Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(105)

“You call this a temper tantrum?” he roared.

She glared at him, her soft lips primly compressed, arms folded over her protruding belly. “Yes,” she said, in her snippiest voice.

Con limped to the door and stared out onto the back lawn, his back to them. His long, lean frame was tense, vibrating. Radiating fury.

Erin cleared her throat. “OK. Well, Cin, since the damage is done, you might as well tell us what the man said.”

“Yeah, Cin. Tell us.” Miles’s voice came from the doorway, icy and sarcastic. “I’m twitching with curiosity as to what your tits can do.”

“Oh, but I think you already know, Miles,” Cindy retorted.

Miles’s face reddened, but at least that shut him up. Cindy wound her fingers together and squeezed til her knuckles went white. “Well, um, he didn’t tell me much. He said he didn’t know Kevin well. That the Midnight Project had to do with neurological research that folded due to lack of funding. That he didn’t know who funded it. That’s all. It’s just…” She hesitated, unsure if her feelings were worth sharing.

Erin made an exasperated sound. “What, Cin?”

“It was the vibes I got from him, more than anything he said,” she offered hesitantly. “When he first saw me, he came on real strong—”

“Fuck, Cin,” Miles burst out. “Are you insane?”

“No, just a slut,” Cindy said sweetly.

“Don’t get sidetracked,” Con snarled. “Keep your mouth shut, Miles. So? Go on. He was sliming you, and then?”

“And then I said the name Kevin McCloud,” she faltered. “And it switched off. Like, I mean, gone. I swear, the room got instantly colder. He stopped playing kneesies, stopped staring at my chest, stopped giving me compliments. It just…stopped. Boom, like that.”

Connor kept staring out the screen door, shaking his head.

Cindy pushed doggedly on. “So, I got to wondering what would make a really turned on guy suddenly switch off?”

“Fear,” Erin said quietly. “Guilt.”

Connor nodded. “We’ll be paying another visit to Beck. Real soon.”

His tone made her shiver. Sometimes her brother-in-law scared her.

“I want to know what that janitor in Garnett has to say,” she said.

“You’ll have to wait to find out,” Connor said. “You’re going to Hawaii to meet your mom. I’ll make some calls and arrange for twenty-four-hour bodyguard coverage for both of you while you’re there.”

Cindy’s mouth flapped. “But band camp hasn’t finished and I’ve got a wedding to play this weekend with the Rumors, and—”

“Forget band camp. Forget the Rumors. Forget anything written in your datebook. You canceled it all out when you provided an assassin with your mother’s home address. Miles, get onto the computer. Now.”

“Just a sec. I was just going to go have Mina tell Mindmeld to—”

“Forget Mindmeld,” Con snarled. “We’re working full time on this, all of us. I am sick of having assassins breathing down my family members’ necks. It makes me f*cking tense.”

The savagery in Connor’s voice made Cindy cringe even further down into her chair. She felt small and stupid. “Sorry,” she whispered.

It was a mistake to have spoken. Con rounded on her.

“You have two things to be grateful for. One, that your mom is in Hawaii. Otherwise she would be dead. And two, that you stayed with us last night. Or you’d be dead, too. Or else begging for death.”

He flung open the door that led down to his basement workroom and stomped down the stairs. Miles stood there, probably trying to come up with his own parting slap, but he couldn’t top Connor’s, so he just dove down the stairs himself, leaving her alone with Erin.

She couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes. She wanted to disintegrate, on the spot. Erin never got into trouble like this. Or at least, when she did, it was never her own fault. She was smart, brave, sensible. All the stuff that her clueless little fluff-bunny sister wasn’t.

Cindy’s the beauty, Erin’s the brain, her mom said, but Cindy had seen through that crap from the start. Erin was pretty in her own right, which meant Mom’s statement was just a trick to make Cindy feel better about being, well, less brainy. At least she was cute, right?

Small comfort now. She buried her face in her hands.

Erin cleared her throat delicately. “Cin? Um—”

“Please. Don’t. You don’t need to scold me, too. I got the point.”

Erin’s chair scraped as she got up from the table. She walked out of the kitchen, leaving Cindy to dissolve alone.

She’d put Mom in danger? God, was it possible, that just going to bat her eyelashes at old Porky could have unleashed all this mayhem?

It would be a relief to everyone if she just disappeared.

She got up, with a vague notion of going up to the bathroom, to make that French toast sloshing around in her stomach go away.

She stumbled past the studio, saw the rumpled daybed where Miles had slept. She drifted in the door, staring at it. She’d come to his room last night. Not a plan, just a random slutty impulse, to slide into that narrow bed, just to see what those hard-muscled, hairy legs would feel like, twined through hers. Just to see what he said. What he did.