Extreme Danger (41 page)

Becca wiggled and adjusted herself around the hard, unyielding shaft of his cock. “That won’t work,” she said. “I don’t want just sex. That’s not what I meant at all. Not. At all.”

He shut her up the only way he could think of. He kissed her.

A double invasion, with his cock embedded in her slick, squirming warmth of her pussy, his mouth moving hungrily over her soft lips. The taste of the paint on them was unfamiliar, contrasting oddly with the sweet taste of her inner depths, her little tongue.

Again. He had no idea why he made this same goddamn mistake, over and over. This double contact did something to his chest, stretching him out between those two focus points of intense awareness and need. The aching, hollow place in his chest took over his whole body. He clutched her like she was life itself. He was kissing her like he’d die if he stopped. Fucking her with hard, frenzied lunges. Desperate to get inside her, as deep as he could go. She struggled just as hard, straining towards what she needed. Her body clutching, demanding, as her orgasm called forth his own.

He obeyed, rode the crest of that wave for as long as he could, feeling for her, waiting for her before he topped the rise and let himself be battered under the tons of pounding foam.

She was already asleep when he finally had the strength to lift his eyelids. He was grateful for that. Somehow summoned the strength to reach out, flip off the bedside light.

The light that leaked out of the bathroom loved up the graceful curves and lines and hollows of her body.

He tried not to think about it. Tried again. Christ. He fidgeted.

Hey, he would have stopped himself, too. No one knew better than he what Becca had to deal with in Nick Ward. He was a rude, irritable, oversexed pain in the ass. Since he’d met her, their encounters all had more or less the same arc. First he scolded and bullied her, then he subsequently tossed her on her back and fucked her brains out.

Not much of a base there for “I love you.”

He’d never had the nerve in his life to say those words to anybody.

At least not in English. The thought came to him suddenly. He’d said them to his mother, in Ukrainian. And there he went, right off the cliff. Bad move. Thinking about his mother was all he needed right now.

No “I love you’s.” It was against his rules. It was like painting a big bull’s-eye on your chest and saying, go on shoot me. Shoot me, please.

He was a fucking chump idiot to get his tender feelings hurt.

He dragged her closer, his arm jealously tight around her smooth body, and tried like hell to grow up, and get some goddamn sleep.

Chapter
22

“I can’t do it, Richie,” Diana said brokenly. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m so sorry.”

Dismayed, Richard Mathes stared at the woman swaying on his front porch. Diana looked awful. Eyes bloodshot, lids swollen and fiery red, ringed with tear-streaked makeup. Her mouth was marred with a bubbling mosaic of fever blisters; her hair was a rat’s nest, squashed into a bizarre one-sided crest. Her clothes look like she’d slept in them. She stank of old sweat—and of alcohol.

His shock lasted only a moment before his practical nature snapped into action, checking rapidly to see if any nosy neighbors were out pruning their flowers to witness this tableau.

“Richard? Who’s at the door?” Helen’s voice floated out the open door, growing nearer.

“Wait here,” he hissed at her. “No one,” he called, whipping the door shut just as Helen appeared at the top of the stairs, fastening an earring.

“Don’t get absorbed in anything, please,” she said, in a crisp, admonishing voice. “The Zimmer girl’s birthday party starts in twenty minutes, and I can’t take Chloe because I’m taking Libby to get her hair done at GianPiero’s, so you have to give her a ride. Remember?”

Mathes gave her a placating smile, though his teeth clenched hard enough to send bursts of pain up into his skull. “Of course.”

He waited until his wife disappeared back into the master bedroom before he permitted the smile to fade. He had no idea what the real expression beneath it might be, but it was better that the nagging, irritating bitch not see it. He had enough problems.

He slipped out the door, spun Diana around and frog-marched her over the vast expanse of the Mathes lawn and into the shade of the big maple that overhung the drive, and from there into the garage. “Where is your car?” he demanded.

