Shiver of Fear (25 page)

If Finn MacCauley were captured, it would be next to impossible to keep Devyn Sterling out of the story. Her darkest, most
shameful secret would become public information. And that, he suspected, mattered very much to this woman.

The last of the flames ebbed, not as warm, but still… combustible. She stood for a long time and watched the ashes.

Finally he spoke. “What are you doing, Dev?”

She sucked in a guilty breath, looking over her shoulder to meet his gaze.

Please don’t lie. Please, please just don’t lie
, he thought.

“I’m… getting warm.”

He could take the questionable genes. But he couldn’t take lying. Lesson learned—or relearned, as the case may be.

“Come to bed,” he said huskily. “I’ll keep you warm.”

She glanced at the fireplace, which now held merely ashes. “All right.”

And as he held her, he forced himself to remember exactly how betrayal felt. Not good, not good at all.

Every muscle in Sharon’s body hurt. She’d broken at least one rib when the car pinned her to the fence. Her face stung where
Liam Baird had smacked her, her lower lip swollen and dripping blood. Her wrists burned from the ties that bound them behind
her.

If this went on much longer, she’d tell him everything he insisted on knowing.

And then she’d be dead.

She hung her head, her eyes opening and closing in exhaustion and pain, her gaze landing on a few wavy strands of silver hair
on the floor. So that’s why her scalp hurt.

He’d left her in the lab, the lights on, the cabinets open. Such a fool when it came to science. But no fool when it came
to pain and misery. That he could inflict like a professional.

The door popped open, so hard it hit the wall behind it with a resounding crack. She managed to lift her head, making out
two men in her blurred vision. One was Liam. The other was one of the men she’d seen come and go in the house.

“Who did you call?” Liam asked her for the twentieth time.

“No one.” She couldn’t waver.

The back of his hand slammed so hard she felt her brain dislodge and heard her neck crack. “Don’t fucking lie to me,
Doctor
Greenberg.” He said it as though he didn’t even believe she was a doctor anymore.

Her face throbbed, white blades of misery shooting through her head.

“A call was made to an American cell phone number—that much we picked up with our monitoring system. You were seen dialing
a phone. Who did you call?”

“I didn’t.”

He raised his hand again, and she braced for the next blow, but the other man grabbed his arm and stopped it.

“Wait a sec, Liam. Let me have at her.”

Oh, God. That didn’t sound good.

Liam backed down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, a disgusted look directed at her. “She’s a plant, Ian. We were
had. Fucking
had
with this one.”

The other man took a step closer, and Sharon could make out his features, classic black Irish with thick dark curls and deep
blue eyes. She remembered his name now—Ian O’Rourke.

He didn’t strike her as one of Liam’s thugs. More brainy and calm. Maybe that meant he wasn’t about to pound the holy shit
out of her.

“Dr. Greenberg,” he said, his voice soft. Too soft. Like the blow would come when she least expected it.

She squinted at him. Not that she had any choice; her left eye was so swollen she could barely see out of it.

“It doesn’t seem likely that you’re a plant, now, does it?”

“What the fuck?” Liam asked. “She’s running off at night, having secret phone calls, lying about it, demanding more money,
all the time delaying everything we’re trying to do here.” He gestured wildly to the lab. “I don’t trust her.”

“That might be,” Ian continued. “But we went after
her
, Liam. You did the research on this deadly spore business and sought out the world’s expert.”

Liam snorted softly, as if he doubted she was an expert on anything. “
You
told me to get a woman.”

“Usually they’re more pliable,” Ian said, giving her a harsh gaze, as though she should know better than to not be pliable.
“But we found her, so how could she be a plant?”

Exactly what she’d wanted them to think back when this whole plan came together.

“Is this your phone, Dr. Greenberg?” Ian asked.

Oh, Lord. They’d found it in the cemetery. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Ian found it not ten feet from where you were,” Liam said.

Did the text go through?

“Where’d you hide the battery?” Liam demanded.

