Overlord: The Fringe, Book 2

by Anitra Lynn McLeod

  She riveted her gaze to Duster’s ship as the wide scanner tracked its path. To her relief, Duster turned to intercept the shuttle she put Michael in.

  “Sometimes, boot-licking toadies pay off.”

  She grinned as she considered the main console. She had at least thirty minutes to disappear.

  “And a whole lotta ways to make that happen.”

  Michael had recovered by the time Duster caught up to the shuttle. He docked to the main hatch of Elusive Grace.

  Fastening his short robe closed with a belt that barely spanned his waist, summoning as much dignity as he could, Michael left the shuttle and entered the main cargo bay where Duster waited with a compressed grin on his face.

  Through clenched teeth, Michael muttered, “One word and I’ll not only make you wear this damn thing, I’ll make you eat it afterward.”

  Duster seriously considered the threat and wisely said nothing. Straight-faced, he tossed him a bundle of clothes. “Four times now?”

  “Don’t push me. I’m primed to push back.” Michael tossed off the second-hand robe and yanked on a pair of flax-colored work overalls. “Where is she?”

  “Mary?” Duster asked with blinking innocence.

  “Don’t get cute.” Whatever she’d injected him with had left him with a hell of a headache.

  “Gone. And before you snipe at me, I didn’t help this time. Both shuttles launched from Whisper, then Whisper went full burn opposite my course.” Duster held his hands out as if to ward off Michael’s wrath. “Sensors indicated you were in the port shuttle, the starboard shuttle was empty, and Mary was in Whisper. I went after you.”

  “She’s switched bracelets before. How did you know I was in the damn shuttle?” Duster had made the right call, but Michael was still furious that Mary bested him yet again.

  “Shortly after the shuttles detached, your old wrist com on Mary went black.” Duster tapped the updated wrist com on Michael’s wrist. “This techno-wonder confirmed you were really in the shuttle.”

  “And Mary?” He felt compelled to inquire after her safety even though he was peeved she’d tricked him again. It had to be love. Nothing else could make him feel this way. Simultaneously he wanted to wring her neck yet wrap her in the safety of his arms.

  “She disappeared.”

  “Mary made an entire ship disappear?”

  “Yep.” Duster leveled his gaze. “I’m going to say this for the umpteenth time, and I hope you actually listen: Mary is dangerous. She not only made Whisper disappear, but she disrupted an entire quadrant. The only reason you were able to dock your shuttle to my ship is because she wanted you to.”

  “How?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. Scary Mary, she of the dangerous mind and clever execution. He couldn’t wait to hear the details of how she’d foiled them all yet again.

  “She detonated Whisper’s sensors like a bomb, flinging a shock wave of EMF in every direction. Every ship in the quadrant went black for at least a second, shields up or not. Your shuttle awakened because she shut the electronics down to protect them from the blast. Elusive Grace only survived because she forced us to shut down. When we got back online, she wasn’t there anymore.”

  “Not even the wrist com?”

  “All she had to do was cover it with plastimirror.”

  He’d forgotten. Michael rolled his head back and glared at the ceiling. “That woman.” Her sneakiness, her cleverness, her amazing criminal mind intrigued him to a degree that stunned him.

  “Mary is nothing short of intensely dangerous,” Duster said. “I don’t know what happened on Whisper, but it’s damn clear she wanted to get away. Let—her—go.”

  “Same song as before.”

  “And I’ll keep singing it until you hear me.” Duster sounded frustrated and exhausted. “If you haven’t grasped the truth, let me lay it out. You’re alive because that woman just couldn’t bring herself to kill you.”

  “Remarkable Mary.”

  “Scary Mary.” Duster nodded, dead serious. “You’re lucky to be alive. For whatever reason, she spared you.”

  “Care to know why?”

  Duster flashed him a tight, what’s-your-deal wink.

  “She heard you about Kraft. Mary admitted she loves me, but she thinks I’m hell-bent to go after Kraft to declare my undying love.”

  “Are you?” Duster asked pointedly.

