Chapter One
Caleb Lockwood didn’t like to think of himself as a hoverer, but he still found himself going back and forth from the kitchen more times than he would have liked — trying to decide whether it was time to get the bottle of Cristal out of the fridge or whether he should wait until Delia got here, starting to pour some cashews into a bowl and then wondering if nuts would be too much in addition to the strawberries and artisanal crackers and cheese he’d picked up at a gourmet shop just the day before.
Oh, the hell with it. Delia already knew he wasn’t the most understated guy in the world. In fact, she probably expected him to go kind of over the top to celebrate the sale of his former house.
He got out the bowl of nuts and set it on the coffee table in the living room. The weather was far too warm to even think about having a fire in the floor-to-ceiling fireplace that dominated the space — now that it was the beginning of May, temperatures in Las Vegas had parked themselves in the mid- and upper eighties — but he still preferred to hang out in here unless he was watching TV. That activity had been relegated to his man cave on the lower level next to the garage, where his hundred-inch television held court.
Good thing he’d gotten over his dithering about the cashews, because the doorbell rang just a few seconds later. Caleb still hadn’t given up hoping that one day they’d get past the point where Delia felt the need to use the doorbell, that maybe they’d be close enough that she’d have a key to the house, but they weren’t there yet.
No, despite everything they’d gone through together — haunted houses and demon attacks and supernaturally charged poker tournaments — he was still firmly stuck in the friend zone.
But he smiled anyway when he opened the door, glad that she’d been able to carve out some time from her busy schedule at the real estate business she co-owned with her mother so she could come to the house and celebrate the closing of escrow on his previous home, the place where he’d first landed when he came to Las Vegas. However, he’d quickly realized that he far preferred this property, the one he’d ostensibly bought to flip.
This was his home now, and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Congratulations!” Delia told him. She was holding an elegant white orchid in a black pot, something he knew she’d chosen because it would go perfectly with the black-and-white color scheme of the house.
And it seemed she’d decided to carry that theme into her outfit, since she was wearing a sleeveless white blouse with some black embroidery around the neckline and black skinny jeans. Against her copper-red hair, the stark tones of the ensemble were particularly striking.
Maybe one day he’d stop getting blown away by her beauty all over again any time he saw her after a gap of more than a few days.
Probably not, though.
“Thanks,” he said, stepping aside so she could enter the foyer. Not even a glance around, which didn’t surprise him too much. After all, she was the one who’d helped him pick out the flooring and the light fixtures and the white-veined black soapstone that covered the fireplace and stretched up to the vaulted ceiling. “I’m glad you didn’t think I was going over the top with this.”
“Of course not,” she assured him as they headed into the living room. “Closing escrow is a big deal.”
“Even though we already went out to dinner to celebrate when I accepted the buyer’s offer?”
“Even then,” she replied at once, a slight twinkle in her blue-gray eyes. “I mean, it’s great to get an offer and accept it, but until escrow closes, a deal doesn’t feel finished.”
No, it hadn’t felt anything like a fait accompli, especially since the buyer’s offer was contingent on their own house selling. Their home had already been in escrow, but if that deal had fallen through, the whole transaction could have collapsed like a house of cards.
And while there had been other people interested in the property, he liked the couple who wanted to buy the house. They were in their mid-thirties with two kids, and he knew they’d appreciate the mid-century Brady Bunch vibe of the place. Having to start all over again with another set of buyers hadn’t seemed very appealing.
Especially since Delia’s prophecy about the collapse of Aegis Holdings had come partially true. The company — which appeared to have been run by demons or at least people possessed by them — had fallen apart after the poker tournament at the Desert Paradise casino just a month earlier. That tournament had been specifically set up to channel diabolical energy through Las Vegas and utilize it for some purpose neither he nor Delia had yet been able to discover, but after Caleb had foiled their plans…using his own quarter-demon powers in a way he still hadn’t quite been able to figure out…Aegis Holdings and most of the people who worked there had pretty much disappeared off the map. The homes they’d owned had been put up for auction, and the glut of properties had caused housing prices in Las Vegas to cool a bit.
Luckily, his former house was already under contract before the shit really began to hit the fan, and, thank God, the couple who were buying the place hadn’t tried to pull out or renegotiate. Maybe they’d decided it was better to go with a bird in the hand, or maybe they figured the market would bounce back soon enough and it was better to ride out the momentary turbulence.
“But it feels finished now,” he said, and Delia smiled.
“Yes,” she said, her tone cheerful. “I should have a cashier’s check for you tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”
Since today was Sunday, that meant the escrow company was going to be on it first thing Monday morning. While Caleb didn’t exactly need the cash — he had several million bucks stashed in a bunch of banks and credit unions around town, and around the same amount in various investment accounts that his broker handled — he wanted the sense of completion that getting the roughly three-quarters of a million the house had fetched would give him.
Even if it meant he’d have to open a few more accounts so none of them would go over the $250K FDIC-protected limit.
Or maybe it was time to start thinking about offshoring his money, even though he’d avoided that step so far because he wasn’t sure whether his fake credentials would hold up under the extra scrutiny. When he’d escaped from Hell and come to Las Vegas, a few inquiries…and a few thousand bucks slipped into the right palms…had gotten him a birth certificate and a credit report under his adopted name of Caleb Lowe. He’d used the birth certificate to get a Nevada driver’s license, but he hadn’t tried for a passport yet.
Everything was going pretty smoothly, and he hadn’t wanted to rock the boat.
Delia had moved toward the coffee table and was looking down at the bottle of champagne in its silvery cooling sleeve with some amusement. “Cristal, huh? You don’t mess around, do you?”
He grinned and took a few steps toward her. “You know I don’t do things by halves.”
For a second, their eyes met. Caleb thought he could easily drown in those cool, watercolor depths.
Especially since right now he thought he detected a certain warmth there…unless he was just fooling himself, which was distinctly possible.
