The Mystery Woman

  “You are such a romantic,” Abigail said. She munched a lobster canapé. “But you are right. Joshua’s injuries sent him into seclusion for a time but they did not break his spirit. There is steel in that man. It is good to see that the shadows that always seemed to envelop him are gone.”

  “Thanks to the healing energy of love.”

  “I am happy for both of them, of course,” Abigail said briskly. She picked up another canapé. “But it strikes me that at the rate we are losing our agents to marriage, Flint and Marsh will soon be bankrupt.”

  “We will find other agents,” Sara assured her, unperturbed. “And it is not as though we have lost their services. The four of them have made it clear that they are available for consultation on future cases.”

  “Bah. Perhaps we should close the doors of Flint and Marsh and go into another business.”

  “Such as?”

  “Matchmaking.”

  Sara chuckled. “We do seem to be rather good at it, don’t we?”

  “Evidently, but there’s more profit in the investigation business.”

  “True.” Sara looked at Nelson, who was in animated conversation with Lucas’s brother, Tony, and his sister, Beth.

  “It strikes me that instead of reinventing ourselves as matchmakers, perhaps we should consider expanding the investigative services of Flint and Marsh,” Sara said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sara tapped one finger against the buffet table. “Young Nelson appears to have inherited talents that are quite similar to those of his uncle. There have been times of late when it would have been helpful to have had a bodyguard available to protect one of our agents who was exposed to danger in the course of a case. I wonder if Nelson would be interested in that sort of work.”

  Abigail narrowed her eyes. “Why don’t we inquire?”

  —

  BEATRICE WATCHED HER former employers approach Nelson, Beth and Tony.

  “Hmm,” she said.

  Evangeline, Joshua and Lucas all turned their heads to see what had attracted her attention.

  “What do you suppose Mrs. Marsh and Mrs. Flint are up to?” Evangeline said. “They appear to be on a mission.”

  “Yes,” Lucas said. “There is something very determined about that pair.”

  “If there is one thing I know about Mrs. Flint and Mrs. Marsh, it is that they are excellent businesswomen,” Joshua observed.

  It was impossible to hear the conversation that was taking place on the other side of the rosebushes, but it was not difficult to see what was happening. Nelson was paying close attention to what Mrs. Flint and Mrs. Marsh were saying. The more they talked, the more enthusiastic he appeared.

  “Something tells me that Nelson will soon be engaged in a position with Flint and Marsh in the near future,” Beatrice said.

  “I believe he is at long last on his way to finding a career,” Joshua said. “Hannah will be thrilled.”

  Beatrice winced. “I doubt it.”

  “She will understand,” Joshua said. “I was very much like him when I was that age.”

  Fifty-Four

  They spent their wedding night in Fern Gate Cottage. The small, cozy house belonged to Lucas Sebastian. It was situated down the lane from Crystal Gardens.

  Beatrice put on the beautiful new nightgown that Sara and Abigail had given her. She waited in bed listening as Joshua made his way methodically through the cottage checking locks and windows. She smiled to herself. When he arrived in the doorway he paused to give her an inquiring look.

  “Something amusing?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking of how careful you are when it comes to the details.”

  Joshua propped his cane against the bedside table and started to unfasten his shirt. “Details are like small holes in the bottom of the boat. Plug them and the vessel will stay afloat.”

  She raised her brows. “One of your own quotes?”

  He smiled. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Words to live by, I’m sure.” She plumped up the pillows behind her and watched with pleasure as Joshua removed his shirt. “But you can’t anticipate everything in life.”

  “I am well aware of that.” Joshua finished undressing, turned down the lamp and got into bed beside her. He gathered her close against him. “For example, I certainly never anticipated you, my love. I broke most of my rules because of you.”

  She savored the heat in his eyes. “Just most of the rules? Not all?”

  “No, not all.”

  He brushed his mouth across hers and wrapped one powerful hand around her hip.

  She felt the energy of joy and love and passion welling up inside her but she pulled back an inch or so and put her fingers on his mouth to stop him from deepening the kiss.

  “Wait,” she said. “I have to know which rule you did not break.”

  He smiled at her there in the moonlight, love heating his eyes. “The one that states that simply because something cannot be explained, it does not follow that it does not exist.”

  “Good heavens, sir, are you telling me that you have at last come to believe in the existence of the paranormal?”

  “I will not go that far,” he said. “But I promise you that I do believe in love. And I will love you always and forever.”

  She remembered what Abigail and Sara had said about him the night she told them about her encounter with Mr. Smith’s mysterious Messenger—Anyone who had dealings with him knew that if he made a promise, that promise would be kept.

  She touched the side of Joshua’s scarred face with her fingertips. “That will do for now.”

  He covered her mouth with his own. The promise was there in his searing kiss. Always and forever.

  Joshua might not be convinced that love was a form of paranormal energy, but he was capable of love, and he loved her as much as she loved him. That was more than enough for tonight.

  More than enough for a lifetime.

