Terms of Surrender (4 page)

"Actually, Stallone doesn't hold a candle to him," she said, not knowing where that came from. She still hated the man, more in the last two days than ever—that much hadn't changed. So why the flattering remark?

Peyton hadn't missed the compliment, eyebrows instantly shooting up. "You conveniently hid that in our previous conversations about Mr. Vega. That means there's something going on between you two that you don't want anyone to know about."

"Nothing but work. He's too arrogant for me."

Peyton curled her lips, folded her arms across her ample breasts and stared. "Yeah, right.

I know you, Ms. Breeze. You've got a weakness for the forceful, arrogant types."

"Please don't remind me." Slany frowned, remembering her miscalculations with Ron.

She'd thought she'd found someone strong and dependable, a man she could trust with her secrets, a kindred spirit to entertain them, not an unscrupulous bastard to exploit her weaknesses, try to make her feel like some reprobate and guilty for her longings.

Ron was a master manipulator, always turning situations around to suit his needs and wants, while turning Slany's wants and needs against her, treating her as if she had committed a crime when she related what she would like in bed after he'd specifically asked, prodded.

From the moment she'd told him, she'd regretted it. Ron behaved differently towards her, his innate cruelty coming to the fore during their sex play, using her proclivities to hurt her beneath the guise of fulfilling her needs. He talked more dirty to her than was necessary, enjoying the trash nomenclature just a little too easily and gleefully. Basically treated her not only with rough hands and words, but as less than an inferior who didn't deserve the respect of a bug on the bottom of his shoe. To top off everything, he'd frequently bring up her mixed heritage in petty arguments he started, calling her a passer and a mutt, outright stating she wasn't good enough for someone as pure as him.

15

Gracie C. McKeever

How she had gotten caught up with such a judgmental Neo-Nazi was beyond her.

"I know where you're going with that fertile imagination of yours, so just stop it now,"

Peyton said. "Nick is not Wells."

"Who says?"

"I do."

"Like you know so much about it."

"I know enough. I hear how you talk about him."

"I can't stand him." That he was an always-right know-it-all with insightful ideas that made her and everyone else in the agency envious had nothing to do with her dislike, of course.

"My point exactly. You can never stand the men you usually wind up in bed with."

Fertile imagination? Did Peyton Carlyle have to have such a fertile memory, dammit?

"You make it sound as if there've been all that many."

Peyton smiled and put an arm around Slany's shoulder. "I know very well the chaste existence you've been living the last decade."

"It's only been two years, smart-ass!"

"Nevertheless, I know you've been abstaining since you hit thirty—not that you were all that active and wild when you were indulging—and I want you to know there's no need for you to continue. You've atoned for any number of sins and misjudgments you
think
you committed.

Time to get back on the horse. Or the stallion, as it were." Peyton wiggled her eyebrows.

Slany playfully elbowed her in the ribs, and Peyton fell back in the grass, clutching her middle with the appropriate amount of histrionics.

"I think you broke a rib," she gasped as she sat back up.

"C'mon…" Slany slapped Peyton’s thigh. She got to her knees, then stood, Coco immediately at her side. "I've got some leftover Chinese in the fridge. It's more than enough for two."

"Well, why didn't you say so? You know the only reason I trek out to your house in the

'burbs as often as I do is to bum a free meal." Peyton bounded to her feet and left the patio, following behind Slany's heels on the way to the house. "You're going to have to start learning how to throw down in the kitchen if you're even thinking of taking up with Nick. You know how Italians are about their food. I bet his mama makes her pasta and tomato sauce from scratch."

Slany didn't even turn as she gave her friend the finger over a shoulder. "How horribly stereotypical of you."

Peyton just chuckled behind her.

Coco ran by both of them to get to his big dish in the far corner of the kitchen floor.

Slany peeled off her gardening gloves and tossed them into the bucket by the basement door, then walked to the cupboard to retrieve Coco's food. She filled the bowl to the brim from the large bag of dry food, and Coco went to work emptying it as she went to the fridge a few feet 16

Terms of Surrender

away. She pulled out several white cartons and put them on the Formica counter adjacent.

"There's Egg Fu Yung, sweet-and-sour broccoli, white rice, and fried chicken wings."

"How you stay in shape on a diet like this…" Peyton hefted herself up and parked her shapely derriere on the counter beside the food cartons, opened a couple, and leaned in to sniff.

"It's a good thing you don't do this too often."

"A rare indulgence, I assure you."

"Good. I taught you well, Grasshopper."

Slany giggled at the preposterous statement. Peyton was the biggest Twinkie addict this side of the Mason-Dixon line, but no one would ever know it to look at her slim, but voluptuous figure.

She took a fork out of the silverware drawer and apportioned the contents of each carton onto two disposable plates, then heated one plate in the microwave.

"I didn't realize I was starving until you started doling out the MSG."

"Stop belittling the food of which you are about to partake." Slany playfully swiped at her head. Peyton laughed and hopped down from the counter as the microwave buzzer sounded.

Slany removed the plate and placed it on the counter in front of Peyton before she put the other plate in. "You want to eat out on the patio?"

"It's nice enough out, sure. But in the meantime…" Peyton dug into a gravy-laden egg-and-shrimp patty with her fork, took a bite, and hummed.

Slany smiled, turned her back on the microwave, and glanced out her kitchen window, watching as her father pulled up at the curb several yards away, then made his way up her driveway. He was just fifty-three, but his jaunty step had long deserted him, in its wake the slightly stooped frame of a much older man whose spirit had long died.

She cleared her throat. "We've got company."

Peyton followed Slany's glance out the window and grinned. "Like you said, you've got more than enough for two."

"You don't mind?"

"Your pops? You know me and Mr. Breeze are ace boon coons."

