unpleasant jolt. Rachel’s fairy-tale wedding was over. Now they had to go back to Cadence to face the problems of the missing relic and a sociopath Guild man.
“I didn’t think of it as adventurous, you know,” she said.
“Yeah? How did you think of it?”
She considered the question closely. “More like a necessity. Just something that had to be done in order to keep my family safe.”
“Point taken,” Davis said quietly. There was a world of understanding and approval in his eyes.
In the lobby, the wedding guests mingled, exchanging good-byes and offering more congratulations to the parents of the bride and groom. Those who were not spending the night at the hotel prepared to collect their cars and drive home.
Davis checked his watch. “Eight o’clock. Time for us to hit the road. If we leave now, we’ll be back in Cadence before midnight.”
Celinda saw her mother coming toward them. She had obviously overheard Davis’s comment.
“Are you sure you want to make that long drive tonight?” she asked. “You’re welcome to come back to the house with us. Or you can stay here at the hotel and go home tomorrow.”
“I have to go in to work tomorrow morning, Mom,” Celinda said quickly. “I’m still the new person at the agency, you know. I don’t want my boss to think I’m unreliable.”
“I understand, dear. Well, at least take some of the leftover hors d’oeuvres with you to eat on the road.”
“Good idea,” Newell said, coming up to join them. “I think I saw a lot of those little cheese and cucumber sandwiches left on the buffet table. Plenty of cookies, too. Hate to think of them being thrown away, given what I paid for ’em.”
Walker sauntered over. “There are some crackers and chips left, too.” He surveyed Celinda’s pink gown and grinned. “I’ll bet you never wear that dress again. You look like a big slice of the wedding cake.”
Celinda raised her brows. “That might be amusing if it wasn’t coming from a guy in a pink cummerbund.”
“Shows how much you know,” Walker said. “Pink is the new black for men this year.”
Davis smiled and tightened his grip on Celinda’s arm. “Let’s go see what’s left on the buffet table.”
“I’ll come with you,” Walker said. “I want some more of those little cheese twist thingys.”
“Help yourself to as much as you want,” Newell said. “It’s all nonrefundable.”
They walked back through the lobby and along a wide, paneled hallway. The glittering ballroom was nearly empty. The only people inside were two uniformed members of the hotel staff, a man and a woman, who were starting to pick up the silver serving trays. The cleanup process had begun.
“We’d better hurry,” Walker said. “They’re starting to take the food away.”
A scream rang out, so high and shrill, Celinda was amazed it didn’t shatter the glass in the chandeliers. It emanated from the female member of the hotel staff.
“What are those things?” the woman shrieked. She dropped her tray and leaped back from the table. “There’s one in the cake. Oh my God, there’s another one in the champagne fountain.”
The other staff member stared first at the cake and then at the fountain. “What the hell? They look like dust bunnies.”
“I’ll go get the manager,” the woman yelped. “I don’t get paid enough to deal with stuff like this.”
She set out at a dead run, heading toward a set of swinging doors at the far end of the room.
Celinda got a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She looked at the buffet table. “Uh-oh.”
“Hang on,” Walker said, pulling out a small flash-rez camera. “I want to get a picture of this. Too bad Rachel and Josh missed it.”
On the buffet table Araminta was deep into what remained of the four-tiered pink and white wedding cake. She was nibbling on a pink icing rose. There was more pink and white icing matted on her fur.
Max was perched on the edge of the multilevel glass fountain that had been used to display and serve the pink champagne. He seemed to be wobbling a little. As Celinda watched in horror, he swayed back and forth and then went headfirst into the fountain bowl, splashing champagne everywhere. He started swimming.
“Little guy can’t hold his liquor,” Davis explained.
Chapter 23
“I GUESS ARAMINTA RAN OUT OF ROOM SERVICE FOOD,” Celinda said. “I should have checked on her a couple of hours ago to see if she needed more.”
“Look on the bright side,” Davis said. He kept his eyes on the night-shrouded highway. “They didn’t stage their surgical strike on the buffet table until after the bride and groom had left. No harm was done to the Great Pink Wedding. After a while you’ll laugh about it.”
“Araminta ruined that beautiful cake.”
“It had already served its purpose.”
“But Rachel wanted to keep the top tier as a souvenir. The hotel staff was supposed to box it up and freeze it. That’s the tier Araminta went after first.”
“Look, if you’re that worried about it, we can pay to have another cake made,” he said soothingly. “Just that one tier. The baker can box it up and freeze it, and it will be waiting for your sister when she and Josh get back from their honeymoon.”
Celinda looked dubious. “It would be expensive.”
“So what? We’ll put it on the Guild’s tab.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her mouth twitch a little.
“The bill you plan to send to Mercer Wyatt when this is over is going to be very interesting,” she said. “I assume you itemize?”
“Sure.”
“I can see it now. One single-tier wedding cake decorated with pink roses and, oh, by the way, there’s a para-sociopath member of the Frequency Guild Council after your relic.”
“Wyatt’s been around awhile. He takes these things in stride.”
“You know him well enough to be sure of that?”
“I’ve worked for him before. He won’t complain as long as I hand over the relic along with the bill.”
Her wry little smile faded. She leaned her head against the back of the seat and appeared to sink into a state of deeper gloom. “I wonder what the odds of that happening are?”
“We’ll get it back.”
She turned her head to look at him, her face lit a pale gold by the amber lights of the dashboard. “You really think Wyatt will take care of Benson Landry?”
“Landry is ghost bait. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
She seemed to brighten a little at that.
Night lay heavily on the vast swath of lonely desert between Frequency and Cadence. Silver moonlight gave the landscape an eerie luminescence that was as mysterious and exotic as the glow of alien quartz. He could see one other vehicle in the rearview mirror. Occasionally they passed cars coming from the opposite direction. But mostly they had the road to themselves.
He liked being out here in the desert at night, he thought; he liked being alone with Celinda. And the dust bunnies, of course.
The departure from the hotel had been somewhat delayed due to Celinda’s insistence on taking both dust bunnies upstairs to rinse them off in the bathroom sink. By the time Araminta and Max were clean and fluff-dried and the overnight bags, together with the infamous pink bridesmaid’s dress, had been packed into the trunk of the Phantom, it was close to nine o’clock. But he figured that if he pushed things a little, they would still be back in Cadence by midnight.
The two miscreants were napping. Araminta, stuffed with wedding cake, was stretched out on Celinda’s lap, four eyes closed. Max was on his back on the narrow deck beneath the rear windshield. He was sound asleep, all
