Three months? Beth closed her eyes and hung her head. Man, had she gotten it wrong. What a mess. And what had Scotty been thinking?
“He was thinking I was his life mate,” Odilia said with pleasure.
“But he wasn’t, was he?” she said sharply.
“He should have been!” Odilia shrieked with frustration. “Look at you. You are nothing but a whore, and a common whore at that, while he is a laird! You are not good enough for him. I am a lady! My father was a baron. I have money. I was raised properly, and I would never sell myself for a couple of coins.”
“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Beth agreed. “But apparently you’ll blow people up, cut them into pieces with wire traps and—Oh my God, you were willing to blow up Rickart and Magnus,” she said suddenly.
Odilia shrugged her shoulders. “Collateral damage.”
“But they’re friends of Scotty’s,” she pointed out with disbelief. “And yours. You work with them.”
“Collateral damage,” she said again.
“Oh, wow,” Beth said with disgust. “You’re a complete and utter sociopath.”
Odilia raised one eyebrow. “Really? You are going to say something like that to the woman who is going to kill you?”
Beth considered the question and then shrugged. “You can only kill me once. It’s not like you can kill me for every insult I give you.”
“No. But I can make it extremely painful and last a really long time to pay you back for every word you say that I do not like,” she pointed out.
“Somehow I don’t think you have the time,” Beth said with certainty. “We won’t be alone out here long enough for that.”
“Oh, I am sorry. Did you think I was going to kill you here?” Odilia asked tauntingly. “No, no, no. You will only stay here for another half an hour, and then my shift is over and I am going to put you in the back of one of the vans and take you to my place, where I can kill you quickly . . . or slowly. The choice will be yours. Oh, wait,” she added. “Actually the choice would be mine, so maybe you had better start being nicer to me.”
Beth shook her head. “This isn’t going to work at all, Odilia. Scotty will never love you. You’re not his life mate and you don’t really want him anyway,” she added with exasperation. “If you knew what it was like to have a life mate, you wouldn’t look twice at Scotty. Didn’t Magnus and Scotty tell you that? Didn’t they explain what it was like to have a life mate?” Beth closed her eyes even as she finished asking the question and then muttered, “What am I thinking? They’re men. Men don’t talk about stuff like that.” Sighing, she raised her head and asked, “What about this Mrs. McCurdy? Surely she told you something?”
“Mrs. McCurdy was very old-fashioned,” Odilia said primly. “She told me to wait for the right man. Scotty is the right man.”
“No he’s not,” Beth assured her, and then suggested, “Read my mind. Since I’m a new life mate, I know you can. Look into my memories and see what I’m talking about.”
“No,” Odilia growled.
“Just read my mind,” Beth insisted. “Or are you afraid to see I’m right?”
“Shut up!” Odilia snapped. “I hate you. I hate you so much. Everything was perfect, and then he went to Spain and had those damned shared dreams . . . Until then, he thought I was his life mate.”
“I don’t know how,” Beth said with exasperation. “He should have known that lame-ass sex you two had wasn’t life mate sex. Gentle and caring!” She snorted. “Did he ever want to be inside you so bad he ripped your knickers wide open just to get to you? Did he ever make you scream with pleasure so all-encompassing you passed out from the strength of it? That is life mate sex, not this insipid childish nonsense you keep prattling on about.”
Beth shut up then, mostly because she’d become aware that Odilia was pale and quivering, her eyes stricken as she concentrated on Beth’s forehead. The woman was reading her memories as she’d suggested, and Beth gave them to her with both barrels, remembering every encounter she’d had with Scotty and letting it replay inside her mind like a porno. Every position in the garage in Vancouver, the heated moments on the plane, the two days they’d spent in bed while he healed and after. Even the dream sex they’d shared that had started in the market and ended in the forest-green bedroom.
“That’s why he changed the color of his room?” Odilia breathed, sounding beyond hurt. “For you? For a hundred years he has not allowed anyone to change it. He has it repainted the same color, has the sheets custom-made if he cannot find them in that color, and it was all for you?”
Beth’s eyebrows rose. Odilia had seen all he’d done to her in that bedroom and that was what she was upset about? The color of the room. Scotty had said he’d decorated it that color because he’d known it would suit her. That she was—
“Fire and ice in a forest of green,” Odilia breathed, and then rage filled her face again and she withdrew the dart gun from her weapons belt and shot her again.
“Maybe she and Donny went for a walk,” Mortimer suggested, and then cursed and said, “This was a hell of a time for the cameras to go down.”
“Somehow I do no’ think that is a coincidence,” Scotty growled.
“No,” Mortimer agreed. He shook his head, looking frustrated. “They must have gone for a walk.”
“I do no’ think so,” Scotty countered, shaking his head. “They have no’ left the grounds, and we’ve been out in the yard and they were no’ there. ’Sides, surely they’d have returned by now if they’d just gone fer a walk?”
He and Mortimer had been running around in circles trying to figure out where the pair could be since Scotty had returned and passed on what he’d realized while talking to Odilia—that Donny was missing.
Mortimer seemed to think that was a good thing. That it probably meant they were both fine. Scotty didn’t agree. It made him more anxious.
“We did not check the airstrip. That is quite a hike. They would take longer to walk that,” Mortimer pointed out.
Scotty stared at him in stunned silence for a moment, shocked that he hadn’t thought of it himself.
“Come on,” Mortimer said, leading him out of his office. “We can take the van. It is in the attached garage.”
Scotty followed him through the kitchen to the door to the attached garage and headed for the passenger side, but paused when Mortimer threw him the keys to the vehicle. Scotty caught them instinctively and then glanced to him with surprise.
“I noticed that you like to drive,” the man said dryly as he passed him to take the passenger seat himself.
Fingers tightening around the keys, Scotty hurried around to the driver’s side. Mortimer had hit the remote on the visor to open the garage door before Scotty was inside. By the time he started the engine, it was already halfway up, and he had to wait barely a moment before he could slam on the gas and squeal out of the garage. He turned the wheel sharply the moment they were clear of the building, sending the van shooting around the house and along the lane toward the back of the property.
He spotted the door of the outbuilding opening, but didn’t slow when he saw Odilia step out and glance around with curiosity. He was busy concentrating on the way the lane ahead narrowed as they surged into the trees. Mortimer’s phone began to ring as the trees closed in on either side.
“It is Magnus,” he said, and pushed the button to put the call on speakerphone.
“Mortimer?” Magnus’s voice asked.
“And Scotty,” Mortimer told him.
They heard Magnus grunt and then he said, “I thought you said the cameras at the apartment building were just empty casings? Fakes to deter criminal activity rather than working cameras to film it?”
“Yes,” Mortimer agreed. “That is what I was told.”
“Well, we were talking to the store clerk while waiting for the film to copy, and he asked us why we did not get the film footage from the apartment building. We told him what you had said about the cameras not being real and there not being footage, and he said sure the cameras are real. The manager of the apartment building drops in to the store all the time to buy cigarettes and is forever complaining about how he has to clean the camera lenses twice a week, or the picture on the film is so fuzzy you cannot see the faces of the kids who keep spraying graffiti on the walls.”