Gift of Gold (32 page)

Or maybe she was frequently sharp with Jonas because a part of her was trying to protect herself from the uncertain future she saw awaiting her. It was easier and far safer to yell at Jonas than to let herself fall in love with him.

But Verity was very much afraid her tactics weren’t working. She was scared to death that she had already fallen in love with Jonas. That knowledge seemed only to whet the edge of her tongue.

Jonas finished the tale of their trip to San Francisco, elaborating cheerfully on his brilliant handling of the negotiations.

“So that was that,” he concluded triumphantly. “After getting the price up another three thousand, I accepted Haggerty’s offer. After that, Verity and I went shopping for costumes for that damned Renaissance ball Evanger’s planning. Verity went crazy in the costume store, by the way. I had to forcibly restrain her at times. You should have seen the gown she wanted to rent. Scarlet and gold, and it was cut to her navel.”

“It was a beautiful gown. And very authentic. They wore lots of low-cut gowns during the Renaissance,” Verity defended herself as she added stone-ground mustard to her potato and pea salad.

“Who’s the authority on the Renaissance around here, anyway?” Jonas retorted. “That dress you wanted looked like it was designed for an expensive call girl.”

“I wanted to go as a Renaissance courtesan.”

Jonas smiled grimly. “Be grateful I didn’t rent the nun’s outfit for you.”

Verity raised her eyebrows as she looked at her father. “He was in a terrible mood when we went into the costume shop, even though he’d made that great deal for the pistols. He’d been annoyed with me ever since we left Kincaid’s office.”

“She kept smiling at the bastard,” Jonas muttered.

“I was only following orders. Your orders, Jonas,” Verity said pointedly. “You’re the one who told me to smile at the man, remember? I was supposed to play the part of a fluff-brained redhead.”

“You didn’t have to go overboard, dammit. He was looking at you the way a shark looks at a swimmer’s feet.”

Emerson held up a palm, seeking peace. “Children, children, that’s enough squabbling for now. This is too grand a day to ruin with bickering. Save your fighting for later.”

“Good idea,” Verity said. “I’m too busy to fight now anyway. But you haven’t heard the whole story of our little adventure, Dad. Jonas didn’t tell you that he tested himself again on a dagger that was hanging on the wall of Kincaid’s office.”

Emerson cocked a bushy brow. “Is that right? Same thing as when you handled the gun? A mental image in a long corridor?”

“The corridor seemed different this time,” Verity answered. “Vaguer, somehow. Less clear and defined. But there was a scene in it. A horrible one. It was an image of a man sprawled on a dinner table. Blood all over the linguini.”

Jonas studied the small print on his beer can. “I’ve been thinking about the lack of definition in the corridor itself,” he said slowly. “I wonder if it’s got something to do with the fact that the dagger and the scene we encountered were only a few years old. Maybe the psychic energy they generate is still coalescing and shaping itself. The thing is, I shouldn’t have been able to pick up on anything that recent.”

“Did you know the dagger was twentieth century when you asked Kincaid to let you handle it?” Verity asked.

Jonas nodded. “I was almost certain it was a reproduction. There was something about the look of the steel. The instant I touched it I knew it was contemporary, but at the same time it was giving off vibrations like crazy.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand it, unless…”

Verity bit her lip. “Unless what?”

He gave her a disturbingly direct look. “Unless being around you is having the same effect all that testing back at Vincent College did.”

“You mean your talent might be getting stronger?” Verity asked uneasily.

“Yeah.”

There was silence in the kitchen as they both considered the ramifications of that. Emerson looked curiously from one to the other. “Trouble?”

“Jonas considers his ability a mixed blessing,” Verity explained quietly. “But at least up until now it’s been limited to a certain era of the past. If he’s getting stronger in terms of range, he’s going to run into more and more objects that will trigger his trips into the corridor.”

“I get it,” Emerson drawled. “Could get to be a real nuisance, couldn’t it?”

“To put it mildly,” Jonas agreed. “Damn.” He crumpled the beer can in his hand. “I could have done without this added complication.”

