Ultimate Weapon (18 page)

Josh had other fish to fry anyhow. He was dangling at least ten different girlfriends on a string.

She was going to have a talk with that girl. Poor little thing. She wished Sveti could have exactly what she wanted just once in a blue moon. She deserved it, after what she’d gone through with the organ pirates, as well as what she’d done for Rachel. Rachel had only lived through that ordeal because of Sveti’s love and care.

Tam would gladly chain up that panting dog of a Joshie in a monastery and keep him pure for Sveti by brute force until she grew up.

But life didn’t work that way. People could not be controlled, feelings could not be controlled. She hadn’t always believed that, but the last few months of life with Rachel had driven the point home.

People so seldom got what they deserved, for good or for evil, she reflected, casting a sour look at Janos. Rachel was participating enthusiastically in his efforts to undermine her. And everyone had begun to notice that she had company. Tall, dark, handsome company.

Davy recognized Janos and stared at them fixedly as he jiggled little Jeannie in his arms. He looked puzzled and alarmed.

His eyes asked her
is this a problem
?

She made an executive decision in that moment to handle it herself and rolled her eyes to indicate,
no problem, just a pain in the ass.
Hoping it was true. She didn’t want to spoil the party for Davy, either, or any of the rest of them. And oh, joy. Now Margot was gawking, too, her eyes like saucers. A little poking and gesticulating, and within seconds, everyone sitting in her orbit was rubbernecking. A wave of stares, grins, whispers followed from Seth, Raine, Liv, Sean.

Connor and Erin, too. Erin smirked knowingly over her son’s round blond head. Idiot. Thinking that wild, wonderful sex was finally being had by that snotty bitch in her mountain lair. No doubt reflecting smugly that getting properly nailed would magically render Tam a docile, satisfied pussycat who would be sweet and nice and obliging to everyone henceforth.
Don’t hold your breath, babydoll,
she told Erin silently.

Then again, who could blame them for thinking it, after what Davy and Nick witnessed at Shibumi? Everone in the room probably knew the details, the way that crowd gossiped among themselves.

It took a few minutes to identify the prickling heat in her face, it was so unfamiliar. Mother of God. She was blushing. She was shocked at herself. If she needed any further proof of her impending nervous breakdown, this was it. Maybe she was having a hot flash. Premature menopause would be easier to embrace than blushing.

Still. At thirty-one, menopause seemed a bit too much to hope. Flu maybe? A sudden fever? Except that she never got sick.

And since when did she give a shit what anyone thought of her?

She was so absorbed in her own thoughts, the explosion of hoots, howls, and applause made her jump. Nick grabbed his new wife and bent her over in a juicy, triumphant kiss. Tam nuzzled Rachel’s warm curls as the organ began to blare, bracing herself for the obligatory physical contact, the mandatory boring chitchat. Torture, every time.

Why did she go to these events, anyway? For Rachel’s sake, she supposed, but not entirely. She hated them, yes, but she was honest enough to acknowledge that a piece of her, for some reason, wished she was a person who did not hate them.

Part of her wished very badly that she didn’t have to hate everything so goddamn much.

That didn’t help her now, though. Not in the midst of being simultaneously bored, encroached upon, invaded, and annoyed by everyone. She muscled a big smile onto her face, clenched her teeth, and put Rachel on the floor as the deluge approached.

Erin was the first to bear down on her, flushed with triumphant delight. “Hey, Tam. You look great. Gorgeous dress, and Rachel is a doll in lipstick red. What a nice surprise to see you here, Mr. Janos!”

“A delight for me, too.” He bowed over Erin’s hand and gave Tam a sidelong wink before he kissed it, à la Count Dracula.

He would die for that wink, Tam silently vowed. She met Connor’s eyes, grimly amused to note that Connor was as unimpressed as she at Janos’s slick, Transylvanian gallantry. Erin seemed to be enjoying it, though, and baby Kev as well. Babies liked the guy. Go figure.

