Sweet Seduction Shield

by Nicola Claire

  The women shifted in their seats and the men all stood a little straighter. It seemed when Nick spoke everyone listened.

  "OK," I said, lifting my eyes to his ice-blue ones.

  "Gen and Adam stay here with Daisy," he ordered.

  "What?" Gen exclaimed. "I don't get to go? Why not?"

  "Dominic," all three men said in unison.

  I expected Gen to splutter and fume, but she cocked her head to the side and then shrugged. My gaze met her amused one.

  "It's all right, he'll pay," she explained. "It'll be fun."

  "I bet it will," Kelly murmured, receiving a snigger from Abi in response. Gen just smiled, wickedly.

  "We'll be buying drinks, but no one consumes them," Nick added. "They'll be for show."

  Everyone nodded.

  "Eva, Marie, Kelly and I will go in together. Abi and Ben will scout the bar out first before we do. We do not proceed unless they give us the all clear."

  "How will they know it's safe?" I asked.

  "Abi's familiar with McLaren's men, and Ben's familiar with any locals," Nick pointed out reasonably. It all made complete sense. "Both of them are trained to handle any difficulties that could arise," he added, making me look at Ben's head, noticing the bandage had been removed, but the memory of why he'd had to wear one was still fresh.

  Trained or not, even professionals get caught out.

  Nick's eyes were on me.

  "It's up to you, Marie. If you think the risk is too high, we flag it. Give Pierce instructions on where to find the ledger and hope he can find it."

  It was a solid option, he could just flash his badge and storm in there, probably get a search warrant and level the place flat trying to find it. It was the safest path to tread. But I needed this. I needed to be the one to retrieve the book, to make sure it was still there. It wasn't logical. It wasn't a desire based on intelligent thought processes. It was from the gut, from deep inside where Rick used to live. His ledger, his hand writing, his deeds... all on display in a leather bound tome.

  The book would destroy Roan McLaren, but it would also shatter what tiny sliver of peace Richard Costello had in death. His hand was all over that book. His accounting, his figures, his twist on New Zealand tax law. Everything I stood for as a chartered accountant was blatantly snubbed by my dead husband on each page. Forget the criminal activities, every dime that went in or out of McLaren's coffers was accounted for by Rick.

  And every dime was dirty, but came out clean after it had spent a time or two between the pages.

  I felt disgusted to be associated with the ledger. But I also felt compelled to be the one to hand it over to the Police. That had been my intention all those years ago. I needed to see that through to the end. I needed to touch it first, before Pierce did. Because despite everything he and I felt for each other, Ryan Pierce was a cop. And if he was the one to retrieve the book, then what did that say about me?

  I flicked a glance over the table towards Daisy, who was munching a muffin in one hand and opening and shutting the little door on her newly decorated birdhouse with the other. The conversation was probably over her head, but the atmosphere would not have been missed. Her round eyes came up to meet mine. And held me there.

  "You gotta do it, Mummy," she declared, crumbs falling all over her chin and chest as she spoke.

  Yeah, I did. For her. For me. I nodded, but said, "Daisy-girl, look at all that mess." My voice was too light to be a reprimand, somehow over the past few days the constant need to clean up after my daughter didn't seem as important anymore. Daisy offered a wide smile and stuffed the rest of the muffin into her mouth in one go.

  Adam snorted, Ben chuckled and Abi rushed over with a cloth.

  "See, all gone, Mum," Abi declared once she'd fixed my daughter up.

  "Marie?" Nick urged, when I still didn't say anything. Stuck on how easy it was to be with these people. How comfortable. How completely normal it felt. How much I didn't want it to end.

  I took a quick look at all the faces in the room, each one watching me expectantly, but not in any way judgementally. I was an ice princess surrounded by bright rays of sunshine, and I think I was welcoming the burn.

  "Let's do this," I said, holding Nick's gaze.

  "All right," he said with a nod, pulling a cellphone from his pocket and swiping at the screen. "You get that?" he asked, as soon as it was answered. I couldn't hear the reply, but I was guessing he was talking to Eric at ASI. Who else would get what had just been said? "Yeah, we leave in fifteen. What can you see at the 'Cage?"

