The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game Book 3)

by Ainslie Paton

  Bernadette screamed.

  Rory put her hands up in protest. “I take back the bit about you being smelly.” She mouthed the words, “But you are.”

  Bernadette apparently lip-read. She screamed again.

  “Okay, okay, I’m a low-down dirty rotten lying toad. There is this awful hollow feeling in my chest. I can’t get rid of it. I thought I was coming down with a virus but it’s not that. There are other symptoms. I find it difficult to sleep and it’s not about not having anything to read. I’ve never daydreamed so much in my life. I have these feelings of longing. It might even be pining. I don’t feel like myself at all.”

  Violet, Melanie and Gertrude were staring at her, unblinking. When Rory had been briefed on her goat duties, no one thought to mention what good listeners goats could be. Petunia butted her hip.

  “I think Zeke took my heart with him when he went.”

  Violet tried to get to Rory’s shirt again. She pushed the goat away. Melanie pooped in the straw Rory had already cleaned. “I’ve always loved him, but this is different. I think I might be in love with him.”

  She put the empty bucket down and Gertrude kicked it. “It’s a shock to me, too. I’ve spent nearly a month thinking it was just this place. My isolation and how that might’ve made me cling to him a bit too hard. But talking to you guys has helped me think it through.”

  From the stall next door, Alvin yelled. Alvin really did have a problem with body odor. All the girls complained, and he shut up. If only other males were so easy to manage.

  “Of course, I can’t tell Zeke. I can’t do anything that might wreck this job. That’s the last thing I want. The whole reason I took this on was to prove to the family that I am reliable, that I can be trusted not to crack under pressure. To prove it to myself. This is not the time or the place to go having divine realizations that I’m in love with my best friend.”

  That was met with a chorus of bleating.

  “Oh my God.” She hid her eyes in the crook of her elbow. “I am completely, utterly in love with my best friend.” The barn swayed, and she stumbled across the space to a bale of hay and sat. “It’s different to anything I’ve ever felt before.” How could she have missed this for so long? Ignored what was right in front of her. Conned herself.

  Again.

  One of the mini goats, Therese, who was an expert escape artist and was in the wrong pen, jumped up beside her and snickered, sounding like a cartoon goat who wanted to see the manager this instant.

  “Zeke has always lit up the room for me. Always challenged and inspired me. He makes me feel like I am more than enough, not for how I look or the skills I have but for who I am inside. He has always seen the real me, not Rory who can pretend her way through anything, but Aurora Rae who likes dancing on bar tops as much as she likes hiding away to read on her own for hours.”

  Bernadette licked her boot, leaving a trail of slobber. Yuck. The other goats were eating, aside from Therese who was bouncing on and off the hay bale as if she were dissatisfied with the manager’s complaint handling and was pushing things up the chain.

  “I’m working out my feelings by talking to goats.” She picked up a handful of loose hay and wiped her boot. It was possible Zeke knew her better than she knew herself and that was unsettling.

  “And he waited all this time for me to work it out.” That thought made her almost sob aloud. She took a few deep breaths, filled her nose with the earthy warmth of the barn, the funky farm animal smell that was undeniably real.

  “Here’s my plan. Tonight, I tell Orrin my happy news. When Zeke is back I’ll be totally normal with him. No letting him see I might die of pleasure just to be able to look at him any time I like. Then we find the damn weapons cache and call Tres and when this is all over, it can be about us.” She stood and pushed Melanie away. “And if I’m very lucky, and if Zeke loves me like I think he does, we’ll all live happily ever after.” Only seemed fair. That’s the way it worked in her favorite books.

  She was a junkie for epic romantic fantasies for a reason.

  She went straight from putting Therese into her rightful pen to Orrin’s apartment.

  He answered his door with a predatory smile. “Adorable.”

  She squinted at him. She was banking on being bathed in eau de barn and that acting like bug spray, keeping him at arm’s-length. He gestured to her head and then pulled a stalk of straw from her hair.