“It’s around the corner,” she said faintly. “On the Avenue.”

He abruptly ruled out the possibility of sending her packing back to her own vehicle. She was drunk, for one thing. Worse still, in this neighborhood, she would be remembered in this deplorable condition. Bad enough that she’d staggered this far.

Time for damage control. He jerked her into the garage, unlocked his BMW coupe and bundled her into the passenger’s seat. Not gently, he shoved her down onto her side. “Keep your head down,” he snarled.

He left her there weeping while he went in to deal with Helen.

He found her in the foyer, shrugging on the elegantly crumpled white linen jacket that matched her suit, tucking a nonexistent wisp up into her smoothly coiffed blond hair. She glimmered with accents of gold and diamonds. Who’d guess that a world-class bitch lurked behind that perfectly groomed, angelic façade?

He gathered his energy. “Something’s come up,” he said. “A medical emergency. I can’t take Chloe to the party.”

Helen’s eyes went blank for a moment, and then the lower lids quivered and crept up, as they always did when she was angry with him. Which was to say, every instant of every goddamn day.

“You’re lying. Of course.” Her voice had that low tremor of martyrdom that made him want to wrap his fingers around that slender white throat and squeeze until her blue eyes popped. “You’re going to play with one of your whores, I imagine.”

He grabbed his briefcase, which was always at the ready near the door. “It’s work, Helen,” he said, with steely patience.

“Isn’t it always?” She folded her arms across her chest. “Well then, why not take Chloe on your way? The Zimmers are en route to your office. Which I assume is the site of your, ah, medical emergency?” Her voice rang with righteous challenge.

He thought of Diana, sweating and sobbing outside in his car, and silently cursed her for being so weak. Falling apart on him like a wet paper bag just when things got critical. “I do not have time to swing by the Zimmers. Just as I do not have time for this conversation.”

“Daddy?” Chloe appeared on the stairs. His daughter had inherited her mother’s spectacularly bad timing. She gave him a dewylashed look of desperate entreaty. “If I have to wait for Mom to take Libby to GianPiero’s, I’ll miss the party! I swear, you just have to drop me off, it’s not like you have to go in and chat, and I—”

“No!” he bellowed. “God, how many times do I have to say it?”

Chloe jerked back, mouth quivering, and ran up the stairs.

Mathes beat a hasty retreat, so he wouldn’t have to look at Helen’s thunderous face. God, a man got no peace in his own home.

All this family drama sweetened his mood nicely for when he slid into the driver’s seat of the car. Diana was sitting up again, to his extreme irritation. He seized a handful of her hair and yanked it down. Her face whacked the plastic cupholder on the fold-down center console. That was going to leave a bruise, he thought. The next thought came quickly, resolute and cold.

It doesn’t matter now.

He grimly wrapped his mind around the idea as he put some distance between them and his own neighborhood. If Diana was so far gone that she would accost him at his own home, she had become dangerously unpredictable. A security liability. He suppressed a pang of melancholy, let anger well up to replace it. This was going to be embarrassing and reflect very badly upon him with Zhoglo. And her whimpering was driving him crazy.

“Shut up,” he said.

She did, touching her face with the tips of her fingers. “Can I sit up now?”

“Yes.”

He saw a crimson flash of blood out of the corner of his eye, and slanted a look. He’d given her a split lip. Her face was distorted by the silent weeping.

“I am interested to know exactly what you think could justify a crazy stunt like this,” he said. “Last night’s spectacle was bad enough.”

She put her hand over her mouth and made a visible effort to compose herself.

“Did you get the samples?” he demanded.

“I delivered them directly to the lab,” she quavered. “I got there around three in the morning and left them with Jankins. And I specified that the older girl’s samples were a rush job.”

“Good. Then why are you falling apart?”

Her shoulders convulsed. He realized with a grinding sense of dismay that she was starting to cry again.

