Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(106)

But he hadn’t been there. Just his laptop, glowing in the dark.

She sank down in front of the desk, wishing she were a better person. Smarter, less self absorbed. She wished she hadn’t hurt Miles’s feelings so badly. That she were the kind of person that Con could respect. Maybe even like.

She blinked at the computer screen. Letters typed themselves across the page. She got a ghostly shudder til she realized the screen was open to a chat room. Someone thought they were talking to Miles.

Mindmeld666: Hey Mina u still there? Want 2 meet me and C the Haven?

She ran her eyes up the screen, scrolled up, read the previous conversation. The Haven. That mythical place she’d heard of, like the school for mutants in the X-Men movies. It was real. How totally wild.

It occurred to her. Here was a place she could go where the assassin she’d unleashed upon her luckless family would never find her. No one would. She had no idea where it was, and Mindmeld had no idea who she was. Double blind anonymity. It sounded great right now.

She could lift the dead weight from her long suffering brother-in-law. Get away from all those scowls and scolds and disapproving glares.

And just maybe even make herself slightly useful in the process.

Her mind raced, excited. She could meet this guy, check out the place, suss out the vibe. If they were up to no good, she would send an SOS to Miles, cross her fingers and take her chances, like other grown-ups who did risky things. Dad had risked his life all the time to catch bad guys, before he’d gotten wound up with that scumbag Lazar. He’d done some good along with the bad. That didn’t cancel out the bad, of course, but maybe, in the end, it tilted the scales in his favor a tiny bit.

She wanted to do good mixed in with her bad, too. At least, she could try. They would worry, and be furious, but so what else was new?

If she got wiped off the face of the earth, it wasn’t like the world would stop. Her mom and Erin would be sad. Miles would be relieved. The Rumors would find another sax player. Life would go on.

Chances were, Mindmeld and the Haven were exactly what the guy said they were, in which case, well, bully for her. The Haven was all about expressing dormant brain potential, right? God knows, her brain was as dormant as they came. Who knew? She might even learn something. Stranger things had happened.

She reached out, poised her fingers over the keyboard. Hesitated.

Me again. I decided. Would luv 2 meet with u. Where?





Chapter 21



“P lease slow down,” Liv asked him for the fourth time. He didn’t ease off the accelerator on the car Davy had rented for him. He was showing admirable restraint by staying below ninety. “If you don’t like how I’m driving, tough shit,” he said. “You should have stayed with Tam, where you’d have been safe.”

“I don’t want to sit on the shelf like a china doll,” she said. “So far I’ve contributed exactly nothing to the solving of our problem. Other than servicing you sexually, of course.”

He gave her a sidelong glance, caught the teasing gleam in her eye. “Not that it’s such a chore,” she added. “It’s excellent. Even so, I don’t want to spend this whole investigation with my legs in the air.”

He started to speak, but she cut him off. “Yes, you’re the super commando whiz with a zillion languages, but I have some ideas, too.”

“I never said you didn’t.” He slowed down as they entered Garnett. “I think you’re brilliant. Which is why you should be working on Kev’s drawings. I stared at those suckers until I went batshit fifteen years ago. I have no ideas left. You might see something fresh.”

“I’ll study them all you want. I would have studied them all night, if you hadn’t kept distracting me.”

“Distracting you? There’s a brand new euphemism. Actually, it was you who distracted me. I remember lying helpless, flat on my back, with a sweaty, dominating bitch goddess riding me hard.”

“You were hardly helpless. And that was after over an hour of being distracted by you, Sean,” she pointed out. “But I suggest we don’t discuss it now. This is a dangerous road, and we’re almost there.”

“We could pull over in the woods,” he suggested hopefully. “I could distract you up against a tree. Or we could try the backseat.”

“I want to talk to Trung, and so do you,” she said. “Concentrate.”

He appreciated her attempt to lighten the mood, but it just didn’t seem right to him, wandering around under a big, open sky with Liv beside him and no squadron of Special Ops soldiers flanking her.

He didn’t know how to deal with this fear. Usually he faced danger with the what-the-f*ck attitude of a guy who wasn’t particularly afraid of death. He was afraid for Liv, though. Pissing himself afraid.

He was nervous as an alley cat, constantly checking the rearview. Peering into the sky to check for helicopters, for f*ck’s sake. This was the flip side of what happened when a guy allowed himself to give a shit. It clouded his brain, made him stupid and thick and useless.

“It’s not safe,” he said. “I can’t concentrate. I could get us killed.”

She reached over, touched his thigh. “I feel safest with you.”

His throat went hot and hard as a fist. “Please, don’t say that.” He forced the words out with difficulty. “Don’t set me up.”