THE RISK OF LOVE AND MAGIC (21 page)

“Yup,” she replied complacently. “I’ve seen your brothers in action. You can’t guilt me. Where is our kid going to school?”

She was perfectly right. Since Oz’s kid had been stolen, Conan had become all about saving kids. His team was already surrounding the Academy, looking for ways to infiltrate. The kids were about as safe as they could be. Frustrated, Magnus dragged the computer over to his side of the table. “She’ll need a birth date and social security number.”

“She’s attending a private boarding school because we travel a lot,” she added with relish.

“You’re a rotten mother, not a controlling one, then. A poor kid with finding gifts needs understanding.” He sent Conan the specs for setting up a new ID.

She smiled in delight. “Spoken like a good father. That’s why you’re asking about special schools, and all I’m doing is checking our genealogy. Jo-jo may relate better to another man. How did we find out about his school?”

“Cousin,” he replied. “More potential victims.”

They settled into peaceful give-and-take until Nadine started yawning. Magnus escorted her upstairs, offered to let her sleep alone so she might sleep better, and appropriated the computer without her noticing.

Back in his own room, he inspected the history of her searches and found the news sites. Damn, but she was good—and he wasn’t. He sent the information to Conan and returned her laptop to her room.

Using his own computer, he drew up a few preliminary sketches for the additional security he planned for their safe house, and hit the bed. He hoped this time he might sleep instead of dreaming of a vivacious female who craved his body and nothing more.

In the morning, they both dragged down to breakfast late. Magnus blearily prepared coffee. Nadine poured orange juice and went outside to dance in the sun. Dance.

Magnus blinked and studied her crazed moves with interest. She wore shorts, a tank top, and some see-through shirt that revealed her every curve—and an earplug. Absolutely nothing was sacred to that woman. He was going to owe their landlord a fortune.

It was worth every penny to see her pagan sun ritual or whatever it was.

He tried to muse on freedom and how the lack of it had affected her, but he preferred enjoying his coffee and the show. Nadine’s fluid movements marked her as a natural dancer.

“I had a message from Vera,” she said with joy when she returned to the kitchen. “She’s surrounded by Jack’s friends and relatives and being escorted everywhere around campus. One of them is driving over to the vet’s today to pick up the dog. They removed the microchip and threw it out. I love communication!”

Magnus loved watching the Librarian unfurl like a new rose. He suspected more than lust was driving him when he pictured taking her to Conan’s wedding and dancing until dawn.

He knew he was in serious trouble after breakfast when he agreed to teach Nadine how to drive around the private streets of the gated community. She jumped up from the computer and excitedly planted a kiss on his cheek. “You are a man among men!”

She ran off to find shoes while he sat there, wondering what had just happened.

***

Standing beside the ratty rental car, Nadine impatiently held her hand out for the keys.

“I knew how to take a car apart and put it back together before I was old enough for a driver’s permit,” Magnus told her, not giving her what she wanted.

He stood there in his bad-boy black t-shirt pulled taut over spectacular pecs, looking all military gruff and authoritative. Only the palm leaf dancing above his head kept her from kicking him.

How could he make beautiful love to her at night and turn into King Kong during the day?

“You expect me to take a rental car engine apart?” she asked in incredulity. “I can’t even open the car door without keys!” She rattled the locked handle.

“You could if you knew the mechanics. It’s useful information should you lose your keys.” Relenting, he pushed the electronic lock button so she could slide into the driver’s seat.

Nadine smiled in satisfaction at the array of dials and waited for him to climb into the passenger seat. “I once tried to persuade the chauffeur to teach me. Jo-jo instantly had extra security installed on the garage so I couldn’t even get near the cars. Don’t hold me captive, Maximator.”

With an exaggerated sigh, Magnus handed her the keys. “Guilt works. So he doesn’t actually live underground?”

Nadine snatched the keys and inserted them into the ignition. “A normal person would have asked how it felt to be trapped in an office all day with no other entertainment. Most of the time, I worked in damned basements and couldn’t even see out. That’s underground enough for me. And no, I’m not telling you where.”

