Chasing Rainbow Read online

  Chasing Rainbow

  By Sue Civil-Brown

  Summary: Jake Carpenter has traveled all over the wold, living a neat, orderly life.Now he’s come to Paradise Beach, Florida, intending to stop his globetrotting ways and settle down with a tidy woman. But barging into his life comes untidy, disorderly Rainbow Moonglow. The sexy psychic turns Jake’s world upside down, gets him all shook up in more ways than one.

  And suddenly - surprisingly - he’s having the time of his life.But Jake knows that he and Rainbow are worlds apart. His soul-searing desire for this eminently kissable woman defies all rational behavior, but rational is the last thing he feels when he takes Rainbow in his arms. She’s as tempting as a summer breeze yet as unpredictable as the weather. And soon he realizes he can never let her go…even if it means chasing Rainbow from here to eternity.

  Prologue

  “We’ve got to do something, Lucy.”

  Joe Krebbs had just returned from a visit to their old home, and he looked worried. Spirits were allowed to return and check on their loved ones from time to time, but Lucy tried to avoid it. The person she loved most was here with her now, and looking in on old friends only made her feel wistful.

  But Joe went back occasionally, and from the way he looked right now, that might have been a mistake.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked gently. “I thought you were delighted that your nephew was finally moving into your old condo.”

  “I was. That’s why I went back to check. I wanted to see how he was settling in, but I found something else. Sweetheart, our friends are in danger.”

  Lucy felt a shudder of fear pass through her. It had been a long time since she had felt any such thing, and the sensation was unpleasant, even in her present disincarnate state. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Joe said, “you know what happened to us. It’s about to happen again. We’ve got to do something to warn them!”

  “But how? It’s not like we can pick up a phone and call them!”

  Joe shook his head, staring off into the incredible blue sky of eternity. “There’s a way. I know there’s a way. All we need is a psychic.”

  “But nobody would listen!”

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that I know how to get their attention.”

  One

  Somebody was watching him.

  Jake Carpenter dropped the last of his boxes in the middle of the living room and looked around. Of course, no one was there. He shook his head a little, dismissing the sensation as the early stages of heat exhaustion.

  Grabbing the towel he’d been using all morning, he wiped the sweat from his brow. He was a big, strong man, with dark hair and startling blue eyes. In his work as a petroleum geologist, he had acclimated himself to some of the harshest climates in the world, but while Florida in August wasn’t as hot as the jungle he’d recently left behind, it was at least as humid. He wished he’d bought some Gatorade to drink, and settled for a glass of water.

  He looked around the two-bedroom condominium with its contrasting modern architecture and antique furnishings, letting the cool air conditioning wash over him, and found himself remembering the last time he’d been here. His uncle, Joe Krebbs, had been alive then, and the two of them had done some deep-sea fishing on Joe’s boat.

  But now Uncle Joe was dead, and the condo felt empty. Jake stood there, feeling the deep well of sadness that filled him now whenever he thought of the man. He’d felt closer to his uncle than he had to his father, and Joe had been just about the only family he had left—except for a couple of cousins he preferred not to think about.

  Well, he told himself, that was the way life was. People you cared about eventually moved on, one way or another—which was why it rarely paid to invest in intangibles. The only constant he’d been able to find in fife was science. When he held a drilling core sample in his hands, he was holding rocks that had endured for millennia. Living rocks that whispered their stories to him and that would whisper their stories to generations to come.

  Braced by the reminder of what really mattered, he bent to heft the box and carry it into the second bedroom, which he planned to use for a study.

  But then it came again, the neck-prickling certainty that he was being watched. Straightening quickly, he whirled around—and saw that no one was there. More than once over the years that ability to know he was being watched had saved him from thugs on dark, dangerous streets around the world, or from snakes and tigers in the jungles. It unnerved him to realize he’d been mistaken.

  But after a moment, he shrugged the feeling off, though it wouldn’t quite go away, and returned to moving and unpacking.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” he heard himself saying to the empty air, “but I think I’m going to have to rearrange some furniture.” As soon as he spoke, he felt embarrassed. Joe would hardly care now how the furniture was arranged—if Joe could even hear him, and with the certainty of a scientist, Jake believed he could not.

  Even if there was an afterlife—a possibility Jake found hard to stomach—Joe wouldn’t care about earthly things now. And why, he wondered, had he begun to think about such things, anyway? Since Joe’s death, such questions had occurred to him often, and they made him uneasy.

  Brushing that thought aside, along with the feeling that he was being watched, he carried the box into the second bedroom, now devoid of the guest furnishings his uncle had installed there so long ago. There had been a queen-size bed, a dresser, a rocking chair, and some blue curtains, but they were now in the master bedroom.

  Jake had stayed in the guest room on his visits, and the furnishings had a sentimental attachment for him, so he had decided to use them as his own. The big wooden bed that had belonged to his uncle had gone into storage, along with the other items that had once filled the room. Hard-headed realist or not, Jake couldn’t bring himself to sleep in his uncle’s bed.

