To Love a Highland Dragon (31 page)

As she headed into the room full of boxes, Gaby glanced back over her shoulder. “I’m going to need a pot of coffee. And please get rid of the weed smoke. It makes it hard for me to concentrate.” Flicking vague fingers in his direction, she’d already forgotten him as she reached for the first box.

“We’re leaving now.” Luic’s voice penetrated her concentration. Gaby waved one hand in acknowledgement, fingers of the other never missing a beat on the adding machine. She looked up to see Luic pointing to the man next to him. “This is Harry Daniels, part of the band and our business manager.” With his long, sun-streaked hair, patterned shirt, and faded jeans, Gaby thought Harry couldn’t have been further from any business manager she’d ever seen.

“Should we send up dinner for you?” Harry asked.

Dinner? What happened to lunch?
Eight forty-two read the cheap watch the twins had given her for her birthday.

“Going! I can’t miss the last ferry.” Gaby made wild grabs at the equipment she had precisely arranged in parallel rows across the suite’s dining table.

“Go on without me,” Luic told Harry. “I need to talk to her.” Looking over at the mirror panel next to the elevator, she thought Harry looked amused as he pushed the elevator call button.

When Luic turned back, Gaby dove under the table to unplug her ten-key adding machine. “I can get you a preliminary report first thing tomorrow.” A glance back as she crawled out showed him leaning against the wall, one eyebrow raised as she defensively reached back to twitch her skirt into place. She stood and reverently packed the adding machine into its padded case. “There is a lot more to do, but basically, your books have seen more action than hookers at an auto convention.”

She frowned at the small pile of papers she’d just finished reviewing and added them to three of the piles arranged with military precision across the large dining table. “Stuff dances through accounts and then eventually disappears.”

“Disappears?”

“Yes.” What was it about the eyebrow that stopped her thoughts?
Breathe, Gaby.
“Um, I don’t know all the steps yet, but at the end of the dance you are definitely hemorrhaging money. Don’t you know where it goes?” Her tone dripped disdain for anyone who didn’t know the intimate details of his own finances.

“I don’t do numbers.” He mirrored her dislike. “But I suppose you better tell me about it. Over food.”

“Can’t miss my ferry.” Like her life didn’t already suck enough. Now she was turning down a chance for dinner with Luic leMuir. He might be an arrogant jerk, but dinner invitations were few and far between for a junior accountant raising adolescent siblings. And there
was
that eyebrow. She didn’t slow the practiced ballet that saw an astonishing amount of material and equipment vanish into her battered case. Making a grab for her coat, she raced for the door. “I’ll be here at seven tomorrow morning and we can talk. Do not let anyone touch anything before then.” She waved a hand over the precisely arranged piles along the table.

His hand caught the closing elevator doors, and he stepped inside. “The only people who talk to me at that hour are the ones I’ve been with all night.”

“Neither of us thinks that will ever include me.” Gaby jabbed the lobby button. “Look, I’m not good with people. That’s why I’m with a temp agency instead of one of the regular accounting firms. But I’m damn good at accounting. Numbers talk to me in ways you would never understand. So you have your choice of me putting all this into a memo or you finding a time to talk to me.”

“Dinner. Tomorrow. And if you want this job to continue, you’ll be ready for dinner at eight tomorrow night.”

Despite her physical pain at the thought of the untapped banker’s boxes, Gaby shook her head.

“I can’t miss my ferry. I have … responsibilities. I’m sure the agency can find you someone else.”

Icy blue-eyed fury met her stony brown-eyed gaze.

“And the glare isn’t going to change my mind,” she said. “I face down the world’s scariest twelve-year-old girl several times a day.”

“Fine. Tomorrow morning.”

Bemused Seattle commuters and tourists streamed around the chauffeur holding the sign with big block letters proclaiming GABRIELLE CPA.
That’s just wrong,
thought Gaby as she headed down the ferry Kaleetan’s foot-passenger ramp the next morning. As she passed the uniformed sign holder, she called out, “She’s not coming.” Just beyond, the dark window of the limo rolled down. “I haven’t had any sleep,” warned the voice she already knew too well. “I’m not happy. Get in. Now.” Gaby looked in the window and saw Luic gesturing over the decanters in front of him. She sighed, marched over to the truck parked on the corner, and came back with two cups of coffee, two bagels, and a couple of oranges. Getting into the limo, she handed him one of each.

“Good morning, Gaby,” she hinted. “How was the ferry ride? Looks like a beautiful day. How are you doing?”

He glared.

“When you’re done with breakfast and ready to behave like a normal person, we can talk.” She positioned the sugar, optimistically labeled creamer packets, and a giant pile of napkins on the seat between them, unrolled the window on her side, and proceeded to work her way through bagel and coffee.

