Time Travel Romances Boxed Set (149 page)

The High Priestess whispered of intuition.
It had been she who told Lilith to have faith in her conviction
that Mitch was truly Sebastian, even if he didn’t remember. And
maybe she had given Mitch a similar message, for he had been
charming to Lilith when they next met.

Of course, his dog had trashed her garden in
the interim.

Lilith ran her fingertips across The Empress
card. Productivity was her realm, not just in terms of work but in
terms of the earth itself. The Empress knew of gardens, of fruit
and harvest. Lilith’s smile faded. And The Empress advised on
parenting. Hadn’t yesterday shown what a protective parent Mitch
was?

And reminded Lilith of the parent she would
never be?

Lilith forced herself to consider the next
card in their mutual adventure. A decisive man demanding an
audience, that was The Emperor, which no doubt hinted at what Mitch
would do sometime soon. But The Emperor was also concerned with the
balance of power, with domination and submission, with defining who
was in charge.

Lilith sat back and chewed her lip
thoughtfully, unable to dismiss her sense that she didn’t like the
import of that.

Eventually, Lilith turned the successive
cards face down, leaving only those up to The Emperor face up. With
one last glance over them, she left the cards where they lay and
went to make herself a pot of chamomile tea to help her ponder
Mitch’s next move.

*

The newsroom was a familiar cacophony of
sound and Mitch welcomed the evidence of organization after his
muddled weekend.

“
Get moved all right?”
Isabel demanded cheerfully. Their current interim, she was young
and idealistic, too thin to be healthy to Mitch’s way of thinking
and a whiz with both her camera and their antiquated filing system.
Today she wore black, despite the heat, her lips a decidedly Gothic
burgundy.

“
Pretty much,” Mitch
admitted. He gave her clothing a significant glance. “You look like
you’ve been hanging out with those Edwardian vampires on Queen
West.”

“
New guy,” Isabel conceded.
“So, what’s going on today?”

“
I don’t know yet.” Mitch
noted that his boss was beckoning him into their morning meeting.
He grabbed a coffee and decided to take a chance. “But maybe you
could do me a favor in the interim.”

“
Anything for the star
reporter.” Isabel grinned. “Might as well learn from the
best.”

Mitch took the compliment in stride, knowing
an investigative reporter was only as good as his latest scoop.
“Have a look through the files and see if you can find anything
about cons done by fortune tellers. Maybe in teams. And whenever
there’s a woman involved, try to get me a description.”

Isabel whistled. “Sounds like a juicy lead.
We gonna bust somebody?”

Mitch shrugged, striving to look more casual
than he felt about this. “You never know. You can only follow them
up.”

“
Okay. I’ll see what I can
get.”

“
Thanks.” Mitch nodded,
then headed into the meeting, scalding his lip on the coffee. It
wasn’t even worth it, the stuff tasted so bad. All the same, he
felt a grim satisfaction with both his idea and Isabel’s agreement
to help.

Because cons weren’t the only ones who could
retrieve information and use it to their own advantage. A harmless
wacko next door was one thing – but a scam being run on his
stepmother by that neighbor was quite another. Mitch was markedly
less well disposed to his beguiling neighbor. By the end of the
day, he was certain he’d have the goods on Lilith Romano.

Or whoever she really was.

*

By Monday afternoon, Lilith knew she had a
serious problem.

She hadn’t thought much of it when a trio of
cable repairmen came to her door that morning, insisting that they
had to have access to her yard to fix the main line. She didn’t
have cable herself, but she knew the line ran across the end of the
backyard, along with the telephone wires.

It had been a bit strange that the trio had
lingered on the porch grinning goofily at her, especially after she
told them where the gate was.

Even after she shut the door, they still
stood there.

And when they turned up in the backyard,
they seemed to spend a lot more time looking for her than fixing
the cable line. One waved so hard when he glimpsed her in the
kitchen that he nearly fell off his ladder.