  In his entire life, except for his years in college, when he had decorated an off-campus room in early Goodwill, Jake had never had either a permanent home or any furniture to call his own. It felt odd now to step into a room full of pieces he had bought himself over the past couple of days—a desk, a desktop computer, a comfortable executive chair, a cre-denza, bookshelves, and a file cabinet.

  The curtains hung by his uncle had been taken down, leaving only the white mini-blinds, giving the room the businesslike atmosphere he wanted it to have.

  Here, surrounded by his books and his research notes, he hoped to write a textbook about petroleum geology. And maybe, if he had time, he would write a memoir of his experiences in the field.

  He set the box on the desk and ripped it open.

  Field notes. Carefully he lifted the file folders containing research notebooks and loose papers out and put them in the file cabinet, filing them according to the system he had been using for years. When he had emptied the box, he cut the tape on its underside and folded it flat, stacking it with others leaning against one wall.

  He was just going back to the living room for another box when he heard a tentative knock at the door. He went to answer it and found himself looking down at a slender, beautiful gray-haired woman with a complexion as fresh as any debutante’s.

  She smiled up at him and handed him a flyer. “Hello, Jake,” she said. “Do you remember me? I’m Nellie Blair. I was a good friend of your uncle’s.”

  “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Blair.” He looked down at the flyer, something about a condo association meeting this evening.

  “You might want to come,” Nellie said, indicating the flyer. “You’ve been nominated for association president.”

  Jake was startled. “Me? Why? I’m just moving in.”

  “Well, your uncle was president, you know. For a long time. We tho
ught it might be a nice gesture.”

  “But…” Jake trailed off, trying to marshal his objections.

  “Besides,” Nellie said with a friendly smile, “you’re the youngest person in the building. We figure you’re up to it.”

  Before he could say anything else, Nellie had patted his hand in a maternal fashion and strode down the hall to the elevator. As the doors opened to admit her, she gave him a friendly wave, then stepped in and vanished.

  Jake looked at the flyer, shook his head, and closed the door. President of the condo association? No thanks. Hell, there were more handicapped slots in the parking lot than regular ones, and the average age of the building’s residents was rumored to be sixty-five. These people needed someone in their own age group who would understand their needs.

  And, he decided, the only graceful way to decline would be not to go to the meeting at all. That would certainly make it clear that he didn’t want the position, and there wouldn’t be a lot of awkward questions to answer.

  That decided, he returned to his unpacking. It was going to be nice living here until he took another contract abroad. Or so he told himself. Sun, sea, and sand—and a building full of people so old that they couldn’t possibly get up to any mischief, let alone make horrendous amounts of noise, exactly the kind of retreat he was looking for.

  Rainbow Moonglow laid out the tarot cards in her favorite T pattern, then hesitated before turning them over. The sun streamed in through the bay window of her little cottage near the beach, drenching the green plants she was growing on the shelf there.

  As a psychic, she used the tarot cards a great deal, but she didn’t endow them with any magical powers. To her they were simply a way to focus her psychic abilities and intuition. She might as well have used a crystal ball, a bowl of water with a few drops of oil in it, or one of her mother’s many crystals, but she had always felt an affinity for the tarot deck. Something about the images on the cards seemed to nudge her unconscious.

  Today she was doing a reading for herself, largely because she’d been plagued by a prescient sense that something momentous was about to happen in her fife.

  And for once she was surprisingly reluctant to explore the feeling and try to pinpoint it more closely.

  Sighing, she reached out and turned over the first card: Death.

  Well, naturally, she thought. She’d been feeling a major change was about to occur. She should have expected to turn up this card first. There was no new information in that.

  Then, in rapid succession, she turned up the Hermit and Strength. So, she was living a solitary existence and she needed to keep her head and her sense of balance in whatever change was about to occur.

  She sat back a little, brushing her long dark hair over her shoulders, and studied the three Major Arcana cards she had turned up. It was unusual, though not impossible, to turn up three Major cards in succession, and she felt uneasy. The sense that something important was coalescing around her was confirmed by those cards.

  The Hermit really troubled her, though. She didn’t think she lived a solitary life, although if she were to be brutally honest about it, she did tend to keep people at a distance, mainly because they were either so uncomfortable with or so doubtful of her psychic abilities.

  Reaching out, she turned another card, and was relieved when it was one of the Minor Arcana, the Six of Wands, reversed. Confusion. Anxiety. Maybe embarrassment. Well, that would be nothing new. Any psychic who hadn’t felt those things was a fraud.

  This wasn’t helping at all, she thought suddenly, and gathered up the cards, replacing them in the deck. They were going to tell her nothing she didn’t already know.

  The problem was with her. She was afraid of the change that was coming.

  Suppressing yet another sigh, she rose from the table and went to look out the window at the brilliant August day. A swim, she decided, would be the ideal distraction from her worries, and with no readings scheduled with her regulars, this was the perfect opportunity. And that, she decided, was exactly what she was going to do.

