Keeping Secret: Secret McQueen, Book 4 (9 page)

I sighed and smiled at Olivia. “Let’s try something else.”

Three dresses later I was developing a lace rash and running out of patience. How could any bride in her right mind look forwards to this part of the experience? Even without the extra skirts and bustles, the dresses were heavy and cumbersome, the boning of each bodice threatened to cut off my breath, and all the white was making me feel more than a little guilty about the super-hot sex I’d had before I got here.

My impatience was starting to show. Every time Olivia brought a new dress to replace one I’d rejected, I would groan. To keep my girls from staging a revolt, someone had brought them a full bottle of Moët and a plate of finger sandwiches. I’m sure it was going to be added to my final costs, but I didn’t care as long as they were enjoying themselves.

Judging by the bubbling laughter that erupted every time I came out in a new dress, they were having way more fun than I was.

“I’m not
good
at this,” I complained to Kimberly when Olivia ducked out. “I’m not the kind of girl who feels her wedding is the best day of her life. I don’t
care
about this stuff.” I pointed to the wall of silk, satin and the godforsaken tulle.

Ignoring my uncharacteristic outburst of honesty, Kimberly smiled at me and patted my arm with a forced sisterly compassion. “It will be worth it when you see the look on Lucas’s face the first time he sees you.”

I tried to imagine the moment, but all I could bring to mind was Lucas’s cold eyes staring at Desmond’s dead body while he asked me, “What have you done?”

“I guess.”

Olivia returned a moment later, and soon I was trussed up again, itchy lace draped over my shoulder and my back exposed. The dress was pretty, but I wish someone had warned me how heavy lace was.

Trudging out, I stepped onto the platform in front of about ten thousand mirrors so the girls could get a look at what fifty-seven pounds of Venetian lace did for my five-foot-four frame. I turned so they could see the bare back.

Which was how I saw the gun.

The figure dressed all in black wouldn’t have stood out thanks to the uniform of all Kleinfeld employees, but the ski mask was a little out of the ordinary. As was the raised Beretta in the attacker’s gloved hand. There was a flash of light, followed by a muffled pop from the silencer. Without thinking, I dove for the most vulnerable person in range.

Olivia and I tumbled to the floor as the mirror exploded into a million pieces and Kimberly began to scream. Kellen joined in the chorus, obviously still scarred by the memory of what had happened on the highway earlier in the week. I, too, remembered that night as the pain in my shoulder responded to the sound of gunfire.

Mercedes—bless her police officer blood—had withdrawn a gun from an ankle holster and was ducked behind the loveseat with Brigit next to her. I rolled off Olivia and instructed her to stay the hell down. She was crying so hard I didn’t know if she heard me, but I hoped her common sense would give her the same instruction.

“Cedes,” I whispered loud enough for her to hear me as I hunkered down behind a mannequin. “I need my purse.”

She didn’t question me, just grabbed the large leather satchel and hurled it in my direction. With my beloved SIG 9mm in my hands, I immediately felt safer. With a bullet loaded in the chamber, the whole situation was less uncertain and foggy.

The salon was almost empty thanks to our late-evening appointment, but there were still quivering, whimpering masses of bridal white pressed to the floor and crying black-clad employees hiding in recessed closets, their hands covering their heads. I saw a young woman in a wedding dress get to her feet, and before I could shout out a warning she made a dash for the waiting room.

“Fuck, fuck,
fuck
,” I cursed as I rolled from my hiding place. The gunman was here for me, not these people, and I’d be damned if anyone died here tonight because of me. The women in the salon were here to prepare for the best day of their lives, and instead they were caught in a living nightmare.

This was what I did to people.

I wrestled with the skirt of my lace dress and jumped over the sofa, using the arm to propel myself higher, grateful for my bare feet. Another shot rang out an instant before I collided with the girl. We tumbled down in a mass of white fabric, and she screamed the way people can only if they’ve been shot—a high, keening wail.

I pushed off her and saw the tiniest bit of skin sheared from her arm, just above the elbow. If I hadn’t pushed her when I did, it would have hit her dead center in the chest. The gunman wasn’t aiming for flesh wounds.

“Shhh, shh, shush,” I whispered, trying to be soothing when I was really impatient with her wailing. “It’s a graze. You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine.” She continued to scream, and it got worse when she saw the gun in my hand.

Heavy boot steps moved behind the wall. The woman and I were hidden only by a decorative divider where dresses were hung on display. I wrenched a veil off a mannequin nearby and wrapped the delicate fabric around her bloody arm. The front of her dress was splattered red, and the spray from her wound had left my own lace gown soiled with smears of blood. With the veil in place, I squeezed her hand and lied to her face. “I’m a cop,” I told her, and the screaming stopped almost instantly. “And you’re going to be fine.”

She nodded, still whimpering like an injured puppy.

“Put pressure on this.” I squeezed her arm gently. She winced but did as she was told. I stood, and she grasped at my free hand.

“Don’t go.”

“I have to.”

Pulling away, I moved to round the corner when another shot went off, but this one had no silencer and came from behind me. Mercedes had her elbows braced on the edge of the white loveseat and her backup revolver aimed at me.

But not
at
me, at the space six inches to my left where my would-be assailant cried out in pain and was calling her a
stupid bitch
as he dove for cover behind the dividing wall with one hand cupping his injured arm. I skirted the wall after him, my gun raised and ready, but when I got to the other side, there was nothing but a streak of blood on the ivory carpet. A thump and a wail called my attention back to the main room, and I followed spots of blood to the commotion.

The assassin, still wearing his ski mask, was holding one of the younger salesgirls in a chokehold with his gun nestled in her auburn hair. She clawed at his arm, black rivers of mascara staining her cheeks as she stared at me with a pleading urgency.