  “Goats,” she said.

  “I heard you were reassigned.”

  As if he didn’t have everything to do with that. After starving her, he wanted her fattened up for the kill. Macy had looked relieved when she’d brought Rory the news of her reassignment.

  “I love my new job. And for some reason, when you tend goats everyone wants to be your friend.” She shrugged. A big exaggerated gesture. “I don’t get it.”

  He stuck the end of the stalk in his mouth and drawled around it. “Are you still lonely, little one?” He looked delighted to see her. Replace the word lonely with horny. The feeling was not mutual.

  Orrin held the door open for her and she crossed into his apartment with a quick catalogue of the place to see if anything had changed since the last furtive visit. “No. I think I found my people in the barn.” The signal jammer sat in its place, green light blinking ineffectively without its antennae, which she’d let Bernadette munch on. Goats really will eat anything if you let them.

  “There is a sharpness about you, Rosie, that I find most attractive, even when you use it to mask your greatest need.”

  “Which is?” Right now, leaning into Zeke’s side and not doing anything to make him worry for her sanity. Later, there was quite a list of things she wanted, starting with her e-reader and the rest of her tech, and an hour to peruse the shelves of her corner bookstore for all the new releases. Orrin in an orange jumpsuit would be a nice touch. Knowing she’d helped put him there would be a victory. Bring on that happy ending.

  Orrin’s smile went all the way to his eyes. “Hmm.” He gave her a top-to-toe perusal. “I can’t work out if you simply need to be loved right or you just want your music player charged.”

  She held her hand out with the tiny iPod in it and flashed a smile. “Can’t it be both?” She’d been tempted to steal the charging cable for it but that would’ve added extra time to her fake baked-goods delivery, antennae-stealing mission.

  He closed his hand over hers. “Did you come here looking to bring our bond date forward by a few nights?”

  That was what he wanted. Her capitulation. The urge to pull her hand away was intense. “I came because I’m worried and I need your advice.” He’d like that. It wasn’t falling at his feet, but it was declaring her dependence on him. It was also the indirect way to get information she really wanted before she dropped the boom gate on him.

  He gestured to his big leather sofa, patting the space beside him when he sat. She eased down next to him, fidgeted, then jumped up, gratified that he was irritated by her restlessness. “I’ve had a lot of time to myself to think and I’m worried. How did things get so bad so quickly outside that you’re going into lockdown?”

  “It was always going to happen. It’s what we’ve been working towards.”

  Less vague, asshat. “Everyone has been writing letters.” And talking about the shortage of handmade envelopes and other things like seed for next year’s planting and parts for broken farm equipment. “Will there be time to get all the new recruits in?”

  “You’re feeling guilt. It can be a burden to know you’ll survive when so many will perish.”

  He was good at this, always in character. She nodded, drifted across the room to a side table with a lamp and a pile of loose papers on top. They’d not been there before. She’d been over every inch of this apartment and while it was filled with luxuries and possessions others were denied, there was nothing contained here that was an asset in tearing Orrin down. “It’s true. I don’t want people to die.”

  “They were incautious
. They deserve their fate. You’ll be safe in here. We all will.”

  She shivered. Did he really think the rest of the world deserved to die? He was hideous. “I don’t feel safe. How long until we go into lockdown?”

  “We have little time and much to get ready.”

  She enjoyed talking to the goats more. She was getting nowhere. It was possible that once she announced she was expecting, he never spoke to her again. She needed to change things up. It wasn’t clear what large injections of cash were going to fund if there wasn’t going to be any further trading with the outside world and how they were meant to manage shortages. Best bet, Orrin was siphoning it off for his own use.

  “Don’t you sometimes wish you could run away from all this responsibility?” she asked.

  He was amused by that. “Haven’t I already run away?”

  “If the world wasn’t on the verge of collapse I’d like to walk through a rainforest. Isn’t there some place outside you’re going to miss?” Somewhere he might run to when all this got too hard.