“Richie, it was horrible,” she forced out. “They looked just terrible, for one thing—all of them are so thin and starved-looking, and they have so many bruises. Somebody should fire those horrible people who are watching them. And the little ones screamed and cried, and the oldest girl—oh, God, Richie, she kept trying and trying to talk to me, and then she…she attacked me!”

He waited, a measured pause. “It doesn’t seem as if she injured you too badly. We discussed this, Diana. At length. You told me you could handle it. That you were good at compartmentalizing feelings.”

“After all these years with you? Of course I’m good at it,” she said, with a sudden flare of heat. “But I wasn’t expecting…I didn’t think they would be so—”

“Those children are refuse from the worst orphanages in the world,” he lectured. “They were abandoned and raised in institutions that drastically inhibited their cognitive development. What they have lost can never be regained and they are irreparably damaged. They will never lead normal lives. Never have fulfilling relationships. Never be contributing members of society.”

“But Richie—”

“And we have been through this! It’s a difficult ethical decision, but we made it together! The time for philosophical debate is past!”

He abandoned his harangue. She was sobbing too hard to hear it.

He wondered why he bothered. Habit, maybe. He should have realized at the banquet that she was breaking down, but the time crunch had stressed him, Helen had been chewing his ass all evening, and he hadn’t been able to think of an alternative plan on the spot. Besides, he shouldn’t stop scolding too soon. Diana may be going to rack and ruin, but she was an intelligent ruin. When she cared to be.

“That girl…her eyes…” Diana faltered. “She looked so desperate. She tried to speak to me, Richie. She asked for help.”

“And then she attacked you, remember?” He thought of Henry Metgers, who had already paid fifteen million dollars for his sixteen-year-old daughter’s new heart, and decided it was time to try a new tack.

“The Metgers girl is an artistic genius,” he said. “A budding concert pianist. With her rare blood type, it could be months before a match became available through normal channels. She doesn’t have months, Diana. She will die in a matter of days without that heart.”

“I know, I know,” Diana whispered.

“And you would deny her that?” He pounded away at her, ruthlessly. “Edeline Metgers barely has the strength to speak. She’s a lovely, gifted child. She deserves to live. Doesn’t she?”

“Of course she does, but Richie, I—”

“Life is like that, Diana. I’m sorry, but it is. Either this brilliant child lives and shares her incredible talent with all humanity, or she goes out like a candle. And for what? For the continued existence of a stunted, mentally deficient girl, destined to huddle in a locked room for her entire meaningless existence?”

“Richie, it was her eyes,” Diana wailed. “You don’t understand!”

He cut off his tirade, which was wasted on her anyway, and pulled up to the curb, a block away from Diana’s bungalow.

“Try not to think about it,” he suggested, forcing a gentleness into his voice that he did not feel. “Go on home.” He reached into the back seat for his briefcase, rummaged through the contents until he found the right bottle, and shook four pills out into his hand.

There was a small bottle of mineral water in the seat. He held them out to her. “Take these,” he urged. “By the time you get to bed, you’ll already be feeling calmer. You’re exhausted. Get some rest.”

She hesitated for a moment, but he held them out again, and she tossed them into her mouth and gulped them down. He began to relax.

She took a deep breath, let out a shuddering sigh. “Richie, there’s something else.”

He felt his skull throb again, from the teeth-gritting. “And that is?”

“I think someone was watching me last night,” she whispered, after a nervous pause. “I think I was followed.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Diana,” he snapped. “That’s ridiculous. Of all times to start having paranoid delusions—”

“Really! When I got back to the hotel, my key card didn’t work. When I went down to get another, they told me I’d been there five minutes before to get a key redone! Someone who looked like me pretended to be me, and searched my room. I know it sounds crazy.”

Mathes stared into her wide, wet, mascara-ringed eyes, wondering if this went deeper than a simple nervous breakdown. Perhaps Diana was having bona fide hallucinations.