Born to Darkness (6 page)

Mac hadn’t thought twice about it. It was all just part of what they did whenever she showed up. Justin told her what he’d been doing since they’d last connected—usually not a lot—and she … Well, she gave him a list of excuses—all true—for why she hadn’t called, why it had been so long since her last visit. Work was crazy, she’d had to travel, and this time she’d even lost her phone. And even though he never really understood, he forgave her.

Always.

And then the talking part of their visit was over and he would drill her. There wasn’t much that Justin was good at, but when it came to sex, he was a natural.

The last time, it had happened right on the kitchen table. He’d swept the clutter off onto the floor, as she’d laughed and kissed him back and sent him into orbit, too.

The table was clear again now—the entire place was tidy, the
garbage was out, there were no perishables rotting in the fridge. He’d cleaned up before leaving, which was so not a typical Justin thing to do that Mac was pretty certain this Sandi girl had been involved.

Part of her still couldn’t believe that he’d actually left. He’d
left
. But his clothes were gone from the closet, and he’d taken the quilt off the bed—the one that his grandmother had made. He’d left his cell phone behind on the bedside table—no doubt because Mac had bought it for him.

He’d also left her last month’s electric bill—another expense she’d always picked up, along with the rent.

She stashed both items in the pockets of her cargo pants as she stared at the bed, wondering if he and Sandi had …

Okay, don’t go there. She could feel the girl’s presence in the apartment. She could practically taste the bitch’s happiness, but it was more about going home. Or maybe not.
She was finally going home, and Daddy would love Justin, but not half as much as the way
she
loved Justin when he—

Yeah, he’d had sex with Sandi-with-an-i in that bed. More than once. Nice.

It made her think about Tim, and she hated thinking about Tim—or her father, or her father’s third wife and Tim’s mother, Janice. None of whom Mac had seen or even e-mailed in over a dozen years.

Mac limped back into the living room, well aware that she’d thought about Tim every time she’d visited Justin. It had been impossible not to. It sucked, and she would have stayed away, if she didn’t need to use the sex to help her heal. Yeah,
that
was why she’d come here as often as she had.

It certainly hadn’t had anything to do with real emotion—with anything as laughable as love.

She knew that Justin didn’t love her. He’d never loved her. Instead, she’d inadvertently used her crazy-ass Greater-Than mental powers to make him
think
that he did, to make him want her, to desire her. She’d charmed him, dazzled him, entranced him. And
then she’d given in to temptation, hating herself for her weakness, and kept him like a self-walking, self-feeding puppy in this apartment that she’d paid for, telling herself that he was using her as much as she was using him.

And every now and then she’d dropped by to get shagged and adored by the kind of guy who would never have adored her, let alone been faithful, had she not been a Greater-Than.

There’d been a time, before Mac had learned to use and control her talents, when out of sight very literally meant out of mind. She’d discovered at an early age that when she was with a man—any man—she had the power to make him want her, ardently. But as soon as she walked away, those feelings vanished—instantly forgotten. Over the years, that had changed. She’d not only learned how to control her powers, which, most of the time, kept total strangers from following her down the street, tongues hanging out. But she’d also developed her skills to the point where a lover could well remain charmed and faithful for weeks.

Justin had pursued her—relentlessly—when she’d first met him. She’d tried to shut him down, but he hadn’t let up. And she was probably going to go to hell—if it existed—for not being strong enough to walk away. Although she
did
pay for her sins by letting him live here for free.

But now he was gone.

Mac left the apartment, locking the door behind her, and as she went down the stairs that led out to the street, she jarred her ankle hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, despite her ability to block physical pain.

Yeah,
that’s
why she was crying. Her fucking foot hurt. God, she was a pathetic idiot, weeping over some stupid man.

Justin hadn’t really meant all that much to her, either. If he truly had?
She
would’ve left
him
—a long time ago.

Mac went down to the sidewalk, jamming her hands into her gloves and then her pockets, because even though it was spring, the night wind was cold. Hunching her shoulders, she limped toward Kenmore Square, unsure of her long-term plans—what to
do with the apartment now that Justin was history, how to deal with her injured ankle—but dead solid when it came to the next twenty minutes of her life.

She was heading to the nearest bar on Beacon Street—a dive called Father’s that had been there forever.

It had been one total hellfest of a night, and she needed a drink.

Shane was winning when she walked in.

His plan was a simple one: spend a few hours here in this lowlife bar and win enough money playing pool to take the T down to Copley Square, where there was a cluster of expensive hotels. Hit one of the hotel bars, where the women not only had all of their teeth, but they also had corporate expense accounts and key cards to the comfortable rooms upstairs.

But drinks there were pricey. Shane had spent his remaining fifty-eight seconds at the Kenmore comm-station checking menus, and he knew he’d need at least twenty dollars just to sit at the bar and nurse a beer. Fifty to buy a lady a drink. And expense account or not, you had to be ready to start the game by buying the lady a drink.

But then
she
walked in—or rather limped in. She was smaller than the average woman, and slight of build. She’d also injured her foot, probably her ankle, but other than that, she carried herself like an operator. She’d certainly scanned the room like one as she’d come in.

Which was when Shane had gotten a hit from her eyes. They were pale and he couldn’t tell from this distance whether they were blue or green or even a light shade of brown. But the color didn’t matter, it was the glimpse he got of the woman within that had made him snap to attention—internally, that is.

She looked right at him, gave him some direct eye contact, then assessed him. She took a very brief second to appreciate his handsome face and trim form, catalogued him, and finally dismissed him.