  From

  DECEPTION COVE

  By

  JAYNE CASTLE

  A NOTE FROM JAYNE

  Welcome back to Rainshadow Island on the world of Harmony.

  In the Rainshadow novels you will meet the passionate men and women who are drawn to this remote island in the Amber Sea. You will get to know their friends and neighbors in the small town of Shadow Bay.

  Everyone on Rainshadow has a past; everyone has secrets. But none of those secrets is as dangerous as the ancient mystery concealed inside the paranormal fence that guards the forbidden territory of the island known as the Preserve.

  The secrets of the Preserve have been locked away for centuries. But now something dangerous is stirring . . .

  One

  The two low-rent thugs were waiting for Alice when she left the darkened theater through the stage door. She sensed their presence as soon as she started walking toward the street. They were hiding behind the large garbage bin in the middle of the alley. They were not the subtle type.

  “I do not have time for this,” she said to the dust bunny perched on her shoulder.

  Houdini chortled enthusiastically and bounced a little. At first glance he looked like a large wad of dryer lint that had been decorated with six paws and two baby-blue eyes. He had a second set of eyes—they were a very feral shade of amber—but he only opened them for hunting and other violent activities. He was still wearing the elegant red satin bowtie that Alice had put on him for the night’s performance of the Alien Illusions Magic Show.

  A born ham, Houdini adored the limelight. He was always up for a performance. Somehow he sensed that they were about to give one here in the alley. True, it would be for an audience of two and neither of the lowlifes had purchased a ticket, but he wasn’t particular about the size of the crowd and the concept of money was lost on him. He took a more pragmatic approach to finances.
Pizza worked for him.

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Alice said. “We’ve got an empty refrigerator waiting back at the apartment and a mean landlord who will be expecting the rent tomorrow, remember?”

  She did not have the money for the rent. The Alien Illusions Magic Show had folded without notice tonight. That kind of thing happened in show business, but in this case she was pretty sure she knew why the owner of the theater had cancelled all future productions. He had been bribed to dump the act.

  She was now towing a wheeled suitcase crammed with costumes, wigs, stage makeup, and everything else she had been able to salvage from her tiny dressing room. A large blue tote filled with props was slung over her shoulder.

  It had not been a good day, and the night was turning out to be worse. Not only was she once again unemployed, she’d been experiencing the all too familiar edgy sensation for the past several hours. During the past year she had learned the hard way that the icy little jolts of warning were coming from her intuition. Someone was watching her. Again.

  And now a couple of street creeps were about to try to mug her.

  “Really, how much can any woman be expected to take?” she said to Houdini.

  Houdini chortled again, eager to go on stage.

  One of the thugs emerged from behind the far end of the garbage bin. His head, which had been shaved to better display the tattoos on his skull, gleamed in the light cast by the fixture over the stage door. He had a knife in one hand.

  The second man popped out of hiding and moved toward her along a parallel trajectory. He wore a stocking cap over his long, straggly hair. The blade of his knife glittered in the light.

  “Now what’s a nice girl like you doing out here all alone at night?” Tattoo Head asked. “Didn’t anyone tell you this is a dangerous neighborhood?”

  His voice was high-pitched and over-rezzed with the sort of unnatural excitement that indicated he had been doing some serious stimulants earlier in the evening.

  “Get out of my way,” Alice said. She adjusted the weight of the tote on her shoulder, tightened her grip on the suitcase, and kept walking. “I’m not in a good mood.”

  “Now why you wanna go and talk like that to a couple of guys who just want to party?” the man with the stocking cap crooned. “We’re gonna show you a real good time.”

  “A real good time.” Tattoo Head leered. “What’s that thing on your shoulder? Some kinda fluffy rat?”

  Alice ignored him, closing the distance between the three of them as she trudged toward the alley entrance. No doubt about it, a really bad day was turning into a really bad night.

  “Listen up, bitch,” Stocking Cap snarled. “Stop right there. First, put that big purse down on the ground. You hear me? You’re gonna take out all the money you got inside and if my friend and I like what we see, we’ll all have some fun. If we don’t like what we see, why then, you’re gonna have to give us a reason not to cut you up a bit.”

  Alice kept walking.

  “Hey, my buddy told you to stop,” Tattoo Head hissed.

  Alice continued walking. She felt Houdini’s little claws grip her shoulder. He was no longer chortling. He growled a warning and sleeked out, his scruffy gray fur flattened against his small frame. He opened his second set of eyes and watched the knife-wielding pair closely. He was ready to rumble.

  “There’s an old saying about dust bunnies,” Alice said to the thugs. “By the time you see the teeth, it’s too late. Turns out Houdini and I have our own little twist on that bit of wisdom. If you can’t see the teeth or anything else, you’re in trouble.”

  “What do you think you’re doing, you stupid woman?” Stocking Cap said. He skipped and danced across the pavement, closing in on her. “You asked for it. I’m gonna have to cut up that face of yours to teach you a lesson.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Alice said. “I’ve got some real issues at the moment. You shouldn’t mess with a woman who has issues. Never say you weren’t warned.”

