White Lies (9 page)

Archer was clearly taken aback. “Your goal was to become a psychic investigator for J&J?”

“I thought it would be exciting and a perfect way to use my talents. I’ve sent in applications to the West Coast office every six months for the past few years.”

“No luck, I take it.”

“The dumbass who heads up the regional office, Fallon Jones, always rejects my applications.”

Archer blinked. “Dumbass?”

“I assume that is an appropriate description because he is obviously too dumb to realize how much I could contribute to J&J.”

“I see.”

“Every time I apply, I get a letter informing me that there is no position available. Doesn’t take a human lie detector to know that’s a bunch of bull. Fallon Jones has decided my sensitive nature is too delicate for the work.”

“How do you use your talent in the philanthropy field?”

“Lots of frauds and scammers out there who will go to any lengths to get their hands on a foundation’s money. It just so happens that I am uniquely qualified to detect frauds and scammers. Until six months ago that’s what I did for my employers.”

Archer turned thoughtful. “Must have been tough all these years, living with that lie detector talent of yours, though.”

“Mom and Aunt May saw to it that I got some help from a really insightful parapsychologist. Dr. Oxlade helped me figure out how to control my sensitivities.”

“That fiancé of yours. Was he a member of the Society or a sensitive?”

“No.”

“He ever figure out that there was something a little different about you?”

“I don’t think so,” Clare said. “At least not in the way you mean.”

“You’re better off without him, then. Anyone as strong as you would have been miserable with a nonsensitive.”

She said nothing. Given that it was unlikely she would ever find a sensitive who was willing to risk marriage with her, there didn’t seem to be much to say.

“What makes you so damn sure we couldn’t work together on my foundation?” Archer asked after a while.

“Intuition.” She paused a beat. “Archer, if you’re making the offer because you feel guilty about the past, forget it. It’s not your fault you didn’t know I existed.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Startled, she looked at him. “Why do you say that? Mom told me that she quit her job and left Arizona forty-eight hours after the two of you had your one-night stand. She said she never contacted you again.”

“I should have checked up on her,” Archer said. “Made sure she was all right. But the truth was, her quitting like that made my life a whole hell of a lot simpler. I had enough problems on my plate at the time. I concentrated on dealing with them.”

“What kind of problems?”

“The company was going through a bad patch. Myra and I were having trouble. By the time I had my head above water again a year or so had gone by.”

“So you concentrated on the future, not the past.”

“I don’t look back too often,” Archer said. “Not my way. I told myself that it was highly unlikely your mother got pregnant that one time and that if she did, I sure as hell would have heard from her. Most women in her situation would have come looking for the kid’s inheritance. And she’d have had every right to do just that.”

“Mom’s a very proud and independent woman.”

“I remember.” Archer smiled wryly. “Probably why I was attracted to her. That and the fact that she was a hell of an accountant. At any rate, she never got in touch after she left so I figured that was the end of it.”

“What’s done is done. I understand and accept that you feel some responsibility to take care of me financially. I respect that. I appreciate it. But it’s not necessary. I can take care of myself.”

“I never said you couldn’t. But what the hell is wrong with taking a job from me?”

She heard a car in the drive. “That will be the guy from the rental car company.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

She collected her purse and stood. “It wouldn’t work.”

He got up and faced her. “Before you run off, give me your word that you’ll at least think about taking the position I’m offering.”

“It’s not a good idea. Trust me.”

“I hit you with it cold today. You haven’t had a chance to give it serious consideration.”

“I don’t think—”

“Forty-eight hours,” he said, cutting in swiftly. “And stay here in Phoenix while you’re thinking about it. Is that too much to ask?”

“Why do I have to stay here while I’m mulling over your offer?”

“Because if you go back to San Francisco you’ll find it easier to say no,” he said. “Besides, like it or not, I’m your father. You owe me some consideration.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “Never let the client walk away on a no, right? Congratulations. You get an A in Business Psychology one-oh-one.”

For the first time Archer’s eyes gleamed with amusement. He grinned. “Honey, I’ve been doing deals since before you were born.”

She realized she had just caught a glimpse of the Archer Glazebrook her mother had known. Three decades ago he would have been hard for any young woman to resist.

She hesitated. It was a mistake.

“Forty-eight hours,” Archer urged softly. “That’s all I’m asking. As long as you’ve come all the way down here, you’ll want to spend some time with Elizabeth, anyway. Just give me a couple of days to show you some of my ideas for the foundation.”

“You’re serious about establishing one, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” Clare said. “I’ll stay a couple of days. You can show me some of your plans. But I am making no commitments. Is that understood?”

“Understood.”

“Good-bye, Archer.”

A few minutes later she was behind the wheel of the replacement compact. On the way down the drive she glanced in the rearview mirror a couple times, contemplating the sight of the big house where her sister and brother had grown up.

Archer watched the little compact turn onto the main road. All his life he’d known exactly where he was going, he thought. His goals had been clear: money, success, power, the woman he loved and heirs to whom he could leave what he had built. He had acquired everything he set out to get, never questioning any of the decisions he had made along the way.

He was not proud of some of the things he had done in the past but what the hell. He wasn’t a saint. Saints didn’t put together financial empires. Saints usually came to bad ends.

He went back inside and stood looking out at the pool. As he had told Clare, it was not his habit to contemplate the past. He got through life by staying focused on the future. But he could no longer pretend that what he had come to think of as his Lost Year had never taken place.

He had been married to Myra for two years when the company he and Owen had worked so hard to get off the ground started to implode. The economy went south. Business was almost nonexistent. Bankruptcy loomed. Myra’s father, the senator, who had been dubious about the marriage from the start, was dropping heavy hints to his daughter about the wisdom of divorce.