“Let the girl go,” I said, my own weapon trained on the sliver of ski mask visible from behind his hostage’s head.

“I don’t want her. I came for you.”

Dozens of gazes focused on me with new interest. I was the reason they were in this horror show, and now they all knew it.

“Too bad she’s not alone,” Mercedes said, her gun leveled at him from the side, where she could easily get a shot through his skull and still avoid hitting the girl. “NYPD, motherfucker, you have the goddamned right to remain silent.”

Panic flashed in the gunman’s eyes. He was caught and he knew it. There were two guns trained on him. No way in hell was he getting out of this with his job complete. He took the gun off the salesgirl and shoved her at me using brutal force. I caught the girl before she fell and held her as she cried into my shoulder, never letting my aim waver.

Then, with a speed neither Mercedes nor I had anticipated, the failed assassin pressed his own weapon to the underside of his chin and pulled the trigger, raining a mist of pink, red and gray all over a display of haute couture gowns and the women hiding beneath them.

Chapter Thirteen

Two hours later I was the proud owner of not one but nine wedding dresses.

The lace number I’d been wearing, the ruined gown worn by the young bride, and the half-dozen monstrous-looking dresses that now had assassin brain smeared on them. Plus one simple, elegant, tulle-and-blood-free gown with a strapless bodice and subtle beading that happened to be the right size for me.

Police connections and a hundred and fifty thousand dollar payout went a long way to getting forgiveness for a bloodbath at a bridal salon.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of Detective Tyler Nowakowski’s black Nissan SUV, still wearing the bloodstained lace wedding dress. Police lights flashed in front of the boutique, and uniformed officers were gathered together collecting witness statements while others kept the goggling eyes of locals and tourists from taking photos as the ambulance took the injured bride away and the coroner did the same with the assassin.

Tyler was talking to Mercedes, and they both kept turning to look at me as they spoke. Neither of them appeared particularly happy. Cedes was going to have to file paperwork and give a statement to Internal Affairs to justify shooting the dead man before he could shoot me, but every witness statement agreed he had been the one to kill himself.

Officially, we were calling it a kidnapping attempt gone wrong. As the bride-to-be of a world-famous billionaire, I was a target for those looking to make a quick buck on my ransom, and this guy hadn’t expected half the bridal party to be armed. As a licensed P.I., I was allowed to carry a weapon, so no one would question the SIG. It was registered and everything.

In the end, it would be a pain in the ass of paperwork and press, but none of us were going to get in trouble. I’d have liked to bypass the whole thing and call my wardens in to adjust everyone’s memory and make the whole situation disappear, but the shop manager had hidden in the office and called the cops the second the first shot was fired.

Smart woman, but her quick action meant the police showed up well before I could set a cover-up into motion.

Tyler patted Cedes on the shoulder, and she smiled at him. They’d recently partnered up at the precinct, which was an obvious step for their careers given how often they ended up working on bizarre cases together. At least if they were united, they didn’t have to pretend the paranormal shit wasn’t real. Both of them were under my protection, belonging to me by vampire law. I didn’t like being responsible for the safety of so many people, but I hadn’t been willing to wipe their memories after a winter bloodbath a thousand times worse than this one.

People had died, people they knew and cared about, and I couldn’t bring myself to brainwash their experience into nonexistence. Which meant, according to council law, they were my problem now.

The driver’s door opened and Tyler got in, handing me a blue-and-white Greek-stylized paper cup full of lukewarm coffee. It even smelled bitter. I accepted it, cupping it in my cold hands, and stared at the scene on the street with detachment.

“You sure know how to find trouble,” he said, arching a thick black eyebrow at me.

“You’re not the first person to tell me so, Detective.”

“Is this mess…” he pointed to the officers milling around on the sidewalk and the dozens of curious looky-loos, “…vampire related?” The way he said
vampire
almost made me chuckle. He’d known the truth for about two months and was still having trouble saying the word like it related to something real.

“No.”

“You’re sure? Mercedes said the guy was an assassin gunning for you.”

I nodded. “He was. That’s not the vampire M.O.”

“No?”

“No. If the vampires wanted me dead, I would just vanish. You’d never know. If they were really cool about it, you might not remember
ever
knowing me.”

Tyler looked away from the unfolding drama. “They can do that?”

“We can do a lot of things.” I smiled sadly into my lukewarm coffee and took a sip of the dark, bitter liquid. “You don’t really want to know about this, Tyler.”

“I do.”

“Not now.”

He frowned, wringing his hands on the steering wheel. “You’ve done your damnedest to give us the bare minimum, Secret, and I can only let it slide for so long. I see a guy get dismembered by something impervious to bullets, and then you make me say
nothing
when you let vampires set fire to the station.”

“I know.” I met his eyes, and our gazes held for a long moment. I’d lied to Tyler in the past—I was finished with that now. “I need you to be patient.”

“I
have
been patient.”

“More patient. Saintly patient.”

Tyler sighed and snatched the coffee out of my hand, taking a deep swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. There was something refreshingly masculine about Tyler, like an old noir cop. I liked being around him now that he didn’t spend his time growling at me and thinking I was up to no good.

Now he
knew
I was up to no good, and he could like me again.

He handed the coffee back, and I accepted it, sipping from what was left.

“Everything I tell you gets me in trouble,” I told him. “Humans aren’t supposed to know. That’s the first and most important rule.”

“The first rule of Vamp Club is you don’t talk about Vamp Club?”

I howled with laughter, almost spewing coffee back into the cup. It was the first time I’d laughed in a while, and it felt good. Freeing.

“Something like that.”

“But you’ll give me something more than what you have?”