Ultimate Weapon

Book 6: The McClouds & Friends

by Shannon McKenna

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Action & Adventure Romance; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

"Dark characters and darker emotions.  .  .perfectly balanced by the heat they generate."-- Romantic Times The First Cut Is The Deepest Covert operations are what Val Janos is all about. The man is mysterious and sinister, and lethally hot. Only Tamara can understand the strange intensity that drives him to win at all costs--and only she can match it. Val has one weak spot: Imre, the frail old man who befriended him when he was a scared, hungry kid abandoned on the streets of Budapest. But Daddy Novak knows about Imre, and Imre's head is on the block if Val doesn't deliver Tam up to Novak's tender mercies.  .  . A white-hot passion explodes when Tam and Val get too close. They both have too much to be afraid of, too much to hide. And now, for the first time, too much to lose.  .  . Praise for Shannon McKenna and Her Novels "Full of turbocharged sex scenes, this action-packed novel is sure to be a crowd pleaser." -- Publishers Weekly on Edge Of Midnight "Highly creative.  .  .erotic sex and constant danger." -- Romantic Times on Hot Night (4 ½-star review and a Top Pick)"Aims for the heart with scorching precision." -- Publishers Weekly

Release date: October 4, 2022

Publisher: Brava

Print pages: 545

Sample

Find the weak spot. Then exploit it.

The brutally simple directive repeated in Val’s head until it was meaningless babble. Val pushed the white noise to the back of his mind and clicked “play” on the footage he’d collected that day.

For the twentieth time, he watched the woman unload the wriggling toddler from the SUV and head toward the waterfront park playground. He had memorized their every move—the swings, then the slide, the merry-go-round, the jungle gym. Then came a horsie ride on the woman’s shoulders through the trees. And the moment when she held the child up to swipe and grab the brown leaves that clung to the branches. He had memorized every nod, every smile, every hug.

The jeans, hiking boots, and shapeless down jacket the woman wore did nothing to hide the feline grace of her slender body. Her brown hair was twisted into a loose, thick dark braid. She wore no makeup. The child reached higher to grab for the leaves, giggling.

Children were always a weak spot—but not one he could bring himself to exploit. He hated when there was a child involved. It made him tense, anxious. It destroyed the hardwon professional calm that usually rendered him such an effective operative. Had he known about the existence of the child, he would have refused the job, no matter how Hegel blustered and threatened. The worst they could do to him was kill him, no? Let them try. Others had already, several times. Eventually someone would succeed. It wouldn’t matter a damn who had done the deed after he was dead.

The job had seemed straightforward when Hegel presented it to him. Locate this woman who was in hiding—one of Val’s specialties, considering his hacking abilities and his skills at social engineering. Deliver her to Georg Luksch, willingly, if possible, under false pretenses if not. Failing that, by any means necessary. Coercion. Abduction.

He did not like working for Luksch or having any dealings with the mafiya. Too much history, too many ugly memories. But Hegel had pulled rank, yanked strings. And Val had convinced himself that he could stay cool and just get the job done. Wrong.

The first thing he had done was to send out feelers to all of the best sources for fake identities. Using a judicious blend of threats and bribes, he had obtained a list of the passports that Steele had procured for herself and her daughter. A few telephone calls and some discreet hacking into Homeland Security databases had ensured that Steele was never going to be traveling with any of those documents, at least the ones he knew about. Now he wished he had not been so efficient.

He wanted her to escape. Damned unprofessional of him.

The room was cold, growing dark with the onset of the early January sunset. He wore nothing but a pair of baggy sweat pants, but he stayed motionless on the floor in a meditative position in front of the computer monitor, trying in vain to settle his mind down to the stillness necessary to perform his personal technique of data processing.

It was based on the way Imre had taught him to play chess years ago as a boy. Deceptively simple, but requiring profound concentration. He put the information, no matter how irrelevant or superficial, into a floating construct in his mind that Imre had named “the matrix” and held it suspended in a transparent form that he could rotate, turn inside out, disassemble, reassemble, contemplate from every side. Then he detached from it, floated away, and quietly observed.

Take three steps back and breathe, Imre had said.

That distance was the key element. It kept his mind loose, soft and open, leaving space for insights, solutions, realizations to arise.