Of course, he
was
playing the role of the hick just off the turnip truck—he would have dismissed himself, too, had he just walked in.

Shane watched from the corner of his eye as she sat at the bar, shrugged out of her jacket to reveal a black tank top, then pulled off her hat and scarf. She was completely tattoo-free—at least in all of the traditional places that he could currently see.

Her light-colored hair was cut short and was charmingly messed. But it was the back of her neck that killed him. Long and slender and pale, it was so utterly feminine—almost in proud defiance of her masculine clothing choices, her nicely toned shoulders and arms, and her complete and total lack of makeup.

And Shane was instantly intrigued. He found himself restrategizing and forming a solid Plan B almost before he was aware he was doing it.

Plan A had him missing the next shot—the seven in the side pocket and the four in the corner—which would lead to his opponent, a likable enough local man named Pete, winning the game. After which Shane would proclaim it was Pete’s lucky night, and challenge the man to a rematch, double or nothing, all the while seeming to get more and more loaded.

Because Pete was a far better player than he was pretending to be. Pete was hustling
him
, and all of the regulars in this bar knew it, and at that point the bets would start to fly. Shane would drunkenly cover them all, but then would play the next game in earnest, identifying himself as a hustler in kind as he kicked Pete’s decent but amateurish ass. He’d then take his fairly won earnings and boogie out of Dodge.

Because if there was one thing Shane had learned from the best pool player in his SEAL team—an E-6 named Magic Kozinski—it was that you didn’t hustle a game and stick around for a victory beer. That could be hazardous to one’s health. Resentment would grow. And resentment plus alcohol was never a good mix.

Plan B, however, allowed Shane to stick around. It gave him options.

So he called and then sank both the seven and the four, then
called and missed the two, which put the balls on the table into a not-impossible but definitely tricky setup. Which Pete intentionally missed, because making the shot would’ve ID’d him as the hustler that
he
was.

They finished the game that way—with Pete setting up a bunch of nice, easy shots, and letting Shane win. Which put five dollars into Shane’s nearly empty pocket.

Which was enough to buy a lady a drink in a shithole like this.

“You’re on fire tonight,” Pete said, when Shane didn’t do an appropriate asshole-ish victory dance. “How ’bout a rematch, bro?”

And Shane wanted to sit Pete down and give him a crash course in hustling, because this was a beginner’s mistake. You never,
ever
suggested the rematch yourself, not if you’d just intentionally lost the game. The mark had to do it, otherwise the hustle was too much of a con. The mark had to think he was going to screw
you
out of your hard-earned pay.

Pete’s suggestion made him significantly less likable and more of the kind of sleazebag who deserved his ass handed to him on a platter.

“I don’t know, man,” Shane said, massaging the muscles at the base of his skull as if he’d had a hard day at the construction site. “You’re pretty good. Let me think about it …?”

Pete thankfully didn’t push. “I’ll be here all night. But, hey, lemme buy you another beer. On account of your winning and all.”

Better and better. As long as Pete didn’t follow him over to the bar. “Thanks,” Shane said. “I’m going to, um, hit the men’s and …”

But instead of going into the bathroom in the back, he went to the bar and slid up onto one of the stools next to the woman with the pretty eyes. She was drinking whiskey, straight up, and she’d already ordered and paid for her next two glasses—they were lined up in front of her in a very clear message that said,
No, butthead, you may not buy me a drink
. She’d also purposely left an empty-stool buffer between herself and the other patrons. And the glance
she gave Shane as he sat let him know that she would have preferred keeping her personal DMZ intact.

Her eyes were light brown, but she’d flattened them into a very frosty
don’t fuck with me
, dead-woman-walking glare. It was a hell of a talent. The first chief Shane had ever worked with in the SEAL teams—Andy Markos, rest his soul—could deliver the same soulless affect. It was scary as shit to be hit with that look. Even to those who knew him well and outranked him.

But here and now, Shane let this woman know that he
wasn’t
scared and
didn’t
give a shit that she didn’t want him sitting there, by giving her an answering smile; letting his eyes twinkle a little, as if they were sharing a private joke.

She broke the eye contact as she shook her head, muttering something that sounded like, “Why do I do this to myself?”

Any conversational opener was a win, so Shane took it for the invitation that it wasn’t. “Do what to yourself?”

Another head shake, this one with an eye roll. “Look, I’m not interested.”

“Actually, I came over because I saw that you were limping,” Shane lied. “You know, when you came in? I trashed my ankle about a year ago. They giving you steroids for the swelling?”

“Really,” she said. “You’re wasting your time.”

She wasn’t as pretty as he’d thought she was, from a distance. But she wasn’t exactly not-pretty either. Still, her face was a little too square, her nose a little too small and round, her lips a little too narrow. Her short hair wasn’t blond as he’d first thought, but rather a bland shade of uninspiring light brown. She was also athletic to the point of near breastlessness. The thug he’d tangled with earlier that evening had had bigger pecs than this woman did beneath her tank top.

But those eyes …

They weren’t just brown, they were golden brown, with bits of hazel and specks of green and darker brown thrown in for good measure.

They were incredible.

“Be careful if they do,” Shane told her. “You know, give you steroids. I had a series of shots that made me feel great. They really helped, but ten months after the last injection, I was still testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Which was problematic when I tried to earn some easy money cage fighting.”

She turned to look at him. “Is that it? You done with your public service announcement?”

He smiled back at her. “Not quite. I did a little research online and found out that that particular drug can stay in your system for as long as eighteen months. I’ve still got six months to kill.”