  Just as she started for her bedroom to change into her swimsuit, the doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone, and her few friends all had jobs and businesses that kept them occupied even during the slow days of August. Someone must have noticed the discreet sign in her front window advertising tarot readings. She hesitated, feeling truly reluctant to do a reading for someone else when she was feeling so much at odds with herself.

  At last she decided it would be unkind not to answer the door. So many of the people who came to her were sincerely troubled and had nowhere else to turn.

  On her doorstep she found an elderly couple who looked vaguely familiar. The man was tall and thin, with salt-and-pepper hair, and the woman wore the permed blue halo so popular with her age group. They were dressed casually, in shorts and sandals and straw hats, looking ready for the beach.

  “Miss Moonglow,” said the man, with a courtly little bow of his head. “I’m Ellis Webster, and this is my wife, Pat. We live over at the Paradise Towers. Could we have a few minutes of your time?”

  Rainbow smiled and invited them in, offering them seats in her living room, all the while hoping that they were here to seek donations for charity rather than ask for a reading.

  “We’ve been sent by our condo association to ask for your help,” Ellis Webster explained.

  “My help?” She couldn’t imagine what she would have to offer to a condo association—unless, perhaps, they wanted to use her as a fortuneteller for some fundraising scheme. If that was the case, she would give them a firm refusal.

  The couple exchanged looks, as if deciding who would take on the unpleasant task of telling her what they needed. Rainbow folded her hands and waited patiently.

  Finally the Websters seemed to reach some sort of silent agreement. Pat turned to her and began to speak.

  “This is really difficult to explain, Miss Moonglow. I personally am not inclined to… believe in ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Ghosts,” Pat repeated. “We seem to have them in the building.”

  Rainbow did believe in ghosts—after all, her mother communicated with them on a regular basis. Still, she was surprised. This was not at all what she had expected to hear. Finally she said, “Are you sure?”

  “A few of us are,” Ellis said a little sourly. “I’m reserving judgment myself. But some people have seen them, and it’s the general feeling in the association that we have to do something about them. Folks are becoming quite distraught and uneasy.”

  “Uneasy?” Pat repeated. “Scared is what they are, Ellis. Terrified. And one of these days someone is going to turn around and see one of these ghosts and have a heart attack.”

  “Which is why,” Ellis continued in the same sour tone, “we need to do something about it. Liability, you see.”

  “Liability?” Rainbow repeated blankly. That was not a term she had ever heard applied to a ghost before.

  “Liability,” Ellis repeated. “If one of our residents suffers harm because of these ghosts, and the association has done nothing to get rid of them, we could be sued.”

  “Oh, dear,” Rainbow said, even as she felt a bubble of amusement. It was too easy to imagine the look on a judge’s face if he heard that the condo was being sued because they hadn’t done anything to get rid of a ghost.

  “I agree it sounds ridiculous,” Ellis said, “but people sue over everything these days. Even if it were dismissed, it would be expensive. We don’t have that kind of money, and I’d be very surprised if our association insurance would cover it.”

  “So would I,” Rainbow agreed, permitting a small smile to show. “Hauntings probably fall under acts of God.”

  “Most likely.” Ellis looked as if the idea didn’t sit well with him at all. “I said we should get better insurance.”

  Pat reached out and touched his hand. “You did, dear. I remember it. But I’m afraid this time it wouldn’t make any difference. I’ve
never heard of a policy for hauntings.”

  “Lloyds might have covered it,” he said gloomily. “Well, it’s too late now. We have to do something to protect ourselves. And that’s where you come in, Miss Moonglow.”

  “I had a feeling it might be.”

  Pat smiled at her. “We—the association, that is— feel that a seance might help. You’re a well-respected psychic here in Paradise Beach, and if you come and say we don’t have ghosts, everyone will have to believe it.”

  “But what if there are ghosts?”

  Ellis reflected distaste, while Pat merely looked resigned and asked, “Then you can do something to help get rid of them, surely?”

  “That would depend on the ghosts, I’m afraid.”

  “But I’ve heard that ghosts come back because they have unfinished business.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “If we could find out what it is and help them resolve it, they’d go away, wouldn’t they?”

  “Probably. If that’s what’s going on.” Rainbow wished her mother weren’t at sea on a cruise. This was Roxy’s end of the business. Rainbow never dealt with the spirit world, if she could avoid it.

  “We have to try,” Ellis said firmly, looking as if he hated to say it.

  “Oh, I’m willing,” said Rainbow. In fact, she was intrigued. This could be interesting, ghosts or no ghosts. It might even be the pick-me-up she needed when she was feeling so out of sorts. “But you have to understand, I can’t guarantee anything. That I won’t find ghosts, or that I can do anything to encourage them to move on if I do. There are no guarantees in this business.”

  Ellis finally smiled. “Miss Moonglow, if you made any promises, I’d think you were an utter charlatan.”

  Rainbow stiffened a little. “I am not a charlatan.”

  “I didn’t say you were. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’m sure you believe fully in what you do.”

  But in truth, he didn’t. It was as obvious to Rainbow as if it had been written on the wall. She smothered a sigh and looked away, giving herself some space to think and allow her intuitions to come to the fore.