Not tonight. He’d sat there motionless for hours while dark fell, and muscles cramped in protest. Solutions and insights were not forthcoming. He could not take three steps back. He was distracted. Angry that there was a child. Anger derailed the process. He had to stay cool.

And God knows, staring at Tamara Steele for days on end was no way to get or stay cool. He had never seen a woman so vividly beautiful. Her beauty was intensified by something burning inside her, a bright light, a driving force. She disturbed his dreams, unsettled his thoughts, stirred his body. And utterly destroyed his concentration.

Imre had earnestly explained that the matrix process worked for solving ethical problems, too, but that sermon had been wasted on the young Vajda, cynical, thieving hoodlum that he’d been.

Hmmph. An irrelevant thought. It had no place. It would not serve. He dismissed it, waving it away in his mind like a stinging insect.

He knew every detail of Steele’s schedule, all centered on the child. Weekly visits to the pediatrician and child psychologist, trips to the Children’s Museum, story hour for toddlers at the library, the Mommy & Me swim class, the playground at the riverside park. No variations to speak of, except for that unwary visit to Conor McCloud’s house that had given him his opening.

She had her groceries delivered. No doubt she did her personal shopping via Internet. She spoke to no one but her daughter’s doctors, visited no one, never went to a coffee shop or restaurant. He did not blame her. The child’s schedule was already a dangerous level of exposure for her. As demonstrated by the amount of data he’d gathered on her in the two weeks since he’d finally pinpointed her residence.

It had taken weeks of data analysis and tedious waiting before the passive surveillance he’d been conducting upon the McClouds had paid off. Steele showed up one day on the long-range telecamera mounted to a tree in the park across the street from Connor and Erin McCloud’s residence. With a toddler on her hip, to his blank astonishment.

The tech who was monitoring had called him, and by chance, he’d been near enough to hand tag her SUV with an RF device while she was still on the back porch having barbecue with her friends.

He had not mentioned the child in his reports. He was not sure why. There was no hiding her. Once the satellite had trained its cold eye on the woman’s residence, everyone at PSS who was interested knew that the woman was caring for a child. They could see her with their own eyes, loading the kid into the car, playing with her on the beach.

Now that he’d found Steele’s mountaintop home outside the small coastal town of Cray’s Cove, his challenges were different. It would have been easier to conduct surveillance in a bustling city, although he’d need a team. But no one could follow her undetected in a place like Cray’s Cove. Which was, he supposed, the whole point of hiding there.

As soon as he had tagged her SUV with the nearly undetectable RF device, things had proceeded smoothly. He analyzed her schedule, installed tiny surveillance cameras at key points in her trajectory. A wireless receiver in a series of rental cars parked a discreet distance from the establishments in question, and he could watch and listen to her in real time on his laptop, or even his Palm Pilot.

He’d forgone tech support, being as competent with the electronic equipment as any of PSS’s tech specialists. He wanted no one breathing down his neck on this job. No spectators, suggestions, criticism. He preferred to work alone whenever humanly possible.

In fact, he preferred to do almost everything alone. It was easier to take those crucial three steps back without the noise and the chatter.

It had been an easy matter to breach security at the psychologist and pediatrician’s offices to obtain copies of the child’s clinical charts. He’d hacked into the database of the agency handling the adoption proceedings. He knew the entire dramatic story of the child who was soon to become Rachel Steele, and thanks to the remotely activated bugs under the psychiatrist’s and pediatrician’s desks, he now knew more than he had ever cared to know about the child’s bowel habits, food allergies, rashes, hip and ankle malformations, vision problems, chronic ear infections, sinus problems, and sleep disruptions.

And he knew a great deal more than he was comfortable knowing about how much Steele cared about the child. It was important information for the matrix, but he resisted it. It disturbed him.

He knew what his target wanted the world to know about Tamara Steele, which wasn’t much nor was it true. Her multilayered identity held up well to prolonged scrutiny. He would have had no reason to question it had he not already known that the woman was a con artist, thief, and killer. Skilled at bank fraud, real estate scams, money laundering, and various other criminal enterprises too numerous to count. And a talented liar.

Then again, what was truth? He was not judging her. His own life was a tissue of lies so thick and complex he no longer had any idea what personality traits he could actually claim as his own. It was all false scaffolding and beneath, blankness. Paper and cardboard.

He batted the distracting thought away, irritated. This kind of self-pitying reflection was stupid and irrelevant. He had no time for useless philosophical musing.