  A pause, as Abi cleared the table and Ben helped her stack the dishwasher.

  "That's good, keep him there until we arrive," Nick said, then swiped the cellphone screen to end the call. "Jason's outside the Birdcage waiting on us. He'll stay outside and keep an eye on the entrance, relay any changes as they occur."

  "So, I guess we're set," I said, sucking in a fortifying breath of air.

  "We're set," Nick declared, standing up and adjusting various things hanging from his belt. Taser, handcuffs. Gun. This was happening, and all because I'm a bit screwed in the head and need to finish what I started.

  "It'll be all right, Marie," Ben said from across the table. His back to the window above the sink, his arms crossed over his broad chest. The others started to file out of the room, one by one, until it was just me, Daisy, Ben and Abi left.

  "How do you know?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Because Pierce wouldn't have agreed to let us go in with you, if he wasn't sure the coast was already clear."

  That's what he thought, and part of me wanted to believe it too. I must have shown some of my doubt on my face though, because Ben chuckled, shook his head and added, "He said to give you this."

  A folded piece of paper was pulled from his jeans pocket and he reached forward and handed it over the table to me. Then with one last look at Abi, he clasped her hand and pulled her from the room. I sat stunned, staring at the still closed piece of paper, willing myself to open it up and read what was inside.

  "Is it a love letter, Mummy?" Daisy asked, making me jump slightly, for a moment too caught up in my own world to remember she was sitting there.

  I mentally shook myself and slipped the note into my back pocket and then turned to face my daughter. I offered her a beaming smile and nodded towards the birdhouse.

  "Did you do this all by yourself?" I asked.

  "Nah, Adam and Ben helped. That Nick guy just gave instructions from a deckchair."

  I laughed. That sounded about right.

  "Well, you all did a great job. Where's it going?"

  "In our backyard," she declared, and I wondered if we'd ever get back to our two bedroom flat in Grey Lynn. "I'm gonna ask deetetiv Pierce to hang it up."

  So determined to include Pierce in our lives. I blinked down at her, as she toyed with the latch on the door to the 'house'. Unsure exactly what to say to that.

  Was it wrong of me to want Ryan in our lives too? Was I setting Daisy up to be hurt? I didn't know the answer, and now was not the time to work it out.

  "OK, sweetheart, we'll see," I said instead.

  "Oh, we'll see all right, Mummy. Yes we will."

  I guess I'd just been told, hadn't I?

  Chapter 19

  Yeah, I'm Ready, Babe

  The note felt heavy in my back pocket as I sat between Abi and Kelly in the rear of an SUV. I should have read it as soon as Ben handed it over. Reading a 'love letter' in front of my daughter was one thing, reading it in front of these two women was something else entirely. I felt like it was burning a hole into my left butt cheek, I kept squirming in my seat trying to assuage the imaginary ache.

  "You got ants in your pants?" Kelly asked on my left.

  "Or do you need to pee?" Abi offered from my right.

  "Could be excitement over seeing Pierce again," Eva suggested from the front passenger seat, receiving an arched brow from Nick who was driving.

  Ben muttered a "Fuck me" in the b
ack of the vehicle, making up the entirety of our little retrieval group.

  "I'm fine," I muttered, ruining my defence when I squirmed in my seat again. Argh! I should just get the damn thing out and read it. The desire to find out what Ryan had written was so great, but the longer I took before I did so, made me begin to doubt it was a love letter at all.

  What if it was just a note explaining the retrieval was back on for tonight. He'd obviously changed his mind about it, and may have done so before he left Ben and Abi's house. The note was to catch me up on the plan.

  Yeah, that was probably it. The squirming stopped and the hand wringing began instead.

  "I used to feel an itch between my shoulder blades," Abi said into the quiet air of the car.

  I saw Nick's eyes come up to the rear vision mirror, they caught mine, but I think he'd been intending to see what expression was on Abi's face. Eva swung around in her seat.

  "Do you still get it?" she asked.