It made no sense, but she had no time to wonder about it. Everyone was crowding around to see the latest sideshow—Tam with a date, whoo-hoo—and she was trapped in a dance of embracing arms and social kisses and loud exclamations.

Rachel grabbed her thigh, protesting at being lost in a forest of legs, but before she could extricate herself, the child was swept up and almost out of her field of vision, skinny red legs waving wildly.

She spun around with a gasp. Janos was putting Rachel on his shoulders. She shrieked with delight, eyes wide, cheeks rosy.

“Put her down,” she spat at him. “
Figlio di puttana.
”

He blinked innocently. Rachel chortled, wrapping an arm around his forehead. “But why? She loves it.”

Tam reached up to grab her. Rachel began to wind up into her ambulance shriek. Tam sighed and let her arms drop.

“She’s not completely potty trained, you know,” she said. “She often loses it in moments of great excitement. But we’re living dangerously today. Taking big risks. No pull-up pants. Just big girl panties. Made out of thin cotton knit.”

Janos gazed back, apparently unintimidated. “Your point is?”

She shrugged. “I have fresh underwear and tights in my bag for Rachel if she pees or poops herself, but I have no spare Armani jacket for you when the inevitable happens,” she said. “Nor will I have the least sympathy for you. On the contrary. It will make my day.”

Janos’s white teeth flashed. “You are less likely to stab with a poisoned blade or tase me with a necklace while I have Rachel on my shoulders,” he said. “I am safer like this. I will risk it.”

“Be it on your head, then. Or your shoulders, and running down your back, as the case may be.” Tam noticed the fascinated audience clustered around them. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she snapped. “Don’t you folks all have people to kiss? Go on, fuss over the bride before she gets annoyed at me for drawing too much attention to myself! Go!”

The crowd dispersed, smirking at each other. Janos followed her as she hoisted the diaper bag over her shoulder and made her way to the ballroom where the reception was being held. He suffered Rachel’s sticky, clutching hands grabbing his ears, his nose, yanking his hair, all with calm good humor.

She spotted a table to the side that was flanked by a long bench, where bulging diaper bags already sat. She recognized them as Margot and Erin’s. High chairs were interspersed with the place settings.

She headed for it and found her name. Janos sat down on the other side of Rachel’s high chair, lifting her onto his lap and bouncing her. The kid giggled madly, delighted. So dangerous, to let oneself be charmed by so little, she thought darkly. “That’s Erin’s chair,” she informed him.

“There’s room for another person,” Janos said. “She was happy to see me with you. She’ll make space for me.”

“Her husband won’t be thrilled to have an uninvited stranger with no security clearance plant his arrogant ass right next to his wife and son,” Tam said.

“You’re my security clearance,” he said.

She passed a roll from the breadbasket to Rachel. “Do you want to live to see the dawn? You do understand the futility of following me around, don’t you, Janos? I will never do what you have asked. Never. Is that absolutely clear?”

“As crystal,” he said.

She watched sourly as Janos was a good sport about having the roll crumbled and smeared all over his Armani. God, how her jaw ached. Social events in general made her tense, and the day’s bizarre events and assorted shocking revelations had ratcheted the tension up higher, nudging her toward homicidal on her own scale. Tam had no talent for parties at the best of times. But Becca wouldn’t like an impromptu amputation with a steak knife or someone losing an eye to an escargot fork at her nuptial bash.
Behave. Down, girl. Breathe.

She reached for the cabernet that sat breathing in the middle of the table and sloshed some into her glass. People were already drifting toward her table like gawkers toward a car wreck. She closed her eyes against the pulse of a stress headache.

It was going to get worse before it got better.

V
al fed data into the matrix as he smiled, shook hands, chatted politely. The husband of Erin glowered at him, just as Tam had foreseen, but did not oust him from the table, at least not yet. The other men all regarded him with the barely concealed suspicion he would expect of a group of seasoned security professionals. The women tried without success to hide their curiosity. Tam gazed off into space, her jaw tense. She looked deathly pale beneath her skillfully applied makeup.

She gave him an unfriendly look when he poured her another glass of wine. “Relax,” he murmured.

