a toy for Araminta. She got very excited about it.”
“Who’s Araminta?” Alice asked.
A fluffy ball of tatty gray fur studded with two baby-blue eyes appeared from inside the tote. The small beast hooked a pair of paws over the edge of the bag and peered at Davis and Alice with great interest.
“This is Araminta,” Celinda said.
“A dust bunny,” Alice said in the tones of someone who is resigning herself to the inevitable. “Should have known, what with the way my luck has been running lately.”