  “The ocean. Yes, I will miss the ocean. As a boy I dreamed of living on a tropical island. Warm sun, blue skies, golden sands, palm trees, fish cooked straight from the sea.”

  You couldn’t be more specific, could you? There were a dozen islands that were tax-free havens.

  “I visited The Caymans once,” he said. “I’m sure they’re underwater now.”

  Bingo. “I have something I need to tell you.”

  “You could sit beside me while you unburden yourself.”

  That wasn’t conducive to her well-being, so she remained standing.

  “I thought at first that it was just the stress of arriving here, how different it was, how I struggled to fit in. I’ve been so tired and there have been other changes to my body. I’ve talked to the other women.” Enough to seed this lie. “I don’t think there is any doubt.”

  Orrin’s expression shifted from indulgent cat with the cream to bad taste in his mouth. “Speak plainly.”

  She used that as her cue to look down at the top page on the pile. Names and numbers in a spreadsheet. “I’m pregnant.”

  He stood, looming over her. “No, that can’t be. No one will have touched you. No one disobeys me.”

  She hunched into herself. “It’s been three months since I had a period.”

  “You fucking little slut.”

  Now whose mask had slipped?

  “You had some last-minute fun before you arrived, and you weren’t careful.”

  “I knew you’d be angry.” She backed away, bumping into the side table and knocking it over.

  “Leave it.”

  She ignored him and went to her knees righting the table, picking up the lamp and fussing with the fallen paperwork, trying to work out what it meant.

  “I mess everything up,” she said from her knees. Shoving the top page into her pants pocket. The way it crinkled should’ve alerted him, but he was moving around behind her in a fit of anger.

  “You have no self-discipline. You’re a petulant child. You’ll go back to your corner in the kitchen. You will have this baby and it will be raised by the other women. You will bond with whoever I choose for you, as often as I choose. You will have no say in this. There will be no special treatment for you and none for your children. I will never look at you again.”

  The words were Orrin’s true colors; the numbers looked like a financial forecast.

  There was a knock at the door. It opened at Orrin’s command as he dragged her to her feet by her arm.

  In the doorway was Daniel the Brute, another goon and Zeke.

  They locked eyes. Zeke was bearded and filthy, his hair flopped over one eye. He smiled at her as if there was only the two of them in the room, in the world, and she wasn’t being held by Orrin, and Zeke didn’t have his hands pinned behind his back.

  “Hi Rosie. I missed you,” he said, before he was forced to his knees with a punch to the gut that made her scream.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Even the best laid plans could knock you off your feet.

  This was not how Zeke wanted his reunion with Rory to go and all because helping Mike had proven more of a risk than anticipated. Mike had been too weak to drive the prime mover through the gate so sucker that he was, Zeke did it for him.

  With his hands tied, he couldn’t signal Rory to tell her everything was fine, and it took a moment to catch his breath from the punch and then another to remember how to breathe when he was this close to her.

  In full fury she was even more incredible; if he had use of his hands, he’d applaud.

  She wrenched out of Orrin’s grip and turned on him. “Why is he tied up? Why did your goon hit him? Let him go right now.” And then she came for Daniel, who was a lumbering bear to her attack dog. He didn’t stand a chance. “Unless you want me to bounce you like a bad check, untie him.”

  Even from his knees, Zeke felt Daniel flinch. “You know she means it, man,” he said, getting a foot underneath him and coming to stand. “You know she can do it.”

  “Enough,” Orrin said. “What’s this about?”

  “Not until you free him,” Rory said, and when no one moved, she pulled some kind of farm tool from her pocket, glared at Daniel until he stepped aside and freed Zeke’s wrists herself. He tried to grip her hand briefly as the cable tie fell away, but his fingers had gone numb and it was more of a fumble.

  “There’s been an incident at the front gate,” Daniel said.

  “What he means is, I drove through it in a truck,” Zeke said.

  “You needed Starbucks that bad,” Rory said.