If the doctor’s and psychologist’s security was inadequate, Steele’s own fortress was not. He knew the layout of her property from satellite images provided by Prime Security Solutions, the private security company for which he worked as a covert operative, but he could get no closer to her state-of-the-art security systems without being nailed.

What he needed now was a pretext for approaching her. With someone so paranoid and reclusive, that was impossible to devise.

He wondered what had possessed a career criminal like Steele to adopt a toddler. If it was a cover, it was a cumbersome, inefficient one, and the woman presently calling herself Tamara Steele had never shown herself to be anything but ruthlessly efficient in the past.

He let out a sigh, acknowledging defeat, and got up, bending his knees and shaking his bare feet to get blood moving. He snapped his fingers under the sound-sensitive lamp, illuminating the hotel suite. Val padded silently into the kitchenette and pressed the hot spigot of the water machine over his cup to brew a cup of smoky Lapsang Souchong tea. It occurred to him as he fished the tea bag out that he’d bought the same brand as he had last week, having liked it. The detail was seemingly banal, but lapses like these could kill a man.

He had to stay rigorous. He should have bought coffee, fruit juice, Red Bull. Anything else. No habits. It was one of the first lessons he’d learned as an operative. Habits were deadly. They soon became needs. An operative could not afford needs or even preferences. He had to be a blank slate, ready to be anyone, anything. Light and empty, flexible as a gymnast. Ready to jump in any direction. Imre’s training helped.

But Imre had never meant for him to be a man made out of blank paper and cardboard. An empty man who could call nothing his own.

He breathed in fragrant steam, feeling oddly rebellious. So he was getting sloppy, but no one was watching. He was just a fly on the wall in the ass end of nowhere, watching Steele play with her new daughter, and inexplicably fascinated by it. If not for the fact that she would almost certainly kill him if she knew what PSS wanted from her, and that he might be required to abduct either her or her little daughter, he might almost have been enjoying himself.

That was the most alarming development of all.

Detach, he reminded himself. The woman was deadly dangerous. Some years ago, Steele had become involved with Kurt Novak, Daddy Novak’s son and heir to his mafiya empire. During that period, which had led up to Kurt Novak’s spectacular and theatrical death, Georg Luksch, Kurt’s lieutenant, had developed a burning obsession for her.

Steele had not returned his regard. In fact, she had vanished like smoke on that bloody day and had shown no desire to be found.

Val had found her, but now he wished he had not. He didn’t want to deliver her to Luksch, who was at best a criminal grown rich by trafficking in drugs, humans, and everything else, and at worst, a psychotic freak. But PSS was not inclined to criticize a client so immensely rich.

Val carried the cup back to the laptop glowing in the middle of the wood floor and sank down in front of it. His naked chest was covered with goosebumps, but the tea would warm him, and he didn’t want to bother finding a shirt or turning on the heat.

He clicked the footage he’d obtained yesterday. The toddler’s swim class. He took a sip of the hot, bitter tea and skipped through the footage to his favorite part. Here he was again, allowing himself to have favorites. Like the tea. An uncharacteristic indulgence.

From one moment to the next, it would distort into a need. And from that, an obsession. He had always wondered what an obsession would feel like. It would seem that he no longer had to wonder.

She came out of the women’s dressing room, silent and graceful as a slant-eyed female panther among the crowd of chubby, chattering women with their squealing offspring. She led the wobbly-legged, huge-eyed little girl carefully by the hand.

Her body was stunning in the black maillot. He always watched the exit from the dressing room, having grown addicted to the hot rush of delighted surprise that it gave him no matter how many times he saw it. He skipped through the class, which he had already watched ad nauseam, to the moment that she lifted the dripping child out of the water and vaulted out in turn onto the pool’s edge, poised in the perfect equilibrium of a predator’s crouch. The curves and hollows, the highlights and shadows of her wet body. High, lush breasts, the discreet mandolin curve of hips and ass. Endlessly long, strong, shapely legs.

He’d seduced many women in his career, and some of them had been very beautiful, but he’d never reacted like this to mere visual stimuli. Or any stimuli, in truth, visual or otherwise. He liked sex, but he took his usual three steps back from it—particularly in the context of a professional operation. From the beginning of his career with PSS, they had required him to use his looks and body as a means to an end. His sexual technique was flawless, but he stayed cool. Always.