Slany smiled, loved her friend's earthiness and patience. There were times she hadn't had as much, and not because her father had been particularly meddling or overprotective during her childhood—rather, he hadn't been.

When her mother was killed in a car accident almost twenty years ago, her father the same age then as Slany was now, Reginald Breeze had taken a six-month leave of absence from his and his wife's successful realty business, taking advantage of the generous premium Alma Breeze's death had afforded. He donated his car to charity and took to getting around everywhere by foot or bike, when he did bother to leave the mausoleum he had let his house become.

More crucial to the Breeze children than their father's physical retreat from the world was his emotional retreat from them.

17

Gracie C. McKeever

Barely thirteen and a carefree tomboy to the bone, Slany had to grow up fast and hard, taking up the substantial slack her father's withdrawal had created to be there for her just-out-of-training-pants little brother and sister, Kieran and Megan. Pretty much raised three children, not just two.

Slany had been luckier than her sibs, enjoying a relatively blissful decade-plus in a two-parent, loving household before the downfall. By the time Kieran and Megan had reached her age, their father was a ghost of his former dynamic self, no longer the formidable man Slany had reached her early teens looking up to.

Slany shook her head at her train of thoughts.

She couldn't change what had happened to her mother, or the unfortunate aftermath of her father's emotional collapse. She was just surprised that after so many years of surviving and thriving in a mixed marriage, during a time when such couplings hadn't been particularly in vogue or acceptable, even in New York, her father had finally succumbed to pressure.

Perhaps, like her, he had just been plain tired. Tired of being alone and putting up a sturdy front for the sake of those he loved.

Slany took a deep bracing breath, glued on a bright smile, and prepared for another session of being the strong and dependable daughter as she went to the back door to let her father in.

18

Terms of Surrender

The dog would be a problem when the time came to take her, and that was a shame.

He liked dogs, liked animals a hundred times more than he liked people. Animals were honest, real and unveiled, their only motivations driven by the most basic instincts—procreation, survival, self-defense, and preservation.

There was no avarice or meanness in animals, no desire to humiliate, no need to belittle another in order to inflate one's own worth. Teasing and bullying did not exist in the animal kingdom the way these pastimes existed in the human species. Therefore, no need for revenge.

When a lioness chased down and ripped open the throat of a deer or gazelle, it wasn't for sport, or out of spite and revenge, but for the simple need to feed herself and her cubs.

Animals did not put on airs to impress, would not go under the knife to look younger, or inject themselves with Botox to smooth out wrinkles. Animals were attracted by pheromones, motivated by their need to reproduce and spread their seed, not by pleasure as much as necessity, not by how many orgasms their mate could evoke as much as that mate's ability to produce healthy offspring and continue the species.

He respected animals, their elemental simplicity.

Unlike people, so complex and confused, they no longer knew their purpose for being on earth, driven more by pleasure-seeking and vanity than survival and self-preservation.

People were fakes, played games, said one thing and meant another, more into self-destruction rather than conservation.

He hated fakes, despised hypocrites, and one of his main reasons for getting into the advertising industry was that this area of corporate America seemed to produce fakes and hypocrites in great amounts, as fertile a hunting ground as he would ever come across for pursuing his mission.

Smiling in peoples’ face in the halls and elevators, while hating them in their hearts, deliberately misleading the public to sell a product, driven by the all-mighty dollar and politics 19

Gracie C. McKeever

and not whether or not a client was worthy of glorification, were just a few of the sins he had witnessed in the business.

He had more talent in one of his little fingers than most of the creative and art directors at
DMT
had in their entire bodies collectively—certainly more than that pretty boy Vega.

He adjusted his audio surveillance equipment, lowering the volume on his headphones as Slany Breeze stood.

So she liked the forceful arrogant types, did she? And this Wells guy must have been just such a type, from the sounds of it, the type that had obviously left a bad impression on Slany.

He gritted his teeth, gut churning with possessiveness.

No one was allowed to touch Slany, emotionally or physically, except him.

He would have to track this Wells guy down and teach him a lesson. The exercise would be a nice distraction and supplement to what he was working on at
DMT
, would give him something to do in the interim rather than just obsessing over and assessing his next target, as pleasurable as these activities were.

But first things first…

He watched Slany as she headed towards her house across the front lawn, preceded by her chocolate lab and followed by her friend.

Why she associated with such a lesbian slut was beyond him.

It was plain to see that Peyton Carlyle—prancing around with her multi-colored hair and those tight-assed jeans, baring her stomach for the world to see, and speaking lightly of Slany's apparent chastity, all but encouraging her friend's promiscuity—had no morals.

It was possible Slany pranced around in tight clothes like Peyton, that she was just as promiscuous and he hadn't witnessed any evidence yet. But since he had started at the agency a little more than a year ago, he'd made it his business to see and know everything there was to know about the fiery and talented art director. He doubted he'd missed anything.

She was one of the rare people at
DMT
that he admired and with whom he liked to work.

He also liked the way she spoke her mind, no matter who the recipient. She stood her ground with the big boys, even when said boys were her superiors.

Nevertheless, he had determined she would yield to
him
, his dick hardening with the idea of her submission.

Sure the other males on staff, especially Vega, had similar notions. Despite the creative director's denials and actions to the contrary,
he
could smell a kindred spirit a mile away, but he would make them all get in line behind him and take what was left when he was done.

Not that there would be anything left. There never was. Not for the police, not for the coroner, and not for the trainees’ family and friends.

He preferred the designation "trainee", for they were not victims, despite what the authorities and media called the women his kind favored. They were candidates, painstakingly chosen with too much tender care for so colorless a title as "victim," their role in his existence more symbiotic than parasitical. He fulfilled the trainees’ needs as much as they fulfilled his, as much as his parents' deaths had shown him the light and his true calling.