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lot.

Chapter
1
 
    One
month later…
    â€œStolen?” Stunned, Orchid Adams managed to keep her jaw from dropping in open-mouthed amazement, but it was not easy. She was still reeling. One thing she had to admit about focusing for Rafe Stonebraker, the jobs were never dull.
    She turned on her heel in a slow circle and stared at the volumes housed in the rows of glass cabinets that lined the steel walls of the state-of-the-art, climate-controlled, underground gallery.
    â€œYou’re kidding.” She took a deep breath. “All of these old books are
stolen?”
    â€œEvery last volume.” Elvira Turlock smiled proudly. Light gleamed on her elegant silver chignon. “Including the one that brings you and Mr. Stonebraker here this afternoon.”
    â€œGood grief,” Orchid whispered, awed in spite of herself. This was definitely Stonebraker’s most bizarre case yet.
    Elvira looked pleased by her reaction. “My new book of Morland poetry is quite spectacular, don’t you think?”
    Orchid studied the slim, leather-bound volume inside the glass case. She would not have it in her library, she thought, but she had been raised to be polite.
    â€œInteresting,” she said cautiously.
    â€œOh, dear.” Elvira winced. “We all know what ‘interesting’ means, don’t we?”
    Rafe stirred in the shadows. “It’s called
Three.”
    Orchid did not exactly jump in surprise at the sound of his low, dark voice, but she did feel the hair lift on the nape of her neck.
    She reminded herself that she had known he was there. He was, after all, the one who had brought her here today. But her new client was a strat-talent. He had an extremely annoying knack of sinking deep into the shadows.
    She had almost refused to accept the first assignment earlier in the week. Only the combination of her boss’s abject pleading and dire threats had finally convinced her to work with Rafe.
    â€œI don’t want to work with a strat-talent,” Orchid had said when Clementine Malone had told her about the job. “They give me the creeps.”
    â€œCome on, how many have you worked with?”
    â€œOne.” Orchid shuddered at the memory. “That was enough.”
    â€œLook, you know I’m trying to build an exclusive image for Psynergy, Inc. Stonebraker’s an exotic. We want to attract exotic talents.”
    â€œThere are other kinds of exotics.”
    â€œYeah,” Clementine said, “but not like strat-talents. You know how rare they are.”
    â€œNot rare enough as far as I’m concerned.”
    â€œNot to put too fine a point on this,” Clementine said, “but you’re not exactly one-hundred-percent normal yourself.”
    Orchid winced but she refused to take the bait. “GiveStonebraker to one of the other full-spectrum prisms on the staff.”
    â€œThey’ve all got assignments. Or a home life at night.” Clementine grinned triumphantly. “Which you, being single, don’t yet have. Besides, you know you always request evening assignments.”
    â€œOnly because I need my days for my writing.”
    â€œStonebraker apparently prefers to work at night.”
    â€œRight. Probably under full moons.”
    Some people viewed strat-talents the way they did wild jag-pards in zoos. Fascinating, but dangerously un-domesticated. In a world where virtually everyone had some degree of paranormal talent and where such abilities were taken for granted as a naturally evolving aspect of the human species, para-sensitive strategic-awareness talent was considered very retrograde, evolutionarily speaking.
    After meeting Rafe Stonebraker, Orchid was prepared to dismiss the throwback theories. Whatever else he might be, he was neither primitive nor unsophisticated, although she would not go so far as to call him domesticated.
    He was well educated, well read, highly opinionated, and chillingly intolerant of