So why was he sweating now? Panting like a hormone-intoxicated teenager? There was no logical explanation. And no excuse.

The thought of that woman soiling herself with that prick Georg Luksch made his hands clench. It made his gorge rise. A bad sign.

Ah, here it was, the best part. The women’s changing room. He had seen a hiding place for the tiny camera behind the fluorescent light fixture in the shower area the night he’d broken into the place. He’d been unable to resist. After all, a long look at the target’s naked body could yield useful data.

Ah, no. Unfortunately, he was not as adept at lying to himself as he was at lying to the rest of the world.

That footage was incredible, though. High breasts, water coursing around her taut, protruding brown nipples as she soaped herself. The child was wrapped in a towel after her own bath, playing with a rubber frog, unaware of her mother’s nudity. Tamara rinsed. The suds sluiced into the minuscule swatch of decorative pubic hair over the smooth, depilated cunt, filling the alluring hollows of her groin.

Steele ignored the other women in the room, who sneaked slack-jawed peeks at a body the likes of which they’d only seen in their husbands’ airbrushed men’s magazines.

His cell phone rang. Val was savagely irritated at the interruption, and yanked off the earpiece clipped to his waistband.

He hung it on his ear. “What?” he asked, with ill grace.

“So?” It was Hegel, his direct superior at PSS, the man who had recruited and trained him. The tone in the man’s voice put Val’s teeth on edge. Tough. Resentment was another thing that he could not afford.

“So what?” Val countered.

“It’s two weeks since you located her. The fat cats are breathing down my neck. Stop sitting on this thing like a fucking hen. Have you got the kid yet?”

Val’s jaw tensed. “That is not the correct approach.”

“It’s quick,” Hegel said. “We need results.”

Val was silent for a moment. “I cannot be sure that she even cares enough about the child for her to be an effective lever,” he said. “I’d prefer to try a subtler approach first.”

“Subtle. Hah.” Hegel made a doglike growling sound. “Come on, Janos. One of Daddy Novak’s ex-thugs should be more professional. What is your brilliant alternative plan? Knock her on the head and put her in a box? That works for me, as long as you do it soon.”

Val clenched his jaw. Three steps back. Hegel loved waving Val’s old connection to Novak’s organization in his face, but it could only irritate him if he allowed it to. “I’m working on it,” he said finally.

“Hmmph. Work harder, Janos. I hope you’re not having an attack of scruples about the kid. That was what fucked up your performance last time. Patience is growing thin up here. Damn, I should have called Henry for this job. He would have been done and gone by now.”

Val was stonily silent. Hegel liked to sow discord, believing that a situation that he had destabilized himself was more easily controlled. But Hegel could not control him. He could have him killed, yes, perhaps. But he could not control him.

Nor could he interfere with Val’s bond with his closest friend and fellow operative, Henry Berne. In fact, Henry might well be his only friend. The person known as Val Janos had “friends,” but none of them knew about his double life. Only PSS staff knew, and of them, only Henry could be counted as a friend.

One friend, in all the world, unless he counted Imre. But Imre was in a category all his own.

“This job is your ticket to retirement,” Hegel ground out. “Do not fuck it up, Janos. I am tired of your superior attitude. I would love to see the ass end of you head off into the sunset, because the alternative would be stressful and bloody. And my personal responsibility since I was the dick who recruited you. Think about that.” Hegel hung up.

Val pulled off the earpiece. It flew across the room and hit the wall before he could even try to grasp for his elusive, detached calm again.

God. Twelve years of sweating blood and taking bullets for those ungrateful bastards, and still they waved their fucking threats at him.

Scruples. Another thing he could not afford. His scruples had been a problem for most of his life. Ironic, considering the career destiny had in store for him. Imre’s influence, no doubt. He could hear in his mind’s ear exactly what Imre would have had to say about that, but he blocked the lecture before it could start to play in his head. He had no time or energy to spare for guilt.

He had told Hegel that he didn’t know if Steele cared enough about the child to use her as a lever, but he had lied. No woman of her type sacrificed an hour of her life to suffer through the tedium of Mommy & Me, or spent hours rolling a ball back and forth across the grass in the park except out of love. She cared, intensely.

From the point of view of expediency, it was difficult to justify not doing what Hegel had urged. Take the child, and start negotiations.

But he disliked hurting children. Kidnapping that child would hurt her. It would hurt any child. Particularly a small, wounded one.

