relationship was such a crazy mix of business and the personal.
“Last night was a little weird,” she said very carefully. “I’m not sure we should draw any conclusions from it.”
“You’re calling that kiss weird?” He sounded interested, not offended.
“Well, yes.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten half naked in a doorway before.” She was suddenly incensed for absolutely no logical reason. “I mean, anyone could have walked past.”
“Someone did walk past. A guy capable of summoning a doppelganger ghost. And another guy drove past, as I recall. Nearly flattened you.”
Back to business, Celinda thought. It’s better that way. Don’t let this get personal again.
They both fell silent for a moment. After a while, Celinda fed Araminta another cookie and thought about the hasty repacking she had done this morning before letting Davis take her suitcases down to the car. On a mad, inexplicable whim she had yanked the plain cotton nightgown out of a case and replaced it with the new, sexy green satin gown she had found on sale a month ago. She hadn’t even worn it yet. What had she been thinking?
Twenty miles later she stirred in her seat. “You know,” she said, “I’m not sure your theory about Araminta not wanting to be parted from her relic for long is going to hold up. We’re almost a hundred miles out of Cadence, and she isn’t showing any signs of agitation about being in a car that is driving very rapidly away from wherever she stashed that relic.”
“Who knows how a dust bunny’s sense of time and distance works?” he said. “She may have no concept of how far away from your apartment we are.”
“Hmm.” Celinda turned in her seat to take a closer look at Araminta. “You may be right. I think she’s sort of distracted.”
“By Max?”
“Yes. If you don’t get your relic back anytime soon, blame your Lothario of a dust bunny.”
“Max is not that kind of bunny.” Davis seemed genuinely insulted. “Trust me when I tell you that Araminta is the first female he’s shown any interest in since I met him six months ago. Furthermore, Max isn’t the only one who’s had a long dry spell.”
“You’re saying that you haven’t had a date in six months? I find that a little hard to swallow.”
“My engagement ended about six months ago,” he said quietly. “My business took a downturn at about the same time. I’ve been concentrating on rebuilding.”
“I see.” In spite of herself she felt a sharp pang of sympathy. Having a Covenant Marriage engagement end at the same time that your business hit some difficulties would have been tough for anyone. “I just assumed from the car and your clothes that Oakes Security was doing well.”
“The car and the clothes are left over from before things hit the skids.”
“Trust me, I know what it is to have everything you’ve worked for suddenly go south,” she said quietly.
The Phantom ate up a few more miles of near-empty highway.
“What about you?” he asked after a while. “Last night you said something about not having had a date in four months?”
“I’ve been busy, too. It wasn’t easy finding a new job, and after I got one, I devoted myself to proving to my new boss that she hadn’t made a huge mistake by hiring me.”
“Leave anyone special behind in Frequency?”
She thought about Grant Blair, the very nice lawyer she had been discreetly dating at the time of the disaster. “There was someone. It seemed promising for a while, but it ended badly.”
“Mr. Perfect?”
“No,” she said. “He was not Mr. Perfect.”
“What happened?”
“I told you, it ended.” She glanced at him. “Look, are you sure you want to get any deeper into this conversation? I thought men didn’t like to talk about old relationships.”
Davis shrugged. “I like to know what I’m dealing with. This guy you were seeing, would that have been Benson Landry, the hunter who’s slated to take over the Frequency Guild?
She was shocked speechless. It took her a few seconds to find her tongue. “You know about Landry?”
“I’m a detective, remember?”
She pulled herself together with an effort of will. “Benson Landry is not the man I was dating back in Frequency. Landry is a manipulative bastard. He also has a very scary parapsych profile.”
Davis’s eyes tightened at the corners. “Like the driver of the getaway car last night?”
Celinda blinked and then shook her head ruefully. Just like that, they were back to business again. “No,” she said, thinking about it. “Both men give off unwholesome vibes, but they aren’t the same vibes. The getaway driver is a powerful psi talent with an obsessive streak a mile wide, but he is sane.”
“Landry isn’t sane?”
“The last time I saw him, he was teetering on the edge of insanity. But the most frightening thing about him is that he passes for normal.”
“So there’s no chance that Landry was the getaway driver?”
She shuddered. “Absolutely none.”
“What about the other man, the one in the cap who fired up the twin ghosts?”
She shook her head. “Definitely not Landry. I didn’t get close enough to read his psi, but I could see enough of him to be certain. That man was tall and gaunt. Landry is built much differently.”
“Okay, so much for that angle.”
She looked at him. “What made you ask if one of those men might have been Benson Landry?”
“Just occurred to me that if one of them was Landry, we would have had an obvious connection to work with.”
“The obvious connection being me?”
“Yes.”
She made herself exhale slowly and evenly. She would not take it personally, she told herself.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said.
“Too late. I think I am taking it personally.”
“Look at it this way; it would have made things easier.”
“You mean from an investigative point of view?”
“Right.” He paused. “Okay, I can see where you might not want to be a connection in this case.”
She shivered. “Especially if it means being connected to Benson Landry. Look, as long as we’re talking about the case again, I want to go over the details of our cover story.”
“What about them?”
“I get that I’m supposed to pass you off as my date for the wedding,” she said, “but I don’t think you realize just how curious my family is going to be.”
“I’m not a big fan of fake details in cover stories,” Davis said, his attention on the highway. “They tend to trip you up. Keep it simple is my motto.”
“How simple?” she asked warily.
He moved one hand on the steering wheel in a slight, negligent gesture. “We met recently, hit it off immediately, and now we’re getting to know one another.”
“I assume you have parents?” she asked patiently. “Siblings?”
“Oh, yeah.”
There was an ominous ring to the words, a man admitting he had a nemesis.
“If you showed up at a family event with a mysterious girlfriend that you hadn’t ever mentioned, wouldn’t everyone demand to know more about her?” she asked pointedly.
“There shouldn’t be any problem if we just stick to the truth as much as possible,” he said, calmly insistent. “They want to know what I do for a living? Tell them I’m in the security business.”
“How did we meet?”
“In the course of an investigation. I came to your office to ask you some questions regarding a case I was