The dials lit up when she turned the key. “Freedom,” she murmured in relief. “Thank you.”

“So, essentially you’ve been locked up in a loony bin most of your life, with no chance of being normal.”

Nadine shot him a look of irritation. “The car isn’t big enough for both of us if you’re going to be overbearing and tedious.”

The car wasn’t big enough for Magnus any way she looked at it. His head brushed the roof and his shoulders crowded her view, and she was entirely too aware of his proximity.

“Tedious is what I am. Impulsive and unpredictable are who you are. I don’t think that changes. We just have to deal,” he told her. “Learn the controls first. They need to become habit, so they don’t require your attention when you’re on the road.”

His calm reaction to her hyper insult eased her tension. “I really don’t like confinement,” she admitted rather than apologize. “If I ever have a chance, I’ll own a convertible.” She pulled levers to see what they would do.

“Find a sedan with a bench seat in back and I’ll show you the value of privacy,” he said without a hint of a smirk.

But she knew he was smirking inside. She shoved his big shoulder and tried not to blush. “Outdoors, under the stars, to heck with privacy,” she told him. “I’ve had all the privacy I can tolerate.”

“I can handle that.” He eyed her hungrily, and the tension dissipated. The man had
heated glower
down to a science. Her gonads melted.

Magnus showed her how to turn levers for different actions and pull back and forth or up and down on others. Nadine grasped the mechanics swiftly, but the Magnificent Hulk was too close, too much in her space, and her mind kept drifting. She could picture running her fingers over his biceps, and she didn’t want to smack him away.

“OK, I’ve got all the important stuff,” she insisted when he put her through a list of commands. “I’ll worry about cleaning the windshields should I ever really drive.” She turned on the engine and admired its purr.

“What we’ll be doing today is basic mechanics, not driving. A car is a two-ton bomb, a weapon of destruction. You have to learn to treat it with respect and know how to avert danger.”

“You mean I can’t make it dance?” she teased. “Lighten up, Oswin.”

“I can’t. I’m handing you the keys to escape and disaster,” he said gloomily. “I’m not the general. I can’t hold you prisoner, but I understand the temptation. Your head is full of dangerous information, and you’re an incendiary device rigged to explode.”

“Nice analogy.” She attempted to back the car down the drive but had no idea where the rear bumper was. “Why don’t all cars have back up cameras?” she asked in frustration after several attempts ended up in the landscape gravel.

“An experienced driver develops a sense of where their vehicle begins and ends. That’s what I’m trying to warn you about. You can’t just jump in the car and go.”

“Damn.” She put the gear in forward, pulled back onto the pavers, then reversed and attempted again. “I’m a prisoner of my own ignorance!”

“Some people are a prisoner of poverty. We all have our burdens to bear. Yours can be overcome with education. And even without that, all you have to do is produce your credit card and call a limo. Others aren’t so fortunate.”

She gaped at him. “There
is
a brain behind that brawn, I knew it!”

He sent her a look that sizzled all her nerve endings.

“I could drive off and just leave you here,” he reminded her.

“Me and my credit card,” she said cheerfully, finally maneuvering the car down the pavers to the street. “And you can’t do anything without me! I think I’ll let power go to my head.”

He sat silently for a minute, watching her steer along the empty street. “What happens if you have a vision while driving?” he finally asked.

Nadine cursed, hit the brakes at an intersection, and glared out the windshield. “Maybe they’ll go away once Vera and I are safe.”

“How often do you have them?”

“Only when there are naked thoughts flying around, and I happen to run into them, or someone directs them my way. It’s like when someone leaves open an unencrypted network. If I get close enough and I turn the computer on, I connect.” She turned at the side street and poked back to the house, shaken by his question. She couldn’t drive a freeway at ninety miles an hour and suddenly have someone inside her mind. She had freedom in her hands, but she was imprisoned by her own damned head. “I have good reason to stay isolated.”

“Learning to drive is still necessary,” Magnus insisted. “Emergencies require taking risks. You need as much knowledge as you can acquire so you can adapt to whatever happens. Try to have someone with you prepared to grab the wheel, maybe. It’s a pity you have no one to teach you to block out broadcasts.”

