Stripper: The Fringe, Book 4

by Anitra Lynn McLeod

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Answer my question, or I’ll kill you right now.” He could do it with his bare hands, and they both knew it.

  “Yes. If push came to shove, I would die for them.”

  Eyes closed, Michael stood there, breathing deep as he held his hands on her shoulders. Rocking his head side to side, he smiled suddenly, and his eyes popped open. He looked down into her face with triumph. She felt as if she’d just been judged, and he would now render his verdict. Irrationally, Diane dreaded what he would say.

  “You are not finished betraying him, are you?”

  Shaking her head, Diane said, “I will not—”

  “Duster doesn’t know, does he?”

  “Know what?” Diane tried to tell herself Michael was only on a fishing expedition, but she couldn’t be certain. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do.” Lifting his hand from her shoulder, he cupped her chin. “I can see why he wants you so badly. Why he would wait seven years for you. You are extremely beautiful, Diane. Such pleasure he would find with your body. Your very painfully empty body.”

  Baffled, Diane stood very still in her plastimetal chains as she considered what he could have possibly smelled on her. Empty body, but empty of what? Heart, soul, fortitude, what? Rather than question him, which she knew would be futile, she simply waited, hoping he would explain.

  “I do believe I will retract my deal.” Michael sauntered back to his desk. “I will let you have what you want.” He polished off his drink. “Then relax and watch as your lies destroy it.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Duster cooled his bare heels in the waiting room off Michael’s office. Two guards played cards as they kept half an eye on him. Bound in plastimetal shackles, Duster wasn’t much for them to worry about, because what could he really do? Head-butt them, but after that? Not much. Even if he managed to free himself and got his hands on a weapon, it wouldn’t do him any good, not on a planet full of smart weapons. Duster no longer had authorization, so any gun he touched wouldn’t fire in his hands. He’d have to use it like a club, and that wouldn’t get him anywhere either. Hell, without an authorized wrist com, he couldn’t even open a door. All the hard work he’d put into designing Windmere’s security now worked against him. Even the tricks Mary had pulled would no longer work. With Mary in charge of security, Duster didn’t take anything as given.

  Turning his mind to Scott, he wondered if his boy cowered in fear. Hopefully not. Diane probably was, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He had a sneaking suspicion that Michael interrogated Diane in his office at the moment. Soon enough, Duster’s turn would come. He hoped Diane would heed his advice and tell Michael the truth.

  “He’s ready to talk to the traitor.”

  Rolling his eyes, Duster stood. “Get bent, Richards. I’m not a traitor, and you know it.”

  “His word, not mine. This is one fight I’m staying the hell out of.” Richards motioned Duster toward the door.

  “Where’s my son?”

  “I don’t know. Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I can’t wait to get away from this mess.” Richards got behind Duster and escorted him into Michael’s office.

  Standing at one of the op-pans, Michael didn’t even bother to turn and face him. He dismissed the guards and turned only when they were alone.

  “It amazes me how easily passion can sway loyalty.” Michael gave him a dark look before turning his attention back to the panel.

  “You mean how it did when you fell in love with Mary?” After seven years together, they’d lobbed plenty of verbal bombs at one another. In a war of words, no one could hurt you worse than your best friend. Knowing intimate details about each other gave them the power to hit and cut deep.

  As if Michael sensed how ugly this could get, he pulled back a bit. Quietly, he pointed out, “I did not betray you for her.”

  “You damn near gave up your whole world for her. You, Michael, not me, punched enough holes in security that we were almost civilized by the IWOG. You don’t call that a betrayal?”

  “You use that to justify what you have done?” Michael spun away from the op-pan.

  “What have I done, Michael? I admitted I made a mistake in wanting to be stripped, then came home with my wife and child.”

  “Wife.” Michael’s lip curled. “Don’t be a fool for that woman a second time.”

  “I’m not a fool, and you have no right—”

  “You’d gladly kill me for her when she is worthless.” Michael rolled on before Duster could argue the point. “She betrayed both of us, and now, because of her, you attempt to betray me a second time.” Duster opened his mouth, and Michael snarled, “Traitor.”