  "Not so much," Abi advised. Ben's hand snaked between us from the rear and squeezed her shoulder once, then disappeared. She offered me a small smile. "Bullseyes and shoulder itches, when my world was uncertain they kept me sane." An amused sound escaped her lips then. "Well, as sane as you could be when paranoid."

  "I'm not paranoid," I pointed out, although softly, not wanting to offend.

  "Paranoia. Fear. At times like this they're one and the same."

  I was scared. I'd denied myself that emotion for so long that now I felt it again it threatened to consume me. I stared down at my white knuckled hands clasped together, felt the moist sheen of sweat on my palms, noticed the slight trembling in my extremities. Yes, I was scared, but not of anything tangible. Not of, say, the tattooed freak jumping out from behind the bar at the Birdcage and attacking. This fear was more elusive than that. This fear was something you couldn't fight. When there's no physical opponent, how do you throw a punch?

  I was walking down a bleak and dark corridor into my past, revisiting aspects I'd long since buried beneath my shields. Exposing painful memories, rifling through a shoebox full of photos in my mind. I knew what I'd find. I knew what it would do to me. But I couldn't stop this now. Too many people knew about the ledger. Too many people wanted it.

  Hell, Pierce and Nick were humouring me by letting me be the one to retrieve it. Ryan because he felt something for me. Nick because Ryan was a friend. Both of them could have just gone ahead and searched for the book on their own. Without me. But they were letting me face my past. Letting me put it right. I wanted to be grateful, and in a way I was, but the past was looming and the closer I got to it the more detail I could see.

  Blood splatter. Gun smoke. Screams and tears and heartache. So much fear I couldn't breathe.

  On one side of me Abi reached out and wrapped a hand around one of mine. On the other Kelly did the same, until both my hands were being held by the two women with me. They didn't say anything, they just offered what support they could in the face of my haunted past.

  I sucked in a deep breath, felt my heart thudding inside my chest. Felt the strain of the muscle as it tried to keep up with the adrenaline coursing through the blood. Gone was my confidence. Gone was my shield. And we hadn't even made it to the Police bar yet. I leaned forward in my seat and attempted to get a handle on my emotions, vaguely aware I was squeezing both Kelly and Abi's hands a little too tightly.

  The vehicle rolled to a stop on the side of the road, Eva still turned in her seat looking worried, but Nick hadn't yet spun back to watch me fall apart. He might have been seeing it all play out in the mirror, but I think he was offering what privacy he could given the closed quarters we were in.

  I finally managed to catch my breath enough to talk, my voice a shadow of my usual self.

  "How did you deal with it?" I asked the space in front of my feet, but everyone must have known the question was for Abi.

  "I don't have an easy answer for you, Marie," she said slowly. "For me I took medication to help settle the anxiety, but it wasn't until I faced my fears that I really made any progress at all."

  "But how did you face it?" I demanded.

  I heard her suck in a deep breath, but for the life of me couldn't raise my eyes from the floor of the car.

  "I accepted that I couldn't do it alone anymore," she said quietly. "That I didn't need to. You're not alone either. You know that, right? You and Daisy never have to face this alone ever again."

  Oh, no. The first tear felt too big for my eye, I couldn't blink it back. It rolled over my lashes and splashed onto my wrist. Hot and wet and exposed. The second and third followed in quick succession and then, like floodgates opening, I lost count as they tumbled freely to the floor.

  No one said anything, just a squeeze of my hand from Kelly and a soft rub of Abi's palm over my bent back. I heaved in sobbed breath after sobbed breath, until there were simply no more tears left to fall. God, I'd never felt so raw, so naked before in all my life. I'd never felt so unmasked.

  I hated Rick for this. Yes, I stole the ledger, but damn it! I wouldn't have had to if he hadn't have gotten into bed with the head of a criminal ring.

  Anger was a good shield I discovered. I sat up slowly, feeling the resentment for my dead husband stiffen my spine. I despised everything he became. Long before that fateful night. How does one throw away love like that so easily? I'd loved him once, but by the time we faced McLaren and his gun toting goons in the back field of his compound, that love had changed, warped into something else. A desperate attempt to save something of what we'd been.

