White Lies (The Arcane Society #2)(72)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“A J&J thing, huh? Never mind.” Glumly she surveyed the steam room. “We’ve got other priorities here.”

“Yes, we do.”

“I don’t suppose you have your cell phone?”

“When I woke up it was gone. Shipley must have taken it off me. You don’t have one on you, either. I checked before you opened your eyes.”

“Not good.”

“No.” Jake straightened and began to prowl the chamber. “Gotta tell you, this hunting-cabal-freaks stuff is for the young hotshots. I’m too old for this kind of excitement.”

She couldn’t help it. In spite of everything, a little laugh bubbled out of her. “You’re lying through your teeth, Jake Salter. You live for hunting bad guys. You need to hunt them.”

“Maybe the old saying is right.” There was no inflection at all in his words. “It’s in the blood.”

“Yep.” She struggled unsteadily to her feet. “Just like lie detecting is in mine.”

He looked at her, not speaking.

She spread her hands. “Hey, we are what we are, Jake, a couple of exotics. We aren’t the first in the Society and we won’t be the last. I say ditch the angst. You know, we might make a good team.”

“You offering me a partnership?”

“Why not? If the two of us work together, we could not only handle a wider variety of cases, we could sell our consulting services to Jones & Jones as a package deal. Think about it. How many lie-detector and hunter investigative firms are out there? Probably none. What we have to offer will be impossible to duplicate.”

There was a short, startled silence. Then Jake took two long strides across the chamber, wrapped a hand around the nape of her neck and kissed her hard and deep.

When he raised his head she was a little breathless again, but not from panic.

“Damn,” Jake said. “I really like the way you think.”

She smiled modestly. “Guess a flair for business runs in the family.”

“Guess so.” He released her and went back to studying the ceiling.

“Where’s Owen?” Clare asked.

“Still here in the building,” Jake said. “I can feel him. He’s throwing off a lot of weird energy.”

“Weird how?”

“I can sense when someone else is running hot. Shipley is definitely at full throttle. But his energy waves feel distorted somehow. Abnormal. Twisted. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Waiting, probably.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Well—” Jake didn’t finish the sentence.

The temperature was starting to rise. Clouds of steam were forming. Clare looked around uneasily.

“Does it feel like it’s getting warmer in here?” she asked.

“Someone fired up the steam system after dumping us in here. Full blast.”

“That can’t be good.” She rubbed her arms uneasily and looked around. “Somehow I can’t see Owen worrying about our personal comfort.”

“No.”

She could feel her skin growing moist. Jake’s shirt was already plastered to his back.

“I wonder how hot this room gets,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about that myself.”

“There must be some sort of safety valve to control the temperature,” she said.

“Probably.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Jake?”

He vaulted up to the highest stone bench and stretched his arm straight up. She saw that his fingers just barely reached the surround that concealed the recessed lighting fixtures.

“The problem with any kind of mechanical temperature control,” he said, “is that there is almost always a way to remove it or override it.”

“Why would anyone want to—” She broke off, horror shafting through her. “Oh, Lord. Don’t bother to answer that.”

“Okay,” he said, “I won’t.”

She tried to take her mind off the implications of what he had just said. “What are you looking for?”

“An access panel. Given all the high-tech plumbing and the HVAC stuff in this chamber, there has to be one.”

“HVAC?”

“Heat, ventilating and air-conditioning.”

“Oh, right.” She shivered again in spite of the heat. “You don’t really think Owen plans to steam us to death as if we were a couple of oversized artichokes, do you?”

“If you put yourself in his position, that scenario does offer some distinct advantages,” he said.

“Describe your idea of advantages.”

“When our bodies are discovered in the morning, it will probably look like we died of heatstroke.”

“For crying out loud,” Clare yelped. “People don’t croak from sitting too long in a steam room.”

“Sure they do.” He glanced at the wall near the door. “Why do you think they put up those little signs warning you not to spend more than a few minutes inside one?”

She swallowed hard. “But if they find our bodies in here tomorrow morning, the first thing everyone is going to ask is what were we doing in the steam room after hours. The second question is going to be, why didn’t we just open the door and walk out when it got too hot?”

“Answer to Question Number One will probably be that we booked a couples special in this chamber last night in order to enjoy hot sex. Very hot sex. Nobody noticed that we hadn’t come out by closing time. Maybe we were having such a great time we didn’t want to be discovered.”

“What about the answer to Question Number Two?”

“We got accidentally locked in here when the staff closed up for the night.”

“Terrific. What about the steam? Why didn’t it shut off?”

“Mechanical malfunction.”

“Archer isn’t going to believe that for a minute,” she said.

“Jones & Jones won’t buy it, either. But by then it will be too late for us.”

“But Owen must know our deaths will only serve to bring the full resources of Archer Glazebrook and the firm of J&J down on his head.”

“You’re forgetting one very important thing,” Jake said.

“What?”

“No one but you and I know that Shipley is the cabal freak.”

She felt a little flare of psi power. She was no hunter but she was definitely becoming sensitive to Jake’s energy, she thought. It had the same unique, intimate, compelling impact on her senses as his scent and the sound of his voice.