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Chapter One

Vivi

I had to just grit my teeth and face it. The van was stuck.

I’d been spinning my tires in sloppy mud for over fifteen minutes now, and my poor old Volkswagen van was groaning and lurching with the strain. I had to suck it up, and devise an adult solution, probably one that required spending money I could ill afford. It also involved looking stupid and feckless in front of a bunch of people that I had never even met, which made me wince and cringe. Alas, poor me.

I killed the engine, shoved my tangled red hair back behind my ears, and pounded on the steering wheel with a grinding shriek of frustration. I was all alone, aside from my long-suffering dog, Edna, so I could throw a discreet little tantrum. Edna would never tell.

Didn’t make me feel any better, though. The world outside the rain-sluiced windshield was a wavering blur of greens. Lightning flashed. I braced myself for the huge crash … and Edna yelped when it jolted us, scrambling frantically into my lap.

I petted the quivering dog. “Easy, honey girl,” I crooned. “It’ll be over soon. We’ll get through it. We always do.”

A hopeful thought, but I would still be in a very sticky jam when the storm was over. Perhaps an even stickier jam, depending on how much water was still in the sky, still getting ready to fall on top of me. This road could slide right off the mountain and bury us under tons of mud.

Which struck me as a train of thought to avoid right now.

It had seemed like a good idea last night to just push on, rain and all. Truth was, I’d been simply too scared to stop driving.

Too much tragic, horrible, terrifying shit had happened recently. The most horrific being that my adopted mother, Lucia D’Onofrio, had been murdered some weeks before.

That calamity had knocked me and my two sisters all onto our asses.

To make matters worse, my two sisters, Nancy and Nell, had both been attacked, multiple times. We had finally managed to conclude, mostly based on the meager crumbs of information the attackers had let drop when they kidnapped Nell, that our enemies were looking for some mysterious art object, something hidden decades ago in Italy, before the Second World War. As far as we could tell, everyone who knew where this thing was, or hell, even what it was, had long since died.

The killers had tried to get information from Lucia, but they had failed utterly. Lucia had died without giving it to them. Because Lucia was a boss. Fierce. Indomitable. My role model, my hero.

After that, infuriated by their failure, those murdering assholes turned their sights on us. Lucia’s clueless adopted daughters, who knew jack shit about Lucia’s mysterious past.

It was hard to argue with stomach-churning fear when I was all alone, no one to act tough and fearless for. Only Edna knew the truth, and bless her sweet heart, she did not judge me. She just panted her hot, fishy breath heavily into my face and offered her solid, comforting presence like the very good girl that she was.

Edna’s silken, chocolate brown fur had soaked up many tears I wouldn’t show to anyone else. But even with my trusty dog at my side, I hadn’t been able to face a roadside motel with a single door lock between me and the night, which was all I could afford. And I was the only D’Onofrio chick that didn’t have a big, vigilant, protective guy giving the hairy eyeball to every stranger within shouting range of his new lady.

Which made me the obvious soft target. On my own, as always.

Not that I begrudged my sisters their good fortune. They both deserved to have a tough, devoted, foxy guy worshipping at their shrines. In fact, Liam and Duncan still didn’t know how lucky they were in their fabulous new fiancées. They were going to be discovering it for the rest of their lives. Those men had been tongue-kissed by Fate.

I was intensely grateful for those guys, and what they had done for Nancy and Nell. Both men were tough, vigilant, and battle-tested. My sisters were as safe with Duncan and Liam as they could possibly be in these strange days. But as for me, well. I was feeling very solitary and unworshipped. I had been feeling that way even before Ulf Haupt and John the Fiend, a.k.a. Snake Eyes, started attacking the D’Onofrio women.

I was a generally cheerful person, and I made a real effort to keep it positive. But under these conditions, it was almost impossible to keep my chin up.

Both of my sisters had tried to persuade me to stay with them until we figured out what to do about our bloodthirsty enemies. But who knew how long that would take?

That solution struck me as nonproductive, unsustainable, and ultimately embarrassing. How long could a woman realistically sit around like a bump on a log in her sister’s home, bored out of her mind, not working, not making art, being a fi­nancial drain and a big fat fifth wheel?

No way. I just couldn’t. I would go mad. I would start to misbehave.

Besides, I really missed my dog. She’d been boarding with a friend of mine who lived out in the country since things got weird, but my sweet girl belonged with me. I’d never committed to anything in my life the way I’d committed to Edna. Every day I had forced her to wait for me had hurt me just a little bit more.