“I… don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The battery could have fallen out on impact,” Ian said.

Then it was a miracle. But had the message gone
through? Had they traced it? Could they find out who she’d called? She’d been careful to delete everything else, including
the message sending her the phone number. But had she been careful enough?

Baird turned to Ian and they shared a look, and a quick comment, too soft and too thick with Irish accents for her to follow.

One more time, Ian dipped to get face-to-face with her. “Dr. Greenberg, you don’t want to die, do you?”

She shook her head.

“Then do what Mr. Baird asks you to do.”

“I never said I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, for Chrissake,” Liam said, pushing off from the lab table he leaned against. “This is a fucking waste of time, Ian. Get
out of here. I’ll deal with her.”

But Ian didn’t move. “Why don’t you go cool off, Liam? Freaking out isn’t going to help anyone or anything. Let me have a
minute alone with her.”

Liam narrowed his eyes at the other man, assessing him and then backing off. “I have to piss,” he said brusquely. “Then she
gets to work and I don’t give a flying goddamn hell if the spores are full grown or not. She can finish the job or die.”

And
die, more likely. She closed her eyes as another wave of pain cascaded through her as he left. How the hell could she get
out of this? Who would help her now? She was in a self-made no-man’s-land.

Ian stepped even closer. “You had no idea it could hurt so much, did you, Sharon? We tried to tell you.”

For a second, she stopped breathing, sure that she’d misunderstood him over the sound of her labored gasps. We? Who did
he
work for?

“Tried to warn you not to contact anyone.”

With superhuman strength, she lifted her head to see him, to dig for the subtext she imagined she heard in his voice.

Did he know who sent her here? Who
really
sent her here?

“You’re on your own now, Doctor,” he whispered. “You know nobody can help without compromising everything.”

She drew a ragged breath. “Do you—”

He silenced her with a deadly look. “You might die.”

“What can I do?”

“The job you were hired to do,” he said simply.

“What about… her?”

“We’re doing everything possible to take care of her.”

Who was
we
? Take care of as in get rid of? Or take care of as in protect?

But before she could ask any questions, the door popped open, and Liam looked like he’d done more than go to the bathroom.
His eyes were bright as he entered, his cell phone in his hand.

“We’re out of time.” He jerked his head to the door. “Get out of here, Ian. This woman has work to do. The buyer is ready,
and we need to be, too.”

When Ian left, without so much as a glance at her, she hung her head again, the fight slipping from her body.

“You ready to give up, Doctor?”

“I can’t do anything tonight.”

“Then let me spell it out for you. I know who you called, Dr. Greenberg.”

Her blood chilled, more at his tone than his words.

“One of my men found the battery, and we traced your little text. Sent me right to her.”

He was bluffing. He
had
to be.

“So you better get to work, Doctor. And I wouldn’t make any mistakes, because if you do, if so much as one spore is lost or
not purified correctly, that young woman dies. And trust me, I will kill her. And then I will kill you.”

He turned to the refrigerator and flipped it open, so careless and stupid. “Let’s get started.”

She didn’t move.

“Or do you need more time to think?”

Yes, yes, she did. He would kill Devyn, no doubt about it. But Devyn—
Rose—
might help her very own mother. So, she wasn’t in a self-imposed no-man’s-land after all. Her
daughter
was out there, and as long as she was alive, she could help Sharon. She
would
help Sharon.

Fueled with hope, she slid off the chair. All she needed was a plan. “Let’s get to work,” she said, sounding much tougher
than she felt.

T
here were no notes lying around the streets of Enniskillen. No secret directions indicating where they could find Sharon or
another clue, and after a long day of discovering nothing, frustration nipped at Devyn’s heart.

Along with the fact that Marc had raised an invisible wall between them, starting with the moment they’d awakened, legs and
arms entwined. She’d expected morning sex, another slam to her senses, and his mighty erection indicated that he expected
the same thing.

