Midnight Man (Midnight #1)(33)

“The man lying on the floor?”

“I’m not too sure…I don’t think I could swear to that in court.” For the first time it occurred to Suzanne that she probably would be testifying in court. A murder had been committed in her home. In self-defense, to be sure, but it was still a murder. Or would that be manslaughter?

John had come running to her rescue and had killed the man. Would there be legal consequences for him? He was just starting out in a new business. Had her problems reached out to blight his life?

“I can swear that he was wearing a black leather jacket and tan pants exactly like what the dead man is wearing. He had a big gun with a barrel on the end of it. It looked like the silencers they show in the movies. He walked several times in front of the window and I could see him and the gun silhouetted against the light. But I didn’t get a good look at his face. He was stumbling around a lot, looking at his feet. He was finding it hard to orient himself in the room. It’s got an unusual layout, as I said, and it’s Feng Shui.”

Bud’s pencil froze over the pad. John stopped his perusal of the room and turned to stare at her. The techs, two on their knees, looked up.

“It’s…what?” Bud asked.

“Feng Shui.” At their blank looks, she smiled. She’d taken lessons from Li Yung herself, who was Mandarin and who pronounced it ‘Fang Choi’. “You probably know it as Feng Shui.” Suzanne gave it the American pronunciation.

Bud put his pencil down and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Honey,” he said, “you’re going to have to make sense. Help me out here. What’s—what was the word again?”

“Two words. Feng Shui. It means ‘Wind and Water’.”

Bud and John exchanged glances.

“Your house is wind and water?” Bud asked, carefully.

It was good to have something to smile about. “It’s the ancient Chinese art of decorating a space to make best use of energy flows. The Chinese believe energy flows in specific directions and you arrange furniture and objects to direct that flow in beneficial ways. But it also means that furniture and objects aren’t arranged in concentric boxes like in the West. The man found a footstool where he was expecting a chair, and a table where he was expecting nothing at all.”

She might as well have been speaking Chinese. Bud looked at his techs, at John, then shrugged. “Okay. So you saw this guy stumbling around in the dark in your office, which is—“ he hesitated, “whatever. What did you do then?”

“I went back through the rooms as quietly as I could and called John.”

“Why John? Why not the police? Why not me?”

Suzanne lifted a shoulder. ‘Why John’ was evident in every line of John’s big body, in the fiercely controlled grace of his every move. In the way he handled his gun, in the way his constant vigilance ensured nothing could surprise him. Why John was clear.

John’s eyes were narrowed as he looked at her. She couldn’t breathe properly while he was staring at her so intently. His hard jaw was dark with black stubble. He’d been close shaven the night they’d had dinner together. Had had sex together. He was probably one of those men who needed to shave twice a day. The beard made him look even more disreputable, even more dangerous. The kind of man no one crossed.

“I thought he might be close by,” she whispered. John had stopped his careful quartering of the room and was focused on her. She’d almost forgotten that feeling of being in the presence of a force of nature. Now, the focus of his intent gaze, she remembered. She remembered how alive she’d felt walking by his side, how every single person in the restaurant had faded into insignificance and how he filled her entire field of vision. She remembered the ferocity of his kisses, the power of his hands on her, his penis thrusting hot and hard inside her.

She also remembered that fierce moment in the closet, one of those defining moments in a person’s life. That moment the plane plunges, the car slides out of control, the earth shakes. That clear cool view of life as you might be dying.

In that moment, she’d wanted John Huntington by her side with every fiber of her being.

In that moment she’d known that he would come for her without question and that he would die for her.

In that moment, she knew that in some primal way, more a matter of blood and bone than mind and heart, she was his.

“I punched in the alarm code, like you told me,” she said to John. “Honest. I remember doing it when I came home. I don’t know how he got in.”

“Whoa.” Bud stared at John. He shook his head. “I don’t believe this. That guy got past your security? Tell me it’s not true. You’re slipping, Midnight Man.”

“Not my security,” John answered tightly. “I was going to install my system tomorrow. She had XOL.”

“Okay. Whew. For a minute there I thought you’d lost your touch.” Bud scribbled some more then looked up. “What then, honey?”

Suzanne pushed her hair wearily out of her eyes. God, she was tired. She was on her second night without sleep. “I got in touch with John. Called him on my cell phone. He said he was a few blocks away. He said to lock the doors, and to go to my closet and wait.” Eyes closed, she remembered those moments, filled with panic and fear. “So I did.”

Bud turned. “John?”