Nah, I just had to muddle on somehow. Even with all the grief and jealousy and confusion and stalking fiends. I was plenty stubborn. It was a D’Onofrio thing.

I stroked Edna’s floppy, velvety soft ears, and buried my face against her silky fur. It calmed me down and let me breathe a little deeper as I peered out at the heavy, swollen gray sky. I supposed I could call my new mysterious landlord Jack Kendrick, Duncan’s old friend from his stint as a field agent in the NSA. Kendrick was liable to know how to begin solving my complicated logistical problems.

But oh, God. How freaking embarrassing was that.

I checked my phone. Well, hell. There was no cover­age out here anyway. That settled that. I was utterly lost in the ass end of nowhere.

Which was the whole idea, of course. To hide out somewhere remote, lost, trackless, where Ulf Haupt and Snake Eyes John would never think to look for me.

I’d made it to the town of Silverfish, Oregon at around two in the after­noon, if one could even call the place a town. It wasn’t much more than a wide spot on the road. Through the torrents of rain, all I saw was a convenience store, a gas pump, a bait and tackle shop, and a boarded-up old Dairy Queen.

I had followed the directions, which I’d been advised to print out, since the place was out of the reach of GPS, and made my way onto progressively smaller roads, finally arriving at a dirt track with a hand-painted sign that read Moffat’s Way. The directions offered nothing more. At that point, it was straight on til morning.

But Moffat’s Way wasn’t a driveway, it was an old logging road, deeply rutted and frighteningly steep. By the time I had realized how rough the road was, those ruts had become streams, with no place anywhere wide enough to turn around.

Then I made a sharp turn into a deep puddle, sank into the mud at a terrifying tilted angle, and that was that.

I leaned my hot cheek against the cool window, mind racing. Still procrastinating. Edna stuck her nose into my hand, gave it a sloppy, comforting lick, and then started enthusistically in on the side of my face.

Who knew how much farther this road went on before it came to Jack Kendrick’s land? I hadn’t bothered to inform myself about such nitpicky de­tails. I just figured, I’d get there when I got there, since the road stopped at his house. You couldn’t go wrong, the directions said. Hah. If there was one thing I was unusually good at, it was taking wrong turns. Everyone had his or her own little superpower, and that was mine.

I spun the tires a few more times, just to torture myself. It was time to take action. The self-sufficient, proactive, fearless Vivi D’Onofrio could rise to any occasion, I bracingly told myself. Psychopathic kid­nappers? Bring ’em on.

A long shudder racked my body. Well. Maybe not so much.

The rain had eased off from a pounding torrent to a regular shower, so I flung open the door of the van, looking around myself in vain for a solid place to put my feet. Edna crawled eagerly over my lap, and I clutched at her harness in alarm. “No way, babe,” I said sternly. “All I need is a mud-covered dog. Get back inside. In!”

Edna shrank back, looking reproachful. I rolled my pants up, looked at my cheerful, bright-green high-tops regretfully, and jumped out. At least they were old, like most of my clothes at this point. Maybe a run through a washing machine would salvage them.

Cold, sucking mud swallowed my feet to the ankles. I slogged around the van and assessed the damage.

The tires were half buried. Chilly rain plastered my hair to my scalp and the green t-shirt to my body. I let loose with a stream of explicit profanity, the foul, biting kind I’d learned in the Bronx as a child, and punctuated by kicking a slimy tire. Hard enough to make a bolt of pain shoot up my leg.

Yeah, that’s right, Viv. Check me out, yapping like a fishwife at inanimate objects. Very impressive. Very mature.

Farther back, I’d seen what looked like a collapsed shack. Maybe some planks laid down in front of the tires would give them purchase to get out of the muck. Beyond the puddle, the road looked almost drivable.

I would exhaust every possibility before limping to Jack Kendrick’s house on foot like a cat left out in the rain. A fine first impression that would be.

Kendrick was still a mystery. I knew only what Duncan had told me. That he was some sort of ex-spy commando who’d been on a top-secret intelligence-gathering task force with Duncan years ago.

Now, unaccountably, he grew flowers. Duncan had been vague about the details of that career change, his brain being flash-fried from being insanely in love with Nell.