“Sure,” she whispered back. “When you stop fucking with my life. And speaking of fucking with lives, have you called the cops off Rosalia’s boys yet?”

He was nonplussed. “Ah…”

“Do it. This very second. Or else I will announce, in a loud voice, exactly who you are and what you want to this whole table. The aftermath won’t be pretty, I promise you that.”

“
Sì, sì.
One moment.” He pulled out his Palm Pilot, tapped in a quick SMS, and smiled at her. “Done. To confirm my good intentions.”

“In a pig’s eye.” She frowned, unconvinced. “Just like that?”

“Give it twenty minutes,” he advised. “Let it trickle down.”

“Not one second more,” she warned.

He sipped his wine, let his eyes smile at her from over the rim of the glass. She muttered something rude and tore her gaze away.

The younger of the bridesmaids came by, leaning over to kiss Tam and murmur to her in a language that Val was startled to realize was Ukrainian. He’d learned it by necessity in his youth, since a great deal of Novak’s business had been connected to the Ukraine.

“Sveti! Sveti!” Rachel crowed with delight, forgetting all about him, and held up her arms, launching herself into midair.

The girl caught her and hugged her, murmuring endearments and covering Rachel’s face with kisses.

“You’re from Ukraina?” he asked in that language. “Rachel, too?”

She gave him a shy smile that struck him as very sad. “Rachel and I were cellmates in prison,” was her unexpected reply. She swung the child onto her hip. “Can I take her over to play with the other kids?” she asked Tamara, in heavily accented English.

“Fine,” Tamara said. “Bring her back when they start serving something you think she might eat or whenever you want a break. Thanks, Sveti. You’re an angel.”

Sveti walked away, her head bent over the toddler’s to listen to the child’s excited babble.

He gave Tam a questioning look. “Cellmates?”

She shrugged. “Just like she told you. They were locked up by organ pirates for months in a stinking basement room. Sveti’s the closest thing Rachel has to real family after that. I fly her over to visit as often as she can come. Excuse me. Since Sveti is watching Rachel, I’ll take this opportunity to run to the ladies’ room.”

Val followed her with his eyes until she vanished. He disliked taking his eyes off her, but Rachel was still visible from here, and he was sure that she would not run without the child.

He turned back to the people at the table. “Organ pirates?” he asked the table at large.

“You mean she hasn’t told you how she got Rachel?” asked the sultry redheaded beauty who sat next to Davy McCloud, wide-eyed. “It’s an incredible story.”

He shook his head. The women tripped over themselves to tell him the tale of the rescue of the orphans. Steele’s rush into the jaws of death dressed only in silver spandex. How she had pretended to be a stripper who had lost her way to a bachelor party to create a diversion while the rest of the team sneaked into the compound. How she had neutralized four guards by herself before they could sound the alarm, making it possible for Nick and the rest to charge in and stop the villains just as they were about to cut Sveti’s heart out.

He knew the story, but listening to these women tell it gave him a whole new level of information. These people admired Steele. They liked her too. Even trusted her—in a careful way.

“Impressive,” he murmured.

“Yeah, that she is,” said a blond man who Val’s surveillance had pegged as Sean McCloud. “Tam’s special. Not to be messed with.”

Val acknowledged the blunt warning with a nod. “I would not dream of it,” he said blandly. “Particularly not when she is surrounded by such a fierce band of loyal friends.”

There was a tense silence. The people at the table exchanged significant glances. Val smiled at them and sipped his wine.

“Mr. Janos is interested in marketing Deadly Beauty in Europe,” Erin explained, effectively breaking it.

That touched off a far less emotionally charged conversation that Val could handle smoothly with a tenth of his brain while the rest of it occupied itself with frantic planning.

As soon as the conversation shifted away from him, he excused himself and left the ballroom. He had to find a place to stage the scene that would take place this evening. The minicam was taped discreetly under his arm. It had to happen now, or else Imre would be…

No.
He could not think of Imre at all. He had to be suave, relaxed. Not desperate. That woman would smell desperation from miles away.

