Jayne Castle: After Dark

"That's enough, Zane," Lydia cut in swiftly. "I'm sure Mr. London has dinner reservations. We'd better be on our way."

"Yeah, sure," Zane said. He looked at Emmett with a proprietary gleam in his eyes. "Lyd's ready to go, Mr. London. She looks real nice, doesn't she?"

Emmett swept Lydia with a considering expression. His eyes gleamed, too. Lydia was pretty sure she saw amusement in that amber-colored gaze, but she thought she also saw something else, something that might have been masculine appreciation. She grew unaccountably warm.

She wasn't blushing. She could not possibly be blushing. This was business, after all.

Maybe she should have worn a business suit instead of the little aqua dinner dress. She had bought it just before the disaster in the catacombs, right after she and Ryan Kelso had started dating. But Ryan had eased himself out of her life in the weeks following her Lost Weekend, and she'd never had an opportunity to wear the dress.

When she had taken the frock out of the back of the closet where it had been hanging unworn for more than six months, it had seemed discreet enough for a business dinner. The long sleeves and the high neckline gave the garment an almost prim look. At least, that's what she had told herself. Suddenly she was not so sure.

"Yes," Emmett said, "she looks very nice."

Nice? What did "nice" mean? She wondered. She eyed his slouchy, unconstructed black linen jacket, black T-shirt, and black trousers. Definitely not nice, she decided. Dangerous, sexy, intriguing, but not nice.

She cleared her throat. "We'd better be on our way. Zane, you can do your homework here and keep Fuzz company until it's time for you to go back to your place. But no watching the rez-screen. Understood?"

Zane made a face. "Jeez, Lyd, I don't have enough homework to fill up the whole evening."

"If, by some bizarre chance, you happen to finish your schoolwork early, you can read a book until it's time to go home," she said heartlessly.

Zane groaned. "Okay, okay. No rez-screen." He paused speculatively. "How about ice cream?"

Lydia grinned. "Sure. As long as you leave some for me."

"No problem." Zane waved her through the door with a gallant motion of his hand. "Have a good time."

Lydia grasped the strap of her purse tightly and moved out into the hall. When Zane closed the door very loudly behind her, she was suddenly conscious of being alone with Emmett. Without a word, she walked beside him to the stairwell.

"Known Zane long?" Emmett asked as they started down to the fourth floor.

"I met him and his aunt right after I moved into this apartment complex. He and Olinda were very kind to me at a time when I, well, when I needed friends."

"Olinda is the aunt?"

"Yes." Lydia stepped into the elevator. "She's okay. A good-hearted soul. Runs the Quartz Cafe down the street. But I'm afraid she's got plans for Zane, and they don't include a college education."

"What kind of plans?"

"Olinda makes no secret of the fact that she can't wait until Zane is old enough to join the Guild and train as a ghost-hunter. A good one can make excellent money, you know."

"So I'm told."

Lydia grimaced. "Unfortunately, Zane shows every sign of becoming a very powerful dissonance-energy para-rez."

"In other words, good old Aunt Olinda thinks Zane's going to become an asset to the family's cash flow as soon as she gets him into the Guild."

"Exactly." Lydia glanced at him. "Don't get me wrong. I'm very fond of Olinda, but she and I are engaged in an undeclared war. I'm fighting to make sure Zane goes to college before he even thinks about becoming a ghost-hunter. Olinda wants him to join the Guild the day he turns eighteen."

"I get the picture."

"I'm doing my best to discourage his fantasies about ghost-hunting, but I'm not making much headway. Young boys are so impressionable. All that macho hunter stuff really appeals to them, especially at Zane's age."

Emmett slanted her an enigmatic look as they exited the stairwell and walked out into the parking lot.

"Being a dissonance-energy para-rez isn't something you can ignore. Sooner or later Zane will have to come to terms with that side of his nature. He won't be able to pretend his talent doesn't exist, no matter how much he tries."

His calm logic irritated her. "Zane's a bright kid. He could be a doctor or a professor or an artist. I'm not saying he can't exercise his talents on the side. But I don't want him to become just another high-priced, overrated bodyguard."

"I realize the profession doesn't rank very high with you, but bodyguards occasionally have their uses."

"Huh. That's a matter of opinion."

He stopped beside a dark gray Slider and reached out to open the passenger door for her. "If you were going to continue as my consultant, you might need one."

She paused, one high-heel-shod foot inside the car. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to fire you."

Outrage and disbelief swept through her. "You're taking me out to dinner to tell me that you want out of our contract?"

"That pretty much sums it up. Those burn marks on your wall have changed everything, Lydia. There's some stuff I haven't told you about this job."

HE'D CHOSEN THE restaurant with the help of the concierge at his hotel.

"The kind of place where the university crowd hangs out, you know, the professors, not the students."

"Don't worry, I know the perfect restaurant, sir. A charming little bistro. It's called Counterpoint. Specializes in New Wave cuisine. Excellent wine list. Very popular with the university crowd."

Lydia said nothing as she followed the maitre d' to a table near the window. Emmett knew that she was fuming. But beneath the simmering anger, he caught the glint of recognition in her expression. He made a mental note to tip the concierge. The guy had nailed it with the restaurant.

Emmett's gaze swept the room, assessing the polished wooden floors, the intimately lit tables, and the waiters dressed in black and white. In recent years he had finally grasped the concept of casual chic. He knew it when he saw it—and Counterpoint was definitely it. The sort of place that served a lot of pasta and did terribly clever, artistic things with miniature vegetables.

Lydia managed to contain herself until after the waiter had taken the order. Then she folded her arms on the table and narrowed her eyes at him over the candle flame.

"Okay, talk," she said. "What's all this about firing me?"

He had given a lot of thought to the problem of how much to tell her. In the end he had decided it would be best to go with at least a measure of the truth. He couldn't think of any other way to convince her that she did not want the job.

"I told you that I came to Cadence to search for a family heirloom that had been stolen from my collection," he said.

Her fingertips did a quick staccato on the table. "Are you going to tell me that your story about the missing cabinet of curiosities wasn't for real?"

"It's for real, all right. What I didn't get around to mentioning was that the person who took it was my nephew, Quinn."

That information made her blink a couple of times. "Your nephew?"

"My sister's kid. He's…" Emmett paused, thinking. "Eighteen as of last month."

"I don't understand. He stole a family heirloom?"

"I doubt if he looks at it quite that way."

"What other way is there to look at it?"

"Technically, what he actually did was pawn it. He dropped a copy of the receipt into the mail to me. Just in case, he said."

"Just in case of what?"

"I'd better start at the beginning. A few months ago Quinn took up with a new friend, a young lady named Sylvia. My sister and her husband did not approve. The long and short of it is that Sylvia came here to Cadence, apparently looking for work. Quinn followed."