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“Have you considered talking to your dad about having him pay at least some of the bill all this security is going to cost you?” I asked, already knowing the answer. But damn it, Steele was right. This threat came from the world of HEG, so that meant her old man needed to cough up the cash so his kid could breathe free.
But she was already shaking her head, her jaw jutting with a mule-level stubbornness I was beginning to recognize. “I would never ask.”
“I’ll ask for you. Fuck, I don’t care.”
“Ido, Lucien. My stalker is my problem. I’ll handle it my way.”
Huh. So that’s what her best impression of an immovable object looked like. “Don’t make me regret telling you my real name when I don’t even know yours.”
“Does a name really matter that much to you? I’mEden. I swear to freaking karma that that’s all I am. Just Eden.”
Slowing for a red light I shot a glance her way, amazed at how much she’d revealed in that one statement. “Not Eden Steadfast?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. Don’t split hairs that aren’t there, monster.”
So I was a monster again. Great. “My beautiful genius, it’s not my fault you dropped all those telling hints just now. Obviously you want me to pick them up.”
She gave me a dirty look. “Telling hints? Me?”
“Everyone has them.” Hers were hard as hell to spot, but I was getting there.
“Prove it. What are my hints telling you?”
“For starters, they’re telling me that you crave distance from your father, because you just cut the name you share with him out of that heartfelt statement—you’re Eden. Just Eden, and not Eden Steadfast. Also, I’m curious as hell about you swearing tokarma. Most people raised in this country swear to a more Judeo-Christian pantheon. Did your father cut the concept of God out of your life because there was only room enough for one god, and that was him?”
“Wow.” She rolled her eyes as the light changed to green. “Sorry I asked.”
“No, you’re not. And if you were, I’d be disappointed that you had no interest in learning about the tells I’m beginning to spot in you.”
“You know what? Having a conversation with you is like being dissected while still being alive. And with no anesthesia.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. So… karma?”
“I don’t believe in a lot of things in this world, except myself,” she muttered, the words dragging out of her as if she were uprooting them syllable by syllable. Clearly, sharing wasn’t one of her many talents, but for my sake she was trying. That meant a helluva lot. “But I do believe that if you screw around with other people to the point where you know you’re doing damage, you’re going to pay for that bad behavior at some point down the road.”
“Pay how?”
“I know it might sound crazy, but I honestly believe in the concept of a cosmic balance in the universe. That whatever energy you put out into the world—negative or positive—one day it’ll boomerang back to you, and you’ll get whatever it is that you deserve. In other words, karma. Is that telling enough for you?”
“Hell, yeah, it is,” I said, grinning my approval. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to start trusting me, and then… My cock throbbed in a way that made me want to grit my teeth, and I had to consciously will myself back to the conversation at hand. “Look at you go, revealing something as normal and human and beautifully not-sociopathic as a guilty conscience. The question is, why? What do you have to feel guilty about?”
For a long minute she didn’t respond, to the point where I was sure she was ignoring me. Then she shrugged and looked back out the window. “You called it when you first heard my father on that podcast. He’s a cult leader. In fact, he’s probably the most successful cult leader in history, if you want to put a finer point on it. He has millions of zombie-headed followers all around the world, and even though most of them have never even met him personally, they would do whatever he told them to do, no questions asked. And he knows it, Luke. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and as far back as my memory goes he’s done everything in his power to train me to follow in his footsteps. You mentioned the name Marvin Pankey earlier, yes?”
I nodded. “Good ol’ Marvin Pankey from Gobbler Gulch, Kentucky. He’s never gotten rid of that accent, which I suspect was deliberate since a folksy Southern drawl usually equalssimpleandnonthreateningto an unsuspecting person. Though now that I think about it, you don’t have an accent to speak of, not even a native Chicagoan’s. Makes me wonder where the hell you were born.”
“Did you look into Marvin Pankey’s background?” she asked, clearly ignoring me.
“Are you wanting me to reveal what I know?”
“Goodness, and here I thought you said answering a question with a question was too weak of a game for either of us to play.”
“Jesus, that sexy brain of yours,” I muttered, while heat flashed through me so fast it was a wonder I didn’t fucking swoon. “Time and again you trip me up with my own words, and I never see it coming until I’m flat on my face. It makes me so damn hot I can hardly stand it.”
I heard her swallow. “That’s good to know, but it’s not an answer.”
“If I can’t kiss you in the next five minutes I swear to Christ and to karma and whatever else there is, that I might actually die.” Taking a deep breath, I almost cheered when our destination came into view. “Short answer is, yeah, we’ve looked into your old man. Marvin Pankey started his criminal career when he was seventeen by stealing a car. He was caught, thrown in the clink for a few years, and when he got out he didn’t waste any time showing the world that he hadn’t learned his lesson. He ran nickel-and-dime scams until suddenly he changed his name, don’t know why, and became a life coach-turned-motivational speaker. That’s when he found out he could fleece his marks legally. The rest is history.”
“The first trick of the trade my father ever taught me was how to pick pockets,” she said softly, staring straight ahead while her hands were loose and relaxed in her lap. Only the tension around her eyes and the slight uptilt of her fair brows hinted at any remorse. “I was so sweet-looking and angelic that even if I got caught, all I had to do was turn on the starving-waif routine and I was given money. Then one day I scored big—a wallet stuffed full of cash, almost a thousand bucks. My father was thrilled, but I had to wonder why someone who looked no better off than we were had so much cash in his pocket. So I got his address from his driver’s license and tracked the guy down just as his wife was screaming at him, a bawling baby on her hip, that they were going to be tossed out into the streets because he’d somehow lost the mortgage payment. Apparently they were already behind, and he’d gone off to sell every bit of jewelry they had, including their wedding bands and her mother’s brooch. I didn’t even know what a brooch was back then, but I knew they were in pain. A pain I’d caused.”