That child was wounded. He knew her story, he’d seen her files, read her charts. He would not be the one to inflict the next blow in an endless series of blows. To say nothing of the practical logistics of caring for a small child with medical problems. He would need a team. It would be chaotic, complicated, messy. A state of affairs he took pains to avoid.

In the course of his career, he’d managed to finesse his dislike of hurting children, and still obtain successful outcomes. He’d relied on luck and cleverness, but his luck had run out last year in Bogotá.

The problem had been glaringly evident to the powers that be at PSS. Which explained the long vacation they’d given him. Aside from the small matter of the bullet wounds he’d sustained.

He’d been out of favor ever since, expecting them to put him down like a rabid dog at any moment. Vaguely surprised every morning that he woke to find himself still alive. They hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

He’d begun to hope that they would simply ignore him for the rest of his life, but no. They had called him to locate Steele—and behold, she had a baby daughter. It was a test he could not afford to fail.

He clicked automatically on the shower footage, thinking to distract himself with that dance of wet female flesh. It did not help to watch her play with the toddler. It made him squirm, it made him sweat. He could not think straight, could not detach, could not take the three steps. Nothing had ever shaken his self-control to this extent.

Find the weak point. Then exploit it. The rule droned in his head.

Vaffanculo, he responded mentally, banishing it.

The beeper attached to his pants chirped at him. He took a look, and his gut clenched. It was a numeric code, sent by Imre’s housecleaning service in Budapest. They were supposed to inform him of any change in Imre’s health and welfare. They had never beeped him before.

The code informed him that he had an urgent message to retrieve from the computer bulletin board. Something had happened to Imre.

His heart accelerated without his permission. There was a tremor in his hand as he entered passwords, clicked the message, decoded it.

A few terse lines informed him that the woman who was paid to cook, clean, and do Imre’s shopping had come in that day and found the door forced, the apartment ransacked, and Imre unconscious on the floor, badly beaten. He was in the hospital, his condition grave.

Val stared at the text on the screen for approximately three seconds and sprang to his feet, overturning the cup of tea. He groped for his phone, splashed and slipped clumsily in his bare feet through the steaming puddle in his haste to dress, pack, go, go, go.

He was breathless, dizzy. Panicking. Calm down. Three steps. Panic was another luxury that he could not afford.

Find the weak spot. Then exploit it.

His gut churned nastily. It seemed someone had just found his.

Adrenaline kicked her right across the barrier of sleep. Tam jerked up in bed, every nerve screaming, and instantly put every mental trick she had into action to block the dream that had provoked it. If the images didn’t sink their claws into her conscious mind, the feelings faded more quickly. Though never quickly enough.

Tonight, she couldn’t block it. The crackle of rifle fire. Hard, clutching hands holding her down under a bruised white sky. Dark silhouettes, mouths screaming, but she could not hear what they said. She was deafened by those rifles popping.

She squeezed her eyes shut and saw their stiff white faces, blank eyes staring up from the trench. Dirt showering into their open eyes. She had tried to close their eyes. Tried, and tried, but she’d had no coins to weigh their eyelids down. They would stay open forever. She could not hide what she’d become from those staring eyes.

And the fear, the shame. Burning, corrosive hatred for that evil leering monster. For what he’d done to them, to her. Stengl.

Her hands itched to kill him, even after sixteen years.

She pressed her hands against her face, and tried to breathe deep, but her lungs seized up halfway through each breath in a painful hiccup that jolted her whole body. Ah, God. She hadn’t dreamed about Stengl and his secret police squad, or the horrors of Sremska Mitrovica for years. She’d deep frozen it, buried it, rolled huge rocks over it.

But something was rolling the rocks away, one after the other. Something like Rachel. Fancy that.

Tam wrapped her arms around her knees. Her body ached, every muscle rigid. Her heart felt like it was going to explode, it raced so fast.

Moonlight streamed in the huge windows of her bedroom. She had chosen every detail of the room to calm, to soothe, having pictured an uncluttered, tranquil haven where she could feel safe and peaceful. What a fantasy. Sleep was a dangerous place for her to go.

The electronically programmed blinds would automatically close shortly before dawn to keep the room dim so Rachel would sleep longer, but the moonlight seemed blinding to her, casting shadows as cold and sharp as knives.

