Rinsed away tears, snot.
That mission accomplished, her legs decided that no more was currently required of them. She pressed her back against the wall and slid bonelessly down. Her ass bumped onto the chilly floor tiles.
She curled into a shaking knot. She hadn’t cried in years, before Rachel. Over a decade, maybe. Hadn’t missed it, either.
She pressed her palms against her eyes until they hurt. Poor Rachel. Tam should never have touched the kid in the first place, considering who and what she was. But she had, and the damage was done, to both of them.
Rachel needed a mother so desperately. A real one, someone committed, smart, sane. Only an idiot would take on a hard luck case like Rachel, considering the child’s background, but an idiot would never survive the experience. The idiot would give up as soon as her pretty fantasies about how sweet and compassionate she was got dashed. And a kid like Rachel would be sure to dash them.
Rachel needed so much. She was a vortex of need, physical, emotional, financial. She’d been deprived since birth. Sveti, the older girl who had been penned up with Rachel in the organ pirates’ shithole, had been the first one to be tender to her, and Rachel had glommed onto the girl and sucked it up like a thirsty sponge. Just like she did from Tam.
Tenderness. Of all things to be required of her. Of all feelings to be entertaining, voluntarily.
Sometimes she missed the hours of quiet. The splendid, barren solitude. Absorbed in her jewelry making, bothered by no one. Needed by no one. And then, out of nowhere, the bleakness, the silence, the blankness of her life before Rachel hit her. And staggered her.
Rachel was over a year behind in development. She was three, but she looked, talked, and had the motor skills of a shrimpy twenty-month-old. And that was the good news. It could’ve been worse. She could have been a drooling vegetable. Or turned her face to the wall and died.
It was a miracle that she hadn’t. And Tam took that miracle to mean that she wasn’t meant to die. She was meant to survive, and to thrive, too, damn it. She was meant to shine, to bloom. Against all odds.
Rachel had made big progress in the months that she’d been with Tam. She no longer looked like a shriveled little monkey. She was walking better, talking better, babbling in three languages; the Portuguese of her babysitter, her own native Ukrainian that Tam was determined that she maintain, and English, of course.
Tam was proud of what she’d accomplished with the kid. But with the fear of stalking predators dogging her, with screams and rifle fire from her dreams ringing in her ears, she couldn’t get away from the thought of how selfish, how egotistic she’d been, to take the child just because she couldn’t resist the way Rachel made her feel. Because she looked like Irina. Because Rachel made her feel so unexpectedly alive.
As if she could offer the child some sort of normal family life as a fair exchange for that feeling. She had no such thing to offer in trade.
Normal? Tam had no parameters, no fucking clue what normal looked like, felt like. Her own early childhood had been good, but it was a million years away, and inaccessible behind that big stone wall in her brain that she’d erected herself. No models to work from there.
She’d been all alone in the wilderness for most of her life. Camped out on Planet Tam. Or not even a planet. It was more like a space station that orbited normal reality, with thousands of miles of vacuum at Kelvin zero temperature as a safety buffer.
What had made her think she could take a fragile, wounded little girl into exile on that space station with her? For company? What kind of egotistic madness was that? A selfish, solitary bitch like her with all her wires crossed? She wasn’t fit to mother a toddler. She was a thief, a crook, a scam artist, a swindler, even a sometime assassin when the situation called for it, although always in self-defense. And everyone she’d ever wasted had richly deserved it. No innocent victims. She was all too aware of what it felt like to be an innocent victim.
But she wasn’t innocent now, by God. She was wanted for a list of crimes too long even for her own steel-trap mind to keep straight. She was in hiding from international law enforcement agencies and the global mafia both. She was fucked, left, right, and sideways. In every way. On every level.
And yet, here she was. Mamma, for a problematic toddler with special needs. Everything was guesswork with Rachel. Tam just kept blundering forward into the dark, desperately hoping every little choice she made would work out.
And of course, there were all the vengeful, dangerous people out there who would love to grind her into paste. Daddy Novak was number one. Georg Luksch was a close second on that list, though he wanted something other than her blood. A chill shudder of disgust racked her at the thought.
She’d been horrified to discover that he was still alive, after the Novak bloodbath. She’d been unforgivably sloppy that day, not to have killed that venomous snake while she had the chance. He’d been hauled off to prison after they patched him up, of course, but she knew how that went. No prison could hold a man with his contacts.
There were plenty of other enemies. The list was long. Tam could be run down, taken, killed, or worse at any time. She could not guarantee a safe home for Rachel, even though it hurt like hell to imagine turning away from the child now that they had bonded.
Rachel would see it as yet another abandonment. Try to explain “for your own safety” to a wigged-out, scared little three-year-old who had never been able to count on anyone in her life. See how far you got.
Still. Arrangements had to be made for Rachel. And soon. Worst-case scenario. Tam tightened her gut, and grimly forced herself to consider the various options.
She could ask one of the McCloud women or Raine to take Rachel, or at least to be her guardian, should she get herself wasted. They were the only women friends she had, if one defined friendship loosely. Or if it wasn’t friendship, it was the closest Tam had ever come to it. They all owed her. They’d all gone through the fire, having found themselves on some scumbag’s hit list at some time or other. But not due to their own arrogance or bad behavior, as was the case with Tam.
Those women weren’t fools. They knew the score. They had no problems with tenderness, either. It would be hard and exhausting for them, and their men would be unthrilled, but whatever. Expensive, too, with the surgeries that Rachel had in her future, but Tam had plenty of money socked away. Money was never going to be a problem for the kid, for the rest of her life. That, at least, was a non-issue.
Any of those women would do it. Not one of them would say no to her. She knew that in her bones.
And still, she cringed to think of asking a favor that huge. Truth to tell, she was uncomfortable dealing with women friends at all. The bother of it, the noise, the time sink. Having them in her face on a regular basis. Having them care, for some strange reason. Their questions, their concern, their laughter, their chatter, it drove her nuts. Their very femaleness grated on her, unfair though that was. Estrogen overload. She could only take so much. She was a solitary creature. Atypical, asexual, asocial. Royally screwed up, yes. She had no illusions about that, and she made no apologies for it. She was what she was, and if someone didn’t like it, tough shit for him. Or her.
Not that their men were much better than the women. The McCloud Crowd menfolk were relatively intelligent, as men went, but they were all alpha dogs to the last woof, and as such, they all had that fog of testosterone obscuring their brains. Which made them prone to the usual arrogant, posturing male bullshit, for which she had no time or patience.
And yet, there they