But with remarkable self-control, he merely left the bed and took a long shower, emerging from the bathroom fully dressed.
While she got ready for the day, he spent the time on his phone, using its spotty Internet service to find out what he could
about the town, still unable to get anything concrete on Padraig Fallon or the “notes” he told them to find.

They set off to explore and inspect, barely touching
except when they had to, the conversation strictly on the business at hand, not on each other.

Disappointed but not surprised, Devyn followed his lead as morning shifted into afternoon and then into autumn dusk, and still
they found nothing. Hungry and exhausted, they stopped at a café on the main drag, taking an outdoor table nestled on a corner.
From there, they could look down the narrow street, up to a church spire in one direction and toward the monuments they’d
just visited in the other.

“Let’s eat,” Marc suggested. “We skipped lunch, and it’s almost noon in Boston. I want to try and reach Vivi. We still haven’t
heard a word about what she found in Raleigh.”

“Probably the same thing we have,” Devyn said, happy to take a seat at the outdoor table he’d gestured to. “Nothing.”

While he dialed his cell phone, she glanced up and down the street, noticing an abundance of orange flags and banners, a sure
sign Enniskillen was heavily Protestant and in support of England. They’d passed a few churches, including the one that dominated
the skyline ahead of her, its dramatic steeple housing the bells that filled the winding streets of the town with monstrous,
melodic chimes each hour.

Along the road in the center of town that led to the church, two- and three-story slate and stone buildings were nestled so
close you couldn’t slide a credit card between them. Most probably had been erected two or three hundred years earlier, then
updated every few decades.

“You
are
there, Vivi,” Marc said into the phone. “Why haven’t you called?”

As he listened to her response, Devyn gave in to the urge to look at him, to study the way his strong, tanned fingers curled
around the glass he sipped, the way he leaned back with ease, grace, and confidence, yet his dark gaze swept the landscape,
always watching.

And then those gorgeous eyes stopped on her and scorched her with a meaningful look… only she didn’t understand.

What had changed between last night and today?

He’d told her about his ex-wife. Laura. He’d put himself out on an emotional limb and she’d responded by…

Burning Finn MacCauley’s phone number.

In the light of day, it seemed a little like an overreaction. But last night, she’d been in abject misery, hearing the echo
of his admission in her head as she tried to fall asleep.

He put his own wife in jail for her crimes; he didn’t have any sympathy for lawbreakers. How could a man like that ever forget
what she came from?

And what about another man? What chance did she have of ever finding happiness if her name was irrevocably associated with
one of the country’s most-wanted fugitives?

So she’d burned the picture and felt guilty as hell about it.

“A calendar? That’s all you found?” Marc’s smoky looked transformed to a quick shake of his head, and more disappointment
wrapped around her chest.

“We’re in Enniskillen,” he said, taking a sip of water, then repeating the name of the town. “It’s in…” His voice drifted,
and she forced herself to stare at the church steeple instead of his mesmerizing face. “Really?”

He suddenly sounded interested, leaning forward, switching the phone to his other ear. “Does it say anything else on that
month? What is it, October?”

The server came with sandwiches for them, so she ate while she listened and tried to make sense of his side of the conversation,
reviewing the day.

They’d combed the island town for clues but hadn’t found anyone or anything except shops, restaurants, apartments, and small
businesses up there. No one appeared to even notice them, let alone give them some kind of cryptic message the way Padraig
had implied.

They’d roamed through the limestone buildings and narrow streets, seeking any kind of connection to Sharon, finding nothing.
They’d even visited the monuments erected in memory of the people who’d died when an IRA bomb ripped through the heart of
the city and changed its role in history forever. Plenty of anti-IRA sentiment, but no one stepped out from behind a bush
in the gardens surrounding the area to announce they knew where Devyn’s biological mother was hiding.

“There are actual letters marked on the days?” Marc asked, pulling a pen out from his jacket to write on a paper napkin. “Read
them to me.” After a pause, he added, “Because you never know, Vivi.”

She watched him write a series of letters, sharing a quick glance with her, his eyes looking a little excited about whatever
his cousin had found.