LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

she could look out her window at society and observe it from a distance, where it was safe, and never have to be a part of it. Little by little, over the years that followed, Avery stopped leaving her apartment. Whenever she needed something, she shopped online and had things delivered. She called Eastern Star Earth-friendly Market, who happily brought her groceries to her front door. The only time she ventured out was if she or Skittles needed to see a doctor. But on those occasions, she began steeling herself for the torment days, even weeks, in advance, shoring herself up to face a ruthless, unforgiving populace, even if only for an hour or two. And then, just to be on the safe side, she got completely snookered before heading out the door. Because the outside world was much too scary, much too menacing. It wasn’t safe, the way prison was.

      “You’re joking.”

      When she first heard him speak, Avery thought Dixon was reading her mind. Then she realized what he didn’t believe was that she couldn’t leave home without being incapacitated by fear. This from a man who sported an abraded cheek—never mind who had just released her from leather restraints—after trying to take her for a little ride.

      Now, she thought, might be a good time to change the subject.

      “Why am I here?” she asked.

      Dixon studied Avery Nesbitt in silence, wondering whether or not he should believe her about being terrified of reality. On one hand, she was just flaky enough that he could buy it. On the other hand, she had been corresponding with Sorcerer for a month, and God knew what he’d put her up to.

      Still, it was hard to fake the kind of mania that had consumed her when he’d tried to carry her out of her apartment. Dixon was pissed off at himself for how he’d handled that. Or rather, how he hadn’t handled it. Not just that he hadn’t tried any harder to talk to her and explain the situation before resorting to physical removal, but that he’d been so unprepared when she’d gone off the way she had.

      But she’d gone off so suddenly and so quickly and with such a powerful detonation, he hadn’t known what to do. Nowhere in his investigation of her had he seen any evidence of her having been formally trained in martial arts. Even her prison file had no record of her ever having participated in any kind of altercation. But the minute he’d tried to remove her from her home, she’d attacked. Viciously.

      And damn, she fought dirty.

      Of course, he’d eventually realized that she was too sloppy, chaotic and desperate to be trained in martial arts. But he hadn’t been able to figure out what exactly she was doing. When Cowboy heard the commotion coming over his headset, he’d responded to render aid. Between the two of them, they’d managed to wrestle her into a service elevator and then the surveillance van, which Cowboy had parked in the alley behind the building.

      But no sooner had they slammed the door shut behind themselves than did Avery go limp in Dixon’s arms. Her eyes had remained open and she had been breathing—though rapidly enough that he’d worried she might hyperventilate—but mentally she’d completely checked out. It was spooky how she shut down the way she did.

      She’d begun fighting again when he’d tried to remove her from the van. Ultimately it had taken a half hour—and a half dozen orderlies and nurses—to get her into the restraints. They’d said it was for her own safety, but Dixon suspected it was more for theirs. He hadn’t left her side once since then. He’d been worried about her, something that frankly had surprised him. He’d wanted to be sure she was okay. That had surprised him, too. Now evidently she was okay. So why wasn’t he relaxing?

      Maybe, he thought, because he was beginning to realize that okay for Avery Nesbitt wasn’t in any way okay.

      He marveled at how anyone who’d just kicked the shit out of him could look so fragile and reserved. Were it not for her ridiculous outfit, she’d even look prim. But what amazed him even more was that he actually found her kind of attractive. In a weird, bohemian, I-really-need-to-be-evaluated kind of way. Though it wasn’t necessarily Avery he was thinking needed the evaluation.

      Nevertheless, even after all she’d been through in the past few hours, she was surprisingly pretty. That first night he’d been in her apartment, Dixon had thought her eyes only looked enormous because of her glasses. Nobody, he’d thought, could have eyes that big or lashes that thick. But without the glasses her eyes were even larger. There had been times tonight when he’d nearly lost himself in their bottomless blue depths. And when he’d seen how that one braid had come unbound to leave her hair flowing over one shoulder like a shimmering, inky river, he’d found himself wanting to touch it, to see if it was as silky as it looked. Now that she’d rewoven her hair the way it belonged, he felt like a child denied his favorite plaything.

      But Avery Nesbitt wasn’t a plaything. Quite the contrary. If things turned out the way they were planning, she might be the most powerful weapon OPUS had at its disposal.

      “Judging by the restraints,” she said, “I’m assuming that I’m under arrest now.”

      She was perched on the very edge of the cot, her right hand massaging her left wrist where the restraints had been. A pang of guilt shot through Dixon. Seeing her like this, the thought of restraining her seemed silly. She looked like a delicate bird who’d injured its wing, and he couldn’t quite jibe the wounded chick with the raging terminator of a little while ago.

      Agoraphobia. That’s what she said she had. Yet nowhere in his research of her had there been any mention of her suffering from such a condition. Not in her prison records, not in her medical records, nowhere. Either she was lying about it or else she was lying about it. Because OPUS didn’t miss things like that. But if she was lying about being agoraphobic, then what had caused her to go off the way she had back at her place? And if she wasn’t lying about being agoraphobic, why was she suddenly feeling okay again, even though she wasn’t at home? Why wasn’t she still throwing a fit or being catatonic or something?

      Just what was the deal with Avery Nesbitt?

      He waggled his head back and forth a little. “Well, you are under arrest and you aren’t,” he told her evasively.

      She stopped rubbing her wrist and let both hands fall into her lap. “If I’m not under arrest, then I demand to be released immediately,” she said levelly. “And if I am under arrest, you’ll never make it stick, so I demand to be released immediately.”

      “What makes you think we won’t make it stick?” he asked. Mostly because he was sure that whatever her argument was, it was bound to be entertaining.

      “You didn’t read me my rights,” she told him.

      “I don’t have to,” he told her right back.

      “Says who?”

      “Says the agency I work for.”

      “Which, as I’ve said—several times, in fact—I’m still not convinced exists anywhere outside your own delusions.”

      “Look around you, Peaches,” Dixon said. “If OPUS doesn’t exist, then where do you think you are?”

      “I have no idea,” she replied. “Could be the renovated garage of some psychopath for all I know. Some psychopath like—oh, gee, who could I be thinking of?—you.”

      He didn’t rise to the bait. “If you’d studied my ID more closely, you’d have realized it’s totally genuine.”

      She narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t give me much of a chance to make up my mind about it. You were too busy tackling, harassing and groping me.”

      “Well, if you’d been a better hostess, I wouldn’t have had to tackle or harass you. The groping probably would have happened at some point, though,” he added, trying not to sound too smug. “Somehow it almost always comes to that. Whether I’m working or not.”

      “You searched me illegally,” she continued, obviously thinking it best to not dwell on that groping business.

      “But it was fun, wasn’t it?” Dixon said. He rather liked the idea of

Скачать книгу