Dragon's Curse (Harlequin Nocturne) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Knock it
off . The plant shivered and he got the distinct impression it was
from laughter, not fear.
    He drew his focus back to the interview. “Your family wouldn’t
mind?”
    She stared at her clasped hands. “There’s only my younger
brother and we don’t see each other much anymore.”
    Cam picked up a tremor in her voice, and despair wafted in the
air around her when she mentioned her brother. So, he asked, “Does his job keep
him away?”
    Ariel shrugged. “More or less.”
    “What does he do for a living?”
    She hesitated. Her gaze drifted to the dragon statue, then
roamed the office before she finally answered, “He’s an archeologist for a
museum in England.”
    Her lie sizzled and nearly crackled in the air between them.
Once again the dragon tree stretched toward her. Cam rose and went over to pick
up the plant. He wanted to get it away from the woman before she saw what it was
doing.
    “Oh, my, what a lovely bonsai.”
    The pot in his hand trembled at the insult. Cam placed it on
the window ledge. “It’s a pun-sai tree. It needs a little more sun than this
office provides. I keep thinking I need to move it outside.”
    He knew full well how much the plant detested the outdoors. As
if it understood the warning, the branches gently stroked his wrist before
settling back into place. Cam resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the sudden
petlike obedience.
    While at the window, he glanced outside. Harold, the family’s
right-hand man, sometimes chauffeur, mechanic and occasional handyman, inspected
Ms. Johnson’s van. Apparently, he didn’t like the looks of the vehicle, or he’d
found something suspicious, because he kept shaking his head as he scanned the
undercarriage with a mirror.
    Cam turned around to face Ariel and returned to his chair
alongside her. “I apologize. You said your brother was an archeologist?”
    “Yes.”
    Again, negative energy from the lie sizzled in the air. “Which
museum is he with?”
    “It’s a private one.” She unlaced her fingers to brush an
imaginary strand of stray hair from her forehead. “I forget the full
name—Renalde something or another.”
    Renalde? Cam frowned. Renalde? Something about that name felt…wrong. Renalde . The letters rearranged themselves in his
mind. R-e-n-a-l-d-e…L-e-a-r-n-e-d . A cold, sinking
feeling hit his gut like a fist. Silently cursing, he resisted the sudden urge
to murder the woman where she sat.
    He’d been right. About everything. Nathan wasn’t dead. And this
woman worked for him. So that meant the jewelry she was looking for was most
likely Alexia’s dragon pendant. She could look all she wanted, she wasn’t
getting her hands on it.
    He wasn’t certain what the box she sought might be—unless it
was that cube Alexia’s dragon had found, and he wondered why she wasn’t
searching for the grimoire, too. Not that it mattered, because that was another
item she would never acquire—Braeden and Alexia had the family’s book of Druid
secrets under guard at all times.
    He knew what Nathan’s stake was in getting his hands on the
pendant, but what was in it for her?
    She was relatively new on the scene. She wasn’t a member of
either family—not the Drakes, nor the Learneds. She possessed not even a trace
of magic, so where did she fit in?
    He retraced events of the past few months in his mind. During
the last break-in at Mirabilus an intruder had been shot and taken to the
hospital in a coma. The young man had miraculously disappeared before they could
discover anything about him. A few weeks later Ariel had visited Mirabilus.
    Without staring, he studied her. She couldn’t be more than
twenty-six. The man in the coma was young enough to be her brother. While the
shapes of their faces were different—the young man’s was more squared at the
chin, where Ariel’s was more of a heart shape—they both had slight builds and
dark hair. Was the missing patient and her brother one and
the same?
    If so, was she