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Nope. She’d be a lonesome rat in a cage in an antiseptic condo. Running on a treadmill in a basement room. Crammed into hose, heels, and a power suit. Ferried back and forth in a car service to a job that bored her silly. Locked in a bank vault. She shuddered with inner cold.
“…have the courtesy to concentrate on what I’m saying, Livvy! Didn’t you hear me at all?”
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m kind of wiped out.”
“Concentrate,” her mother snapped. “Your father and I have decided that you and Blair should announce your engagement.”
That snapped her right to attention. She stared at them wildly. “What engagement? What on earth are you talking about?”
“I hate to rush you, Liv.” Blair’s voice was earnest. “I know you want to wait until you’re sure, and I respect that. But we don’t have to get married right away. It’s just theater.” He grabbed her hand and dropped a gallant kiss on the back of it. “For now,” he added coyly.
“You have to move fast, now that McCloud is showing his hand,” her mother said. “We’ll work out the details later.”
She blinked “What hand? What does Sean have to do with this?”
Blair and her mother exchanged glances. “You mean the possibility hasn’t even crossed your mind?” Her mother’s voice was pitying. “That we’ve identified your stalker? Liv. Honey. Wake up.”
Liv was so startled, she let out a burst of laughter, which turned quickly into a phlegmy coughing fit. “You think that Sean is the stalker?” she gasped out finally. “But that’s totally ridiculous!”
Blair’s face hardened into that pompous, judgmental mask that had always stopped her short whenever she’d been in danger of sliding down the slippery slope into being his fiancée. “There are precedents,” he said stiffly. “His father was severely mentally ill. He’s trained in the use of explosives. He’s worked as a mercenary. His twin committed suicide. He’s unstable. I went to school with him, Liv. I know what he’s capable of. He set off a bomb in the teachers’ bathroom in the sixth grade. He had no concept of civilized behavior. He was constantly fighting, constantly mouthing off. The teachers were desperate.”
“Uh, Blair? Small detail. He was twelve.” She couldn’t keep the irony out of her voice, even though she knew she would pay for it.
Right on cue, her mother let out a distressed huffing sound. “Here we go again. Defending him again, just like old times. You never learn.”
“Reality check, people,” Liv announced, looking around at each of them in turn. “Sean McCloud saved my life today. Yours, too, Blair.”
Her father leaned over, groaning, and clutched his chest. Amelia leaped to his side in an instant, making anxious, solicitous sounds.
Liv had seen the melodrama before, so she turned back to Blair. “I cannot believe that Sean would ever do that to me.”
“Of course not,” Blair said. “You think the best of people. That’s very well and good, in normal life, but this is not normal life. Sean McCloud is strange. His family is strange. What’s happening to you is strange. Don’t you feel how the strangeness matches up, like a puzzle?”
Nope. Sure didn’t.She shook her head. “I don’t get your reasoning, Blair. Why did he stop us from getting into the car?”
“Because he wanted to impress you. He wanted the glory of saving you. He wanted you to be grateful to him. He staged the whole thing to make you feel vulnerable. Don’t you see? It’s so obvious.”
There was no point in telling the truth to Blair when he had that look on his face. Sean McCloud did not have to throw himself in front of a bomb to impress her. All he had to do was crook his finger and smile.
Barely that. He could just be his own charismatic self. Watch the women drop like flies. Herself being the first to hit the pavement.
Whoever T-Rex was, he had a rotting dead spot inside him. In her recent crash course on arsonists, assassins, serial killers and rapists, she’d learned that they were usually loners, failures. Men with no interpersonal skills, no talent at relating with women.
Sean McCloud had no problems relating to women. He had to beat them away from himself to breathe. As for his interpersonal skills, well. The man was capable of talking her into multiple orgasms on the phone. Weird though he might be, there was nothing dead about him.
And since none of these reflections could be profitably shared with the present company, she changed the subject. “Why didn’t anybody tell me about Kev McCloud committing suicide?” she asked.
Blair and her parents exchanged uneasy glances.
“It didn’t seem relevant, dear,” her mother said.
Liv stared at her. “He was my friend,” she said quietly.
“Friend, my foot,” Amelia said tartly. “He was deranged, and probably dangerous. It’s tragic that he didn’t get the help he needed in time, and I’m very sorry for his family, but you were my first concern, honey, not him. You needed to make a clean break, and telling you hard-luck stories about those unfortunate McCloud boys would have just made things more difficult and confusing for you.”
Liv twined her fingers together. Her hands were cold and clammy, white beneath the grime. Her eyes stung with tears. Maybe her mother was right, but that didn’t make it easier to swallow.
The last time she’d seen Kev McCloud, he’d been sweat-soaked, wild-eyed, raving about people who were trying to kill him. She’d had no idea at the time that he was mentally ill. He’d scared her out of her wits when he scribbled down that coded note, shoved his sketchbook into her hand, and told her to take it to Sean and run, or they’d kill her, too.