This mysterious Kendrick lived alone in the woods. He evidently had an apartment in his barn. According to Duncan, the man was cool with letting me huddle in this flowery bower like a quivering, nose-twitching bunny until we fig­ured out what to do about our art-hungry, murdering psychopaths. Very nice of him, but it didn’t say much for his smarts, or his sense of self-preservation. He must owe Duncan money. Only a true bonehead would take on a hard-luck case like me.

I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Duncan had assured me that Kendrick knew the score, that he had agreed to the plan, that he wasn’t intimidated by the risks. But come on. No normal person would agree to something that crazy. The guy must have a screw loose. Yeah, sure, invite the unknown girl with the deadly psychopath stalking her to crash in my barn. What could possibly go wrong?

This quiet, bucolic retreat had sounded so perfect, back in New York City. Too perfect, in retrospect. Now that I was pondering it all alone, stuck in the mud.

Ah, yes. There it was, a stack of gray, weathered planks with the odd rusty nails sticking through them at crazy angles. I wrestled and yanked until I’d extricated a few boards, along with some ugly splinters, then nego­tiated the slippery boards through the fir thickets. By the time I got back to the van, soggy, scratched, and panting, I was spewing a fresh stream of profanity. I hauled out my toolbox, hammered the nails flat, and started wrestling them into place. Mud oozed over the tops of the planks, and I was thoroughly slimed from chest to feet when I heard the deep voice from behind me.

“I don’t think that’ll work right now.”

I jolted up, knocking my head on the bumper. “Who is that?” I scrambled to my feet, looking frantically around myself. There was no one there that I could see.

I scanned the trees and reached for the tire iron stowed under the seat, groping until my fingers closed over the bar of cold, hard metal.

“Where are you?” I called out. “Say something.”

“Over here.”

I spun, brandishing the tire iron. A tall man stood there, half hidden in the trees. He was shrouded in a dull-green hooded rain poncho, dripping with rain. I would never have seen him if he had not spoken.

Adrenaline zinged through me. I gave the tire iron an experimental heft. “What do you think you’re doing, sneaking up on me like that?” I demanded.

He took a step forward. I raised the tire iron with a menacing face, and he stopped.

“Sorry I scared you,” he said.

Edna whined anxiously from the van, sticking her nose outside the door I’d left halfway open. “Stay, Edna,” I snapped. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m not going to attack you,” he said, pushing back his hood. “You can relax.”

Relax, my ass. Light, silver-gray eyes, cool and unreadable. His face was brown, lean. High cheekbones, a hooked nose. A scar on one temple slashed down into one of his straight, dark eyebrows, leaving a white line. He had a short beard, or maybe longish beard stubble. Dark hair, long and shaggy. He regarded her steadily. Drops of rain beaded his face. He did not look like Snake Eyes, as Nancy and Nell had described him. This guy was not loathsome, swollen, squint-eyed, or malodorous. Not that I could smell him from here. I would have to get much closer. And inhale. Hungrily.

This guy was oh-my-God fine. I tried to breathe. My terror was transmuting itself into utter embarrassment. An unfortunate development.

“Put it down, please.” A small smile crinkled up the skin around his eyes.

“What?” I said, realizing that my mouth had been hanging open.

“The tire iron.” He glanced at my white-knuckled hand.

“Oh.” I felt foolish, panicked. Acutely conscious of the mud on my clothes, the hair stuck to my face, the way my wet, muddy shirt clung to my tits. Of how incredibly tall he was. Even if he wasn’t Snake Eyes John, he was still a stranger, and there was nobody around here for miles. Just me and Edna, the world’s friendliest dog.

I looked at the hand that clutched the tire iron. It was shak­ing.

“The boards aren’t going to work,” he said. “It was a good idea, but the mud is too deep.” He took a step closer. I backed away, then kicked myself for acting like a scared, cringing kitten.

He picked up a stick, walking away from me and heading around the back of the van, prodding at the mud with a stick he held.

Released from the spell of his eyes, I finally managed to ex­hale. Get a grip. He was not going to leap on me like a rabid dog. I had to at least try to be civil. My face felt so hot, raindrops should be skittering on it like water on a griddle. Insane. I never blushed.

“I asked what you were doing here,” I said, trying to sound authoritative.

“This is my land,” he said.

“Oh.” I dropped my gaze, before his bright eyes could catch it and nail it down again. “Do you always walk around in thunder­storms?”

“I do, actually. Rainstorms, at least. The thunder took me by surprise. But I like the rain. I like the way it smells. I really, really wish you’d put that thing down.”