  “Do I look like I’ve been sitting around mourning Kraft lately?” Michael pointed to the discarded robe.

  One look at the fluffy blue heap caused Duster to laugh. “When you got here, you looked like you were ready to have your hair set and your makeup done.”

  “I asked for that. Point is that Mary’s convinced I’m hopelessly in love with Kraft, but I’m hopelessly in love with Mary. Everyone knows it for a painful, and at this moment, rather embarrassing fact. Everyone but Mary herself.” Michael shook his head with a sigh. “Can’t say I blame her. If someone did to me what Emmet did to her, I’d have serious trust issues too. And before you even remind me, yes, I jerked her around as well.”

  “I didn’t say anything.” Duster spread his arms wide.

  “You don’t have to. I know what you’re thinking.” Actually, Michael could smell what Duster was thinking. “I apologized to her.”

  Duster lifted his brows. “I guess she didn’t believe you.”

  “Actually, she did.” Michael was certain of her acceptance. He smelled love emanating from her body when they’d come together in Tan’s bedroom. He saw love in her eyes as she’d explained and said goodbye to him in the shuttle.

  “Then why did she run from you?” Duster’s flippant tone grated on Michael’s already raw nerves.

  “She didn’t run. She let me go because she loves me.” A small, sad smile lifted the edges of his mouth.

  “You’re fooling yourself.” Duster laughed as he looked at the discarded robe.

  “No, I’m not.” His sober tone stifled Duster. “Mary thinks I’ll be happier with Kraft.” Seeing a knowing smirk dart across Duster’s face, he warned, “Don’t you dare ask me if that’s true.”

  Duster swallowed hard and gave him a razor gaze. “You play so much it’s difficult to know when you’re telling the truth.”

  “Mary let me go because she loves me enough to let me love someone else. You said love is what you do, sacrifices you make. Look at what Mary did, and tell me I’m wrong.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Mary kept a careful watch on the console. Blacked out, she hung not more than thirty minutes from Duster’s ship. He couldn’t see her. She could see him. Once he’d intercepted Michael’s shuttle, Duster turned his ship toward Windmere. She waited until they went beyond her sensor range and then brought Whisper to life. She turned the one direction Michael would never consider.

  “Right back at him.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “This is ridiculous.” Michael tossed the reports to his desk and paced the cool marble floor in his office. “They should have found Whisper by now. Mary had to have sold the ship, because she doesn’t have the script to run it.”

  “It’s gonna take time.” Duster sat with his feet up on the desk, sipping from a fresh cup of coffee.

  “It’s been a month. The longer we take, the farther away she gets.” Michael fought to keep his frustration from showing, but he knew his voice and posture clearly conveyed his growing irritation. “How did she manage to vanish into thin air?”

  “Because she doesn’t want to be found.”

  Michael gritted his teeth. “That may be so, but she also doesn’t know everything she should.”

  “So, you just want to find her to talk to her,” Duster said with a courteous yet patronizing tone.

  “Yes.”

  “Good gods, Michael.” Duster laughed. “You couldn’t even say one word with a straight face.”

  “Fine!” Michael shook his head. “I want to find her because I’m so hopelessly in love I’m about to go out of my mind
with worry. Now, can we move on to the part where we actually find her?”

  “Nope. Not until you really fess up.” Duster sat up and planted his shiny boot-clad feet on the floor. “You’re not worried about her at all.”

  “Since when did you become psychic?”

  “I know you. You’re not worried about her. You want her.”

  “Obviously.”

  Duster laughed again, more heartily than before. “And I know Mary. She’s fine, broken foot and all. No one is gonna take advantage of that woman. Hell, Never-Fail Nash himself is so afraid of her he won’t go after her a second time.”

  “When did you ask him?” Damn. Michael held on to Foster Nash like an ace up his sleeve.

  “When she absconded with Whisper the first time.” Duster sighed long and hard, his laughter abruptly gone. “Best you hear the truth from me and not him, but I tried to pay him to find her and pay her off.”