Tam looked down at the lump in the bed beside her. Rachel stirred, fussed in her sleep. Tam laid down alongside her, and stroked the child’s back. She wasn’t sure it was appropriate to take her nightmares into bed with the innocent toddler, but Rachel wouldn’t sleep on her own for love or money.

When she was being honest, though, she recognized that excuse for the cheap justification that it was. She just liked to be close to Rachel. She loved to watch her sleep, see the rise and fall of her little chest, the beatific relaxation in her face. To touch and snuggle that warm body. And she liked to be there when Rachel reached for her in the night. Right at the child’s fingertips. Instant gratification. The least she could offer, considering what Rachel had been robbed of up to now.

Just watching her was restful. Maybe she couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep herself, but watching Rachel get one was the next best thing. Tamara could lie there and feel that miraculous sensation that had taken her hostage in the aftermath of the organ pirate adventure. That hot softness in her chest. The melting.

The problem was, the rest of Tam’s emotional defenses were melting right along with her heart, and she was by no means ready to live without them yet. Scary.

Rachel rolled over and reached out, flinging a skinny but surprisingly strong arm over Tam’s neck, dragging her into a strangling, baby-soap, sour milk, and toothpaste-scented hug.

Tam grabbed the little girl, comforting herself with the warmth of that snuggly, wiry body. Rachel vibrated with life, glowing like a little sun. Being close to her fed something inside Tam that had been starving. Something she had thought was stone dead.

Rachel needed her so badly. Or rather, Rachel needed someone, and it had been the toddler’s questionable luck that Tam had been the one standing there, at the crucial psychological moment. Snap, click, and hey, presto . . . the kid was stuck to her like glue. And out of nowhere, Tam had suddenly come to crave being needed in return.

So strange. Where did that come from, after a lifetime of deliberately not giving a shit? After making not caring into a high art?

Rachel was barely three years old, and she’d had more crap luck than a lot of people pulled in an entire lifetime. Tossed into a sty of an orphanage at birth, scooped up by rapacious organ pirates to be broken down for parts, locked in a stinking windowless pen with a pack of desperate kids for months—it didn’t get worse than that.

Until you added in the fact that somehow, she’d managed to pull Tam Steele out of a hat for an adoptive mother. Yippee, what a prize.

And if that wasn’t enough, the mother she had chosen was getting twitchy and paranoid. Which was to say, more twitchy and paranoid than usual, which was really saying something, given her impressive list of mortal enemies. It was a strange sensation, but she couldn’t shake it. For weeks, she’d felt her grunting reptile brain looking back over her scaly reptile shoulder, telling her she was being watched.

Paranoia or genuine danger? Impossible to tell. Her instincts were good. But the emotions that had broken ranks and gone nuts inside her might have knocked even that out of whack.

She might never get it all wrenched back obediently into line. Chaos ruled, inside and out. She just had to get used to it.

Tam petted the fleece-covered back of the sleeping toddler, stroking the warm curve of the child’s head. Her fingers marveled at the spider-silk ringlets, the swell of her soft cheek, that flowerlike pink mouth, half-open, shiny with baby spit in the moonlight. Such a pretty little girl. Her breathing deepened, her heartbeat slowed, steadied. And then, that incredible feeling unfurled in her chest, like it always did.

Hot and soft . . . and so alive.

Alive. God help her. There was something alive inside of her, after all. She regarded that development with mingled terror and awe, not quite sure yet if it was good news or bad.

Moonlight crawled over the wall with agonizing slowness. Tam stroked the child’s back and just breathed. The crackle of gunfire still echoed stubbornly in her head, the shrieks of pain and terror floated up from the basement cells and reverberated through her memory. But if she just concentrated on Rachel, on how beautiful and small and perfect she was, she could get enough oxygen. She could walk that narrow line through the bad memories without falling headlong into a stress flashback.

It was hard. The dream images weren’t fading tonight. They’d sunk in deep. She’d be hearing that gunfire, those screams, all night long. But she would endure. She was all right. Just . . . breathe.

Part of her missed the cold numbness she’d felt before Rachel. It was a pain in the ass, being continually tossed and flung around by her emotions like a twig in a flash flood. She hadn’t expected that when she took the child. The impulse had taken her by surprise. She hadn’t had the presence of mind in the turbulent aftermath of the organ pirate adventure to consider what Rachel would do to her equilibrium.

Hell, she’d thought she could handle anything. She’d be