No Fair Lady

“Worth dying for.” My lip curls. An unfortunate slip of honesty, but I push past it quickly, smoothing my hair and tossing my head. “Just don’t assume I’m the one who’ll be dying.”

I walk away from them, then.

I have to.

I can’t let myself feel anything like affection for those overgrown idiots.

Feelings get me in trouble.

Feelings are what set me down this track.

And if I’m going to get what I want, there’s no alternative and no room whatsoever for softness.

I have to be as cold as ice and use every scrap of training and experience I have to pull this off.

But as I step away, balancing my heels in the loose dusty earth with experience born of practice, Gray’s voice drifts after me.

“Take care of yourself,” he mutters. “Please.”

I don’t stop.

I don’t look back.

I don’t answer.

But…

Yeah, I think. Yeah.

You too, Doc Sad Eyes.

All of you, please take care of yourselves.

And, if you can, if you just keep on keeping on the same way you’ve been since you made Heart’s Edge your world…

Take care of each other.

4

Pour Some Sugar on Me (Fuchsia)

I was right.

Finding Tim Rook is like taking candy from a baby.

There’s a certain level of paranoia that can make someone invincible. Prepared for every contingency, always with a backup plan, a way to cover their tracks and erase their presence in an instant until it’s like they never existed.

Then there’s a certain level of paranoia that makes someone hammer-on-the-head stupid.

The kind of dumb that leads a man to do things like keeping the black box recorder on his cruise-ship-sized yacht active. All because he’s terrified of drifting out to sea with no one able to rescue him if he gets lost.

Guess which kinda paranoid I am.

Now guess which kinda paranoid Tim Rook is.

And guess which IT guy didn’t even think about how easy EDR black boxes are to hack, especially the outdated kind they fit on boats like his.

Oops.

But I guess he feels safe. Because when I slipped up on the blind side of his enormous dick-waving yacht in a silent, fast-moving single-person motorboat, speeding across the Puget Sound just off the shore from a Seattle beach…

He had his lights up, making himself a beacon on the dark water, music playing loud enough to be heard for miles around.

Apparently, stupid buys a lot of gross overconfidence that leads to funny things like hiding in plain sight. Or maybe it’s just that Timmy’s captain went AWOL and decided he’d had enough of getting paid to hide a wanted fugitive.

Sure, these boats are so automated they practically maneuver themselves. But the ocean proper is a big, scary place for a man with zero experience on ships outside his pleasure cruises. Tim Rook decided to play it safe by staying close enough to still see civilization.

Make that safe-ish.

With no other boats in sight on the horizon and the shoreline a good twenty miles away, he didn’t have to worry about the nosy neighbors.

He did have to worry about me.

And as drunk as he was on the expensive champagne he’d apparently been mainlining since sunset, I didn’t even have to try to lay him out on his ass.

He’s a large man. Stocky, thick beer belly, barrel chest. A lazy, drunken bear.

I think the boat actually shakes when I slice the flat edge of my palm against his neck, striking a crucial nerve through layers of muscle and fat. It sends him toppling over with his eyes wide and his tongue lolling in confusion, red and wet and messy.

He starts to struggle up.

I never give him a fighting chance.

He just flops there on the floor of his luxury built-in personal movie theater cabin, thick whimpers in the back of his throat, his ankles kicking loudly against the seats on both sides of the aisle.

It’s a sad, pathetic sight that normally might give me a flicker of amusement, but today?

I’ve got no time and even less chill for his agony.

Snarling, I pin him in place with the four-inch stiletto heel of my black Louboutins.

Right over the hollow of his throat.

One hard stomp, and I puncture his windpipe and drive clean through to the floor.

What can I say? I like being efficient in my threats.

And this one doesn’t need a word.

Rook goes deathly still, his breath wheezing. His jowly cheeks go cherry-red, and he stares up at me with bulging eyes in a washed-out shade of shallow blue.

“I-is…is this…fuck!” He makes a choked sound.

Narrowing my eyes, I let my heel up just a tad.

“Spit it out, you little idiot,” I say.

“Is…is th-this some kind of uh…dominatrix thing?”

Bad, bad choice of words.

I almost spear my heel through his throat right then and there.

Shame I need him.

So I press down a little harder, enough for a satisfying ulp! sound before easing up a little.

“You know damned well who I am,” I bite off—and surreptitiously shake my hand out behind my back, from where I struck him. That bruised a little. Not that I’d let him notice. “And you know exactly what I can do to you, Rook.”