Sex & Sensibility

  “Kiss me.”

  A sound of pure pleasure escaped from Tessa’s throat as Griffin’s tongue met hers. His lips were firm and he knew how to take charge.

  He slid both hands around her waist, then stroked down over her derriere. “I thought we decided this wasn’t a good idea,” he whispered.

  “You may have decided. I like it.”

  He pulled up her tank top and tugged it over her head. “You’re a visual feast. It’s been a long time.”

  Tessa took a deep breath, forcing her nipple into his mouth, each caress of his tongue sending pleasure careening through her. “So how long has it been?”

  His chest shook as he chuckled. “So long I think they reissued my virgin card.”

  “Ooh. I’ve always wanted to have sex with a virgin.”

  “Then this is your lucky day.”

  Dear Reader,

  Back in the nineties, devotees of The X-Files (of which I was one) would go around saying things like “Trust No One” and “Plausible Deniability” and “The Truth Is Out There.” But the one I liked was on the poster behind Agent Mulder’s desk: I Want To Believe.

  So what happens when a man who trusts no one meets a woman who makes him want to believe? Tessa Nichols is a sensitive, a woman who can sense things that others can’t, who has access to information that others do not. Her first job is to make Griffin Knox believe in her gift—and then she finds herself wanting to make him believe in her, and finally in himself.

  A classmate of mine from grad school, Nancy Myer, is a bona fide psychic detective who has helped police departments solve hundreds of cases. Her stories fascinated me, as did her book Silent Witness. This fascination led to the creation of Tessa’s character, back in July 2004, in Blaze #144, His Hot Number. I’m so glad that I now have the chance to tell Tessa’s story!

  For a sneak peek at my next Harlequin Blaze adventure, visit www.shannonhollis.com.

  Warmly,

  Shannon Hollis

  Books by Shannon Hollis

  HARLEQUIN BLAZE

  144—HIS HOT NUMBER

  170—ON THE LOOSE

  SEX & SENSIBILITY

  Shannon Hollis

  To Jenny Andersen, with thanks for the Denny’s receipt

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Lieutenant Patrick Picciarelli, NYPD Ret., for his unstinting willingness to help my fictional investigators do their jobs. Thanks also to Diana Duncan and Jamie Sobrato for lending me such a snappy title.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  1

  WITH A CRACK LIKE A GUNSHOT, the coffeepot broke and showered hot coffee all over his hand, the counter, and his pants. Griffin Knox wasn’t the kind of guy to believe in signs and omens, but holding the black plastic handle in midair over his still-empty mug, he hoped this wasn’t an indication of how the day was going to go.

  In a moment he found out.

  The cell phone he wore exclusively for communication between himself and his employer went fleedeep at five past nine. Fleedeep meant the summons was in walkie-talkie mode, which meant Jay Singleton couldn’t wait the thirty seconds it would take to press seven digits and let it ring.

  Singleton used walkie-talkie mode a lot.

  Wiping the coffee from his hand and his jeans with a paper towel, Griffin grabbed the unit from the counter before it got drowned and pressed the respond button. “Knox.”

  “I need you at the house right away.”

  “The house?” As Singleton’s vice president of security, Griffin’s job was to make sure nobody messed with the vast tract of redwood, meadow, and low-slung architecture known as the campus of Ocean Technology in Santa Rita, California. If someone got laid off and came back waving a rifle, Singleton called him. If intellectual property slid past a nondisclosure agreement and into a competitor’s lab, Singleton called him. If a visiting supplier from Singapore needed an escort, Singleton called him.

  But typically his marching orders took him to Singleton’s spacious office on campus, with its mile-high windows and en suite bath, not to the Carmel mansion perched above a crescent of beach like a coy starlet afraid to get her toes wet.

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he told his boss.

  “Make it twenty and I’ll pay for the speeding ticket.”

  “Done.”

  Griffin gave up on the coffee altogether and put the pieces of the broken carafe in the trash can under the sink. There was no time to change out of his stained clothes. He grabbed his leather jacket off the back of the couch and slammed the door of the postwar stucco house behind him. The house wasn’t much—two bedrooms, a bath, and a banana tree on the south side that stayed alive in spite of him—but it was his. In a life that, in one of those curious one-eighties he could never quite figure out, now belonged pretty much to Jay Singleton, that was a lot.

  Griffin pushed his thirty-year-old pickup to the top end of high gear and kept a wary eye out for the California Highway Patrol as he sped down Highway 1. Ocean Tech might be based in Santa Rita, a town known for keeping the flame of the Summer of Love alive as every new class graduated from the nearby UC campus, but its CEO hobnobbed with the rich and famous on the greens at Pebble Beach when he wasn’t inviting them to dinner at his home in Carmel. Griffin often wondered when Jay had time to run his shop, but apparently the wonders of mobile communications and an executive assistant who was a combination of Xena the Warrior Princess and C-3PO enabled Singleton to function as well in Carmel as he did in his office or anywhere he happened to be in the world.

