Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(73)

Breathless. Squished. Startled…and scared.

“Do not ever, ever joke about that with me,” he said.

Miles’s hoarse whisper sent shivers up her spine. She made a sound like a rusty hinge. She noticed random, disconnected things. Like he had nice breath. A sexy mouth. And his nose was swelling up.

Yikes. Miles’s nose had been really formidable to begin with.

“Ever again,” he repeated softly. “Not. Funny. At all. Got it?”

She licked her lips, and nodded. “Sorry,” she mouthed.

He didn’t let go. Just loomed over her, vibing like crazy. Wow.

Miles was freakishly tall, but he’d never loomed before. But then again, looming was a state of mind. The McCloud guys were all loomers, every last one of them. Miles must have learned the art from them.

He’d learned it really well. Her head flopped back so far to look up at him, her neck hurt. She’d never felt this quality of energy buzzing off him before. And intense heat was radiating from the hard bulge at his crotch. She sneaked a quick peek, and almost squeaked. Gosh. The old joke about long noses must be literally true. Miles was hung.

It was like there was a volcano inside him. Her geeky old best buddy was looking at her as if he were about to grab her and kiss her.

And for one wild, crazy second, she actually wanted him to.

He stepped back, broke eye contact, broke the spell. “Sorry.” He looked away. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

Her heart thudded. Her knees felt wiggly and weak. “Oh, puhleeze. Give me a break. I wasn’t scared,” she lied.

“Bring the kid to record his thing tomorrow at noon. Don’t be late. I’ve got things to do.” He yanked the door open, and marched out.

Well, that settled that. His lats and traps were finger-licking good. And his ass was just as good as she had imagined.





Chapter 15



B esides being butt-ugly, the fogeymobile was a rattling, tubercular piece of shit. Sean tried to coax more speed out of the old monster, but when he hit sixty, it started to shimmy all over the road. He eased down, cursing under his breath. It was taking longer than he’d anticipated to make it to Tam’s. He was reasonably sure they weren’t being followed, but he could use some sleep, in someplace secure. Tam’s fortress was as secure as it got, after Seth and Raine’s Stone Island hideaway. Seth had rigged it up for her himself. Pure, high-tech, state of the art paranoia. Just what the doctor ordered.

“What language was that?” Liv asked.

He glanced over, startled to find her awake, and dragged the incredibly filthy epithet he’d just uttered out of his short term memory bank. “Croatian,” he said. “A regional dialect of it, anyway.”

“What does it mean?”

He hesitated. “Uh, well, it was directed at the car,” he hedged.

“Yes?” she said sweetly. “And the meaning?” Her soft, beautiful voice was froggy with sleep, but full of curiosity. She waited.

He sighed. “It was a crude, vicious attack upon the virtue and chastity of the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of the mechanic who last serviced this piece of shit car.”

She made that muffled little giggling snort that he loved so much. “How awful,” she murmured. “Those poor women. How unfair.”

“Yeah, right. My manners suck,” he said sourly.

“So where did you learn Croatian?”

He shot an uneasy glance, but there was nothing to see in the dark but the pale glow of the oversized T-shirt she wore. He’d been pathetically grateful when the princess collapsed into exhausted sleep the minute they got on the road. She needed the rest, for one thing. And he needed space just as badly. Time to process what was happening.

He wasn’t done with that processing yet, but Liv was done with her nap, and feeling fresh and chatty and curious. He was so in for it.

“In the Army,” he told her. “Ranger Regiment. Mostly in the Balkans. After my stint in the military, I bummed around in eastern Europe and Africa. I got contract work through military contacts. The money was good. And it suited my mood, at the time.”

“Contract work?” Her voice was delicately cautious. “What’s that?”

“Mercenary,” he said.

That shut her up. She was probably thinking that he’d been a hired thug. In some ways, he guessed he had been. It all depended on your point of view. Life was like that. Hard to define, hard to justify.

“Wow,” she said faintly. “Isn’t that, ah, really dangerous?”

“Yeah. I got lots of work because I pick up languages fast. I speak Croatian, and Farsi, and some Arabic, some Persian, decent French, and a bunch of obscure dialects you probably never heard of. That photographic memory about works aurally, too, if you program your brain right.”

“Wow,” she whispered. “Amazing. I wish I could do that.”

He shot her a glance. “Why couldn’t you?”

She gave him a derisive snort. “Get real.”

“No, really,” he protested. “It’s just a trick. My dad taught us. You just have to set your mind to it. No biggie. Anyone could do it.”

“Yeah, right.” Her voice was heavy with irony. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Sean, but what you describe is not normal. It is, in point of fact, what other people would describe as freak genius.”