Lilith decided they had just been compelled
to sit through a seminar on improving customer relations or some
nonsense and didn’t think too much more about it.

Monday lunch brought the paperboy, whom
Lilith hadn’t even known still came to collect personally. And she
didn’t even have the paper delivered – she bought it at the corner
every day. An earnest twelve-year-old, he stood in her foyer and
gaped at her like a fish out of water.

It was more than a bit uncomfortable,
especially as the boy stammered and flushed and couldn’t manage to
tell her why he was there.

Then he comped her for a month of
newspapers, blushed scarlet, and ran.

Lilith watched him go in puzzlement. She
checked her blouse and her skirt but found nothing odd about what
she was wearing. Everything was done up as it should be, the foyer
was orderly and there was no obvious indication of what could have
made the boy respond that way.

Maybe it was something in the wind. Or the
stars. Lilith checked her charts, but there was nothing adverse
there.

She might have forgotten it all, if cranky
Mr. Lewison next door hadn’t gone out of his way to be friendly
when she was leaving to run errands. He even gave Lilith a bloom
from his prize Austen rose, the one he guarded jealously from the
most fleeting glance of admiration. He bowed, before her astonished
eyes, and surrendered the rose with a romantic flourish.

“
Beauty to beauty,” he
declared gallantly.

Lilith put the rose in water and wondered if
Mr. Lewison had gone back to drinking gin for breakfast again.

The boy at the grocery store insisted on
carrying her box of acquisitions all the way to the house, flatly
refusing a tip. He just grinned and said carrying her groceries was
enough of a bonus for him.

Lilith was starting to think that things
were definitely odd by the time she rode her ancient bike down to
the occult bookstore for her afternoon session of readings. A
startling number of car accidents seemed to occur right behind
her.

She supposed the roads were getting really
dangerous.

But she had never noticed so many men idling
around, apparently with nothing better to do than whistle
appreciatively at women on bicycles.

At least, not until she got to the
bookstore. Oddly enough, there was a whole line of people waiting
for her to read their cards. That was a bit disconcerting. Usually
there were one or two anxious older women, or a few giggling
teenage girls, but Lilith had never been confronted by fifty men
who looked like they probably had real jobs.

Fifty men with their tongues hanging
out.

She frowned and entered the bookstore, just
as the first two started a shoving match as to who was actually at
the front of the line. The argument quickly escalated into a fist
fight, even though the proprietor – a reedy man of the gentle,
daisies-in-guns variety – tried desperately to intervene.

One last punch resolved the matter and the
loser went down. As Lilith watched in astonishment, the victor
clutched his bloody nose and lunged into the chair opposite Lilith,
a very familiar gleam in his eye.

“
Hey, baby, what’s your
sign?” he murmured, a wolfish grin at his own cleverness curving
over his lips. “Maybe you and me could, like, make a
love
connection.”

And Lilith suddenly understood. These men
were all in lust.

For her.

And it was all because of her spell.

She sat back in her chair and regarded the
line of agitated men with dawning horror, the lines she had chanted
trailing through her mind.

“
Lover true, come to
me,

Through the air or across the sea;

Once we loved through the night with style –

Come back NOW! I’ll make it worth your while.”

Oops.

Lilith checked the state of all the pants
she could see and swallowed hard. Oops, oops, oops. She had
concocted a love potion, drunk it, and flat out forgotten to make
it specific to Mitch.

These men: the paperboy, the cable guys, the
grocery clerk, they all hoped to seduce her. They were all
expecting her to make it worth their while.

They didn’t even know why they were
attracted to her – they were just like dogs following a bitch in
heat.

And Lilith had done this to herself. Just
like the song said.

She really had made Love Potion Number Nine
was apparently irresistible to the male gender as a result.

Yet the one man at whom the spell was
supposed to be targeted seemed to be immune. Didn’t that just
figure? It was too bad, because Lilith could have used a staunch
defender of her honor. She wasn’t entirely sure she could escape
this bookstore unscathed otherwise.

