Running Hot

good care of you.”
    “Okay.” Like heck she would tell Luther Malone that he was supposed to take care of her. She didn’t need any help in that department. She had been taking care of herself since the day her mother died.
    “I’ll keep an eye on your cottage while you’re gone,” Arizona added. “Make sure the sons a bitches don’t try to get into your files.”
    “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
    “Stay alert, stay alive,” Arizona said. She snapped off a quick salute and stalked off across the parking lot, heading for the glass doors of the post office.
    Grace got into her car. She thought about her landlady as she drove out of the parking lot and turned toward the highway that would eventually take her to Portland.
    Arizona was a powerful sensitive, although she was probably unaware of it. Her talent was similar to Fallon’s. She could see patterns in chaos. But somewhere along the line she had lost control of the paranormal side of her nature. Perhaps if she had been raised as a member of the Arcane Society community, things would have been different for her. Perhaps she could have been taught how to control her talent. Or maybe not.
    There was no question but that it was far too late to intervene now. Arizona had gone too deep into her strange, private world. Now her talent controlled her.
    Grace wondered if Fallon Jones ever worried that he, too, might someday get trapped forever in his own world of plots and counterplots, unable to find his way back to reality. He was trying to do too much, she thought. On several occasions during the past few months she had heard the exhaustion in his voice. Running the West Coast office of J&J was obviously too big a job for one person. He needed an assistant.
    It started to rain. Fat drops spattered on the windshield. She turned on the wipers and wondered if it was raining in Hawaii. When she got bored thinking about the weather in the islands she wondered if she was pushing her luck by taking this assignment from J&J. The what-ifs loomed in her imagination. What if she couldn’t handle the mission? What if Luther Malone uncovered her secrets?
    Don’t think like that, she mentally scolded herself. How much trouble could a guy on a cane possibly be? You’ve been hiding in Eclipse Bay long enough.

    The courier from the Arcane Society—a young man who seemed thrilled to be performing a role, however small, for the legendary firm of J&J—delivered the packet to Grace at the airport hotel. He handed it to her in the lobby, so close she could feel the pulse and power of his talent. A para-hunter, she thought. She didn’t have to jack up her own senses to know that he was strong.
    “What’s your name?” she asked, automatically stepping back to put some distance between them.
    “Sean Jones, ma’am,” he said.
    Of course, she thought. The Jones family tree was filled with hunter talents of various kinds.
    She thanked him and hurried back to the elevator, ripping open the sealed packet as soon as she reached the privacy of her room. The contents tumbled onto the table—Luther Malone’s phony driver’s license on top. She picked it up and studied the picture, consumed by a curiosity she could not explain.
    Like most license photos, the shot was not intended to be flattering. It was possible that it was the lighting that made Malone look so hard but her intuition told her that the brutal planes and angles of his face would look just as austere in person. His dark hair was cut short. The note said his eyes were brown but in the picture they looked unreadable, the eyes of a lone wolf.
    The picture should have been off-putting. Malone appeared to be stone cold. But for some reason she could not stop staring at the image.
    Reluctantly she put the license down and reached for her plane ticket and the resort reservation.
    Approximately sixty seconds later—the length of time it took her to get her shaking fingers under control—she dialed the now-familiar number in Scargill Cove.
    “You didn’t tell me that Malone and I would be registering as Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs,” she said, her voice rising in spite of her determination to remain cool and professional. “There’s only one room.”
    “Take it easy,” Fallon said, uncharacteristically soothing. “I made sure you got a suite. Take the bedroom. It has its own bath. Tell Malone he can have the pull-out bed in the living room.”
    “I don’t know if I can do this, sir. You should have warned