Page 21 of Edge of Ruin (The Edge Trilogy #3)

I’d tried calling Aunt Tavia in L.A. A guy answered, and said she hadn’t lived there in four months, and no, he didn’t know where she was.

He’d heard somebody say she’d gone to Baja.

But it might have been Boulder. Or Bali.

Then the guy told me that I seemed stressed and should practice “letting go.” “Hanging on” caused all the suffering in life.

In fact, if I would tell him the date and hour of my birth, he would be happy to provide me, for a small fee, with a mantra calibrated to attain the serenity of non-attachment, and also?—

I hung up on that babbling prick. Then I took the tattered envelope off the fridge, and dialed the long string of numbers written on it for the ashram.

The guy who answered spoke only Hindi, and had then passed the phone to someone else who must have been speaking German. I struggled with that for a while, repeating my mother’s name, and then hung up on that guy, too.

I stared at the phone. Finally, I picked up the receiver, dialed information for Silverfish, and asked for Margaret Moffat.

“I have an M. Moffat in Silverfish,” the operator had said. “Do you want the number?”

“Sure.” I wrote the number down, folded it, stuck it into my jeans.

I had no idea what to do next. I had wandered around the empty house as night deepened. The quiet terrified me. I wondered when the police would come, and what could happen to me if they found me there. If they would put me in jail, too.

At dawn, I had filled my knapsack with as much stuff as I could carry, tied a rolled blanket onto the top, and headed out onto the road.

“... okay?” I jolted out of my memories. Vivi’s face was close to mine, her gray eyes wide with worry. She patted my shoulder.

She tried again, louder. “Are you okay, Jack?”

I focused on the faint pattern of freckles on her perfect, narrow little nose. Like a constellation of stars. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry. I was someplace else for a while.”

She touched my cheek with her knuckles, a shy, tender stroke. “No place good,” she said. “You had that look on your face.”

I shook myself to alertness, embarrassed. “What look is that?”

“Sad,” she said simply. “Can I make you some tea?”

“Coffee,” I said, rousing myself. “Tea doesn’t do it for me. Sit down. Stay with your dog. I’ll make it.”

“No, no. I’ll do it.” She pushed me back down. “It’s the least I can do. Thanks so much for helping. It would have been a lot worse alone.”

“It’s nothing,” I muttered.

“Not to me and Edna it’s not.” Her smile was so warm and bright.

I followed her into the kitchen, just to stay close. Taking every sneaky opportunity to touch her, brush against her, sniff her scent as we put the coffee on together.

When it was done and poured, we sat across the table from each other. I reached out and grabbed her hand. We’d hit another smooth patch, and I was going to ride it for as long as I could. “I’m sorry for what I said in the?—”

“Don’t,” Vivi broke in. “You apologized the last time you insulted me, and the time before that. Every time, I let down my guard and let you do it again. Let’s establish a rule. No insults. No apologies. Okay?”

“You misunderstood. I never insulted you,” I said.

“No? Me, the itinerant sexpot neo-hippy?”

I narrowly avoided spluttering my coffee. “That doesn’t count,” I protested. “You took me by surprise. In a wet t-shirt, no less.”

“Oh?” She gazed at me over the rim of her mug, eyes sparkling.

“Yes! Give me a fucking break! There you were, soaking wet in the forest, nipples poking through your shirt, looking like something out of a Penthouse centerfold?—”

“It’s not my fault it was raining! I looked like a freaking mudslide!”

“Yeah, and it’s not my fault all the blood in my body got instantly rerouted to my dick,” I muttered. “You expect me to be rational when a gorgeous woman tricked out like that waves a tire iron at me?”

Her eyebrows went up. “Did the tire iron turn you on, Jack?”

“I’ll tell you what turns me on,” I told her. “A proud, beautiful, self-reliant woman who takes no shit off anybody. That absolutely yanks my chain. Big time.”

Her eyes fell, but she was smiling now. Maybe I’d manage to navigate this one without going off the rails. “I never insulted you,” I went on. “I made a rational assessment of the situation based on the information I gathered. You read it as an insult, but I was not judging you.”

“Wrong,” Vivi said sternly. “Your assessment is faulty.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve had lots of practice.”

“Whoever you’ve been practicing on isn’t me. But let’s not talk about it, or we’ll just crash and burn all over again.”

She tried to tug her hand back, but I hung on to it, stubbornly.

“That wasn’t what I was apologizing for,” I confessed.

“I meant when we were out in the field. You asked about my uncle. And I got all uptight. I closed you off.” I blew out a careful, measured sigh, trying to relax my clenched insides.