Verity felt a cold chill. She was the cause of this “added complication” in his life. Her fingers clenched tightly around the bowl in her hand. Jonas had been drawn to her originally because of her connection with his psychic ability. Maybe that was the very thing that would drive him away from her.

“The psychometry still seems to be limited to objects associated strongly with violence, though,” Jonas said thoughtfully. “I’m not picking up on just any old emotion, thank God.”

“What do you think that scene in the corridor was all about?” Emerson asked curiously.

“I don’t know,” Jonas said. “That’s the problem with these corridor scenes. I never get more than a few seconds of information. It’s like looking at a few frames on a reel of film. Probably the frames that show the single most violent moment associated with the object I’m holding. It’s the one image that’s most clearly captured, for some reason. Sometimes I feel like I’m part of the image. I know what’s going on around me for those few seconds. But other times, it’s like looking at a photograph of people I don’t know. That’s the way it was yesterday.”

“Don’t you have any theories about why that dagger elicited that particular image of a man bleeding into a plate of linguini?” Emerson persisted.

Jonas shrugged. “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we were probably looking at the former owner of the dagger at the moment when he lost possession of it to someone else. Or we could have been looking at someone who had just been stabbed with it.”

Verity was startled. “That’s funny. For some reason, I assumed the man had been shot.”

Jonas gave her a thoughtful glance. “Did you? It’s possible.”

Emerson shook his head. “This is incredible. I didn’t know what to think the night you tried that first test with the pistols and I still don’t. I tell myself I have an open mind, but Christ, this is stretching the limits of it, I’ll tell you. You do realize how bizarre this whole thing is, don’t you?”

“It’s been pointed out to me,” Jonas said dryly.

Emerson shook his head. “It’s one thing to think you might have a touch of psychic talent. Hell, lots of people are convinced they’ve had a psychic experience of one kind or another. Telepathy, a bit of precognition, whatever. It’s damn common, in fact. But this business of both of you seeing the same images in some mental corridor is downright spooky. I’d swear you were both lying except that I know my daughter too well. Verity doesn’t lie. And I don’t think you’d bother with this kind of elaborate fiction, Jonas. Too much work involved.”

“That’s the truth.” Jonas spoke with great feeling. He tossed his crunched beer can into a trash basket in the corner. “But if you think this whole thing is weird, imagine what it’s like for me. I’ve been assuming for years that I’m the only one on the face of the planet who sees these damned visions when I’m handling old junk.” He looked at Verity, his eyes molten gold. “It’s one hell of a relief to find someone who can share the experience with me. At least I can be relatively certain that if I’m slowly going insane, I’m not going there alone.”

Emerson looked at both of them. “Neither of you is crazy and neither of you is a liar. We’re stuck with the only other conclusion—there really is some kind of mental weirdness going on between the two of you. Tell me more about the guy who was bleeding into the linguini,”

“There’s not much to tell,” Verity said. “I had just turned around and spotted the image when Jonas came up behind me and said we were getting out of there.”

“But he was definitely connected with the dagger?”

“Probably,” Jonas said slowly. “I’ve always had the impression that the people who show up in the corridor images are directly connected with the object I’m holding at the time. But I don’t always understand the connection.”

Verity wiped her hands on her apron. “The clothes the man was wearing looked a little out-of-date. Maybe ten or fifteen years old.”

“You were very observant,” Jonas remarked, eyeing her curiously. “You didn’t mention the age of his clothes when we talked this over last night. Did you notice anything else?”

“No, except maybe a feeling that the guy knew who it was who had just killed him. the poor man looked so astonished, as if he wasn’t expecting anything like that to happen. Almost as if the other person was a friend.”

“I think you’re right,” Jonas said reflectively. “Although I guess it’s equally possible a stranger walked into the room and shot him. A man caught unawares like that could have the same expression of astonishment on his face.”

“What about Kincaid?” Emerson asked shrewdly. “Do you think he knows anything about the history of the dagger on his wall?”