He had to hide it under a layer of impenetrable charm. And still, the word pulsed in his head, like a strobe light.
Now, now, now.

A long corridor of dimly lit administrative offices was a likely possibility. He strode down the hall, trying all the doors. One of them was open, a utilitarian staff kitchen. Sink, coffeemaker, microwave, cupboard, and small refrigerator for storing staff lunches.

This was it. His only option, he decided, lacking in atmosphere though it was. There was no time to look for someplace better.

A dismantled drip coffeemaker on top of the refrigerator gave him an idea. He stuck the vidcam into the glass pot, and added handfuls of miscellaneous objects from the drawers to hide it: sugar packets and Sweet’n Low, tea bags. He directed the lens so its field of vision was unobscured. He’d programmed it to be light-activated.

God help him. Imre’s only hope, at the mercy of a tense, nervous, frightened woman’s whim. What bizarre conditions under which to seduce the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A blues tune began to play, pulsing from afar. The dancing had begun. That might help.

He ran into her outside the bathrooms on his way back. She looked pale. “Are you well?” he asked.

“Great. Perfectly wonderful, thanks to you.”

“Let’s dance.” He slid his arm around her waist as they went into the ballroom and swung her around into his arms.

She went rigid. “Let go of me, you tricky son of a bitch,” she said, through a smiling grimace. “Or I’ll open your jugular with my hairpin.”

“Do not be that way,” he wheedled. “We were doing so well. You do not want to upset all your friends, do you? Look at them, so happy for you, thinking that you are finally enjoying yourself. About time, no?”

She harrumphed, stiff as a wooden plank, shoving against his chest to put more space between them. “Little do they know.”

He jerked her closer as she stumbled. “Relax, for God’s sake.”

“Like it’s so easy,” she muttered. “As if I ever knew how. I don’t like being watched, gawked at or speculated about.”

Val glanced around. Several of the dancing couples were casting furtive, sidelong glances at them. “Your friends told me the tale of the grand rescue from the organ pirates,” he said. “They evidently think that you are a superwoman.”

“Hmmph.” She rolled her eyes. “They like to dramatize.”

“Strange how they trust you,” he said. “Especially the women.”

She looked offended. “Why would that strike you as strange?”

“Because of their men,” he said. “Women tend to be suspicious of other women who are as beautiful as you. It is a brutal fact of nature. You are an inherent threat to them.”

She grunted. “Bullshit. Besides, they’re all beautiful women themselves. Not one of them has any reason to worry.”

“No?” He yanked her into a possessive clinch. “You mean to say you have never taken any of the men in this room as your lover?”

She went motionless, mouth open. “Who, me? If any of those guys cheated on their wives, I would personally remove their testicles.”

He was taken aback. “That is vehement,” he commented.

“Those men are well taken care of,” she went on heatedly. “They have nothing to complain about. And if they did, they wouldn’t dream of messing with me. I’ve put the fear of God into every last one of them.”

He willed her to relax against the heat of his body. “Such high standards to hold them to,” he teased. “After all, they are only men.”

“They can damn well live up to those standards. They have quality women who trust them more than any man deserves to be trusted. If they ever, for one second, demonstrate any lack of appreciation for their good fortune, I will be there standing by. Garden shears in hand.”

He cleared his throat, trying not to smile. “They all seem…er, more or less intact. I take it that so far they have behaved well?”

She nodded. “Pussywhipped to the last man,” she said, with cool satisfaction. “And now kids are coming right and left. I doubt they have the energy to misbehave at this point. Not that it stops most men. Ass-sniffing, leg-humping dogs on the furniture that they are.”

He let that caustic attack upon his sex pass without comment, and spun her into a deep, sensual dip. “That reveals so much,” he said.

She almost tripped over his foot as he tugged her back up again. “Reveals what? What are you talking about?”

He grinned. “You are secretly a romantic.”

That startled a burst of laughter out of her. “Me? Hah!”

