Page 36 of Edge of Ruin (The Edge Trilogy #3)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Vivi

I drifted in and out of consciousness on the drive into Portland, but even when I was awake, I kept my eyes closed.

I didn’t have the nerve to talk to Jack.

To ask him how he felt. What it all meant.

If he had changed his mind about the two of us, or if he was just being righteous and heroic.

A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, yada yada and all that.

His grim, taut face discouraged confidences. Didn’t seem like the right time.

He had bullied the hospital into letting me leave after only twenty-four hours, and there had been a big kerfuffle about it.

Lots of shouting about security and danger and attackers.

The angry doctors made me sign a waiver accepting responsibility, which I’d been glad to do, though my fingers barely felt the pen, floating in a Demerol cloud.

Even stoned out of my mind, I knew what side my bread was buttered on.

When it came to Snake Eyes, the doctors and nurses were no protection.

Jack Kendrick was my man. Hands down. He was my best shot.

Margaret had come by that morning, bringing Jack some clothes, and one of her own warm-up suits for me. It was eggshell blue, spattered with yellow daisies. Wow. Very special. But still, I was grateful.

“I’m flying to New York,” I announced, bracing myself.

“That’s the last place you should go!” Jack said sharply. “John told you he’d hired an army. We’ve warned Rafael, your sisters and their men. Do you want to face an army now? Those guys weren’t enough of a challenge for you?”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just can’t live like this anymore. I have to resolve this thing. No matter what. You do what you want. I’m more grateful than I can ever say, but I’m flying to New York. I want to meet with my sisters, now that we have the necklaces back.”

Jack muttered something foul under his breath, but he gave in eventually.

The earliest flight we could find with seats available left the following morning. Way too long to wait, but we had no choice. We checked into an airport hotel. When we were locked in our room, Jack laid his pistol on the kitchenette counter.

“I’m taking a shower,” he announced. “You all right out here?”

He waited for my nod, his eyes still doubtful. “Don’t open the door,” he added.

Hah. As if I would. I rolled my eyes, and he disappeared into the bathroom.

I felt like a puppet with strings cut when I didn’t have his hot, vital energy to struggle against. I curled up on the bed and thought it through.

I had to be realistic. Hard-nosed. I had nothing to offer Jack except a crushing burden of danger, financial drain, and constant, grinding stress.

He’d already risked his life, dodging bullets and knives, diving into wild water.

A man couldn’t marry a risk like that. Or plan a future.

I’d be stupid and selfish to demand promises from him now.

This, however, did not mean that I was going to deny myself the comfort of his body. Life was short and uncertain. I was seizing every day and night from now on.

I listened at the bathroom door to the shower hiss. I caught a glimpse of myself, in the prim, daisy-spattered warm-up suit, and sputtered with laughter.

I stripped it off, folded it carefully, and waited for the shower to stop, shivering in the air-conditioned chill.

When I opened the door, his startled face made me smile, catlike. I laid the gun on the counter by the bathroom sink. The room was a fragrant fog of steam. The bruises on his face were taking form.

Maybe I was presuming too much. Maybe he was too stressed, too injured and exhausted—or, um ... maybe not. His cock pointed straight at me, in seconds flat. That seemed promising.

“What’s this, Viv?” he asked.

I touched the dripping, gleaming contours of his body. “I’m just living in the moment, Jack.”

He flinched. “Don’t throw that in my face. We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t,” I said. “No past. No future. Just now.”

He looked worried. “How long do we have to play this game?”

“How long is irrelevant, when you’re in the moment,” I told him. “Only now exists. You should know that. Aren’t you the expert?”

He stared at me with haunted eyes. “You’re a real hard-ass, Viv D’Onofrio, you know that?”

“I’ve had tough teachers.” I gazed into his face for a moment, and finally relented.

“Look, if I ever have a normal life again, with no axe hanging over me, and you still want to have a conversation about our future, we can have it. Until then ... no.” I reached out, seized his cock and stroked it boldly.

“And until then, you just want to fuck me?”

My mouth twitched at his sulky tone, and I sank gracefully to my knees. “I ask it ... respectfully,” I purred, trying not to smile.

He let out a stifled burst of laughter as I swirled my tongue around his cockhead. “Oh, God. I’ve never gotten respect like this in my life.”

“Your time has come,” I murmured, then sucked him into my mouth.

He was so thick and broad and hard, but I was inventive, hungry, and aching for his every shudder and gasping sigh of pleasure. I used my hands, my tongue, and, bit by bit, pulled him deeper into my throat, long suckling strokes that made him quiver and groan.

I kept it slow, kept him trembling on the brink until the ache of my own yearning grew too sharp to bear. Then I rose up and turned to face the mirror. I parted my legs, arching my ass so he could see everything. How flushed and gleaming wet and eager I was for him. “Take me,” I said.

He seized my hips, stroking them. “I don’t have condoms.”

“Of course you don’t. You’ve been too busy saving my life to pay attention to stuff like that.”

He looked worried. “Viv, this is exactly the kind of thing we need to talk about?—”

“No talk. Give it to me before I start to scream.”

He eased past my body’s resistance, sliding and circling his cockhead around in my lube, deliciously seductive and teasing.

Then drove himself slowly, deeply inside me, surging tenderly, sliding over my most sensitive spots.

