He tried not to let the touch of frost in her voice bother him.

“Not about us,” he said. He closed the refrigerator door and looked at her. “About my talent.”

“Oh, right, your talent.” She hefted the pan off the stove and spooned the eggs onto two plates. “Well? What about it?”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything about it to anyone else, especially the members of your family.”

She glanced at him, brows lifted. “Why not?”

“Because your family is well-connected with Arcane and I don’t want J&J or anyone else getting curious about the effects that gas had on me.”

“Got it.” She set the pan down. “I understand and I agree.”

“You do?”

“My family may be well-connected within the Society but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know how things work in the organization. I’m well aware that rare and unusual talents make some members of the Society uneasy. That goes double if those talents are powerful. I don’t think there’s any doubt but that you are now off the charts. Level Ten with a very large asterisk.”

“Off the charts with an unknown talent,” he added quietly.

“A heretofore unknown aspect of your core talent,” she corrected.

“Doesn’t matter.” He poured the juice into two glasses. “Arcane gets nervous when the words unknown and off the charts appear in the same sentence. The same is true in the Guilds and at the Bureau.”

“I’m aware of that. Don’t worry, I have no intention of discussing your talent with anyone else, including the members of my own family.”

He was glad she was not going to argue with him. He put the bottle of orange juice back into the refrigerator and picked up the coffeepot.

“You were right about one thing, I’m going to need time to figure out just what has changed in my talent,” he said.

She carried the plates to the table and sat down. “You probably won’t figure it out until the first time you use it intuitively. We both know that’s how psychic abilities manifest themselves.”

He sat down across from her. “And sometimes people find out the hard way.”

She picked up a fork. “Don’t worry, you know now that you’ve got the control you’ll need to handle the energy you’re capable of generating.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely.”

He ate some eggs, thinking. “What was it like for you?”

She gave him a wicked smile. “Are we talking about last night or my talent?”

He grinned. “I was thinking about your talent but if you’d rather discuss last night—”

“Forget last night. I spent a good portion of it on a lumpy sofa because there was a dust bunny on my side of the bed.”

He groaned. “Don’t remind me. It won’t happen again. By the way, I left your sheets on top of the washing machine.”

“Thanks. I’ll take care of them before I go to Looking Glass.”

“I don’t know why Rex took over your side of the bed last night. At my place, he never sleeps on the bed. In fact, he’s usually gone most of the night. Shows up around breakfast time.”

“Got a hunch he was guarding you,” she said, very thoughtful now.

“From you?”

“No.” She paused. “I think he was watching over you while you slept off the burn. Somehow he understood that you weren’t in a normal sleep state. He must have sensed that you were vulnerable until you woke up. He’s your buddy. He was watching your back.”

“You know, they say we shouldn’t anthropomorphize animals.”

“True. But Rex’s relationship with you is certainly odd.”

“I can’t argue that.” He slathered butter on a slice of toast. “You were going to tell me what it was like coming into your talent.”

“When I was thirteen, I started seeing faint rainbows in various reflective surfaces but only whenever there was someone else in the vicinity. I didn’t realize what was happening for the first few months, although I soon discovered that if I concentrated hard, the rainbows got brighter.”

“You didn’t realize you were seeing ultralight rainbows?”

“Not for some time. And neither did anyone else because it is not only a low-rent talent it is generally a very weak talent. A lot of people with the ability never realize what they’re seeing. They catch a glimpse of an ultralight rainbow in a mirror or a window and assume it’s just a trick of the light. Also, because the talent is not exactly impressive, it hasn’t been studied. It is poorly understood and not adequately described in the literature.”

“So how did you figure out what was going on and what you could do with your ability?”

“It was a long process,” she said. “When I mentioned the rainbows to my mother, the first thing she did was take me to an ophthalmologist who concluded that there was nothing wrong with my eyes. Aside from the fact that I needed glasses, that is.”

“But you kept seeing rainbows.”

“Of course. And they got increasingly vivid. My parents finally started to wonder if there was a link to my psychic senses because I certainly wasn’t showing signs of developing any other kind of talent. Everyone in my family has some talent, you see.”

“They say there’s a strong genetic component in some families.”

“Yes, but psychic genetics are extremely complicated. My talent doesn’t appear anywhere on the family tree. At any rate, the next appointment Mom made for me was with some experts in rare talents at one of the Arcane labs. They ran a lot of tests on me and eventually announced that I was an unusually strong rainbow-talent.” Charlotte waved one hand. “And that was the end of it, as far as everyone was concerned because, as everyone knows, the talent is just a novelty at best.”

“You seem to have parlayed it into a good career as an antiques dealer.”

She looked at him over the top of her mug, her eyes shadowed with darkly luminous mysteries. He felt the hair stir on the back of his neck, as it always did when he sensed secrets.

“Yes,” she said. “It has worked out well for me from a financial point of view.”

He looked at the mirrored pendant she wore. “Tell me about that necklace.”

“This?” She touched the pendant with her fingers. “I came across it a few years ago in an estate sale. I had no idea what it was but I knew that I had to have it. Later I figured out that it works a bit like tuned amber. It helps me focus my talent more precisely.”

“Interesting.”

She looked hesitant. He got the feeling that she was about to tell him something else about the pendant but in the next moment she changed her mind. She glanced out the window.

“Brace yourself,” she said lightly. “We have a visitor.”

He followed her gaze and saw Thelma Duncan striding briskly along the drive toward the cottage. She was dressed in her standard uniform, an oversized denim shirt heavily embroidered with colorful flowers, sturdy trousers, and a pair of well-worn boots. Her gray hair was covered by a broad-brimmed straw hat. She carried a basket on one arm.

“Something tells me you’re going to be eating zucchini bread for another week,” Slade said. “Rex will be happy.”

Charlotte set down her mug and got to her feet. “I admit I’ve had enough zucchini bread to last me until next summer’s crop comes in but I hope she brought more of those incredible tomatoes and basil. I could eat those all year long.”

Under other circumstances, her enthusiasm for the free produce would have been amusing, he thought.

“You do realize that Mrs. Duncan is going to see me here having breakfast with you,” he said. “She will draw the obvious conclusions. The news will be all over town by noon.”

Charlotte paused in the kitchen doorway and looked at him. “So what? Everyone assumes we’re sleeping together, anyway.”

“Assuming is one thing. Having the facts confirmed by a witness who actually saw us at breakfast takes the quality of the gossip to a whole new level.”

Charlotte winked. “The locals will conclude that their cunning plan to keep you happy here on the island is working.”