Page 44 of Edge of Ruin
“You misunderstood. I never insulted you,” I said.
“No? Me, the itinerant sexpot neo-hippy?”
I narrowly avoided spluttering my coffee. “That doesn’t count,” I protested. “You took me by surprise. In a wet t-shirt, no less.”
“Oh?” She gazed at me over the rim of her mug, eyes sparkling.
“Yes! Give me a fucking break! There you were, soaking wet in the forest, nipples poking through your shirt, looking like something out of a Penthouse centerfold?—”
“It’s not my fault it was raining! I looked like a freaking mudslide!”
“Yeah, and it’s not my fault all the blood in my body got instantly rerouted to my dick,” I muttered. “You expect me to be rational when a gorgeous woman tricked out like that waves a tire iron at me?”
Her eyebrows went up. “Did the tire iron turn you on, Jack?”
“I’ll tell you what turns me on,” I told her. “A proud, beautiful, self-reliant woman who takes no shit off anybody. That absolutely yanks my chain. Big time.”
Her eyes fell, but she was smiling now. Maybe I’d manage to navigate this one without going off the rails. “I never insulted you,” I went on. “I made a rational assessment of the situation based on the information I gathered. You read it as an insult, but I was not judging you.”
“Wrong,” Vivi said sternly. “Your assessment is faulty.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve had lots of practice.”
“Whoever you’ve been practicing on isn’t me. But let’s not talk about it, or we’ll just crash and burn all over again.”
She tried to tug her hand back, but I hung on to it, stubbornly. “That wasn’t what I was apologizing for,” I confessed. “I meant when we were out in the field. You asked about my uncle. And I got all uptight. I closed you off.” I blew out a careful, measured sigh, trying to relax my clenched insides.
Her eyes softened. She set down her coffee and reached across the table. “There’s a reason I was asking those questions about the bust, you know,” she said.
“Yeah?” I asked warily. “And what’s that?”
“I just wondered if it was something that we had in common,” she said. “I was in the middle in a big drug bust once, too. When I was a kid.”
I stared at her, my mouth stupidly open. “Huh? You?”
“Me,” she said. “It sucked. As you are highly qualified to agree.”
“But aren’t you … didn’t you ...” I racked my brains for the details that Duncan had given me about Vivi D’Onofrio’s background. Italian nobility. Priceless art. And now drug busts? What the fuck? This did not compute. Not at all.
“My two sisters and I were all adopted,” she said, answering my silent confusion. “Lucia took us in as foster kids. I went to her when I was eleven. I was lucky. Nancy and Nell had to plow through years of bad placements before they found Lucia. I hit pay dirt right off the bat, on my first go. Lucia was amazing. And I got two kick-ass, readymade sisters in the bargain. They were the best. I hit the jackpot.”
“And before?” I prompted.
Her face clouded. “Ah. Before. Well, my mom was a junkie. And the men she took up with were all dealers.”
“Jesus,” I said under my breath.
“I got used as a sentry,” she said. “Deliveries, too.”
“No fucking shit!” I was aghast. “How old were you?”
She shrugged. “Eight, nine. Red pigtails, freckles, ruffles. Who would suspect what was in my Hello Kitty knapsack? I liked it, at the time. It made me feel important, grown up. Useful.”
“Used,” I corrected, harshly. “Anything could have happened to you! A little kid, for drug deliveries? That’s fucking insane!”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Duh. But anyway, the shit came down. There was a shoot-out. My mom’s boyfriend, Randy, got killed in the bust. My mom went to prison.”
I winced. “Tell me you weren’t there when it happened.”
