Shannon McKenna Bundle: Ultimate Weapon, Extreme Danger, Behind Closed Doors, Hot Night, & Return to Me. Shannon McKenna

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СКАЧАТЬ rubbed some on his skin, inhaled. His body was too cold to release the scent, and the inside of his nose felt frozen solid, but still, he smelled it, just barely, and the earthy, sensual essence warmed him.

      It made him think of Tamara Steele. The way her red lips curved in that secret smile in the evening gown photograph. The picture of her in the black dress, wildflowers in her outstretched hand. Lavender and daisies. Her pale, beautiful face, filled with ancient sadness.

      But the image of Imre’s mutilated hands battered at him.

      He was unaccustomed to the sensation of fear after years of cultivating detachment. It was intensely unpleasant.

      If they killed Imre, that was it. There was no other reason for Val to remain even remotely human.

      You are a whining dog begging for scraps.

      True. His stock portfolio had a net worth in the millions now, and look at him, still living on scraps. A chess game every few years. Distant memories of egg and bread fried in butter, Socrates and Descartes, Bach inventions played on the grand piano. That lumpy, dusty old divan.

      And soon enough, a mossy grave in the cemetery with Imre’s name carved on it.

      Scraps. All that he would ever be allowed to have.

      Chapter

      5

      Tam muttered something foul in some half-remembered language as she tore off her goggles. She wiped her hair back off her sweaty forehead and flung down the troublesome pendant with disgust.

      She hated it. The colors weren’t melding. She had envisioned a tangle of bronze and green-tinged copper clockwork bits layered with delicate filigreed gold to hide the mechanism that housed the little hypodermic, but it wasn’t fitting together right, and the semi-precious stones she’d chosen looked dull and blah. The piece didn’t throb or hum, or whisper seductive, ominous things; it had no menace, no driving intensity, no sex appeal. It was a necklace that a funky college girl with a pierced nose might buy from a pothead vendor in a Seattle open-air market for fifteen bucks. Not Deadly Beauty.

      She was losing her touch, her eye, her concentration. In a word, everything. Lack of sleep, maybe. Not that she’d ever slept much.

      The light over the door strobed. Rosalia was intercomming her. She pulled off the earphones, thinking wistfully of the twelve-hour-long trances she used to go into to work. Absolute concentration, no distractions. Miles inside the sweet privacy of her own twisted mind.

      Those days were gone. And she had no one to blame but herself.

      She stabbed the button that stopped the savagely melancholy Spanish gypsy lament howled out by broken wine-and-cigarette-roughened voices. A sentimental choice. Unusual for her. Usually she went for hard rock. Something feverish and raucous, to burn out the fog in her head and help her get to the faraway place where the images of the jewelry came to her, glowing and glittering and

      twisting in her mind.

      She hit the intercom. “Yes, Rosalia? What is it?”

      “A visitor,” Rosalia replied, in her native Brazilian Portuguese. “The red Volkswagen. I think it is the dark lady with the boy baby.”

      Tam dropped her face into her hands. No. Please. Not Erin again.

      It had only been a week since the last concerned visit, full of great examples of beatific madonna-style mothering and tit-sucking and cooing and crooning and gentle, well-meant, incredibly irritating advice.

      She tossed down the goggles and punched up the security program onto her studio computer monitor. Sure enough. There was Erin’s red Volkswagen Bug, parked outside the outermost line of defense. Waiting to be beckoned in. Tam switched to another camera angle, and made out the car seat in the back, with Kev’s chubby, heavy-cheeked profile. Probably already hungry for his liquid lunch. She was in for it.

      Her sigh felt almost like a growl as she deactivated the various devices. Time to brace herself for the irritating questions. Had she done a fucking blood test to check for anemia? Was she taking a fucking multivitamin and mineral supplement? Did she want to do another fucking barbecue lunch on Sunday with the McCloud Crowd? To which the answers were always no, no, no, and leave me alone, already.

      But Erin was tough. Thick-skinned. She didn’t back down easily.

      Erin’s car started up again, and Tam watched it glumly as it advanced up the road. The McClouds made big fun of all her security doodads, but she could care less. Daddy Novak would probably love to kill Connor and Erin and their spawn too, for their part in Kurt Novak’s death. But if they wanted to paint targets on their asses and hang them out in the breeze, that was their affair. She wanted no part of it.

      She washed her hands and headed down the stairs to the entrance. Rachel was heaping towers of blocks with Rosalia on the floor in the big living area. The instant she saw Tam, she dropped everything and hurled her little body in Tam’s direction, squeaking, arms outstretched. Tam scooped her up and hugged her hard. She hefted the toddler, gauging her weight. A little heavier this week. Thirty grams, maybe, depending on whether the diaper was wet. Since taking on Rachel, Tam had become a human precision scale.

      Erin was parked in the garage and getting little Kev out of his car seat when Tam opened the door. Kev was almost as big as Rachel was, even though he was two years younger, the snorting little piglet. Tam tried not to hold that against him. It was difficult sometimes.

      Tam ran an appraising eye over Erin as she hoisted the chubby kid onto her hip. The other woman was finally slimming down from her baby weight, though she was still very soft and squeezable. Tam suspected that Connor liked his wife just that way. Whatever. To each his own.

      “And to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” There was no way to modulate the bitchy edge in her voice, so she didn’t try.

      Erin ignored her completely, saving her smiles for Rachel. “And how is this pretty little sweetheart today?” she crooned. She bent forward and gave Rachel a kiss on the back of her tousled, black-curled head. Rachel clutched tighter, buried her face in Tam’s neck, fingers digging in like little kitten claws.

      Progress. Four months ago, that brief kiss would have sent Rachel into screaming convulsions of fear. She was mellowing. Her little body was tense, but not trembling much. As Tam reset the alarms, Rachel even lifted big dark eyes a little to peek out at the baby on Erin’s lap. Little Kev returned her regard with grave, oddly adult curiosity.

      “You’re not quite so thin this time.” Erin’s voice was full of motherly approval. “That’s really great. You look better already. Much.”

      Tam suppressed a sharp reply. Her appetite was as crappy as ever, but Rachel had this annoying new mealtime game without which she would not eat, called you-take-a-bite-and-then-I-take-a-bite. So, by brutal necessity, a certain quantity of butterfly pasta, banana slices, crackers, fish sticks, Cream of Wheat, yogurt, and turkey burger patties were introducing their fat and calories into her system.

      She supposed it wasn’t so terrible. She’d been looking pretty damn haggard, not that she cared much. Rachel didn’t give a damn what her new mother looked like. Beauty had just been another weapon in Tam’s arsenal, but it was not one she cared to ever use again. It was only useful to attract and maniuplate men, and she’d aggressively phased СКАЧАТЬ