Page 41 of Mistaken

If his hands were so perfect, what must the rest of him look like?

“It is not homework,” he said, and that flicker of amusement had returned to his voice. “You may play, or not. You may sing…or not. But to avoid it would only be a further waste of your talents.”

After delivering that remark, he inclined his head before walking calmly out of the room and leaving her alone.

For a moment, Sarah only stood there, not sure what she should do next. The coward in her wanted to follow, to go to her room and pick up the iPad and pretend the Steinway wasn’t waiting for her on the other side of the house.

But she’d been a coward for far too long, hadn’t she?

A deep breath, and then she sat down on the piano bench and paused for a moment.

Well, she’d begun with Beethoven. She might as well continue in that vein.

Head down and focused on the keys, she began to play the first notes of theMoonlight Sonata.

Chapter13

“We’re not seriously goingto leave Sarah there to rot, are we?” Lindsay asked.

Miles set down his wine glass, blue-gray eyes narrowed behind his silver-rimmed glasses. More than once, she’d wondered what was going to happen when his prescription shifted and he needed some new ones, but so far that particular fear hadn’t come to pass.

Good thing, since they had plenty on their plate already.

“We don’t even know she’s in Ghost Ranch,” he pointed out, then reached over just in time to prevent Dylan from sticking his fist into his plate of lasagna.

All right, that was true. The drone hadn’t stayed up long enough for them to see exactly what was going on in there, or whether Sarah was on the property at all. Shawn still claimed that he’d seen some kind of movement under the trees near that big house at the top of the hill, but his eyes could have been playing tricks on him, wanting to manufacture something that proved their lost volunteer was still alive and in the area.

“And we don’t know that she isn’t,” Lindsay returned. “I just hate the idea that we have to stand back and do nothing simply because the elders told us the place is off limits.”

“If they don’t want us going there, then it’s best that we stay away.”

Lindsay picked up her fork and put a bite of lasagna in her mouth. All right, it wasn’t exactly like her mother’s, not without any access to real mozzarella or parmesan, but it was still cheesy and rich and should have been very satisfying.

At the moment, though, she couldn’t keep from fretting over Sarah. In all these years, they hadn’t lost a single person — well, okay, Isla had been taken by Aamir al-Qadir, but he had ended up falling in love with her, so no harm, no foul — and Lindsay didn’t want to start now.

Even if the elders were telling them they needed to back off.

“Technically, they shouldn’t have a say in anything we do,” she said, and Miles gave her a pained look.

“I suppose that if you wanted to split hairs, then yes, the djinn elders do not command us humans,” he replied. Even as Lindsay began to remark that she was glad he agreed with her, he went on, “However, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to upset them. The djinn are powerful enough, and the elders are an order of magnitude more. I don’t think any of us fully comprehend the extent of their powers. We rely on the devices to protect us, sure, but I can’t forget how several of the elders were able to ignore them at least partially when they needed to come near here. Who’s to say they won’t disregard them entirely if we make them angry enough?”

All right, her husband had a point there. No one really knew what the djinn elders might be capable of if they got their panties in a wad…mostly because no one had been stupid enough to do such a thing in the first place. Maybe far back in the mists of time, one of the elementals had challenged their elders, but whatever had happened, it was obvious that they’d maintained their position as the rulers of the djinn.

Was it really worth having the elders descend on Los Alamos in a rage and putting everyone in jeopardy, just to save one person?

Lindsay had always thought of herself as a nuts and bolts kind of person, someone who relied on logic and facts to make decisions. It was probably a large part of the reason why she and Miles got along so well; neither of them was anything close to sentimental.

And that kind of logic would state, in the words of an oldStar Trekmovie she’d seen years and years ago, that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few.

That didn’t mean she had to like it.

It also didn’t mean she wasn’t going to still poke at the problem, trying to see if there was some way they could come at it from a different angle.

“Well, what if we don’t go to Ghost Ranch?” she asked then. “What if Sarah got lost going to meet Carson, and she’s wandering around somewhere by the lake?”

Once again Miles had to pause before he answered, this time to make sure Dylan wouldn’t wrap his fingers around a chunk of lasagna and throw it at the wall. Already Lindsay suspected that the little boy indulged in that kind of behavior not because he was acting out, but because he was curious to see what would happen after he experimented with a particular combination of action and reaction.

Like father, like son.

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