Jonas lifted one shoulder in a negligent gesture. “Who knows? He thought the dagger was a genuine sixteenth-century piece, I do know that. He was furious when I told him it was a reproduction. He probably paid a fortune for it. But most collectors like him don’t ask too many questions about the recent past of an object they want to buy. The less they know, the better, as far as they’re concerned. If someone shot and killed a man to get hold of that dagger and sell it at huge profit to a fanatic collector like himself, Kincaid wouldn’t want to know about it. Just as Haggerty didn’t push too hard to know the recent history of those pistols. It was enough for him that they were genuine.”

“I can understand that line of thinking, although I’ve always thought it was better to be informed than take a chance on being hung out to dry. Ignorance is not bliss. But I guess we can assume that Kincaid doesn’t know too much about the dagger,” Emerson concluded.

“He didn’t even know it was fake,” Verity scoffed. She shoved a pan of pasta into Jonas’s hand. “Here, put this on the counter behind you.”

He looked down at the pile of naked, steaming noodles. “What is it?”

“Linguini. I was going to make a red sauce for it, but for some reason I changed my mind this morning. I’m going to make a nice green pesto sauce instead.”

Much later that evening Verity did something she hadn’t done since her affair with Jonas had fully blossomed. She left Jonas and her father playing chess in her father’s cabin, grabbed her terrycloth robe, and headed for the peace and solitude of the empty spa. Both men were concentrating so hard on their game that they barely noticed her departure.

The blue and white tiled room was empty, as it always was at this time of night. Verity left most of the lights off, turning on only the few she needed to find her way to her favorite pool. She stripped off her jeans and blouse and slid nude into the pool When she was submerged to her neck, Verity leaned back and contemplated the recent chain of events. She had found a lover, discovered a rather useless psychic talent, and become friends with a famous artist, all in the space of a few short weeks. The quiet, orderly lifestyle she had painstakingly created for herself in the past few years had been severely altered.

The question was, how much of it would last and for how long? The psychic talent was connected to the lover who would undoubtedly go away one of these days, and the famous artist was on the point of giving up her brilliant career. Compared to everything else going on around Verity, her restaurant business looked stable.

Verity decided not to dwell on the psychic connection she shared with Jonas. It was too disturbing, too fraught with unanswerable questions. Tonight she preferred to deal with hard facts.

The first hard fact that came to mind involved herself. She closed her eyes and wondered if she really was turning into a shrew. That led to the question of how long any man would hang around such a woman.

It was easier to wonder about that than about how long a man would hang
around a woman who was causing his weird psychic ability to get stronger and more weird.

“You are not, by any chance, sitting naked in that pool because you knew I’d be along after a while, are you?”

Jonas’s indulgent voice, sounding unabashedly hopeful, took Verity by surprise. Her eyes snapped open. Instantly she was violently aware of her nudity. Considering all the nights she had spent with Jonas, her flushed reaction was ridiculous. With any luck he would attribute the pinkness in her cheeks to the heat of the mineral water.

“I thought you were playing chess with Dad,” Verity said quickly.

“I was playing chess with him until he won. My mind was wandering. We’ve scheduled a rematch for tomorrow night. I went looking for you and discovered you were not tied up in a red bow and waiting in bed for me.” Jonas came to a halt at the edge of the pool and began unfastening the buttons of his blue work shirt with lazy intent.

“When have you ever found me wearing a red bow and waiting in bed for you?”

His grin was wickedly knowing. “Never, but a man can fantasize, can’t he?” His eyes moved over her body, most of it quite visible in the crystal-clear water. “Don’t worry, finding you this way is just as good.”

Verity stirred and glanced toward the entrance of the spa room. “What if Laura shows up again the way she did the last time we were here together?”

“I doubt she’ll be terribly surprised at what she finds.” Jonas tossed his shirt aside. His long fingers went to work unbuttoning his jeans.

Verity watched, half-mesmerized by the sexy sight of Jonas undressing. He took his time about it, revealing his strong shoulders and flat stomach first. The hair on his chest seemed to offer an open invitation for her fingers to scamper through it. When he stepped out of his jeans he was already partially aroused.

Verity cleared her throat. “Are you practicing to be a striptease artist?”

He slanted her a laconic smile and moved into the water. “I don’t believe in teasing you, little tyrant. What you see is what you get.” He spread his arms out along the edge of the pool and leaned back, savoring the hot water. “Damn, this feels good.”