Free Finder's Keeper by Vivi Andrews Page B

him. “I broke through them and I’ll break this one. We can do this. We just need to shake it up. Change…” Chase stopped pacing and spun to face her. “Tell you what. Let’s return to the scene of the crime. Sometimes reliving the experience of discovering something is lost will help trigger a stronger desire to find it.”
    Mia hesitated. Instinct still demanded she just say Sorry it didn’t work, have a nice life , but Gina’s comments from the night before came back to her. She hadn’t meant to mock her family’s beliefs. She certainly hadn’t intentionally lost the watch. Giving this superstition a chance seemed only fair. A real chance. She’d follow it through to the end. If only to prove to herself that she wasn’t irrationally discounting a scientific possibility.
    “Let’s go back to my place,” she said, hitting the button to unlock her car. “The safe is there. Will your bike fit in the trunk?”
    This time it was Chase who hesitated, his eyes shadowed, but only for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
     
    Chase jerked his hand away from Mia and slammed the door in his mind, trying to shake off the murky swell of her intangible desires—and the disturbing intimacy they caused. “Ooookay,” he muttered, slumping against the wall beside the safe, the acidic bite of her mimosa taste still lingering in his mouth. “That didn’t work.”
    He’d had clients who had mixed motivations and had a hard time focusing on the item they wanted, but this was the first time it was as if she resented both the item and the method of retrieving it. He couldn’t break through the walls she’d constructed within herself against magic—though she didn’t seem to be consciously resisting anymore. At least that was a step in the right direction.
    “What am I doing wrong?” Mia grumbled.
    “You don’t actually want to find the watch,” he told her.
    “Yes, I do!”
    He held up his hands in surrender. “Easy on the death glare, honey. I come in peace, remember?”
    “I do ,” she insisted, a little less violently. “I need it.”
    “You might need it, but you don’t want it. And your mixed feelings about the damn thing are making me dizzy.”
    “I’m trying .” Mia slumped to her closet floor. “It’s just hard to turn off thirty-four years of hating the damn thing long enough to actually want it back.”
    Thirty-four . Wow. He would have pegged her a decade younger than that. Though he guessed multiple Ph.Ds didn’t come much younger.
    He crouched next to her. “You wanna talk about why you hate it? Purge a little before we try again? Maybe tell me why you need it if you’d just as soon drop it over Niagara Falls?”
    “A hundred and fifty years,” she groaned. “It’s been passed around my family for a century and a half and no one has ever lost it. How can I face my parents after I tell them I lost the single most important piece of our family history? They all know I think the legend behind it is idiotic. They all know how hard I’ve tried to avoid being its caretaker, even for a day, and now this? They’ll think I’ve done it on purpose. They’ll think I wanted it to be lost forever just so they would stop talking about it.”
    “Well, didn’t you?”
    “Of course I did, but I didn’t do it intentionally!”
    Chase took her hand, just for comfort, keeping his gift firmly locked down. “Look, I know this is probably the last thing you want to hear, but maybe you aren’t the best person for me to be using as a guide. There’s something different about the read I get from you. The intangibles…the emotional static of what you want… It’s louder with you and I’m picking up on more of your thoughts.”
    “You’re reading my mind?” she asked, her skepticism clear.
    “In a manner of speaking. I don’t want to invade your privacy.” Or experience the jarring intimacy of the connection any more than absolutely necessary. “Is there someone else in your family who