  “Pay her off?” Michael couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “So she wouldn’t come back.” Duster grimaced. “Don’t ask me what I was thinking. I’m not so sure myself. Anyway, Nash turned me down.”

  “Money wasn’t good enough?” Michael would gladly pay millions to get Mary back. In the month she’d been gone, he’d been a bastard to be around, and no matter what he did, from brutal workouts in his dojo to brief and bitter showers in the locker room, he couldn’t shake his growing anxiety that he would never see her again.

  “No money would be good enough.” Duster sipped his coffee. “Nash is afraid of her. Can’t say I blame him after what she did to his trigger finger, not to mention his nuts.” Duster chuckled. “By the way, don’t mention Nash’s injured nuts to him. Gets him rather—testy.”

  Michael laughed at the pun, then sobered. It didn’t surprise him at all that Duster and Nash had a fearsome respect for Mary. Underestimating her was something most people did only once. Michael had to repeat the error until she damn near drilled it into his head with a real drill.

  “Do you realize you, Nash and I total a solid eight hundred pounds of hulking male while Mary stands a slender one-thirty?”

  “Yeah.” Duster nodded, taking another sip of his coffee. “Thing is, she’s got an arsenal in her skull.”

  “You wouldn’t put your blades up against her?”

  “No.” Duster checked his boots where he kept his blades ever ready. “If I snuck up on her, I could kill her from a distance, like a coward. Stab her in the back, literally. Face to face, hand to hand? I’d think twice, hell, maybe three or four times about taking her on. She’s slick. Scary Mary does things no one would expect.”

  “Too damn smart for her own good.” Michael smiled at the irony of her abilities attracting him yet keeping her from him.

  “That’s why I, and anyone with half a brain, think it would be wise to leave Mary alone.”

  “You don’t want me to go after her,” Michael said flatly.

  “No,” Duster answered, just as flat.

  “I love her.”

  “I know.”

  “She loves me.”

  Duster didn’t say anything as he fiddled with his cup.

  Michael couldn’t stand the silence, or that scent of cinnamon pastry Duster kept giving off. “Just say it. I can damn near smell you edging up to wanting to say something so bad you’ll explode if you don’t.”

  With a deep sigh, Duster set his cup aside. “Whether Mary loves you or not isn’t the point.”

  “Why don’t you tell me the point.”

  “She doesn’t want to be found,” Duster said, absolute conviction in his words. “A woman with a bright blue cast and dress, barefoot, hobbling on a cane, in a stolen ship that’s missing both shuttles, with a wad of plastimetal and plastimirror on her wrist, with no bonafides, no script—she should stand out like a thumb hammered raw.”

  “Not Mary.” Michael fidgeted with the useless stack of reports scattered across his desktop.

  “You got it.” Duster refilled his cup from the carafe on the desk. “Somehow—don’t you dare ask me how, because I haven’t a clue—she’s disappeared. We can’t find her. Not because we’re stupid or incompetent, but because she doesn’t want to be found. Mary is so freaking sneaky she could disappear in an empty room.”

  Michael rubbed his hand down his exhausted face. “I need to find her.”

  “You want to find her.”

  Michael gritted his teeth. “Granted.”

  “Let—her—go.” Duster enunciated each word with exaggerated patience.

  “I can’t.” Michael would never stop looking for her.

  “You won’t.” Duster clenched his coffee cup. “It seems to me that she has a damn good reason for disappearing.” He took a sip. “Maybe she doesn’t love you.”

  “And maybe she does,” he snapped back without even thinking.

  “Maybe is a big slippery slope,” Duster said reflectively. “It’s real easy to get sucked into the promise of maybe.”

  “Isn’t it?” Michael stripped Duster with a razor gaze and a deep sniff. “Don’t foist your abandonment issues on to me or Mary.”

  “I’m not.” Duster sounded offended and his scent changed from burnt chocolate to fresh baked bread.

  “You’re thinking how noble you were for letting Diane go. All these years, all these resources at your fingertips, and you never once looked for her. You want me to make the same noble sacrifice for Mary.”

