Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(45)

Tomorrow, they would take Liv off to someplace where neither he nor T-Rex would ever be able to find her—and the world would go flat.

Unless she called the number he’d programmed into her cell.

He stopped in his tracks on the dark road, the huge dark pine and fir trees rustling in the cool wind and thought about that.

Screwing Blair Madden’s fiancée. That’s what he’d just done. He made himself face it. He imagined Liv, going home after she showered off the evidence. Thinking about her secret lover while she did her wifely duty in bed. His stomach lurched. He would never survive that.

She had to be doing the guy already, if they were engaged. His imagination promptly offered up fully realized 3-D images of that worthless turd Blair, having at her. And Liv, letting him. Liking it.

Bad idea. He hung over the roadside ditch and hacked up gastric juices, fists clenched, eyes watering. Oh, that was foul. He was a flexible guy, but that level of emotional gymnastics was not in his repertoire.

Hypocrite. Like he had a right to be uptight about Liv screwing whoever she pleased. He’d worked through six condoms—or was it seven?—in a tequila haze with the f*ckbunny duo from the Hole.

Though to be entirely fair and accurate, he had not been engaged to be married to someone else while boinking the bunnies.

It gave him a sad ache in his chest, to think that he’d never given any woman more than what Liv had given him tonight. It hurt when the rest was declined. He’d dished out a lot of that. He wasn’t proud of it.

One of his former would-be girlfriends, Sandra, was a grad student at U of W, studying clinical psych. A chubby, fuzzy-curled blonde with intellectual horn-rimmed glasses and lovely pink-tipped tits. She’d explained the dynamic of his pathological condition to him, given him the number of a good therapist and a list of local support groups and twelve-step programs for sexual addicts.

All of this preparatory to telling him to go f*ck himself.

He deserved it. Everything she said made perfect sense, but understanding it didn’t help worth a damn. It was always the same; the itch that drove him out to look for sex, the approach, the seduction. It rarely took long, once he turned on the charm. He made the sex safe, hot, and prolonged for his lady friends. That much, he could guarantee.

But his liaisons rarely lasted more than a week. Usually less.

In a way, he loved them all, even the Staceys and the Kendras. He knew they deserved better. He hated to hurt their feelings. Sometimes, he reflected wistfully how great it would be if he could just decide, by brute force of will, to make some girl’s unrealistic fantasies come true.

Just pick out some nice girl who made him laugh. Make some goddamn promises to her. Try like hell to keep them. Simple. Right?

What were all the guys around him doing but just exactly that?

No. Something always stopped him whenever he was tempted to try it. A presentiment of doom. Or maybe it was watching his brothers and their lady loves, wallowing in the big bubbly bathtub of true love.

It made his teeth hurt, sometimes, but damn, it looked like fun. They looked so relaxed. Like they didn’t have to try and fool anybody.

He wished he could convince all those girls of how beautiful they were. How much more they deserved from the worthless, doglike men in their lives, himself included. But he couldn’t argue with that sucking ache in his gut. Couldn’t control it, banish it, ignore it.

It felt like grief. And Christ, he should know.

As soon as he felt that ache, and it never took long to show up, he was history. If he forced the issue, if he tried to stick around out of guilt or stubborness or loneliness or whatever, it just got worse, and worse, until it was incapacitating. And oh, that was bad. Oh, how that sucked.

It didn’t matter worth a damn how much he liked the girl, how much fun the sex was, how much he wished that things were different.

He wondered why he felt compelled to endlessly repeat the whole depressing drama. He loved sex, but he hated slamming into that brick wall. Knowing even before he met the chick how it was going to end.

Not tonight. What happened in Liv’s bedroom was a movie he’d never seen. A pulse-pounding cliff-hanger. He saw her naked body when he closed his eyes. He could smell her scent on his hands. It was like she had a homing beacon, and he was tuned to its frequency. He didn’t even need X-Ray Specs. He could just follow his dick, like a dowser.

A strange feeling brushed over him. Ghost fingers, sending a cold, tickling shiver down his spine. He froze, listening. Slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees, not that he could see f*ck-all in this dark.

His skin crawled. His heart rate increased. On this stretch of road, he was wide open to a gunman sitting up on that bald knob of hill overlooking Endicott House. If the guy had an infrared scope, that is.

Yeah, and that was just old Crazy Eamon’s hypervigilant, paranoid jive talk, forever jabbering in the back of his head. He knew it, but even so, instinct and training together were too strong to resist.

He dove over the shoulder and down the hill, sliding in the gravel scree, choking on the dust he kicked up. He hit the scrub, arms out-spread to break his fall, and whack, scratch, slap, shit and ouch.

He was relieved when he fetched up on the washed out creek bed where he’d parked his shiny new Jeep Wrangler. Pain in the ass, having paranoid genes.

He fired up the computers and the X-Ray Specs receiver in the office as soon as he got home, and entered the beacon codes.