“What does Francesca do? She’s a pilot!”

“Helicopter, not plane, and she always has a co-pilot with her. Still, she might know tricks. Education is important. We need to end this standoff with the general so you have an opportunity to learn.”

Bleakly, Nadine let that truism sit there, unacknowledged.

By the time they returned to their computers, Conan had conjured the ID of a nine-year-old girl named Lydia MacArthur.

“Can her parents be traced?” Nadine asked anxiously when Magnus showed her the screen.

“No. Conan will have found someone who died decades ago on the other side of the country. He’s building an on-line identity for her parents now. He’ll erase them when this is over.”

Nadine studied the information. “I’ll fill in only the bare minimum on the genealogy site, just enough to catch someone’s notice, if they’re watching. We don’t need to give them everything at once,” Nadine said. “Most people are hesitant to reveal too much. When I monitored the site, I used to keep an eye out for new people and do my own investigating. I don’t know what anyone’s doing now.”

“Can you find out?”

She shrugged and tapped out access keys to the sticky Malcolm website she’d created and knew inside and out. “Nothing was happening last time I checked. I don’t dare take a look in the back door for fear someone is expecting me to do just that.”

“It’s okay if they trace Lydia to this address and computer, but it’s best not to let them know it’s you hacking in their back door,” he agreed. Mad Max returned to fiddling with a mysterious circuit box that had arrived by UPS earlier.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not good at pretending,” she admonished.

“This is the method
you
chose to reach the general. Learn,” he said without sympathy. “Once we have him, you’re free to be you.” His eyes crinkled at the corners when he glanced up at her. “I just hope the world is prepared.”

His grin eased a tightly wound wire inside her, and Nadine turned back to her own website with less concern. “Positivity instead of negativity. I like that.”

“Same as doing instead of thinking.” He returned to tinkering.

“You have a strange idea of thinking then, if you equate it with negativity. I’m putting in your occupation as master dancer and choreographer when I’m ready to fill out the form.”

He snorted but didn’t object. She liked that about him.

She liked him too damned much. She needed to get the hell out before she ended up as another man’s appendage.

Monday evening, Magnus finished installing his version of a spyware detector on the back of the house and began running wires for his next level of security.

He fretted over Nadine’s implication that she felt trapped—with
him
—as she had with the general. Knowing how she felt—was damned uncomfortable.

Thinking about that was negativity any way he looked at it. He’d rather put her in a car and set her free and be done. Since that wasn’t possible . . . He pondered some other action that might let her enjoy her new-found freedom.

“Someone downloaded the latest info from the Malcolm website on Friday,” Nadine reported as he finished the wiring. “Lately, they’ve only been checking it on Fridays.”

“Crap. You’re saying they might not find our bait for nearly a week?” So not what he wanted to hear.

“Can’t say yet. Anything is possible. If Jo-jo chose my replacement from that Malcolm family tree, we could be up against anything.”

“Employee archives are inaccessible?” He set up his laptop and connected the wireless to his new network.

“Not totally. I set up a layered system of passwords, and someone has changed all of them in the servers I can locate. I’m running software on them now, but I suspect the vital servers have been moved. It will take a while to locate them. What are you doing?”

He pushed a button and grunted at the screen. “Detecting. I’m playing with a new security system. It’s located a night vision scope on the bluff.” He swung the screen around to show her. “I’ll install the program and leave instructions for the guy who owns this place so he’ll know if photographers are up there.”

She leaned over his shoulder, and his brain immediately clouded with the brush of her breasts. Damn, but he had it bad.

“You think that’s paparazzi out there?” she asked in disbelief.

“Nope, I think the general had someone trace your sister’s dog to this address, and he’s spying on the person he thinks was spying on him. The fact that the dog was taken to the vet and is no longer present hasn’t deterred him. The general is really and truly paranoid.”

“Nothing new. Wow. You just put this together? Impressive.” She studied the red beam on the grid. “What do we do now?”