  She jacked up her senses and pulled hard on her talent. She had never met anyone else with the same kind of psychic ability that she possessed—light-talents of any kind were rare. Those strong enough to do what she could do were considered the stuff of fairytales.

  She cranked up her aura and used the energy to bend the wavelengths of normal spectrum light around herself and Houdini. The process was similar to the way a rock diverts water in a stream. To all intents and purposes, she had just gone invisible to the human eye.

  She pushed a little harder and extended the shield to her tote and suitcase. It took a lot of power to bend light around not only herself and Houdini but the objects she was touching as well. She figured she wouldn’t have to do it for long. She had learned over the years that people tended to freak out when they realized that, in her case, going invisible was not merely a magic trick.

  As paranormal talents went, the ability to vanish for a short period of time was not nearly as useful as one might think. Career options were limited. Having concluded that she was not cut out for a life of crime, she had tried various other professional endeavors ranging from the food and beverage business to a job as a clerk in a museum gift shop. The last one had nearly gotten her killed.

  This past year she had tried her hand at the magic business. It seemed like the perfect career for a woman with her skill set. As it happened, however, any halfway experienced magician could routinely make objects disappear on stage. The fact that she used psychic energy to achieve the effect did not impress anyone in show business. She was a one-trick wonder.

  Still, the ability to disappear at will along with whatever she happened to have physical contact with at the time did have its benefits.

  “Shit,” Tattoo Head yelped. He halted abruptly and stared at the place where Alice had been seconds earlier. “Where’d she go?”

  “I don’t know,” Stocking Cap said. He was clearly jittery. “This is too weird. Maybe that last dose of green dust was bad, man. Gotta find a new dealer.”

  “It’s not the dust,” Tattoo Head said, edging back toward the entrance of the alley. Fear shivered in the atmosphere around him. “Maybe that magic act of hers is for real. Maybe she’s a witch or something.”

  “No way. Are you crazy? No such thing as a witch.”

  Alice hurried toward the alley entrance. She could not remain invisible for long, not now. She had used a lot of energy on stage. Psychic energy was subject to the laws of physics, just like any other kind of energy. Use a lot of it and you needed time to recover. But she was sure she would only have to bend light for another minute or two. Stocking Cap and Tattoo Head were starting to panic.

  On her shoulder Houdini chortled gleefully. The sound echoed eerily in the night. So did her footsteps and the rattle of the suitcase wheels on the pavement.

  “Shit, I can hear her,” Tattoo Head said. “It’s like she’s a ghost.”

  That proved too much for Stocking Cap.

  “I’m getting out of here,” he said.

  He whirled and fled toward the alley entrance. Tattoo Head was hard on his heels. They nearly trampled Alice in their haste. She got out of the way, hauling the suitcase to one side and stood with her back to the brick wall as the pair thudded past.

  They did not get far. A man materialized in the shadows at the front of the narrow passage. Moving with the swift, efficient speed and agility of a specter-cat, he did something fast and ruthless to Tattoo Head and Stocking Cap. Alice could have sworn that she saw a spark of dark paranormal lightning flash in the night but it winked out before she could be certain.

  She blinked and saw Tattoo Head and Stocking Cap were on the ground. Neither moved.

  The newcomer walked to where his victims lay and collected their knives. Then he crouched and went swiftly through the pockets of the unconscious men.

  Just when you were convinced
that a day could not get any worse, Alice thought. She stood frozen, her back to the alley wall, suddenly afraid to make any noise. She held her breath and struggled to keep the invisibility shield wrapped around herself, Houdini, and her burdens.

  For his part, Houdini no longer appeared concerned. He was alert and watchful but he was back in dryer-lint mode. She was not sure what to make of that. On the one hand, it was reassuring to know that he did not sense another threat. Then again, maybe he was simply relishing the extended performance.

  Evidently satisfied with his search, the man who had taken down Tattoo Head and Stocking Cap rose easily to his feet and started walking toward her.

  As he came into the full glare of the alley door light, she saw that he was wearing wraparound, mirrored sunglasses.

  Mirrored sunglasses. At midnight.

  She just had time to realize that the stranger looked somewhat familiar before it dawned on her that he was looking directly at her.

  “You must be Alice North,” he said. “Your great-grandfather and mine were partners in a seafaring business a long time ago. My name is Drake Sebastian.”

  That explained a lot, she thought, including the sunglasses-at-midnight thing. The Sebastians kept a low profile but given her personal interest in the family, she paid attention when a member of the clan occasionally appeared in a rez-screen video or in the newspapers. Drake was the heir to the corporate throne—the man slated to take over the helm of the family empire—so lately he had been showing up more than any of the other Sebastians.

  Drake was never seen in public without his mirrored glasses. They were his trademark. According to the media, he did not wear them for effect. The unique mirrored lenses had been developed specially for him in a Sebastian company research lab. It was no secret that following a lab accident three years earlier he had developed a severe sensitivity to light from the normal end of the spectrum. Now, without his special sunglasses, Drake was even blinded by a low-watt lightbulb.