Living on the Edge

by Susan Mallery

  “Wouldn’t Blaine notice?” he asked.

  She noted he didn’t say that Christopher wouldn’t try something like that. Obviously if he was capable of kidnapping her, he was capable of hurting her father.

  “My father is the classic absentminded professor. I don’t know if he was always like that or if marrying my mother made it worse. He would often use work as an excuse to escape from her. When I was little, I used to beg him to stay, to not leave me alone with her. Not that I was scared she’d hurt me, she was just so quiet. But he never listened. He told me I would be fine and left anyway.”

  “That must have been hard on you.”

  “It was.” She remembered the silence of the house and the living creature that was her fear. “As I got older, I grew less afraid of being around her. But then I worried about growing up to be like her. My father worried, too. If I laughed too loud at a party, I would catch him looking at me. If I didn’t smile, if I smiled too much, he would say something. I started monitoring my own emotions, afraid I would feel too much or not enough. It was exhausting.”

  He leaned forward and took her hands in his. “You’re not crazy. Not even close.”

  “I appreciate the show of support. Eventually I gained more confidence in my own mental state to ignore the little voices in my head whispering that I was just like her.”

  Tanner watched the muscles in Madison’s jaw tighten. Whatever she said aloud to him and the world, she still had her doubts.

  “You’re tough and smart and if you give in to the fear, you let Hilliard win,” he said.

  “I know. That’s what keeps me going.”

  “Have you ever talked to anyone about all of this?” he asked. “A professional?”

  “Therapy?” She sighed. “I saw someone before I left Christopher. She told me I was as sane as the next person and that my biggest problem was that I’d married someone emotionally and physically abusive. It helped me, but it didn’t convince my father. He thinks I’m one breakdown away from turning into my mother. If Christopher got his hands on me, it would be so easy for him to lock me up. My father wouldn’t do anything to stop him.”

  He heard the fear in her voice. “I’d stop him. Madison, I swear to you, Christopher isn’t going to be allowed to put you away.”

  “Would you beat him up, too?”

  “Would that make you feel better?”

  “In the moment, but it’s probably not a good idea. He’d have you arrested, and I don’t think you’d like prison.”

  “I’ve been there before. I survived.”

  She smiled. “You were much younger then. A bad boy. I never really had a thing for the bad-boy type before.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m starting to see the appeal.”

  His cell phone rang. He released her hands and reached for it. “Keane.”

  “Gray here, boss. You want to know if Blaine went to the doctor?”

  “Hold on.” Tanner plugged the cell phone into a speaker system. “Okay. I have you on speaker. Madison got an e-mail from her ex saying her father was ill. That he’d been to his doctor and was diagnosed with a heart condition.”

  Gray swore. “He’s trying to lure her out.”

  Tanner looked at Madison and nodded. “That’s what we think, too.”

  “Boss, I can tell you Blaine hasn’t seen a doctor since we started watching him. He’s either in his lab or he’s at home. He doesn’t stop anywhere on the drive back and forth. All his appointments are logged by his secretary. We’ve cross-checked them with the security-camera tapes we’re tapping into. No one is getting in or out without us knowing about it. There haven’t been any doctors in the lab.” Gray chuckled. “Not any medical ones anyway. This place is crawling with Ph.D. types.”

  Tanner looked at Madison. “You want to ask him anything?”

  She leaned toward the cell phone. “Gray, how does my father look?”

  “Fine. The same. He eats the same breakfast every day while he reads the paper. His housekeeper prepares him dinner. After finishing that, he goes into his library, where he reads until he goes to bed. There haven’t been any phone calls to the house.”

  She glanced at Tanner, then shrugged. “It’s what I needed to know. My dad is fine—this is just another one of Christopher’s sick games.”

  He nodded. “Thanks for the report, Gray. If you see or hear anything unusual, let me know right away. Hilliard is going to do whatever he can to get Madison out in the open.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Tanner hung up the phone. “Better?”

  “Yes. Thanks. You’re in a very interesting business.”

  “Every day is different.”

  She smiled. “I like my days the same. Routine is very comforting.”

  “Soon you’ll have yours back.”

  “Maybe.” She studied her fingers, then glanced back at him. “He’ll go to jail, right? He won’t be free to wander the streets.”

  “We’re going to find out what he’s doing, then put him away,” he told her. “For that and for the kidnapping.”

  “We can’t prove he was the one behind it.”

  “We can try.” He stood and pulled her to her feet, then drew her against him. “As far as I’m concerned, the job isn’t over until you’re safe.”

  She relaxed into him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “So you work for me now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When did that switch happen?”

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “When are you going to let me start paying you?” she asked.

  “This isn’t about the money.”

  “You have a lot of expenses. A staff. Around-the-clock monitoring of my father. Don’t worry, I can afford it.”

  “It’s not just that,” he said, trying not to smile. “There are other issues.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t sleep with my clients.”

  Her eyes widened, then her mouth curved up into a smile. “I didn’t think about that. Interesting dilemma.”