  “Are you done?” Duster waited a full ten seconds for Michael to spew more. When he didn’t, Duster calmly said, “You know I’m not a traitor.” Long ago, he’d learned that if one of them didn’t remain calm, they would escalate into a screaming match. That was the last thing Duster wanted.

  “Really?” Michael settled to his desk. “Tell me where your loyalties lie, then.”

  “There’s no conflict between my being loyal to you and my family.”

  “I don’t see how you can manage both.”

  “You haven’t even given me a chance. In fact, you wouldn’t even speak to me about it.” Duster couldn’t get over the fact that Michael wouldn’t even talk to him when he’d called from the ship.

  “Because there is no point to discussing what is a foregone conclusion.”

  And now Duster understood just how frustrated Diane had been when she’d tried to apologize and explain, and he’d refused to listen.

  As much as he wanted to launch into a lengthy diatribe, he didn’t. Flippantly, he said, “I didn’t realize you were psychic now too. Tell me, O Great Reader of the Future, what is it you know will happen?” It was foolish of him to goad Michael, but Duster couldn’t help it. He was tired of Michael’s know-it-all attitude about damn near everything.

  “That Diane will betray you again.” Michael spoke with full conviction and a pointed glare. “Of that there is not one doubt in my mind. I can smell it on her.”

  Smell what? Duster almost let the two words slip from his lips, but he didn’t. Given the history between Michael and Diane, Duster couldn’t trust Michael to be honest about his impressions of Diane, even if he used his reader ability. Just because Michael said he smelled something didn’t mean it was true. Instead, Duster asked, “What if she does betray me again? Isn’t that my problem?”

  “Not if she twists you to come against me.”

  “Good God, Michael. Are you nuts? After working seven years as your faithful and thankless sidekick, why would I suddenly thirst for your position? I’ve been gone seven days, and you’re acting like you don’t know me from Adam.”

  “Perhaps I don’t.”

  “You know me. You know I built Windmere—oh, excuse me, Prime Bastard—for my own little place in it. I don’t want to be you. I don’t ever want to have to make the decisions you do. Even if—and that’s a big, huge, hulking if—Diane managed to twist me around, do you think I could succeed in bringing you down? With what? The guards have loyalty to you, not me.”

  “You managed to turn my wife against me, and she is head of security. Or rather was.” Michael’s gaze darted to the op-pan behind his desk, then back to Duster. Duster realized he had to be looking at Mary in lockdown. “Don’t even think of looking to her for more help. At the moment, my wife cannot move from where I have placed her.”

  That answered that. Mary must be in lockdown. But Michael didn’t seem to be gloating over that fact. Each time he looked at the op-pan behind him, his eyes flashed with guilt and shame.

  “I see you have no loyalty yourself.”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

  “You’ve turned on your own wife. Who also happens to be carrying your child.”

  Michael stiffened, and his eyes shifted to t
he op-pan.

  “Poor Mary, so filled with love for you, and you cut her by claiming the child isn’t yours, when you know damn good and well it is. You hurt her just to pay her back for bending your orders. Knowing her horrible past, you still decide to bully her.”

  Michael closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

  “For your information, Mary did her job as head of security. We were a risk out there. She contained that risk by taking us in. Whether you see it or not, she did right by you. Mary made the same call I would have as head of security.”

  “I’m not here to discuss Mary with you.”

  “Right. Because what you’re doing to her points out your own fuzzy concept of loyalty. You should have seen her face when you said you weren’t the father. You sick fetch. Every nasty trick played on Mary her whole life didn’t hurt her like your cutting words did.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “True enough. How you abuse your wife is none of my business. Unless I make it so. Gee, let me think about it—yeah, I’m making it my business. Because I like Mary. Even when I had to worry about her as a security risk, I still liked her. And I thought you loved her. Guess your love is as fickle as your loyalty.”