  Duster clenched his jaw. “What I want you to do is wake up and see the obvious. Mary doesn’t want to be found.”

  Michael started to respond, but Duster shook his head.

  “Okay, look. That point is real clear, but let’s turn to what will happen if—and that’s a big, huge, hulking if—you actually manage to find Mary. What are you gonna do with her if you do find her?”

  “I just want to talk to her.”

  “You still can’t say it with a straight face.” Duster set his cup on the desk. “What are you really planning to do? Keep her prisoner? Force her to your bed?”

  “You know I wouldn’t.” But then again, Michael wasn’t so sure. Something about Mary drove him to want to possess her, yet he wanted her to surrender to his control, and then trade places.

  “Dunno. You’ve done some pretty strange things since you met Mary. You acted like a total jackass when you just thought you were in love with Kraft. Now that you really are in love, I have no idea what you’re capable of doing.” Duster lifted his hands as if to encompass the vast array of equipment and guards that Michael had at his disposal.

  “I wouldn’t hurt her.” He wanted to touch her and watch her eyes fill with passion. He wanted to smell that compelling scent of her arousal again. He wanted to laugh with her. Be with her. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her.

  “You already did.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” Michael paced again, desperate to dissipate his growing frustration. Anxiety exuded a pungent scent similar to onions from his body.

  Duster considered his right hand and the battered platinum band that encircled his ring finger. “Let her go, Michael. If she wants you, she’ll come back.”

  “Just because you’re willing to wait for someone doesn’t mean I will follow suit.”

  Duster swiveled his gaze. “Diane made a choice. So has Mary. Let her go.”

  “No.” Michael would never stop looking for Mary. If he could just talk to her and tell her the truth he’d discovered about his feelings toward Kraft, he knew Mary would understand. She said she loved him and he believed it. He smelled love on her as she leaned over him in the shuttle. She loved him so much she was willing to let him go so he could love someone else.

  “You’ll end up hurting her.”

  Michael turned away because he feared what Duster said was true.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Mary sank into the plush chair with a sigh. When the scantily clad waitress brought her drink, she tipped high, settled back and looked around like she own
ed the garish gambling hell called Robber’s Roost.

  Hiding in plain sight had been a major pain in the leg. At first, she covered herself in a ragged dress with a huge veil and limped on a wooden cane like an old woman. She’d become a huckster, selling fruit with a shrill voice on Market Street in Borealis. She needed time to heal her foot, then get the cast off.

  No one knew she had almost half a Mil in script in a money belt around her waist. She’d found a buyer for Whisper right away. Captain Conrad thought he could get the ship without paying. He’d found himself strapped to the pilot seat as she took his script and charged him an extra ten percent for hassling her. If Conrad had been looking for her, he never saw her in her first disguise.

  Once the cast went bye-bye and her atrophied leg recovered, Mary dyed her hair vivid purple and dressed herself head to toe in dark purple clothes. Short boots of brushed leather ran to loose pants that gathered at the holster around her waist. Her weapon of choice was an IWOG officer’s pistol. It cost her a damn fortune, but just the deadly appearance of the weapon backed most down. A shirt of Dardinian silk billowed pirate-like around her. On her face, she plastered intense makeup that enlarged her eyes and purple lipstick that enhanced her full lips against pale skin.

  Striking, she hid in plain sight. Everyone looked at her, everyone talked about her, but nobody associated her with the Bandit of Taiga or Remarkably Average Mary.

  The first time she saw one of the wanted posters, she panicked and almost fled Corona. Quite a good likeness of her face, but the sketch showed the old Mary with the sad eyes and haunted look of one who’d been kicked around too many times. The warrant listed a slew of crimes, most of which she hadn’t committed.

  Must be her IWOG father who posted them, because the warrants specified in no uncertain terms that she was wanted alive with a bounty of a Mil to whoever turned her in. That got lots of folks talking and looking, but they never glanced twice at the Purple Lady of Corona.