She was, she admitted, tired herself. After getting home so late, she’d looked over her sister and brother’s homework, listened to Carey’s chatter about their day, evaded Connor’s questions about her assignment, and sent the twins off to bed. Then she spent the next two hours thoroughly cleaning their little house. Not until she could verify everything was in its precise place did she finally climb into bed herself, only to stare at the ceiling for hours. She told herself it was her
harmonia
gift for making sense of hidden patterns that kept her awake. It was struggling to decode the story starting to emerge from Luic’s financial records, her fingers itching for the numbers waiting in the untapped banker’s boxes, that denied sleep. It couldn’t have been the memory of one blue eye and an arrogantly-lifted eyebrow.

Closing her eyes as she finished her coffee, she leaned against the cushioned seats of Luic’s limo and waited. When she finally looked back, he still scowled, but coffee and bagel had disappeared. “Do you need help peeling your orange?”

“Good morning, Gaby,” he ground out as his long musician’s fingers stripped peel from the orange. “I’ve never been a normal person. Now can we talk about my money?”

“Here’s what I know so far.” With a cautious glance at the front seat, Gaby closed the partition behind the driver. Her voice was low and serious. “Somebody took the time to set up your finances professionally. It looks like there are charities you support, plus the usual tax and other accounts. All about what you’d expect. But the part I haven’t been able to track yet is the way stuff moves around. And you’ve got weird investments—do you know how many of your oil wells don’t produce oil? Investment money goes lots of directions, and some of them pay off. But a lot of them just suck in cash. Why do you keep buying the wells?”

“I’d say it’s what you’re going to find out for me. Harry and I have had the same management team in place since our first gold record, but all of a sudden things are just not adding up. I want you on a plane to New York tomorrow morning.”

“No, thank you,” she said politely.

“You work for me, and I need you to go.”

“Do you think the drinking could be causing these memory lapses? I already told you: I don’t work for you and I have responsibilities.”

“I checked on those ‘responsibilities.’” Luic leaned back and his blue eyes gleamed at her. “I think your brother and sister will need the kind of money I’m offering you. I’ll give you two percent of whatever you get back for me. And I’ll pay you another twenty thousand if you can tell me who’s got their fingers all over my money.”

She froze. Gaby didn’t talk about Carey and Connor or her goal of providing them with a normal life. Ever.
What gives this total stranger the right to “check” on us?
Her eyes narrowed with what she hoped was anger but felt a lot like fear.
What if he’s with Haven? What if they decided that killing Gifts like Mom and Dad wasn’t enough, and they’ve come for me? Or the twins?
“Why me? For your kind of money, you can hire teams of accountants.”

“I could say it’s because, even though Harry recommended you, I had you investigated. You are raising your brother and sister on almost no money. Your parents are dead, and you don’t seem to have any other relatives. And you’re just as smart and talented an accountant as you think you are.”

“But?”

“But actually it’s because you don’t like me. You’re not going to try to get on my good side, because neither of us thinks I have one. I’ll have my agent set up your reservations.”

Afraid, Gaby? Hell, yeah.
But his investigations and anything else he found out about the Parkers would have to wait at the end of her nightmare line because there were damn big terrors duking it out for first place.
Suppose Haven gets to the twins while I’m away? Should I take Connor and Carey and go to Null City? We would be safe there from Haven’s war on Gifts. We could live there as normal humans, but we’d have to give up our own gifts.
Absently she reached out and straightened the decanters, placing the largest in the middle with the two shorter ones on either side.
Still, his twenty thousand buys a lot of normal right here in Seattle. And he knows it.

“Make it five percent of recovery and I’ll do it.” When he nodded, scowling, she pulled out a notebook and flipped through several pages. “I have other things I need to find out from you. And before you tell me to ask someone else, the first thing on my list is who has access to your accounts. I won’t be talking to any of them until I know more about what’s going on.”

Luic glanced at the pages of her neatly-labeled list. “Did I mention I don’t like you, either?”

The next morning Gaby was waiting in front of Luic’s hotel for the cab to the airport when she heard her name. She turned and watched Harry Daniels approach. Objectively, she thought, Luic’s best friend and fellow band member might be even better looking. But the severely trimmed beard and long, gold-flecked hair tied back at his neck reminded her of austere saints sculpted by medieval masters.

“Gabrielle Parker,” he said.

“Harry Daniels.” She eyed him. “What can I do for you?”

“We have to talk.” He glanced at her suitcase. “Maybe I can give you a ride to the airport?”

She laughed. “We never even went out, and the first thing you say to me is ‘We have to talk’? What’s next? ‘We can stay friends?’ Or ‘I’ll never forget the good times?’”