Read Running Hot for Free Online Page A

when she returned from the Maui assignment.
    The decision made, Grace Renquist turned away from the dresser and placed the neatly folded nightgown into the suitcase. There was nothing sexy about the plain white cotton garment. The sleeves were long and the hemline fell to her ankles. It had not been purchased for purposes of seduction and enticement. She had selected the cozy gown for its practical virtues. Winter nights were chilly on the Oregon coast.
    The nightgown was all wrong for Hawaii and so was everything else she was putting into the suitcase, especially the spare pair of thin black leather gloves. A year ago she had fled her old life with only the clothes on her back. She did not even own a bathing suit; hadn’t needed one in Eclipse Bay. But she was not about to buy a whole new wardrobe for what she had been informed would be a very short trip to Maui. The Arcane Society paid well but not nearly as well as her previous job. In her new life as a psychic genealogist, she had to exercise some financial restraint.
    The work was fascinating and rewarding but it wasn’t enough to banish the increasing gloom of loneliness. Should have gotten a dog months ago. But she knew why she had resisted the temptation. There had been so many uncertainties during this first year as Grace Renquist. What if the Florida authorities tracked her down? What if the two men whose auras pulsed with dark energy found her? What if her new identity didn’t survive scrutiny by J&J? She had wanted to be prepared to disappear again in the blink of an eye. A dog would have complicated any escape plan. She knew that she would not have been able to abandon it.
    But it had been a little over twelve months since Martin Crocker had died. Surely if anyone had been looking for her she would have sensed it by now. Her survival instincts were inextricably linked to her peculiar version of aura talent. Both had been honed razor sharp at the age of fourteen. Even more reassuring, she had made it through the J&J background checks. She was safe now; tucked away in that great dusty vault of the Arcane Society officially known as the Bureau of Genealogy. True, the contents of the vault these days were housed online and she accessed them with a computer; nevertheless, the metaphor still applied.
    She was safe. It would be okay to get a dog.
    Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the coded number and answered immediately.
    “Good morning, Mr. Jones,” she said. The formality was automatic, one of the many tools she employed to keep some distance between herself and others.
    “Are you packed yet?”
    She had never met the man in person. Fallon Jones ran J&J from a one-man office tucked away in a little town on the northern California coast. Some said he was an obsessively paranoid recluse. Others claimed that the reason he lived and worked alone was because no one could stand being around him for more than five minutes. It was true that he had the personality of an annoyed rhinoceros. He was also a brilliant talent.
    She had done some off-the-books genealogical research shortly after her boss, Harley Beakman, had begun referring Jones’s queries to her. Evidently she was the only one in the department who had the patience to put up with the ceaseless demands of the notoriously difficult head of J&J.
    It hadn’t taken much sleuthing to discover that Fallon was a direct descendant of Caleb Jones, the founder of Jones & Jones. That much was not a secret. There was also no question but that Fallon ranked very high on the Jones Scale, probably off the charts. She knew from her work that the members of the Jones family—many of them legends in the Society—were not above fudging their talent rankings with a view to making themselves appear less psychically powerful than they actually were. She did not hold that against them. She had discreetly cranked her own ranking back to a more respectable and far less intimidating level seven.
    The exact nature of Fallon’s