Heart Vs. Humbug

* * *

OCTAVIA DIDN’T HAVE to see Brett’s eyes to feel them. She wasn’t sure why this was so. She suspected it was because of the power behind those eyes, a power that was almost palpable.

He was coming at her from behind. She could feel the change in the air pressure, the spark along her skin, the rush of blood through her heart, the tingle in her fingertips, with every step that drew him closer.

At the precise second he came to a stop behind her, she cut short an answer to the reporter’s question and swung around to face him squarely. He was a man to be faced squarely.

“Yes?” she asked.

The sprinkle of light silver in the center of his black eyes had solidified into stone. She sensed his surface anger and something deeper and more dangerous—and much more difficult to control. The tingling in her fingertips increased.

“I want to talk to you,” Brett said. “Alone, please. This way.”

He bowed in the direction he wished her to go, and then simply waited with the stiff dignity of someone who was accustomed to being obeyed.

Men had made the mistake of trying to order Octavia around. One or two had even tried to take her arm to coerce her. None got a second chance to repeat either mistake.

But Octavia was rather fascinated by the approach Brett Merlin was using to get his way. There was such a polite refinement to it, such an outrageous self-assurance.

What a thoroughly annoying and exciting man. She could barely wait to find out what other emotions this man would engender in her.

But she controlled her curiosity, deliberately making Brett wait, while she turned back to the reporter to conclude their interview. Only then did she deign to accompany Brett to a point some twenty-five feet away from the crowd. She stopped when he did and turned to face him.

He folded his arms across his chest and scowled at her, like a judge about to give a three-time offender a life sentence. The cold anger that solidified the silver in his eyes could have frozen fire.

“You are in serious trouble, Ms. Osborne.”

His voice was rigid and stern. He stood before her so marvelously self-assured and self-important. Octavia’s laughter bubbled up from her throat and erupted into a short, spontaneous roar.

And all the while she laughed, she watched Brett Merlin’s countenance darken until it matched the blackened clouds hanging ominously in the heavy sky overhead.

“What’s so funny?” he asked in a voice that thundered as the silver in his eyes shot through with lightning.

“You are an interesting man, Mr. Merlin,” she said after she had finally gotten her merriment under control. “Your client’s building plans are about to be buried beneath an ancient Indian stone carving and you call me aside to tell me I’m in serious trouble?”

He stepped closer and towered over her—deliberately, she knew. She admired the calculated cunning of the move, almost as much as she admired the breadth of his broad shoulders. The guy was a big, imposing hunk who knew how to throw his weight around with class. She stared steadfastly into his incredibly alive quicksilver eyes.

“I’m going to have you investigated, Ms. Osborne. Thoroughly. Until I know about each and every breath you’ve taken since you were born. And when I connect you with that piece of fakery laying in that pit back there—and I will connect you with it—I am going to see that you are brought up on criminal charges and disbarred.”

Octavia could tell that Brett Merlin fully expected his awesome reputation, presence and words to effect fear and trepidation in her.

His unmitigated pomposity was absolutely magnificent. She put aside her admiration of it long enough to stand on her tiptoes, stretching tall until she was at eye level with him. She tossed her head back, waves of flaming-red hair falling off her cheeks.

“If you ever repeat those slanderous allegations to a third party, Mr. Magician, I will see to it that it is you, not I, who disappears from the legal scene in one highly publicized puff of courtroom smoke.”

She noted with enormous satisfaction the instant shifting of the silver light in his eyes. She sensed she was witnessing a very rare event. Brett Merlin, the deadly Magician of corporate law, reaching to pull a rabbit out of his hat only to find his hand grasping the ears of a tiger.

Octavia chuckled again, thoroughly enjoying the moment.

But the chuckle died in her throat the instant she heard the cry behind her. Startled, she swung in the direction of the outburst.

She was just in time to see her grandmother falling face-first into the excavation pit.

Chapter Three

Brett turned with Octavia at the sound of the cry. The second he saw Mab Osborne falling, he moved. He reached the rim of the pit and scrambled down its sides, slipping the last few feet to the soft, muddy bottom where the elderly woman lay. He dropped to his knees, gently lifting Mab’s head out of the mud and resting her on his knee as he pressed his finger to the pulse point in her neck.

But his fingers were caked in the slippery mud and he couldn’t feel her pulse.

“Mrs. Osborne?”

She lay limp and absolutely still in his hands.

A sudden movement beside him drew Brett’s eyes. Octavia dropped next to him. His first reaction was surprise at how fast she must have moved to have gotten here so soon after him.

His second was admiration for her coolheaded composure and farsightedness as she calmly dug into her shoulder bag for a compact mirror and immediately placed it beneath her grandmother’s nose.

“She’s breathing,” Octavia said as the mirror fogged.

Octavia raised her head and voice to address the quiet spectators watching from the rim of the pit. “Someone please get an ambulance.”

“John Winslow has already gone to call 911,” one of the seniors yelled down.

Brett watched Octavia nod solemnly and direct her attention back to her grandmother. She slipped out of her mud-splattered suit coat and draped it over the unconscious woman. She held her grandmother’s shoulders firmly as she spoke in a tone of stern sobriety that caught him completely off-guard.

“Listen to me, Mab Osborne, you wake up. You don’t have time for this nap. You have a radio broadcast to give this afternoon. You know how important your broadcasts are. There are homebound people out there counting on you.”

To Brett’s continuing surprise and amazement, Mab Osborne began to stir. Her eyes fluttered open. Octavia stared down into them and smiled.

“Hi.”

“Octavia,” Mab said. “What was all that about my missing my broadcast?”

“Not to worry. You have plenty of time now. How do you feel?”

Slowly, Mab lifted each arm and each leg in turn. “I think I’m a little bruised is all.”

“Any headache?”

“No, but it’s cold, isn’t it?”

Octavia scooted around in the mud in order to transfer Mab’s head from its resting place on Brett’s knee to a new resting place on hers. She wrapped her jacket more closely around her grandmother’s shoulders.

“We’ll have you out of this excavation pit just as soon as the medics get here,” she promised.

“Why am I in this pit?” Mab asked.

For the first time, Brett heard a small annotation of anxiety underlying the normally mellow mark of Octavia’s voice.