I stared at her, at a loss for words. She’d been worried about me. She felt responsible for me. She wanted me to come and eat tacos with her and the girls, to be part of her vigilantes club. Why did that make me want to cry? Probably because everything made me want to cry.
I bit my lip for a moment before I said, “Dirk’s mother kidnapped me, and then offered me two million dollars to stop dating him. I’m not dating him, but apparently the fighting, him winning a fight for me, convinced his mother that it was serious. I was wearing puppy slippers. Why does a terrifying vigilante like you have puppy slippers in her closet? I should have been wearing stilettos. Puppy slippers are incredibly difficult to use as weapons.”
She walked over to me and stared into my eyes before she ripped off my bandage in one quick movement that hurt enough to make my eyes water. She frowned down at my arm while I held perfectly still. I was holding a knife and had almost stabbed her for that. I did not want to fight with someone who brought a mountain lion to a knife fight. Also, she wasn’t a villain, not when she’d saved all those women, not when she was here to make sure I was okay.
Yep, I was definitely sniffling.
She poked the stitches while she dragged me out of the bathroom and towards the couch, ignoring Marcus Licinius Crassus. “I was looking over the footage and saw you get hit. You said that you were grazed.” She looked up at me with stormy brown eyes until the rage faded and she shook her head, falling back into her usual only slightly unhinged cowgirl persona. “So, his mama tried to buy you off. Welcome to the ranks of cheap-and-easy gold digger. As if it was ever easy to dig for gold. Sticks in your craw, doesn’t it? You should have thrown him in the desert, but probably not until the arm’s healed a little more. It’s nice work. Who did it?” She pushed me down onto the couch.
I shrugged and winced as I bounced. “It hurts more today than it did yesterday.”
“Naturally,” she said, pulling out a mini first aid kit. “These bullets are really bad. No, normal bullets are really bad. These bullets are… Let’s just say that if you’d gone to sleep without taking care of it, you wouldn’t ever wake up.” She grinned and winked at me like that was a good time. Also, her bandaging my wound. Not a good time. And yet…
I started laughing because everything was so ridiculous, from the mountain lion licking himself in the middle of my marshmallow bed to the incredibly tasteless clothes Dirk had left for me. I laughed until tears slid down my cheeks. I ended with my face in my hands, hunched over on the fluffy white couch. There I was crying again. “This room is ridiculous.” No, I was ridiculous, crying like a child.
She hesitated and then carefully patted my shoulder, not the sore one. “For Vegas, it’s downright classy. I’m sorry I didn’t check you out right away. Minx can get kind of unbalanced, and I had to take care of the women, but I forgot what kind of quiet and brooding critter you are. You’d just go to a cave and lick your wounds and then come out breathing fire once you didn’t die. This time, you would have died. I guess I’ll have to send a thank-you card to Dirk’s mama for kidnapping you. You must have really wanted to kill him.”
I nodded and wrapped my arms around my knees. “I had a knife at his throat. It’s not nearly as nice as this one. He left it for me so I can kill him the next time we meet, when I’m not hampered by blood loss and bullet shrapnel.” I held up the pretty dagger.
She whistled appreciatively. “See, now I get it. The clothes are a total fail, but if he gets you in the weapons where you feel it, that’s doable. After you told his mom where she could put her bribe, what happened?”
“I told her the account number and then I found Dirk down on the G level, taking a nap.”
“You could have killed him in his sleep, but you didn’t. Good. Wait until after the Three-Hundred to kill him. You took the money, I suppose that means you’re going to have to very publicly date Dirk just to antagonize his dear mama. It’s not my style, but I like it. Has grit. Intention. What are you going to do with the money? You could start a nice weapons collection, all daggers for the sake of your love, or a little love nest, which would be a nice bit of irony.”
I shook my head. “I think I’d like to donate to a women’s shelter, since that’s the theme of this month’s Girl’s Night.” Is that what I thought? I mean, two million was a drop in the Haversham fortune. Throw away money. It might make a difference in someone’s life, but not nearly as much as what Jezebel did, actually rescuing a truck filled with women headed for the worst pits in the world.
I shuddered while she nodded soberly, running her hands over my arm in an incredibly painful way. “That does fit the theme. Feels good,” she said, straightening up. “And now you need another bandage. Are you going to lounge around in those trashed pajamas? You probably should order incrediblyexpensive room service and anything else that piques your interest, since Dirk wants to pay. Did you tell him what his mama said?”
I shook my head. “No, but he’ll probably figure it out if he hasn’t already. He’s much smarter than he looks. Jezebel, what did you do when your target’s mother offered you money to leave him alone?”
She got a blank look on her face. “Did I say that?”
“Welcome to the gold-digger ranks.”
She frowned. “His mother never kidnapped me and offered me money to leave him alone. No, he accused me of being a gold-digger and then offered me the official position of his paid mistress.”
I winced. “That’s worse. What did you do? I suppose you took care of him, dumped him in the desert like a respectable woman.”
She sighed heavily and sank down on the couch next to me, legs outstretched. “Love does terrible things to people. I wanted to say yes, can you imagine? Oh, that’d be a picture, Jezebel Whiskey being some rich snob’s bought woman. I guess I did say yes, and then the second I got my mind back, I ran.”
“Was he your target?”
She gave a half-hearted shrug. “I suppose, in a way. I wanted respectability, like all the other elegant, glamorous people had. I didn’t realize that it was as fake as my breasts. I keep telling my surgeon that I should be able to use some of the space for weapon holders or something useful, but he thinks that they’d get infected. Well,” she said, standing up and stretching. “I’m going to head home and sleep until tomorrow morning. If you need anything, if the arm gets red and swollen, give me a holler.”
When she reached the door, I stood up and went over to grab her hand. “Jezebel, thank you for coming to check on me. Youshouldn’t care about me, about anyone, because that makes you weak and vulnerable.”
She flashed me a grin and squeezed my hand back. “You sound like I did ten years ago. That path leads to loneliness. For some people, the isolation is worse than the risk. If I were reading you, which I’m not, because I don’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong, I’d say that you’ve had enough loneliness to last a lifetime. But like I said, I’m not reading you, so do what you want. I left Prudence in the parking lot so you can drive home without waiting on a man or paying ridiculous taxi fares, although hotel parking isn’t much better.” She rolled her eyes and went into the hall, leaving me alone with an enormous bed and racks of clothing as ridiculous as my entire situation.
What should I do? I started for the bed, climbed under the covers and pulled the note out of my pocket.
I’m offended that our date was cut so short. Next time, no prior injuries to interrupt us. You’re beautiful, dangerous, a goddess of death, even in puppy slippers.
~D
He certainly didn’t wax flowery and long-winded in his notes, so why was heart doing the fluttery tingling thing? I’d never had anyone give me a note before. Other than death threats. What was I going to do about Dirk? About his mother? About my inability to pull the trigger? I’d actually called the therapist. Horse. It would be ridiculous to go and talk to someone I couldn’t trust, but I hadn’t been able to pull the trigger or put the dagger through Dirk. Put the dirk through Dagger? Either way. I wasn’t in control. I couldn’t keep screwing up or I would die, and worse, get other people killed. Minx. She’d shot those guys so cold and crisp, like a real assassin, the best of the best. And then had a mental breakdown. At least she’d pulled the trigger first. I had a mental breakdown first. Her way was much safer.
So what to do? I could forget about this scheme and go back to Boston. But as long as I wasn’t in control, my options were severely limited. Living with Jezebel was dangerous because she wasn’t entirely stable, but at the same time, very secure because who would be stupid enough to take her on?