“I’ll put it down when I’m ready to put it down,” I said shakily.

He tossed down his stick. “Whatever. Just don’t hit me with it.”

“I wouldn’t without provocation,” I said.

His mouth twitched. “Oh, please,” he murmured. “Would you just chill the fuck out, already? You are safe. Completely safe. I swear it. On my immortal soul. Okay?”

That made me feel ridiculous, so I promptly threw the tire iron back into the van in disgust.

“You travel alone?” he asked.

“No. With my dog,” I replied.

Edna barked excitedly when her existence was mentioned, taking it as permission to bound out the door. She landed in the mud with a wet plop, shook herself, and trotted over to the stranger. She gave his large brown hand a cautious sniff, then panted up into his face, smiling. Then she stroked her mud-spattered head against his leg.

“Down, Edna,” I ordered, startled. Edna had never cozied up to strangers without taking her cue from me first. It made me feel vaguely betrayed. “Get back in here!”

Edna trotted back, panting and smiling. “Sorry about that,” I said.

“No problem.” A brief smile lit his face. “Nice dog.”

“Too nice,” I muttered. I started to push back the tangled hair that clung to my face, but stopped short, remembering the mud on my hands.

He gazed at me, projecting a weird, supernatural calm. Maybe hanging out in nature did that to a guy. Look at him, walking through pouring rain because he liked the way it smelled. What was he, a freaking Jedi knight? Give me a break.

It made me feel embarrassed to be myself. Frantic, citified, stressed out, nervous, afraid. A shallow little squeaking hamster racing on a wheel. And the hungry, fanged tomcats were lurking out there, licking their chops. Waiting for lunch.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, I needed a vacation. Or at the very least, a night’s sleep.

“Your van’s not going anywhere today,” he remarked.

I suppressed a snarky comment and wiped my hands on the hem of my drenched t-shirt. Good grief. He could see everything through that shirt. I hadn’t worn a bra, being all alone, and I wasn’t wearing a jacket. And oh, shit, now I was blushing again.

“I figured that out all by myself,” I said. “Can you tell me how I might get a tow around here?”

He prodded the mud with his stick once again, looked up at the lowering clouds. “That isn’t going to happen for a while,” he said calmly. “See how steep that hill is? No one can pull you out until this dries up.” He stroked Edna’s head. “What possessed you to drive a beat-up old vehicle like this out onto an old logging road in the middle of a thunderstorm?”

“This beat-up old vehicle is the only one I have,” I shot back. “It’s been my home for years, and it’s a perfectly fine machine that’s served me very well. It’s the damn road that’s the problem!”

A frown appeared between the man’s brows. “You live in this thing?” His tone was faintly incredulous.

“Yes, actually,” I said. “I’m a craftswoman. I work the craft fair cir­cuit, so I often end up living on the road. Up till now, that is.”

“Interesting, but this road goes nowhere that’s relevant to you and your crafts fair circuit, so it doesn’t explain what you’re doing on my land.”

Why, that arrogant dickhead. “That’s none of your business,” I told him.

“It is now,” he said. “Since this thing is blocking my road.”

I lifted my chin. “Wait a second,” I said. “Didn’t you just say that nobody’s going to be driving on it until it’s dry anyhow? Ergo, I’m not blocking anything, buddy.”

His eyes looked me thoughtfully up and down. “True enough, I guess,” he said. “But it’s still my land.” He wasn’t ogling me, but my body still shivered, as if he were checking me out, inch by inch.

I suppressed an urge to cross my arms across my breasts. I would remain nonchalant or die in the attempt. “Besides, I’m not trespassing,” I said, with all the bravado I could muster. “I’m on my way to my new landlord’s place. Can you tell me how far it is to Jack Kendrick’s house?”

The man’s face went blank. His brow furrowed as he stared at me, and then at the mud-splattered, fantastical painting on the side of my van. “Wait,” he said slowly. “Hold on. Don’t tell me you’re Vivien D’Onofrio.”

Tension started to tighten, in my belly, my neck. “Why shouldn’t I tell you that?”

“You’re not what I expected,” he said. “I have to talk to Duncan.”

“Oh, my God. You mean, you’re Jack Kendrick?” I was appalled. I’d been expecting a stolid jarhead type, older, thicker, with a paunch, balding graying hair buzzed off. Maybe a long, bushy mountain man kind of beard.

Not a foxy silver-eyed sex god who loved to walk in the rain.

End of Excerpt