“You.” He put his mouth to her ear. “Your need for your friends to stay faithful to each other as living proof that true love is possible,” he whispered. “Because you keep hoping that it is, no? Even though you are sure in the depths of your heart that it is not, you continue to hope that you might be wrong. It is another one of those bleeding contradictions. You are full of them, Tamara Steele.”

“I…do not…” She squinted at him. “That’s such crap. Let’s not start the armchair psychology game again. And don’t even try to pin a softer side onto me. It won’t stick.”

“Say what you like. I draw my own conclusions.”

“Whatever,” she growled. “The truth is still the truth. I’m going to check on Rachel, so get your big groping paws the hell off me.”

She wrenched out of his arms, and stalked toward the corner where Sveti entertained Rachel, heels clicking smartly over the gleaming ballroom floor. Fury radiated from her tense, slender figure.

Their dining table was momentarily deserted, all of the other couples either dancing or dealing with their children. The chance he had been waiting for. He strolled back to the table, pulled out his cell, and feigned texting a message while he detached the quarter tablet of tasteless, odorless R-55-Triplex he’d taped inside his pocket.

He let it plop into Steele’s wineglass as he reached for his own.

Done. He took a deep swallow, tempted to eat the other three-quarters of the tablet himself, just for a break from this unbearable tension. But he could not. The image of his mother on the bathroom floor was etched indelibly in his mind. Drugs could never be a refuge for him. Nor would he dare risk losing his edge, tonight of all nights.

A quarter dose was the smallest effective dose he could give her in solid form. He’d reasoned that he would have no good opportunity to administer drops unobserved in public. R-55-Triplex was formulated by PSS’s lab techs for situations just like this. In larger doses, it had been favorably compared to Ecstasy—just more subtle, with no hangover, headache or thirst. A quarter dose should render her euphoric, mellow, more receptive sexually. Alcohol intensified the effect, food reduced it. But she ate so little. If he could get some more wine into her…if she didn’t realize that she’d been altered…
maybe.

He took another swallow of wine and smiled and nodded as Davy and Margot McCloud swayed by, entwined. Davy’s eyes lingered on him thoughtfully, and then something his wife said drew his attention back to her. Davy smiled and kissed her. The kiss caught fire, right on the dance floor. When they surfaced, the redhead was flushed, heavy-eyed.

Touching, he thought glumly. How nice for them. Sex with no problems, no lies, no betrayal. How pleasant.

He had tried, for a time, to find weak spots to exploit in the McClouds in the process of reseaching various ways to manipulate Steele. But when it came to McClouds, there were no weak spots, no fault lines. Nothing to exploit. The entire clan was rigidly upright in their business dealings. It was evidently a family trait. Their bank accounts, stock portfolios, and tax returns baffled him. That kind of honesty and transparency in Italy would run a business into the ground in minutes. But to all appearances, they seemed prosperous. A mystery.

He had lost sight of Steele. Panic yawned wide in his belly. He searched the crowd anxiously for that bronze fabric, the flash of her pale face and arms, the gleam of coiled mahogany hair.

Only when he spotted her could he breathe again.

Tam reached across the table and ran her hand through the soft red ringlets of little Jeannie, Davy and Margot’s baby daughter, thinking how pretty the baby was with those huge slate-blue eyes, that crazy open-mouthed grin, the four little pearls of teeth popping out, two above and two below, from her pink gums.

Margot’s mouth fell open. Tam barely stopped herself from giggling at the other woman’s expression. True, she was feeling oddly mellow—for her. She’d downed quite a bit of chianti on an empty stomach, but it was finally relaxing her, thank God. She’d felt like she was made of steel cables strained to the snapping point. Tension that severe had to find some release. It was a physical law, like gravity. If you didn’t respect it, bad things happened.

Finally, that headache was backing off, and she could appreciate how nice the McCloud Crowd looked in their wedding finery. Easy on the eyes, as Nick was fond of saying. She leaned her chin on her clasped fingers, appreciating the tender way that Seth was cupping Raine’s pregnant belly, whispering something into her ear that made her blush.