  Precisely twenty minutes later, the truck rumbled to a stop at the gate.

  “Morning, boss,” said the speaker under the camera that swiveled to look at him. A second camera mounted on an angle behind the vehicle took a picture of his license plate.

  “Morning, Ramon.” On paper, Ramon’s title was Director of Private Security. In reality, he was the techno-wizard responsible for the safety of Singleton’s property and everyone on it. Cameras were his specialty. “What’s going on?”

  “We got problems, all right.”

  “No shit. Details, man.”

  “The little princesa is missing. The señora went to her cottage this morning and found her gone. All of us got called in to search the grounds but there was not a sign.”

  “Sign of what?” He wished he’d had at least a cup of that coffee before the carafe had blown up. “She’s just got her thong in a twist again about having to go to college. She could be shopping or walking the beach in a snit or God knows what else.”

  “Don’t know, boss. But El Jefe is in one hell of a state. He seems to think it’s a kidnapping. I hope that jacket has Kevlar in it.”

  “What have you got on video?” Surely to God the expensive surveillance system would give them their money’s worth in a case like this.

  “Camera 12 has her leaving the kitchen door last night at 8:10, and Camera 15 picked her up entering the cottage at 8:13. But nothing after that. It doesn’t make sense. She’d have to be invisible to leave without one of them catching it.”

  “Or she went out the window and down to the beach.”

/>   “Or someone helped her out that way. Good luck.”

  The gate swung open and Griffin drove through, dread and denial mixing in his gut like a nuclear soup.

  Christina Singleton kidnapped? The fact was, it was only too possible. Jay had about a gazillion enemies. Competitors had tried to take over Ocean Tech, but he’d always beaten them off, saying that as long as he was CEO he was going to run his own shop, not take a cheesy senior VP role while somebody based in Houston or New York made the decisions. He was loud, brash, and didn’t pull any punches, which was why the media hated him and Griffin got along with him so well.

  When Griffin found himself with a shot-up leg and the choice between being a desk jockey with Santa Rita P.D. or an unemployment statistic, Singleton had got wind of it somehow and remembered a night years before when Griffin had done him a good turn. Griffin had been a rookie then, fresh out of the academy, and the sight of a carload of drunk computer geeks trying to climb a tree with a ’76 Pacer would have been funny if it weren’t so pitiful. He’d charged the driver with driving under the influence and hauled the most sober one out and told him to do something with his brain besides knock it out on the windshield. That had been Singleton, in his early thirties but as socially inept as a teenager.

  So, after the shooting that had brought both Griffin’s marriage and his career to a screeching halt, Singleton had stepped in and offered him the job as head of security for his fledgling company. At that time, Ocean Tech had consisted of five cold cubicles rented on one end of a warehouse. No one, least of all Griffin, could have predicted what Ocean Tech—and Jay Singleton—would become. And at one hundred-K a year, payback was a bitch Griffin was happy to live with.

  He let himself into the house and walked across the foyer to Singleton’s office. Each of Jay’s ex-wives had had a go at the interior decoration of the house, but none of them had been allowed to mess with that room, which still looked like one of the cubes in the warehouse. Piles of publications, specs, contracts, and who knew what else layered the desk like some geologic formation. A huge computer monitor and the latest in technology, backup arrays, and telecommunications took up the wall beside it. The rear wall held another mile of windows, and in front of these he saw Singleton, oblivious to the dramatic crash of breakers framed by the glass, pacing back and forth as though he were crushing sand fleas into the Turkish rug.

  “Hey, chief,” Griffin greeted him.

  “Twenty-two minutes. What did you do, take a break to yak with Ramon?”

  “He was briefing me.”

  “Yeah, well, when I say twenty minutes, I mean it. And I’ll do the briefing.”

  “Tell me.”

  It only took a few minutes to fill in the details. Amanda Singleton, Jay’s fourth wife and the second to hold the trophy position, had gone to Christina’s cottage to check that they were still on for a weekend shopping expedition to San Francisco, a hundred miles to the north. The cottage was within shouting distance of the main house, separated from it by a wide flagstone patio and a wisteria arbor. When Christina hadn’t answered the door, Mandy had gone in, thinking she’d overslept. She’d found the cottage empty, the bed neatly made, and none of Christina’s things missing.

  “Not even her purse?” Griffin asked.

  “It was gone,” Singleton acknowledged. “So were her favorite jeans and a black sweater. Basically, the clothes she had on yesterday.”

  “That pretty much cancels the running away theory. Had the maid made up the bed?”

  Singleton shrugged. The activities of the staff were none of his concern, unless the coffee kept perpetually hot and fresh on the sideboard got cold. Griffin decided that if anyone knew anything, it would be Lucia Gomez, Ramon’s girlfriend, who cleaned up after la princesa with a patience that in him would have worn through on the first day. Eighteen or not, Christina was still a teenager. What was she doing with her own cottage, anyway? He and his little brother had shared a bedroom for their entire childhood and counted themselves lucky they weren’t sleeping in the back of the family station wagon. But then, Dad had been a salesman and not Jay Singleton, and when he’d died, he’d left his wife nothing but his name and a hole of debt so deep you could swan dive into it.