Her eyes softened. She set down her coffee and reached across the table. “There’s a reason I was asking those questions about the bust, you know,” she said.

“Yeah?” I asked warily. “And what’s that?”

“I just wondered if it was something that we had in common,” she said. “I was in the middle in a big drug bust once, too. When I was a kid.”

I stared at her, my mouth stupidly open. “Huh? You?”

“Me,” she said. “It sucked. As you are highly qualified to agree.”

“But aren’t you … didn’t you ...” I racked my brains for the details that Duncan had given me about Vivi D’Onofrio’s background. Italian nobility. Priceless art. And now drug busts? What the fuck? This did not compute. Not at all.

“My two sisters and I were all adopted,” she said, answering my silent confusion.

“Lucia took us in as foster kids. I went to her when I was eleven. I was lucky. Nancy and Nell had to plow through years of bad placements before they found Lucia. I hit pay dirt right off the bat, on my first go. Lucia was amazing. And I got two kick-ass, readymade sisters in the bargain. They were the best. I hit the jackpot.”

“And before?” I prompted.

Her face clouded. “Ah. Before. Well, my mom was a junkie. And the men she took up with were all dealers.”

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

“I got used as a sentry,” she said. “Deliveries, too.”

“No fucking shit!” I was aghast. “How old were you?”

She shrugged. “Eight, nine. Red pigtails, freckles, ruffles. Who would suspect what was in my Hello Kitty knapsack? I liked it, at the time. It made me feel important, grown up. Useful.”

“Used,” I corrected, harshly. “Anything could have happened to you! A little kid, for drug deliveries? That’s fucking insane!”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Duh. But anyway, the shit came down. There was a shoot-out. My mom’s boyfriend, Randy, got killed in the bust. My mom went to prison.”

I winced. “Tell me you weren’t there when it happened.”

“I wasn’t,” she assured me. “I was at school. And I didn’t cry for Randy. He was a real prick. I have him to thank for this.” She held up her wrist, with its barbed-wire tattoo. “This was his idea of a joke.”

I stared at the fuzzy, faded tattoo around her slender wrist, anger simmering inside me. “All I can say is, the list of people whom I want to dismember and grind into the dirt on your behalf is growing,” I said.

“Thank you, but it’s ancient history now. So, how did the bust shake out for you? Did you end up with Child Protective Services, too?”

I shook my head. “No. I just took off.”

Her eyes widened. “Alone? At fourteen? How did you live?”

I hesitated for a moment before replying. “Barely,” I said. “So what about your mom? Is she out of prison?”

Vivi shook her head. “She OD’d in prison. Eight months after she went inside.”

I felt sucker-punched. That was what I got for trying to distract her from my own story. “Aw, shit. I’m sorry,” I said, helplessly.

She gazed intently into her coffee mug. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “And I was as lucky with my second family as I was unlucky with my first. I’m okay. You can relax, Jack.”

We listened to the wind in the trees. I reached out until I touched the flower tattooed on her chest. “The perfect combination of toughness and a good attitude,” I said.

She blushed. “You’re doing it again, Jack. Saying all the right things.”

“Is it working? You want to grab me again?”

Her devastating secret smile turned dazzling. She got up, came around the table and sat down on my lap.

My arms encircled her. Emotion made me speechless.

My dick was stone hard against the pressure of her ass, but it wasn’t just that.

I just couldn’t believe she was there, draping herself over me, holding me, trusting me.

She was so beautiful, so special, so shining.

Like a unicorn, laying its head in my lap.

Me, breathless with the wonder of it. So turned on, I could barely suck in a chestful of air.

She gasped as I stood up and swept her into my arms, heading up the stairs. “Jack! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Being masterful,” I said. “Stop giggling like that. Get into the vibe.”

“Hail, oh conquering hero,” she gasped out, between giggles. “Do with me as you will, my wild warrior lover. How’s that?”

“Great. Works for me.” I shoved open the door to my bedroom with my foot and set her on her feet.

We faced off, breathing hard. Her color was high, her eyes were shining.

I tossed off my shirt. Vivi whipped off her tank.

Call and response. I jerked open my belt, popped open my jeans buttons.

She yanked loose the drawstring of her skirt, let the garment puddle around her ankles. Her beauty unraveled me.

“Turn around,” I said hoarsely. “Let me see your ass.”

She obliged me. I came up behind her and knelt, my hands sliding down over her ribs, her waist, to clasp her hips. I pressed my lips against the tribal looking mandala tattoo at the small of her back. “What’s the story with this one?”