  “Maybe we should just forget about who works for whom and go with it.”

  “Not a bad plan.” She slid her hands around until her palms rested on his chest. “I figured we would have to wait until this evening to, um, you know.”

  “Having second thoughts?”

  “About waiting? Absolutely. I think it’s a bad idea.”

  Getting involved didn’t make sense. Tanner knew that the more he was with her, the more he would want her. A woman like Madison only came along once in a lifetime, and that was if a man was damn lucky in the first place. If he kept this up much longer, he wouldn’t want to let her go.

  But there wasn’t a choice, he reminded himself. She had her world and he had his. They were opposites—he lived in the shadows and she sought the light.

  But now, in the twilight time between what was real and what wasn’t, they could find temporary solace in each other’s arms.

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  “Well…as you’re the one with the history of incarceration, I thought you might find it interesting to play escaped prisoner and the warden’s wife.”

  He grinned. “Want to know if I have handcuffs in the cabinet?”

  She laughed. “Not especially, but if you’re very good, I’ll let you chase me around the bed a few times.”

  “You’re on.”

  Chapter 15

  “It’s a nice place?” Blaine asked as he sipped his glass of wine.

  “Lovely. A large garden, with a view of the ocean. She has a corner room.” Christopher smiled at his former father-in-law. “She’s doing well.”

  Blaine nodded. There was an air of sadness about the old man, but resignation, too. He’d always expected his daughter to turn out like her mother. Convincing him that she had had been too easy. He should have done this years ago, Christopher thought, when he really could have locked Madison away.

  “It was the kidnapping,
” Christopher said. “She was doing so well, but after that…” He let his words trail away and made himself think about losing everything. That should put some pain in his expression.

  Blaine patted his arm. “You’ve been loyal to her, which is more than most men would have done. I don’t know what she was thinking when she left you.”

  That she thought she could get away, Christopher thought. “Madison had this idea about being independent.”

  Blaine frowned. “She was independent enough. You never tied her down. She was free to do whatever she wanted. If only she’d known how upset you were when she left. For a while I wondered if you’d ever recover.”

  Christopher nodded. “It was a bad time, but not the worst. The kidnapping was the worst. As long as I live, I’ll never forget that terror.”

  “But she’s safe now. At least we have that.” Blaine took another sip of his wine. “If only she’d had children. That would have grounded her.”

  “I wanted that, too, but Madison was afraid.”

  Blaine nodded. “That it would push her over the edge, like it did her mother. Maybe it’s for the best.”

  Christopher agreed. Despite what he’d told the old man, he’d never wanted children. They were messy and got in the way. Besides, he didn’t want a fat wife, and in his mind pregnancy turned a woman into a bloated gargoyle. When she’d insisted that children were important to her, he’d tried to talk Madison into using a surrogate, but she’d refused. By the end of their marriage, she hadn’t wanted to discuss children at all. He’d thought that had meant she was finally coming around to his way of thinking. He hadn’t known it meant she’d given up.

  “How are you holding on?” Blaine asked.

  “All right.”

  “You look tired.”

  “A lot of late nights in the lab.”

  “Are you working out those last few bugs?”

  Christopher considered the question. “Getting there,” he said, knowing there weren’t any bugs to be worked out. The jamming device worked perfectly, it was just a matter of getting the money together to pay Stanislav the fifteen million he owed him.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day,” Blaine told him. “That we should merge our companies.”

  Christopher did his best to stay relaxed. He took a sip of wine, then reached for an appetizer from the tray his housekeeper had left out for them. Dinner wasn’t for another twenty minutes—plenty of time for them to work out the details.

  Elation filled him. If he could get the old man to agree, they could make an announcement in the morning. That would send the company stock soaring. He had half a million options he’d been holding onto. The difference would cover his next payment to Stanislav and his gambling debts.

  “I’m going to be announcing the new technology in a couple of weeks,” Christopher said. “It would have to be before then or not at all.”

  Blaine smiled at him. “You didn’t tell me you were that close.”

  He grinned back. “I am. It’s very exciting work, Blaine. I can barely tear myself away from the lab. I know it’s important to run the company, but the true joy of my day comes from discovery. The trials and errors of dreaming up a design or a process, then seeing it to fruition.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. Your parents would be very proud of you, my boy.”

  Christopher ducked his head, as if too modest to accept the praise. He had a feeling that if his parents could speak from the dead, they wouldn’t mention much in the way of pride. Instead they would probably want to talk about the sudden failure of their brakes on that icy mountain road.

  “They wanted great things for the company,” he said. “I’ve tried to fulfill their dream, but I’ve missed the mark. Now, with the new technology, I’ll finally be able to do what they always wanted.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” Blaine said. “But that’s a good trait to have. It makes one work harder.” He picked up his wine. “Yes, I think it’s time. Let’s announce the merger. We’ll let the suits work out the actual details, but I want to consider this a done deal. Agreed?”

  Christopher raised his glass. “Agreed.”

