Jack asked, the way so many people had said her given name over the years.
“Rain is fine,” she muttered. “George just likes to use the full version.”
“George?”
“Your neighbor. The guy Zane gave the key to in case Joey showed up?”
“Joey?”
“The cat.”
“You were talking to the cat earlier?” he asked.
“Sure. I was trying to coax him off the wall to start with, then tried to get him to eat very expensive tuna.”
Jack kept watching her, a tiny woman who talked fast, moved with real ease and whom he’d felt against him on the floor. He took a breath, but wished he hadn’t. She carried the scent of…something…sweet and soft…but elusive. And she lived next door. And all he knew about anyone else on this floor was what Zane had said.
“There’s a middle-aged hippie next door to the loft, George Armstrong. He’s a good man, but he’s beyond eccentric and if you let him, he’ll give you hours of lectures about corporate greed. He paints, I think, and comes and goes on whims, apparently. He never got past the ‘do your own thing’ or ‘if it feels good, do it,’ era,” she said.
“You said you live next door?”
“I moved in a few weeks ago. George is my—”
“I know all about George,” he said before she could go into their relationship. He understood all too well from what Zane had told him. But it bothered him that she was involved with the man.
She frowned, then cocked her head to one side and her hair moved in a soft veil. “Oh, sure, of course, you know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just more labeling. Since George doesn’t conform to what you think he should, you’re sure that he’s some irresponsible hippie living like some flower child.” She bit her lip. “Gad, you’re a snob.”
A snob? “Now I’m a stuffed suit and a snob?”
She shook her head, then went past him into the main living area that was deep in shadows except for the light slicing in from the hallway. He followed her, watching her silhouetted against the light coming in the door. She was at the entrance before she stopped and turned back to him. In that fleeting moment, the light behind her softly exposed her slender figure. “Sorry for the intrusion. I’ll let that Zane person know the cat’s back.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“Oh, sure, the responsible one,” she muttered.
She was going back to that middle-aged hippie and he felt vaguely sick. “I’ll take care of it,” he repeated.
“Of course, and, oh, by the way, my name’s Rainbow Swan, for the record. Good night, Jackson Ford.”
With that, she left, quietly closing the door behind her. Before he could do more than absorb the fact that she’d obviously had the last word, the door opened again and this time he could see through the thin cotton of her T-shirt. “I’ve got the key,” she said. “Tell Zane that he can come get it any time he wants to. But until then we’ll guard it with our lives so that you’ll be safe from any and all undesirables who might be in the area.” And she closed the door after her.
Jack crossed to the door, opened it and heard another door shut firmly. Rain was gone. And she’d had a double last word. He hated that. He closed his door, threw the bolt lock on it, then saw the cat. The animal was walking silently along the shelf on the top of the partial wall. He got to the bedroom area, looked at Jack, then leaped in the opposite direction and disappeared. A cat. A hippie. He looked at the clock. The whole thing had lasted fifteen minutes, tops. It had seemed to last forever.
The middle-aged hippie and Rain. It sounded like the title of a bad novel, or some crazy song. But it knotted his stomach with distaste. Instead of going to the bedroom, he crossed to the work station, turned on two lights and sat down in front of the computer. As the monitor warmed up, he heard the cat somewhere close by mewing softly in the darkness. Then a heavy thump came from somewhere beyond the wall across the room that was shared with the next loft.
He looked at the computer screen, logged onto the Internet and went to the mail program. There were several notes from Mrs. Ferris, and a single note from Eve. He opened Eve’s note quickly. All thoughts of Rain pushed to the back of his mind…for now.
RAIN WENT INTO the loft and called out to George. “I’m back.” She crossed to the kitchen to make herself a cup of green tea.
“What was going on over there?” he asked coming up behind her.
“Labeling,” she muttered, a bit shocked that Jack Ford had gotten under her skin so completely. Labels didn’t matter. She’d known that all her life, but for some reason his attitude stung.
“What?” George asked as Rain put the teakettle on the stove, then turned to her father.
Yes, he was a hippie. From the long gray hair, thin on top, pulled back in a ponytail with a friendship rope that Bree, her mother, had made for him, to the rope sandals, the six earrings in his left ear and the cutoffs worn with a shirt that sported a skull and roses on it, he was a hippie. Although Rain liked the term a free, caring spirit better than hippie. He was middle-aged, sincere about helping to make the world a better place, and vastly talented as a painter.
She glanced at the loft, a cavernous space free of any real adornments, with pillows instead of chairs, bed pads on the floor in the side alcoves, and his paintings all around, in various stages of completion. “Want some green tea?” she asked, not about to get into this with her father, too.
He waved that aside with, “No, thanks,” and headed over to his latest canvas, a huge, four-by-six-foot work in progress that he’d labeled Experimental. Red he called it, and it was that. Very red. Lines, sweeping swirls, dots, splashes, all in various shades of red. Even though she loved her father and thought he was beyond talented, it still amused her at George’s chagrin that “normies,” as her dad called the rest of the world, actually liked his work and bought it. “The cat showed up, huh?”
“Sure did,” she said and turned as the kettle started to whistle. As she made a mug of tea, George put on one of his tapes of lute music. She turned with the steaming mug in her hands and inhaled the combination of paint and incense in the air. “You said LynTech used that loft sometimes when their people came to town?”
“Yeah,” George said, studying his painting, hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side. “They’ve got it set up so they can work without ever seeing the light of day,” he said. “I hear they’ll need it with all that stuff going on at LynTech.”
“What stuff?” she asked.
“Something big, and I don’t mean that charity ball next month.” He looked away from his canvas and back at her. “Business intrigue that no one’s talking about.”
She crossed to the rope hammock by the fire escape window on the back wall and settled into it, cradling her tea. This was the way it had been whenever she was here with