  “Amazing.” Every muscle in Michael’s face and neck tensed. “You worry about Mary when you should be down on your knees begging for your own life, your son’s life and even Diane’s.”

  “I know you’ve already decided what you’re going to do with us.” Duster shrugged, and his plastimetal shackles jangled. “Like you said—there’s no point in arguing what’s a foregone conclusion.”

  Practiced, perfect and precise, Michael plucked up a glass from his desk and took a sip.

  “Taken up drinking again?” This was a development Duster wasn’t expecting. As far as he knew, Michael hadn’t had a drink since he’d retrieved Mary. Alcohol blocked his ability, but Michael drunk was not a pretty picture. Sober, he was a ripe bastard, but drunk, he was a monster. “Is the alcohol what’s fueling your need to bully everyone around you?”

  Michael gripped the glass so firmly it shattered in his hand. Shards of glass flew and thwinked against the marble floor as others made soft plops when they hit the thick oriental carpet under his desk. Duster expected a woodsy scent of oak-aged whiskey to fill the air with a pungent stench, but instead, he smelled coffee. Rich, thick and dark coffee.

  Looking down at his hand, Michael seemed surprised to find blood oozing from it. He yanked off his silk shirt and wrapped it around his hand.

  “Don’t worry,” Duster said. “You have plenty of glasses. Or you could save time and drink directly from the bottle.”

  Michael took several looming steps toward him but stopped when Duster stood his ground.

  “Go ahead. Hit me while I’m bound. My understanding is that’s how bullies prefer to fight.”

  Michael abruptly turned and cradled his face with his uninjured hand. He stood there immobile for a very long time. And then Michael’s back trembled. Duster realized that Michael was trying desperately not to cry. In the end, he lost, and Duster heard a strangled, gasping sob that Michael tried to bite down.

  Stunned, Duster stood utterly mute. With pointed words, Duster reduced Michael to tears. Just as he’d accused Michael of doing, Duster became a bully. Clearly, Michael was not himself, and Duster desperately wanted to know what was going on. Michael wasn’t drunk. He seemed to be in agonizing emotional pain. This was nothing like the crazed mourning for Kraft or his frantic searching when Mary disappeared. This was something much, much worse and something far more devastating.

  “Everything is falling apart.” Michael’s voice held no menace, only exhausted weariness. Right now, he sounded a thousand years old.

  “It’s not. You’re pushing everyone away. Hell, you’re driving them away at gunpoint. What’s really going on with you?” If he wasn’t bound, he’d place his hand comfortingly on Michael’s back. In spite of his own pain, he still wanted to comfort his best friend.

  “What do you care?” Michael’s voice was that of a man alone in the wilderness. Lost and afraid, and damning himself to hell before he’d ask for help.

  “I’m your friend,” Duster replied softly. “Your best friend. Possibly at the moment, your only friend.” On the verge of frustrated tears himself, Duster stood his ground and tried to understand what was going on.

  “My friend that I had bound and escorted into my office so I could interrogate you and intimidate you and threaten you and—damn it all to hell—you manage to turn it all around on me.” Using his bandaged hand, Michael wiped his face but continued to give Duster his broad back.

  “Because I’m not afraid of you.” At that, Michael stood taller but still wouldn’t turn. Not in a million years would he face him with tears in his eyes. Michael was just like Mary. Duster had always known they belonged together, and the last day just confirmed his assessment. “I’m respectful of the fact you could have me killed with a snap of your fingers, but I’m getting a strong feeling you won’t, because I think you genuinely missed me.”

  Michael nodded.

  “I think you missed having someone to bounce ideas off of, and someone to argue with. Someone who knows you like I do. Mary’s tried so hard to do that end of my job, but she can’t be your wife, your best friend, your argument partner and run security.”

  “In a few months, she won’t be able to do much of anything.”

  “Is that what this is all about?” Relief washed through him. “Michael, pregnancy isn’t going to—”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what? Do I have to guess?”