To make matters worse, Myra had been upset when he told her he wanted to wait until the company was on its feet before they started a family. She became cold and withdrawn in bed. He was pretty sure she had begun to turn to Owen for sympathy and understanding.

Myra had dated Owen before he succeeded in sweeping her off her feet. When things turned bad, he wondered if she regretted her decision.

Somewhere in the midst of that jumble of impending disasters, he had found himself on a business trip with his young, attractive head of accounting, Gwen Lancaster. Gwen was a strong parasensitive with a talent for finding the patterns in financial data that eluded most people. She was the reason he was on the business trip. Gwen had located a possible contract opportunity. If they moved fast and if Archer could convince the client to go with Glazebrook, Inc., it might be possible to avoid going off a financial cliff.

Archer had closed the deal, dazzling a reluctant client with a strategy for developing a high-end shopping mall.

That evening, alone together in the restaurant of the cheap hotel where they were staying, he and Gwen had toasted the future of Glazebrook, Inc. One toast led to another and before he realized it, he ended up telling Gwen that he was pretty sure his marriage was falling apart. Gwen commiserated with him. They wound up in bed together.

In the morning Gwen realized the enormity of the mistake even before he did.

“You called out her name,” Gwen said, looking at him in the cracked mirror over the dressing table as she put on an earring. She smiled wistfully. “You love her. You will always love her. Go back to her.”

“What about you?” he said, feeling helpless.

“I’m handing in my resignation, effective immediately.” She put on the other earring. “I can’t stay with Glazebrook now. We both know that.”

She rented a car and drove back to Phoenix rather than fly back on the same plane with him. He never saw her again, although he knew she had returned to her office long enough to clean out her desk. He heard through the rumor mill that she went to San Francisco to stay with an aunt while she hunted for a new job. He’d had no concerns about her finding a good position. Her talent for accounting was, after all, preternatural.

Myra had known the moment he returned what had happened, of course. She was a member of the Arcane Society, too, although she preferred to ignore that fact as much as possible. Her father, the senator, had been strict on that subject. He had taught his family that their connection to a group of people who actually believed in the paranormal had to be kept a deep, dark secret. Voters tended to be wary of politicians who claimed to possess psychic powers.

Myra had immediately made his worst nightmare come true. She filed for divorce. He spent the next several months crawling on his knees while simultaneously trying to kill the pain with work on the shopping mall project.

In the end Myra relented and came back to him.After the divorce was final, of course. She wanted to make her point.

They remarried, and nine months later Elizabeth was born. At about the same time the shopping mall project was completed on time and on budget. Glazebrook, Inc., was off and running, a fierce competitor in the high-stakes world of Southwest commercial real estate development.

He never looked back.

Until eight months ago that policy had served him well. But sometimes the past returns to slap you upside the head with a two-by-four.

Clare heard the unmistakable warble of her personal phone just as she went through the Stone Canyon security gate. She pulled over to the side, reached into her purse and retrieved her phone.

“Where are you?” Jake asked.

“Just leaving Stone Canyon in my shiny new rental car. Why?”

“Thought we agreed that I’d take you out there to make the swap.”

She smiled. “That’s funny, I don’t recall agreeing to anything of the kind. What I recall is getting a messagetelling me that you would pick me up and take me out to Stone Canyon. As it happens, I had breakfast with Elizabeth. She very kindly drove me out here.”

Silence hummed while he processed that. She couldn’t tell if he was irritated, amused or merely surprised to discover that she had paid no attention to his instructions.

“You don’t take direction well, do you?” he said eventually, sounding thoughtful.

“I’m usually okay with directions. It’s orders that I don’t take well.”

“How about invitations? Do you accept those?”

A light, fluttery sensation sparkled through her. She stomped on it immediately. She must not forget that Jake worked for Archer. She was dealing with not one but two strong-willed men, each with his own agenda. This was cowboy country and she was the tenderfoot from San Francisco.

“Depends on the invitation,” she said carefully.

“Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

Her mouth went dry.

“Still there?” he asked after a while.

“Yes.”

“Do I get an answer?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Jake said. “I’ll have a car service pick you up at that flophouse where you’re staying at five-thirty. It will take you close to an hour to get back out here.”

“Wait,” she said quickly. “I meant, yes, you get an answer. I didn’t say yes was the answer.”

“What is the answer?”

“Before I give it to you, will you swear on your honor as a consultant that this invitation is coming from you and you only and that you are not doing this because Archer asked you to do it?”

“My honor as a consultant?” He sounded amused. “I give you my word that I am inviting you to dinner because I want to have dinner with you. Not because your father asked me to entertain you.”

He sounded sincere, she thought. But when it came to her type of paranormal sensitivity, nature had not allowed for the complications of modern technology. She had learned the hard way over the years that phones, e-mail and the other varieties of electronic communication rendered her talent unreliable.

Nevertheless, anticipation welled up deep inside. Some risks were definitely worth taking.

“All right,” she said. “Yes. Thank you. I’ll look forward to it.”

“So will I.”

She cut the connection. When she glanced in the rearview mirror before pulling back onto the road she was startled to see that she was smiling.

Then the horrifying truth struck her full force. She had not come to Arizona prepared for a date with a fascinating man. The only clothes she had with her were the severe black business suit that had been ruined by the dunk in the pool, two pairs of black trousers and two T-shirts.

She needed to go shopping.

Her phone rang again two hours later, just as she emerged from the stairwell into the deep gloom of the mall parking garage. It took some major scrambling to locate the device in her purse because she was clutching two shopping bags.

She finally got the phone open.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me, Elizabeth. Where are you?”

“At a mall.”

“You went shopping without me? Howcould you?”

“It was an emergency,” Clare said. “I got invited out to dinner tonight.”