  As easy as that, he thought as he drank down the red wine. Problem solved. He would have the fifteen million for Stanislav and the five million for his gambling debts and he no longer gave a rat’s ass if he ever saw Madison again.

  Not that he could kill her right off. For one thing, he didn’t want Blaine distracted by anything until the merger was complete. For another, he didn’t know where the bitch was.

  It still fried him that she’d managed to turn Keane. Christopher had no idea how she’d done it—the man had a reputation for being ice under pressure. He was professional, seasoned and dangerous enough to make a sane man steer clear. So how had his stupid, selfish wife convinced him to not only protect her but to work for her?

  He knew Keane was the one behind the break-in. Not that his laptop would do them any good. There was no way they could decrypt the hard drive. Not in a thousand years. But it annoyed Christopher that they’d dared to walk into his house to steal it along with Madison’s earrings.

  He wanted Madison and he wanted Keane. He had two teams of men looking for them, but so far they’d found nothing. They’d warned him Keane would disappear like smoke, and he had.

  But they would find him eventually, and when they did, Christopher would lock up Madison for real. Once the merger went through, he would make sure she died in a way that made it look as if she’d taken her own life. Sad but not completely unexpected. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter.

  “This will work out for all of us,” Blaine said. “I always worried about what would happen to my company after I was gone. I couldn’t leave it to Madison—she could never handle the responsibility. With the merger, you can be in charge. That way I know she’ll always be taken care of.”

  “You have my word,” Christopher said as he rose. “Will you excuse me for a moment? I need to check on something at work.”

  Blaine waved him away. “I know the call of the job,” he said with a smile. “But when Madison finally comes home, you’re going to have to adjust your hours. She’ll need you.”

  “I’ll gladly be here for her,” Christopher told him. “You know she’s my world.”

  Blaine sighed. “I do, indeed. I felt the same way about her mother. It didn’t matter that she was crazy as a loon. I loved her with all my heart.”

  Christopher walked out of the study and into his office. There he picked up the phone on his secure line and dialed a number he knew by heart.

  “Hilliard,” he said when the phone was answered. “I’ll have the money for you in forty-eight hours.”

  “Very good,” Stanislav said. “I will have the last two components. We will make our exchange at the usual place. Seven o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’m sure you will be. I am pleased you have the money, Christopher. You are a man of many talents—it would be a shame to make you incapable of using them.”

  Madison stretched out on the sofa and stared through the open windows up at the night sky. So many night noises, she thought. The dark was never silent.

  After her kidnapping experience where she was kept blindfolded for nearly two days, she would have thought she would be terrified to be out of the light. Maybe she would have been with someone else. But not with Tanner. Not only did she trust him to keep her safe but she liked how he didn’t play games with her. He didn’t say one thing and mean another. He didn’t want to make her think she was crazy. If he was mad, he said so and acted accordingly. The rules were much simpler here.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked as he brushed his fingers against her bare arm.

  They were both naked beneath their robes, pleasantly sated from their evening of lovemaking. While her body rested and recovered from the pleasure it had received, her heart still wanted to be close to him.

  “That you don’t p
lay games with me,” she said. “You aren’t trying to trick me.”

  “Not my style.”

  She smiled at him. “That would be my point. It’s a good thing. Oh, and I don’t think you’re interested in my money.”

  He grimaced. “Not even a little. Besides, I have money of my own.”

  She grinned. “As much as me?”

  “You only have a small share of Daddy’s company. A few options. How much could they be worth?”

  “Just ten million. Pocket change.”

  He groaned. “Yes, you have more money than me.”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Besides, I don’t actually have the money. I have the options, which means I’d have to cash them in to get dollars in my pocket. There’s also a trust fund from my mother. That’s what I live on.”

  “You could ask the foundation you work for to pay you.”

  “I could, but I won’t. Why should I take a salary I don’t need when that money could go toward another operation for a child?”

  “Don’t go all bleeding-heart do-gooder on me. I really hate that in a woman.”

  She wiggled her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I didn’t think so. But I am happy you’re not interested in my money. I know Christopher was. Or at least he wanted to use me to get access to my father’s company and my inheritance. The irony is, because of his name and the fortune I thought he had, it never occurred to me he would care about money. I can’t even take credit for figuring it out.”

  “What happened?”

  She snuggled closer and sighed. “It was at a party. He loved to have cocktail parties two or three times a month. Despite the fact that he accused me of doing little more than calling a caterer, they were still a lot of work for me. Although it’s not as if I had an actual job or life beyond shopping and lunching with my friends.” She looked at him. “This was during my useless stage.”

  “I doubt you were ever useless.”

  “Then you would be wrong. People talk about a life-changing moment. Well, this party was mine. There were all these scientists talking shop. Most of them didn’t bring their wives to this country, so I was one of maybe three women, and the other two were on the team. I was circulating, playing hostess, but everyone was busy talking about computer chips and tolerances and rates of failure or whatever. I could only smile and look pretty.”