  One of the sweetest side benefits of his salary had been paying off the mortgage that had been the cross on his mom’s back since that day.

  “I’ll start with Mrs. Singleton and the maids,” he said. “I need to get as much information as I can if I’m going to help the detectives when they get here.” At the stony expression in Singleton’s eyes, Griffin paused. “You called the sheriff to report this, right?”

  Singleton’s jaws made a sound that Griffin realized was the grinding of his perfectly capped teeth. “No. No cops. Just you. You’ll find her and no one will be the wiser.”

  Griffin stared at him. “What are you talking about? Of course we call the cops. If this is a kidnapping, it’ll mean the FBI as well.”

  Singleton shook his head, negating every word. “If the cops get ahold of this information, it will be on the noon broadcast, with details at six o’clock. I know for a fact Barbara watches the West Coast news feeds and if she sees it, she’ll yank Christina back to Boston so fast my head will spin. I had a devil of a time convincing her I’d get that kid to choose a college out here if she let her live with me. As soon as we find her, Christina’s going to quit messing around and enroll somewhere and that’s that.”

  There was no point in educating Jay about how careful the P.D. would be with a young woman’s life in danger. Once he made up his mind, he was as immovable as a rock. “Have you heard from anyone? Has there been a demand for ransom?”

  “Not yet, but she only came up missing an hour ago. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Stay by the phone and call me the second you hear from anyone. Set all the answering machines in the house to ‘record’ so at least we get them on tape. There might be some background noise to identify where they are.” And he’d have something to hand to the sheriff as soon as he could reason with Jay. Meantime, there were things he could do. “I’m going to talk to Lucia.”

  Singleton resumed his destruction of the carpet’s pile and Griffin left the study, intending to head for the kitchen to start his search for the maid. But she was waiting for him in the echoing space Mandy called the foyer.

  “Ramon said you would want to talk to me,” she said softly.

  “Ramon was right.” Their voices bounced off the marble floor and the flying spiral curve of the staircase that led up to the second floor. He gestured to his right. “Let’s go in here.”

  “Here” was what Mandy had labeled the drawing room, as if she were in some English mansion straight out of the murder mysteries she read by the bucketload. It was the room she’d started with in her campaign to erase traces of the previous Mrs. Singletons, and even Griffin had to admit that the California Craftsman furniture and warm earth tones of the drapes and carpet were good choices. They echoed the colors of the Navajo rug on the wall that cost at least as much as he did in a year. He liked this room better than the French Provincial dining room and the medieval monastery kitchen, which were Mandy’s next targets.

  “When was the last time you saw Christina, Lucia?” he asked when she settled on the extreme edge of one of the couch’s burgundy leather cushions.

  “Yesterday afternoon, señor.” Lucia studied the carpet. “She had gone for a swim and I saw her at the pool, so I took the opportunity to vacuum the cottage.”

  “You didn’t see her after that?”

  “I believe she had dinner with the family at about eight o’clock, and after that I assume she went to her cottage to watch television or call a friend.”

  “So when you made the bed this morning, did you see any signs of a struggle? Anything dropped on the floor? Anything to indicate what might have happened?”

  The crime scene was irretrievably lost now. Lucia would have made the bed, vacuumed the rug, closed any open windows, a
nd generally cleaned away any reasonable hope of establishing a trail for Christina.

  “Oh, no, señor.”

  He hadn’t expected she would notice anything, but having that confirmed still made hope drain away. “There was nothing unusual?”

  “Not that, señor. I meant that I did not make the bed this morning.”

  “But Mr. Singleton said the bed was made.”

  “If it was, señor, then it means the señorita did not go to bed at all. I have not yet been to the cottage to clean it. Only Señora Singleton has been there.”

  She hadn’t slept at the cottage last night? Griffin wasn’t sure that narrowed down the window of the time of the crime, though. Just the opposite.

  “Thanks, Lucia. You’ve been a big help.” Maybe he could still find a clue at the cottage if Mandy hadn’t done anything dumb. “Do you know where the señora is?”

  “Yes, señor. She is at the cottage, waiting for you. She said I was to bring you there as soon as you had finished with El Jefe.”

  Was it too much to hope that Mandy had read enough of those books to know not to disturb Christina’s room? Could something, just one thing, go right today?

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  2

  “SO BESIDES FLAKING OUT of working on your thesis, what are you up to?”

  Cell phone to her ear, Tessa Nichols stuck out her tongue at her sister, even though she was half a peninsula away. She walked across her one-room apartment to the only window whose very distant view of the water consisted of a vertical strip of blue between two buildings. On a good day. On a bad day, the grad student housing on the campus on the southern fringes of San Francisco sat under a fuzzy, cold blanket of fog and you couldn’t see your hand in front of you, much less the ocean and its illusion of freedom.