  “Remember when Mary broke her ankle?”

  “How could I forget?” Duster chuckled. “That was the first time she kicked a hole in security. Or was it the second?” Duster shrugged. “She’s done it so many times, I’ve lost count.”

  “She’s been having problems with her leg—twinges, cramps and fleeting weakness. But you know Murphy.”

  “Ran every test he had.” Doc Murphy got thorough about even a cold.

  “Indeed. He diagnosed her pregnancy almost immediately, but he didn’t stop there.” Michael hesitated for a long time. Almost as if the disease didn’t really exist if he didn’t name it. And then quietly, he said, “Doc Murphy discovered she has ALS. Advanced. At best, she has two years. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

  “I don’t know what ALS is.” But Duster didn’t have to be a doctor to know whatever it was, it was bad. They didn’t hand out acronyms for easily treatable ailments.

  In his halting tone, Michael explained that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was a neurodegenerative disease that affected nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. “Mary’s voluntary muscle action will be progressively affected until she’s paralyzed.”

  No wonder Michael acted so hostile and cruel. He felt powerless, and that was the one feeling Michael could not abide. All his money, all his power, every resource he could tap with a touch of his fingers, could not stop the inevitable progression of Mary’s disease.

  Closing his eyes with the sudden understanding of Michael’s behavior, and a regretful acceptance of what Mary would have to face—her body falling slack while her mind remained intact—Duster asked, “Mary doesn’t know she has this disease?”

  “No.” Duster opened his eyes when he heard Michael fumbling for something in his desk drawer. “Murphy told me after Mary told me she was pregnant and before you landed.” He extracted a key and took off Duster’s restraints. “I told Murphy I wanted to be the one to break it to her, but I don’t know how I’m going to do that. Not after hurting her and then tossing her into lockdown. Which, knowing Mary, she’s halfway out of.”

  Rubbing his wrists, Duster bit his lip to fight back tears of not only frustration but hopelessness. Michael’s misery and Mary’s made him terribly sad. That he and Diane had a chance, a new start on the flames of their wreckage… “What can I do to help?”

&nb
sp; Tilting his face with a pained, curious expression, Michael smiled for the first time. “After all I’ve done, you still want to help me?”

  “Long ago, we made a deal to remain friends to the end. I’m as committed to that as I ever was. Let me live in my house with my wife and son, and I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

  “Diane will betray you again. I know it as sure as I know I’m standing here right now.” The utter conviction in his voice was compelling, but Duster had already made his decision.

  “It’s my choice to make, Michael, not yours.”

  “But—”

  “I appreciate you trying to act like my dad, but you’re not.”

  A wry smile crossed Michael’s face.

  “You’re ten years older than me, not twenty. And I feel kinda silly pointing this out, but I’m not a little kid. I have to take my lumps just like everybody else.”

  A frown deepened the lines on either side of Michael’s mouth. “What if this time her betrayal devastates you?”

  Again, Duster wanted to ask what Michael had smelled on Diane, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. It would betray Diane if he did. “If you think I’m going into this blindly, I’m not. We’ve agreed to work together to give Scott a home. Like what I never had. What you never had.”

  Michael nodded. “You’d take her back into your life just for your son?”

  “Yes. I don’t think she did what she did seven years ago maliciously. She did it because she felt she had no other option. If she makes a bad choice again, I’ll deal with it. You can’t do it for me.”

  “I really—” Michael took a deep breath, then whispered low, barely audible, “I really need you right now.”

  Respectful of what it cost Michael to admit that, Duster offered, arms open, “I’m here.” To his utter surprise, Michael whirled, embraced him in a fierce hug, then pulled sharply away, turning his back.

  Michael had never hugged him before, even though Duster had offered plenty of times. He’d clasped his hand, gripped his shoulder, but not embraced him. Hugging was not a manly gesture, according to Michael. Duster was certain that idiotic belief had come from Michael’s father. Because of that asshole’s abuse, Michael hated being weak or needy, but more than anything, he hated being powerless.