  Even if we'd escaped that night with our lives, Rick and I would never have been the same together again.

  Daisy will never know. I can't let her. Even before I was aware that she was growing inside my belly, I'd lost my love for her father and had only been clinging on out of sheer stubbornness.

  Tonight I was going to finish what I'd started all those fateful years ago. Tonight I was going to make sure Roan McLaren couldn't destroy another love like he did mine and Rick's.

  Eva handed me a tissue between the front seats, I offered a wet smile and tidied myself up. My face was no doubt blotchy, my eyes would have been bloodshot, but my back was straight and I had a shield in place.

  Tonight I would say goodbye to Richard Costello.

  "Just say the word, Marie and we call this off," Nick said from the front seat.

  I met his eyes in the rear view mirror, chin up, shoulders back.

  "Let's do this," I said, heat coating my words. Surprisingly as effective as my once usual ice.

  Nick nodded, and doors were opened as everyone climbed out of the SUV. I slipped out behind Abi, who was already within the arms of Ben. He must have escaped out of the rear door of the car to beat the rest of us. Both of their eyes were on Nick. Who had his hand up to his ear and a frown marring his forehead.

  "OK, you're on," he said with a nod of his head to Ben and Abi. Seconds later we watched them saunter in the front doors of the Birdcage across the street. "Now we wait," Nick added, leaning his butt back against the car.

  Eva stretched out over the hood, staring in the same direction as Nick, while Kelly adjusted her skimpy top and flattened her hands over her shapely arse. I was guessing Kelly wasn't a usual on these ASI type jobs, and the excitement of the 'mission' was competing with her excitement at being in a pub.

  I flicked my glance over the orange two storey brick building of the Birdcage. It was a striking structure, clearly over a century old, with white masonry surrounding the windows and door, and in the detailed parapet along the roofline. It stood on its own, in the shadow of the Victoria Motorway Overpass, on the corner of busy Franklin and Victoria Streets. It shouted out its right to remain in a world that was constantly changing, upgrading, destroying icons of the past.

  And it was busy. It didn't matter what day of the week it was, the Birdcage belonged to the emergency services. Police, Fire and Ambulance frequented its doors. They never slept, so neither did this building
. Offering a safe harbour for those who often offered such to others in need.

  I'd hoped, when I'd buried the ledger here, that the likes of Roan McLaren would never set foot within the Birdcage's walls. It hadn't been easy, McLaren's book of bad deeds didn't fit inside my jeans pocket. I'd had to smuggle it inside hidden in a tote bag, then when the patrons - many of which were off duty cops - celebrated the New Year with drinks and kisses and confetti spraying revelry, I'd ducked down onto my knees and pried a corner brick out of the side of the courtyard wall.

  My fingertips had been scraped bloody, but I'd scouted the location out before I'd planned my move, so with the use of a file the brick had come loose, allowing me to slide the bundled ledger into a gap beneath the wall. I'd never checked on it since, like I had my mementoes box full of photos at the Salt Water Baths. I'd had to trust the location was a deterrent more than the actual hole I'd buried the book in.

  And now I was back, to retrieve it. To finally use it as I had intended it to be used all those years ago. Risking more than just me to see justice done. I shook my head on that thought, thinking of Daisy and what dangers this could bring my daughter was not wise right now. I had to do this. If I didn't, McLaren would never be stopped.

  Nick straightened up from his recline on the vehicle and glanced at the rest of us.

  "All right," he said, reaching out a hand to clasp Eva's. "We're happy to be here, yeah? It's a fucking bar and we're heading in to get drunk."

  I guess that was his idea of a pep talk. Kelly made a scoffing sound, but we all dutifully put smiles on our faces and walked as a unit towards the front door. Nick and Eva led the way, the cowgirl offering one last encouraging smile over her shoulder. Kelly looping her arm casually through mine, as though we really were out for a night on the town, ready to party.

  My heart thundered in my chest, my pulse flickering so rapidly that I could actually feel it at the base of my neck. I couldn't find the ice, but I reminded myself that I had other shields I could use. Fuck Roan McLaren. And fuck my dead husband too.