It was doubly annoying to realize that
defending a woman’s honor was probably something Mitch Davison did
quite well.

*

Mitch wasn’t in the best mood of his life.
There seemed to be a lot of that going around. No doubt about it –
when the facts didn’t come up the way he expected them to, the
journalist in Mitch got cranky.

He climbed out of the subway station to the
street and swung his briefcase into his other hand. Sweat trickled
down his back as he trudged up his street.

He noted ruefully that his house was readily
identifiable. Not only was it the worst-maintained dump on the
block, the fastidiously kept house directly past it made the
contrast unavoidable.

Lilith’s house. Mitch growled at the
unwelcome reminder of the woman who was tormenting him. Not only
had Isabel come up with a big fat zip on con teams in her foray
through the files today, but they had discovered that Lilith Romano
didn’t actually exist. Mitch had double-checked everything himself.
But there it was.

It was as though she had never been.

Mitch smelled a story. But without anything
in the files, he didn’t know where he’d find a lead.

Because people had to exist. They had to
have social insurance numbers, they had to have immigration papers,
they had to have bank accounts and various other numbers assigned
to them.

Except Lilith didn’t.

Oh, she had bought the house ten years
before all right, paid cash, which said something about the
financial power of fortune telling that Mitch had never considered
before. She had used a bogus social insurance number on the
transaction, but it didn’t trace anywhere.

And before that property title, there was no
record of Lilith Romance anywhere at all. She hadn’t been born
here, she hadn’t immigrated here, she hadn’t ever been to the
hospital, or passed a driver’s license test. She hadn’t had a
run-in with the cops, she hadn’t filed a complaint with anybody
anywhere.

She didn’t have a bank account. She didn’t
have a phone. She didn’t answer surveys or buy investments or get
on mailing lists. Somebody paid her property taxes in cash.

As far as Mitch could discern, she didn’t
even pay income tax. That was a hell of a trick and one he wouldn’t
mind learning himself. He eyed the winking neon sign in her window
and resolved to check the business registry.

But Mitch was quite certain he wouldn’t find
anything there either. He grimaced, pushed his way through the
crowd of men on the sidewalk, and made his way up his own
walkway.

The big question was
why
Lilith
didn’t exist. Because people didn’t ‘disappear’ by accident. No,
Lilith had spent a lot of moment making sure she couldn’t be
found.

And honest people didn’t need to do
that.

Mitch wasn’t going to consider that finding
indications of Lilith’s nefarious intent was at the root of his bad
mood. He wasn’t going to admit on any level that he’d been hoping
that a little research would prove him overprotective and maybe
even wrong.

He couldn’t be grumpy just because that
hadn’t happened. After all, Mitch didn’t like being wrong, so being
pleased by being proven wrong would have made no logical sense.

Mitch opened the front door and called as
cheerful a greeting as he could manage. He had a policy of not
bringing work – or its emotional fallout – home.

Jen squealed as she ran down the hall, the
faithful Bun in tow, and threw herself into his arms. Mitch grinned
and swung her high, very glad to see her giggling again.

“
Daddy, we went swimming
again. And we went to the store and Nana bought
blue
Jell-O
and…”

Mitch shook his head with mock solemnity.
“They don’t make blue Jell-O.”

“
They do! Daddy, they do!
We had some. It’s
boo-berry
.”

Mitch bounced his daughter on his hip and he
headed for the kitchen, her litany of news running in one ear and
out the other. Cooley nudged his knee, demanding his ears be
scratched, his jowls dripping water.

Jason proudly displayed a mayonnaise jar.
Its lid had been punctured, no doubt with one of Mitch’s better
screwdrivers.

“
I caught a cicada,” he
declared and Mitch bent to squint into the jumble of
grass.

“
It’s a big
one.”

Jen bounced Bun on her dad’s shoulder. “Nana
made stir-fry and we helped and it took forever!”

Mitch looked up at that incredible bit of
news. “Nana made a stir-fry?”