In Too Deep

the remote little village on the Northern California coast. At that point, J&J had returned to Los Angeles, where it operated out of Arcane Society headquarters.
    But when Fallon had inherited the business, he had found Cedric’s notes about the Cove and the unique energy in the area. Intrigued, he had come to the little community to check out the location and discovered that Cedric was right. Something about the energy of the Cove suited the business. It also suited him, Fallon thought.
    He had unlocked the door of J&J and walked into a room that had been trapped in a time warp. Beneath three decades of dust, everything, right down to the desk and the wall sconces, was just as Gresham had left it when he had closed the office to move back to L.A.
    In addition to the art deco furnishings, there was a scattering of other antiques reflecting the history of J&J. They included the Victorian-era clock on the desk, an old umbrella stand and a wrought iron coatrack. The only things Fallon had added were the computer and a new, industrial-sized coffee machine.
    He contemplated his new assistant, trying for what had to be the millionth time to get a fix on the mystery that was Isabella Valdez.
    Outside rain fell steadily. The Pacific Ocean was the color of tempered steel and the waves churned down in the Cove. But here in his small, second-floor office all was bright and relentlessly positive. Under other circumstances he would have found all the warm, cheerful energy irritating in the extreme, but for some reason things were different with Isabella.
    She was sitting at the other desk, the new one that she had ordered from an online antiques reproduction store her first day on the job at J&J. It had taken two people—that would be the delivery guy and himself, he reflected—to muscle the heavy wooden Victorian-style desk and the chair that went with it up the narrow stairs to the second floor of the building. Isabella had supervised. He had to concede that she had a flair for organization.
    But it wasn’t her office management skills that disturbed and intrigued him. It was the fact that she had no problems with his talent. She acted as if there were nothing unusual about his psychic nature. That made her unique in his considerable experience. The core of his talent involved an intuitive grasp of patterns within chaos. It was a messy, complicated ability that he himself did not understand. Others often found his ability unnerving.
    Within the Arcane Society there had always been rumors about powerful chaos theory-talents, especially those that popped up now and again in the Jones line. He was well aware that there were those who whispered that he was doomed to fall deeper and deeper into a web of dark conspiracy constructs of his own making. Some speculated that there would come a time when he would no longer be able to distinguish the boundary between fantasy and reality: the classic definition of madness.
    If they knew the full extent of what he could do with his talent, the whisperers would be appalled, he thought. But he was a Jones. He knew how to keep secrets. He was pretty sure Isabella Valdez knew how to keep them, too. Always nice to have something in common with a woman who aroused all the basic instincts in a man. That, of course, was one of the big complications in his life these days. He had been fascinated with Isabella from the moment he had met her.
    The other baffling aspect of Isabella’s personality was that she did not have a problem with his moods or a temperament that required a lot of time spent walking alone on the beach down in the Cove. She simply accepted him as he was.
    He understood the physical attraction. Isabella lacked the generic perfection that made so many female movie stars and fashion models look as if they had popped out of the same mold. But her strong, striking features and mysterious golden brown eyes had riveted him from the start.
    She wore her shoulder-length dark hair in a severe, no-nonsense twist that highlighted the sharply sculpted angles of her chin, nose and cheekbones. She was curvy in all the right places but he had yet to see her in a skirt or dress. Her daily uniform invariably consisted of jeans or dark trousers, a long-sleeved shirt that she wore with the sleeves rolled up, and low boots or flats. She carried a backpack instead of a purse. The backpack was not a fashion statement. It was sturdy and functional, and it was filled with stuff.
    It was as if Isabella