I clutched the kitchen counter, staring at my own flushed face, whimpering at each slick, slamming stroke.

We held each other’s gaze in the mirror as if the fate of the universe depended on it.

He reached around and caressed my clit, tipping me over into a huge, wrenching climax. When I finally had the strength to prop myself up, he was still waiting for his own release, his face tight with self-control.

“I want to come inside you,” he said.

I thought about it for about half a second. “Go for it.”

His eyes widened. “You’re sure? You’re okay with that?”

“I want it all,” I blurted. “I want everything you have to give me.”

His eyes flashed, and he gave it to me, pumping deep and hard. One last shove, a shout, and he came, explosively.

I hung over the counter, limp and soft. Light as air, soft as a cloud. One thought floating in my mind in a perfect shining bubble of hope.

Of how much I would love to make a child with him.

Jack set the shower running and washed me with sensual thoroughness. That interlude ended as one might have expected, with myself pinned against the wet tile wall, legs draped over his elbows, sobbing with delight as he nailed me deep and hard.

Not a thought about bad moments in my past. No dread for the future. Not a thread of panic, of nausea. No “danger keep out” signs. My old phantoms were gone.

They could not withstand the bright light that was Jack Kendrick.

Afterward, glowing and relaxed, I sat naked on the bed and examined the three necklaces that I had retrieved from Ulf Haupt’s briefcase. I laid them out on the bed, fiddling with them. Studying the patterns of gold that decorated each pendant.

Something about them tickled my mind. The setting was different on each pendant. On my own, there were tiny open spaces in the coils of gold. On Nell’s, the lacework was flat, with a slight protrusion on each side. Nancy’s also had those protrusions.

It made me think of a sculpture I’d done back in art school, one of the pieces that had been mangled in Snake Eyes’s second break-in.

Three female figures, made of motley chunks of glass, pebbles, and bits of plastic, all wired together.

But their stylized hair swirled out like halos, hooking and tangling together, linking the three figures.

I had entitled it The Three Sisters. Lucia had loved it. She had displayed it proudly, right next to her priceless bronze Cellini satyr.

I placed the pendants side by side. Nancy, Nell, Vivi. I felt a strange, dreamlike feeling of being gently guided as I slipped the little protrusion of my own pendant into the open space in Nell’s. A push, and click, the openwork linked together, seamlessly.

My heart gave a heavy thud of excitement. “Jack,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “Look at this.”

He looked, and his eyes widened. “The other one? Does it fit, too?”

“Let’s see.” I slid the protruding part of Nancy’s pendant into the openwork of Nell’s. Click. The pieces were all united. Three pendants, side by side. Locked together.

Jack held out his hand, and I passed the pendants to him. He manipulated them delicately, putting pressure on every point. One of the protruding bits on Vivi’s pendant moved. At first, I cried out in dismay, thinking he’d broken it, but then I saw that it was a lever, moving smoothly down?—

Click, once again, and something snapped out of the bottom. Three fine, shining, miniature sheets of gold, flush to each other, as narrow and sharp as a blade.

We leaned closer. Something was written on them, in letters so small, I could not make them out.

Jack pulled out his phone. He held the thing up under his camera and zoomed in, magnifying the image. “Salve Regina Mater Misericordiae,” he read slowly. He turned it over and studied the back. “Primus Modus Doricus.” He looked up at me. “Latin, right? Can you make anything out of that?”

“No, but Nell could. She’s studied Latin.” My voice was high and shaky. I pressed my hand to my mouth, fighting to control my face. It was too soon for tears of joy. I had no idea what this might mean. It was by no means a triumphant win.

But it was something. Finally, a window had opened, letting in some light to illuminate our helpless confusion. We had a place to begin.

“This was the part of the puzzle that I was supposed to figure out,” I said.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “How do you figure?”

“In the draft of the letter we found, Lucia said it was our love of art, music, and literature that would solve the puzzle. I don’t know the first thing about music or literature.

” I thought about The Three Sisters , and the pride that Lucia had taken in it, and tears sprang to my eyes. “But this part was just for me.”

I felt as if I had just received a tender message from beyond the grave. A wave of love and faith and encouragement from Lucia to her youngest adopted daughter.

“Oh, God. I’m losing it,” I whispered. “I miss her so much.”

“Go ahead,” Jack said. “Lose it all you want, for as long as you want. You’re entitled.”

He stroked my hair while I hid my face in my hands. I raised my face after a moment. “I want to call my sisters,” I blurted.

“It’s three a.m., New York time,” he reminded me gently. “We’ll be there tomorrow. We’ve waited this long. Can’t you wait a few hours more?”

“Okay,” I said, sniffling. “I guess.”

Jack laid the united necklaces on the bedside table next to the gun and slid between the sheets. He held the covers up for me. “Will a hard-ass broad like you allow for some cuddling in bed?” he asked.

“Oh, hell, yeah,” I said, sliding between the sheets and into the hot, lovely rush of his tight embrace. “I may be a hard-ass, but I’m not an idiot.”

I let his warmth relax me for a few moments and then turned up to look searchingly into his face. “Thank you for coming back to save me,” I said.

He gazed back. “Anytime,” he replied. “But the truth is, I was saving my own ass. Thank you for still being alive when I got there.”

Tears prickled in my eyes, but if I gave in to them again, I was afraid they would drown me.