I stopped when I faced front again and set my smile back in place. Being in the gun’s sights, it had slipped. “ID?” I asked. He nodded. Still using two fingers, I lifted the jacket and revealed the inner pockets. I pointed to one and slid my fingers inside and back out, the ID between them. At his gesture, I flipped it to the concrete pathway and stepped back. He studied it from the safety of nearly six feet in height before backing toward the house.
“Bring the jacket. You’ll be searched at the door. Thoroughly.” He grinned. He was going to enjoy it too. I could accept a little groping or I could leave. Not much in the way of other choices. But . . . this was a chance to see inside.
“I can live with a search,” I said, pulling off my sunglasses so he could see my eyes. “But if it turns to groping, I’ll bust your balls.” Beast rose in me like a wraith. Big-Gun started to laugh, but it disappeared fast, his eyes watching me like I was a bomb about to go off.
“Yeah. Guests in the house,” he said. Which made no sense to me, but seemed to mean something to him. And then I saw his ear wire. The guys were wired into the system.
Big-Gun looked like an instinct kinda guy, the kind who listened to his gut, followed it, and his gut was telling him I was trouble. But his eyes couldn’t see much reason for the reaction, except for the Beast look I had thrown him. Uncomfortable, he kept his eyes on me, as if he thought I might pounce without warning.
To placate him, I smiled sweetly to show I was just a little old thing, female and weak. He wasn’t buying it. I had always wondered what Beast looked like to others. I had tried to see the effect by studying myself in a mirror, but it just didn’t look like that big of a deal to me.
Beast huffed at the thought. Looks like death. Big claws. Big teeth.
Big-Gun waved me in. I picked up the jacket, still with two fingers, and led the way. Inside was another guy, who took my jacket, indicated I was to stand against the wall for the search, and who looked like Big-Gun. Exactly like Big-Gun, except he was wearing a navy blue T-shirt. “Twins?” I asked, putting palms on the wall as I tried to see over my shoulder. They both pulled off glasses and grinned while I did the back-and-forth to compare. “Huh,” I said.
Big-Gun-Red-Shirt did a professional, nongroping search, while Big-Gun-Blue-Shirt went through my jacket pockets. I just smiled when his brows rose at some of the stuff he found, announcing them aloud to the house system. “Four crosses. Small New Testament. Keys, seven of them, two that look like storage unit keys, one safe-deposit key. Three house keys, a gate key, all on a Leo horoscope key chain. One small, pearl-handled folding knife with silvered blade. Velcro tourniquet.” He sent me an interested look. “Tourniquet?” he said again.
I shrugged. “What can I say? Be prepared.” I quoted a Boy Scouts motto.
“Small flashlight,” he went on. “What looks like a tooth. Cuff bracelet, silver.”
“Hey,” I said, delighted. “I thought I lost that. Gimme.” When he placed the ornate silver cuff in my hand, I slid it on my arm and admired the gleam. The twins rolled eyes at the girly reaction, but it had the effect of calming Big-Gun-Red-Shirt down from his Beast-induced state of readiness. “Tooth.” I held out the same hand. It was a tooth from the same panther that comprised my fetish necklace, carried around for emergency shift, when I didn’t have time to do it the easy way, with meditation, in a gold nugget-marked rock garden. He put it in my hand and I tucked it in my jeans pocket. “So. Can we talk?”
“Sure. Brandon,” Big-Gun-Red said, pointing at his own chest. “The ugly one is Brian.” They both laughed as if at an old joke. “Staff quarters are this way.”
Brian behind me, Brandon led me through the three-story house, which was larger and deeper than I would have thought from the outside. Maybe forty-six feet across the front, and twice that deep, the house took up most of the small lot, with kitchen and added-on staff quarters on the back of the lower story.Which was nice, because the walk through the central hallway allowed me to see the layout.
There was a wide staircase in the foyer, leading up into darkness, carpeted with an Oriental rug in shades of blue and gray and black. The dining room and parlor were on opposite sides of the foyer, with hand-carved cherrywood table and chairs and loads of china showing through glass doors of built-in cabinetry in one room, and antique, upholstered furniture, statues, and objets d’art in the other. Our feet made no sound on the carpeted hallway floor. Gilt-framed paintings hung on the right wall in the wide hall, and a mural graced the left.
A few doors were closed to either side. From the scent of coffee and tea, I identified a butler’s pantry that separated the dining room from the expanded kitchen. I got a glimpse of an old-fashioned music room behind the parlor, and smelled mold that was peculiar to old books in the room behind it. But the rooms on the left at the back of the house were for the servants, including security. Brandon opened each as we passed.