Standing In The Shadows. Shannon McKenna
through her body, making her guilty and sick. Dad was paying the highest price he could for what he’d done. Being sour and pissy wouldn’t change things, and she had no time to mope. Busy was better.
That phrase was another sanity saver. The best of the lot. It was dorky and uncool, but she was already a lost cause when it came to cool. Look up uncool in the dictionary, and you’d find a photo of Erin Riggs. Busy, busy, busy Erin Riggs.
She sharpened a pencil and crossed off Call temp agency. Sure, it was stupid to put items on her list just to immediately cross them off. Grasping for a cheap, fleeting sense of accomplishment. She didn’t care. Every little bit of accomplishment helped. Even the cheap kind.
Mom’s bills still headed the list. The scariest, most depressing item. She decided to stall for a couple more minutes, and dialed her friend Tonia’s number. Tonia’s machine clicked on. “Hi, Tonia? I got a last-minute job from Mueller, and I have to go to the coast tomorrow. Just wondering if you could pass by to feed Edna. Let me know. Don’t worry if you can’t, I’ll find another solution. Talk to you later.”
She hung up, her belly fluttering with anxiety as she gathered together Mom’s checkbook, bank statements, her calculator, and the stack of unopened mail that she’d collected from beneath the mail slot on her last visit home. Throwing away junk mail cut the pile down to half, but many of the remaining envelopes had FINAL NOTICE stenciled across them in scary red block print. Brrr. Special pile for those.
She arranged them neatly in piles. Unpaid property taxes, due months ago. Threatening letters from collection agencies. Past due mortgage payments. Past due phone bills. Medical bills. Credit card bills, big ones. A letter from the bursar’s office of Endicott Falls College, “regretting the necessity of withdrawing Cynthia Riggs’s scholarship, based on poor academic performance.” That one made Erin close her eyes and press her hand against her mouth.
Moving right along. No point in dwelling on it. Organization was calming. It put things in perspective. She piled collection agency letters in one pile, past due notices in another, and made three columns in her notebook: Urgently Overdue, Overdue, and Due. She totaled the sums, and compared it to what was left in Mom’s account. Her heart sank.
She couldn’t cover the shortfall in the Urgently Overdue column, not even if she drained her meager checking account dry. Mom had to get a job; it was the only solution, but Erin hadn’t had much luck even getting Mom out of bed lately, let alone out into the workforce.
But it was that, or lose the house she had moved into as a bride. That would push Mom over the edge for sure.
Erin let her face drop down against the neat piles of bills and fought the urge to cry. Sniveling was not constructive. She’d done enough of it in these past few months, so she should know. She needed fresh ideas, new solutions. It was just so hard to think outside the box, all by herself. Her tired, lonesome brain felt like it was padlocked inside a box. With chains wrapped around it.
This job from Claude Mueller was a godsend. He was a mysterious figure, a reclusive, art-loving multimillionaire, the administrator of the enormous Quicksilver Fund. He had found her in a random Internet search on Celtic artifacts, which had landed him on one of her articles, posted on the website she’d designed when she started her own consulting business. He’d begun to e-mail her, complimenting her on her articles, asking questions, even requesting a copy of her doctoral thesis. Oh, boy. The ultimate ego rush for an antiquities nerd like her.
But then he had asked her to come to Chicago to authenticate some new acquisitions, and he hadn’t blinked an eye at her fee. Or rather, his staff hadn’t. He had been in Paris at the time. She hadn’t met him on that or any of the three subsequent jobs, the fees for which had been providential. The first had paid for her move from the apartment on Queen Anne to this far cheaper room in the run-down Kinsdale Arms. The second and third, in San Diego, had covered the insurance deductibles of Mom’s recent medical bills. The Santa Fe job had paid two of her mother’s past due mortgage payments. And this one, hopefully, would almost cover the Urgently Overdue column.
Working for Mueller had been so dignified. First class, all expenses paid. It had been lovely to be treated with deference and respect. Such a pleasant break from the squalid grind of her daily life; arguing with the bank over missed mortgage payments, begging her landlord to call the exterminator, spending all of January with no hot water. And the sordid details of Dad’s trial, surfacing one after the other, until nothing could shock her anymore. Well, almost nothing. Those videos had been quite a jolt.
Enough. Moving right along. So Claude Mueller wanted to meet her in person, did he? How gratifying. She was curious about him, too. She paper-clipped the bills together, put them into the Mom’s Bills folder in her file cabinet, and turned her attention to the Mueller e-mail.
She had to hit the perfect tone for her reply. Warm, enthusiastic, but not puppyish or, God forbid, desperate. Reserved, but with just a flash of extra personal interest showing through at the end. Looking forward to it…pleased to have the opportunity to meet you at last, etc. Referrals from Mueller could set her highly specialized consulting business on its way. And she was finished in Seattle with museum work, since the Huppert had fired her. She would have to change cities to get away from the dark cloud that hung over her, and she couldn’t possibly leave her mother and Cindy when they were both so unstable.
She had gleaned all the info she could on Mueller from the Internet. He was publicity-shy, though he’d been cited in museum journals for his generous donations to the arts. Her grant-writing and development colleagues were forever swooning over the largesse of the Quicksilver Fund. He was in his early forties, and lived on a private island off the coast of southern France. That was all she knew.
She read over her response and hit SEND. Who knew? Maybe Mueller would prove to be attractive and charming. His e-mails were faintly flirtatious. He was intellectual, erudite. Wealthy, too, not that she cared, but it was an interesting fact to file away. He appreciated the sensual, enigmatic beauty of Celtic artifacts, which were her passion. He was a collector of beautiful objects.
Nothing at all like Connor McCloud.
Ouch. Damn. And here she’d been quietly patting herself on the back for not thinking of Connor for hours. She tried to wrestle her mind away from him, but it was too late. His hair had grown out, as shaggy and wild as a Celtic warrior the last time she’d seen him, at the Crystal Mountain nightmare last fall. He’d leaned on his blood-spattered cane while Georg was loaded onto a stretcher behind him, staring at her. His face had been so hard and fierce, his eyes boring into hers. Blazing with barely controlled fury. The image was indelibly marked on her memory.
That was the day that her life had begun to unravel. And Connor had been the one to haul Dad into custody. Her father, the traitor and murderer. God, when was this going to hurt a little less?
She’d had a knee-trembling crush on Connor McCloud for ten years, ever since Dad had brought the recruits he was training for the new undercover unit home to dinner when she was sixteen. One look at him, and something had gone hot and soft and stupid inside of her. His tilted eyes, the translucent green of a glacial lake. His lean, foxy face, all planes and angles. The sexy grooves in his cheeks when he grinned. His beard stubble, glinting gold. He’d always been quiet and shy when he ate at their house, his mile-a-minute partner Jesse doing most of the talking, but his laid-back, sexy baritone voice sent shivers through her body whenever he spoke. His hair was a shaggy mane, a crazy mix of every possible color of blonde. She wanted to touch its thick, springy texture. To bury her face in it and breathe him in.
And his body had been the focus of her most feverish erotic dreams in the privacy of her bed for years. He was so tall and lean and muscular. Whipcord tough, every muscle defined, but as graceful and agile as a dancer. She’d loved it when he pushed up his sleeves so she could sneak peeks at his thick, ropy forearms. His broad shoulders and long, graceful hands, those powerful legs, that excellent butt that looked so fine in his faded jeans. He was so gorgeous, it made her head spin.
She’d been tongue-tied and fluff-brained in his presence for years, but any romantic dreams she might have had about finally catching his interest when she grew a bosom, or got up the nerve