"Just being pragmatic."
She smiled and stepped back. "Would you like to come in for a nightcap, Mr. Pragmatic?"
He loomed on the threshold, filling the doorway. His face was set in the stalwart expression of a knight preparing to go into battle.
"You probably want to talk about last night," he said.
She smiled. "Nope."
He narrowed his eyes. "Nope?"
"Last night was the most romantic night of my entire life. Why spoil it by trying to explain it?"
"I wasn't planning on explaining it. Seemed pretty straightforward to me. But I thought you might want to talk about it. Women always want to do that. Afterward, I mean."
"And you know this, how?"
He frowned. "Everyone knows that."
She almost laughed. "The one thing I know for sure about last night is that it does not involve a conspiracy."
"Definitely no conspiracy," he agreed.
"That's good enough for me."
"It is?"
She took his hand and tugged gently. "Come inside and have a drink with me, Fallon Jones."
He moved into the room, closed the door and locked it with great care. When he turned back to her she could see the heat in his eyes.
"The most romantic night of your entire life?" he said very carefully.
"Definitely. Was it good for you, too?"
The energy in the room got a little hotter.
"Yes," he said. "The best."
"Then I don't see that further discussion is necessary."
"No," he said. "No more talking."
He swooped down upon her, scooped her up and started toward the bedroom.
Isabella put her arms around his neck.
"Guess we'll skip the nightcap," she said.
SOMETIME LATER She awoke to the knowledge that she was alone in the bed. She opened her eyes and sat up against the pillows. The clock on the night table read two-twenty.
A familiar otherworldly glow illuminated the bedroom doorway. Not psi fog, she thought. It was the light from a computer screen. Fallon had gone back to work.
She pushed the covers aside and got to her feet. She was nude and the room was chilly. She stepped into her slippers and pulled on her robe.
She tied the sash of the robe as she went down the short hallway, past the bathroom into the main room. Fallon was seated gazing into his laptop. In the glow from the screen, his face had the ruthless cast of a man obsessed. She could well believe that he was descended from a legendary alchemist.
"Fallon?"
He looked up. His hard expression relaxed at the sight of her. Energy swirled in the atmosphere. She knew that he was remembering the searing passion they had shared.
"Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to wake you."
"What are you working on?" she asked. She moved to stand beside him. "The Nightshade case?"
"No." He leaned back in his chair. "I was just doing some background research on Julian Garrett."
"You should be in bed. You need sleep."
"I don't require a lot of sleep."
"Well, you certainly need more than you got tonight." She leaned over the desk and took his powerful hand. "It's two-twenty in the morning. Come back to bed."
"I work odd hours," he said.
"No need for them to be this odd. Come with me."
Somewhat to her surprise he got up out of the chair and let her lead him back into the bedroom. When they got there, he pulled her into his arms and down onto the bed.
This time he slept until dawn.
17
She's the granddaughter of that wacko who operates the Iceberg conspiracy website?" Zack asked. He kept his voice pitched low, but the mix of amusement and amazement in his words was crystal clear. "Are you serious?"
Fallon stood at the window of his office and looked across the street at the Sunshine Cafe. Isabella and Zack's wife, Raine, had just vanished inside to pick up some of Marge's muffins for all of them to eat while they waited for Rafanelli and the lab techs.
Should have known better than to try to explain Isabella to Zack, he thought. Isabella was not easily explained. Isabella was unique, one of a kind.
"You know me," he said. "I'm always serious."
"Well, sure," Zack said. "But when it comes to your kind of serious, there are nuances."
Fallon looked at his cousin. Zack sat casually angled across the corner of Fallon's desk, arms folded. There was certainly some family resemblance between them. Like most of the men in the Jones family line, they were both dark-haired and built along the lean lines typical of the clan which had, for generations, produced a lot of hunter-talents.
That was where the physical resemblance ended, though. Zack's eyes were a glacial blue, and he was a couple of inches shorter than Fallon. But the biggest difference between them was the nature of their talents. Zack's psychic ability gave him an edge when it came to anticipating the actions of others, a major plus given his new responsibilities as Master of the Society. His talent was actually a rare form of psychometry. Zack could pick up a knife or a gun that had been used to commit murder and sense what the killer had been feeling at the time the act of violence had been committed.
He had married a woman with a similar talent. When Raine came in contact with the psychic residue of violence, her clairaudient intuition translated the energy into the form of voices. Sometimes it was the killer's voice she heard. Sometimes the victim's.
Like many in the Jones family, Zack had once worked as a J&J agent. But he was now the latest in a long line of Joneses to take the reins of the Arcane Society. In Fallon's opinion, the career change was a good move for both of them. Zack had a natural flair for giving orders, but he had never been any good at taking them.
"You want to talk about my nuances or do you want to discuss the fact that we may have located a cache of Bridewell's nasty little gadgets?" Fallon asked.
"Good to see you, too, cousin," Zack said.
Fallon winced. "Sorry. Things have been a little busy around here lately. Getting your phone call this morning informing me that you were on the way to the Cove caught me off guard, that's all. I wasn't planning on visitors."
"After we talked on the phone last night, I told Raine about what you had found. We both agreed this was a piece of Arcane history that we did not want to miss."
"You didn't come all the way from Seattle just to take a look at some old clockwork inventions."
"Okay, there is another reason," Zack said. "But I'm also interested in Bridewell's curiosities. J&J was never able to recover all of the devices after the case was closed back in the late eighteen hundreds. Couldn't even come up with an accurate estimate of how many had been made. The curiosities that were found were stored in the vault at Arcane House in England, but several vanished during the Second World War. How the hell did some of the gadgets end up here in Scargill Cove?"