  He groaned. “I wish.”

  “Enough of this nonsense,” Orrin roared. He pointed at Daniel. “What happened?”

  “He drove a prime mover through the gate. There was a car waiting. It took Mike away. We’re repairing the gate.”

  Orrin was clearly shocked. “Mike Mellor?”

  “His cancer is back. He needed to get treatment,” Zeke said.

  “So instead of coming to me like any rational adult would, you drove through our security gate.”

  Zeke opened his mouth to make that sound less insane, because put that way, it didn’t make what he’d done seem the least bit rational. Orrin cut him off.

  “This one is stupid and violent,” he pointed at Zeke and then at Rory, “And this one is a conniving bitch.”

  Zeke raised a brow at Rory. “He thinks I’m a slut for being pregnant,” she said.

  He nearly went to his knees a second time for the momentary brain freeze that caused. Rory pregnant. There was a rush of blood that made his limbs tingle. God, for a child of hers to be his too, he would drive through time itself.

  “Congratulations, sis,” he said, voice coming out much steadier than he felt.

  “Escort them back to their cabins. Hold them there until I give further orders. This isn’t finished,” Orrin said.

  Rory moved first, making for the stairs, Daniel behind her. Zeke let her go ahead and addressed Orrin. “Mike was going to do it himself, but he’s been hiding how ill he’s been for months. He was too weak. He said you’d never let him leave.”

  “You’ve betrayed all of us and you signed Mike’s death warrant. We would have cared compassionately for him, eased his passing. Out there he will die alone, sick, frightened and haunted.”

  Which could be true, if Tres hadn’t arranged for him to have the best treatment available. Mike might still die, but it wouldn’t be alone, and if he lived, he’d have the support he needed to build a new life away from Orrin’s lies and deceit.

  It didn’t matter what Orrin thought. In a day or a week, as soon as Zeke could verify what Mike had told him, they were ending this. He caught up with Rory at the bottom of the stairs. He’d give up good beds forever for a moment alone with her.

  She punched his arm. “You drove through the gate?” She pulled her earlobe. Asking if he’d found evidence. Her hair was full of twigs, her face was grubby and fuck,
it was good to see her.

  He smoothed his hand over his head. The everything is fine signal and added a tongue poke to the side of his cheek to tell her he had information. “I had to help Mike.” He looked over his shoulder at their guards. “You guys get that, right? He asked you to let him walk out. He asked you nicely and you pulled guns on us.”

  Mike had been ready to give up when Tres’s rescue car arrived outside. It was only then he believed he had a chance. It was a great diversion. Zeke had rammed the gates before the back tires were shot out and Mike was able to get away clear. Zeke had not been so lucky, dragged from the cabin of the prime mover at gunpoint and it sure wasn’t over, but it was worth it for what Mike gave up.

  “Keep moving,” Daniel said.

  “He’s so cute that one,” Rory said.

  He drew her close. She was warm and safe and smelled weirdly of cattle. Was that some kind of hoof pick she’d used to break his ties? “You’re having a baby.”

  She whispered in his ear. “Found a weapons inventory.”

  He whispered back. “Have the location.”

  They had enough pieces to end this. “Get moving,” said Daniel.

  Rory broke from his hold and gave Daniel the kind of look that might sear his skin off. The guy blinked hard and prodded Zeke in the back. The other guard positioned himself at Daniel’s side as they made for Rory’s cabin.

  “What do you think about Tresna for a name if it’s a girl?” he said, knowing she’d pick that as the cue that they were ready to call this done and get out of here.

  “I really like it,” she said, bumping against him. He bumped her back. That quick, chaste hug wasn’t near enough contact with her. That wild inappropriate thought about Rory having his baby had to be the leftover adrenaline in his blood. She’d always thought she’d have a family with Cal and he’d never let himself think about it being any other way, resigned to being Uncle Zeke who was a bad influence.

  “Shut up and move faster,” Daniel said.