Hidden Talents

her deeper into the trance. She gazed down into the liquid's fathomless depths and waited. Slowly the vision took shape.
    Sunlight, warm and golden, poured into the white room. Somewhere in the distance a waltz was playing. She held the infants cradled in her arms and watched the closed door. Soon it would open and he would come to her .
    The door opened .
    A man walked into the white, sunlit room .
    He smiled at her .
    “Damn,” Serenity said. “Wrong man.”

1

    I THINK YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT SOMEONE IS TRYING TO blackmail me,” she said.
    Her name was Serenity Makepeace, and until thirty seconds ago Caleb Ventress had been giving serious consideration to having an affair with her.
    He had not mentioned the idea to Serenity because he had not yet finished assessing the situation. Never had he been more profoundly grateful for his natural inclination toward calm deliberation than he was at that particular moment.
    Caleb never made a move without first thinking through all aspects of a problem. He applied the time-tested method to his personal as well as his business affairs. He knew better than anyone else that his habit of approaching everything with an unemotional, logical detachment was one of the chief factors responsible for his phenomenal financial success.
    To date, his relationship with Serenity had been limited to a handful of meetings in his office, three working lunches, and two business dinners. He hadn't even kissed her. He'd planned to take that step tonight.
    It had been a near thing, Caleb realized. A strange, cold feeling twisted through his gut as he acknowledged the close brush with disaster. What really bothered him was the uneasy feeling that Serenity Makepeace had the potential for making him ignore his own rules.
    She was unlike any other woman he had ever known. She fascinated him. If he had lived in another time and place, an era during which people routinely believed in superstitious nonsense, for example, he would have wondered if she had put some kind of spell on him.
    She sat there now, on the other side of his desk, ostensibly in his world, but somehow not quite of it. It was as if she had dropped into his reality from some alternate universe.
    Serenity Makepeace had eyes the color of a peacock's tail, and a wild, fiery red mane that today was only partially controlled by a black ribbon tied at her nape.
    There was a fey quality about her that stirred the hair on the back of Caleb's neck. The odd little griffin pendant she wore somehow accented her aura of otherworldliness. She possessed an ethereal air that almost convinced him that she had been meant to dance in moonlit meadows at midnight rather than conduct business negotiations in a high-rise office.
    He sincerely hoped that she was better at dancing in the moonlight than she was at dealing with business matters. He'd had to guide her every step of the way through their recent contract discussions. The problem wasn't her lack of intelligence; she had a disconcertingly healthy amount of that quality. The difficulty was her lack of experience.
    Serenity managed a tiny grocery store in a small mountain community called Witt's End. From what Caleb could discern, the store catered to an eccentric clientele of misfits and nonconformists, artsy-craftsy types and social dropouts. Serenity knew a lot about whole-grain bread, beans, and tofu, but she knew virtually nothing about sophisticated business practices.
    That was where he came in, Caleb reminded himself. Serenity wanted to expand her small grocery into a mail order catalog operation. She needed a start-up consultant.
    Caleb was one of the best start-up consultants in the Pacific Northwest; perhaps the best. He was very good at what he did.
    The Witt's End by Mail project had been very different from Caleb's usual ventures. For one thing, he wasn't accustomed to working with people who were as unsophisticated about business as Serenity obviously was. His usual clients were high-powered corporate executives who sent their lawyers to work out the terms of the contracts. He rarely, if ever, consulted with small, independent businesses the size of Witt's End Grocery. The owners of such firms couldn't afford him. Serenity was no exception. She couldn't pay his usual fees, either.
    The only reason Caleb had taken Serenity on as a client in the first place was because she had caught his attention and piqued his admittedly jaded professional interest. He had been bored with his own highly