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I smiled at Jeremy and gave him what I knew he wanted: the look that said that I appreciated the slender potential of his body under his perfect suit. To humans it would have looked like flirting, but for the fey, any fey, it wasn't even close to flirting. "Thanks, Jeremy, but you didn't come in here to compliment my clothes."
He walked farther into the room, ru
"Want to be? "I said.
He turned, leaning against the desk, arms crossed over his chest. Mirroring my stance at the windows, either unconsciously, or purposefully, though I didn't know why. "We don't usually do divorce work," Jeremy said.
I gave him wide eyes, pushing away from the windows. "Day one lecture, Jeremy: The Grey Detective Agency never, ever, does divorce work."
"I know, I know," he said. He pushed away from the desk and came to stand beside me, staring out into the fog. He didn't look any happier than I felt.
I leaned back against the glass so I could see his face better. "Why are you breaking your cardinal rule, Jeremy?"
He shook his head without looking at me. "Come meet them, Merry. I trust your judgment. If you say we stay out of it, we'll stay out of it. But I think you'll feel the same way I do."
I touched his shoulder. "And how are you feeling, boss, other than worried?" I ran my hand down his arm, and it made him look at me.
His eyes had gone dark charcoal grey with anger. "Come meet them, Merry. If you're as angry afterward as I am, then we'll nail this bastard."
I gripped his arm. "Jeremy, relax. It's just a divorce case."
"What if I told you it was attempted murder?" His voice was calm. Matter of fact, it didn't match the intensity in his eyes, the vibrating tension in his arm.
I moved back from him. "Attempted murder? What are you talking about?"
"The nastiest death spell that's ever walked into my office."
"The husband is trying to kill her?" I made it a question.
"Someone is, and the wife says it's the husband. The mistress agrees with the wife."
I blinked at him. "Are you saying that the wife and the mistress are in your office?"
He nodded, and even through all the outrage, he smiled.
I smiled back. "Well, that's got to be a first."
He took my hand. "It might be a first even if we did do divorce work," he said. His thumb rubbed back and forth over my knuckles. He was nervous, or he wouldn't be touching me this much. A way to reassure himself, like a touchstone. He raised my hand to his lips and planted a quick kiss on my knuckles. I think he'd noticed what he was doing, that his nerves were showing. He flashed me a white smile, the best caps money could buy, and turned toward the door.
"Answer one question first, Jeremy."
He adjusted his suit, minute movements to tug it back into place as if it needed it. "Ask away."
"Why are you scared of this?"
The smile faded until his face was solemn. "I've got a bad feeling about this one, Merry. Prophecy isn't one of my gifts, but this one has a bad smell to it."
"Then pass it by. We aren't the cops. We do this for a very nice pay-check, not because we've sworn to serve and protect, Jeremy."
"If after you meet them, you can honestly walk away from it, then we will."
"Why is my vote suddenly a presidential veto? The name on the door is Grey, not Gentry."
"Because Teresa's so empathic she couldn't turn anyone away. Roane is too much the bleeding heart to turn tearful women away." He adjusted his dove grey tie, fingers smoothing over the diamond stickpin. "The others are good for grunt work, but they aren't decision makers. That leaves you."
I met his eyes, trying to read past the anger, the worry, to what was really going on inside his head. "You're not an empath, and you're not a bleeding heart, and you make dandy decisions, so why can't you make this one?"
"Because if we turn them away, they won't have anywhere else to go. If they leave this office without our help, they're both dead."
I stared at him, and finally understood. "You know we should walk away from this one, but you can't bring yourself to pass judgment on them. You can't bring yourself to condemn them to death."
He nodded. "Yes."
"What makes you think that I can do it, if you can't?"
"I'm hoping one of us is sane enough not to be this stupid."
"I won't get you all killed for the sake of strangers, Jeremy, so be prepared to walk away from this one." Even to me, my voice sounded hard, cold.
He smiled again. "That's my little cold-hearted bitch."
I shook my head and walked toward the door. "It's one of the reasons you love me, Jeremy. You count on me not to flinch."
I walked out into the hallway that led between offices, sure that I would turn these women away. Certain that I would be the wall that kept us all safe from Jeremy's good intentions. Goddess knows, I'd been wrong before, but seldom as wrong as I was about to be.
Chapter 2
I THOUGHT FOR SOME REASON I'D BE ABLE TO TELL WHICH OF THE TWO women was wife and which was mistress just by looking at them. But at first glance they were just two attractive women, casually dressed, like girlfriends out for a day of shopping and lunch. One woman was small, though a few inches taller than either Jeremy or myself. Blond hair cut just above the shoulders, with a careless curl to it that said it was natural and she hadn't done anything special to it this morning. She was pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way, with extraordinary blue eyes that took up most of her face. Her eyebrows arched thick and black, balancing out a lace of dark lashes that framed those eyes in a very dramatic fashion- though the dark brows made me speculate about how natural the blond hair might be. She wore no makeup and still managed to be very pretty in an ethereal, very natural way. With makeup and a little effort she'd have been a knockout. But it would have taken more than makeup and a better fit of clothes.
She sat huddled in the client chair, shoulders hunched as if waiting for a blow to fall. Her lovely eyes blinked at me like the eyes of a deer caught in headlights, as if she were powerless to stop what was happening, and what was happening was bad.
The other woman was tall, five feet eight inches or better, slender, with long pale brown hair that swung straight and shining to her waist. At first glance she seemed early twenty-something. Then I met her eyes and there was an intensity in their brown depths that made me add on ten years. You just didn't get that look much before thirty. Her look was more confident than the blonde's, but there was a flinching around her eyes, a tightness in her shoulders, as if something deep inside was hurting. There was also a delicacy of bone as if what lay under the skin had been formed of daintier things than mere bone. There is only one thing that can give a tall, commanding person that look of daintiness: she was part sidhe. Oh, it was a few generations back, nothing as intimate as my ties to the court, but somewhere a several-times-great-grandmother had lain down with something not human and walked away with a child. Fey blood of any kind marks a family, but sidhe blood seems to stay in the genes forever, as if once in the mix, it never gets cleaned out.
I was betting the blonde was the wife, and the other one the mistress. The blonde seemed the more beaten down of the two, which is usually the case with an abusive man. They may abuse all the women in their lives, but they'll usually save the best or worst for immediate family. My grandfather had always done it that way.
I came into the room smiling, hand out to shake hands, like they were any other clients. Jeremy made the introductions. The small blonde was the wife, Frances Norton; the tall brown-haired one was the mistress, Naomi Phelps.