Midnight Vengeance Read Online Free PDF Page A

only way to survive was to be on her guard and to be grateful for every second, because every second could be her last. No past, no future, only the present.
    And if it hurt her, just a little, not to be able to claim the watercolors and drawings she’d worked so hard on, if it hurt her, just a little, to remember her charmed childhood in Boston that could never come back, too bad.
    That was life.
    “Let’s go look at the Agarwal house sketches over on the east wall.” She tugged at Jacko’s arm.
    “Sure. They’re beautiful. My compliments.” They were crossing the big room and he looked down at her and she thought she saw...again, could that be a
smile
in the depths of his dark eyes? Jacko was the most serious man she’d ever been around. His emotional tones ran the gamut from sober to grim and back again. Even the hint of a smile was extraordinary.
    “Well, it was thanks to you.” She gave him a sunny smile, straight up at him, and his face froze. It looked like something hurt.
    The sketches of the Agarwal house had come out well, she had to admit. It was thanks to Jacko that she’d been able to sketch the house at all. The Agarwal house was an extraordinary structure built by an Indian venture capitalist heavily invested in green energy. The house was built on a remote vast plot of land on the foothills of Mount Hood and had been designed to blend into the forest.
    Lauren had sketched it in fall and deepest winter and had extrapolated what it would look like in spring and summer. She’d spent three full days filling ten notebooks with sketches.
    When Jacko had heard through Suzanne—who’d received the contract to design the interior décor—that Lauren intended to spend a lot of time on the isolated estate he had insisted on accompanying her. The first time, Lauren had balked. She liked—no, needed—to take her time. She didn’t want to draw hasty sketches with a bored guy tapping his size 14 boot waiting for her to finish up. But it hadn’t been like that, not at all. Jacko seemed to have enormous reserves of patience. He found a bench where he sat quietly, simply waiting for her. Five minutes after she arrived in the morning, Lauren had forgotten Jacko’s presence and only came up for air in the early afternoon after an orgy of sketching to find him waiting in the exact same spot in the exact same position she’d left him in.
    Something told her he’d be able to do that for days and maybe even weeks, not just hours.
    And, truth be told, the fact that he was there, watching over her, allowed her to lose her sense of time and do it right. Without him, there was a bit of her that would have remained tense and alert.
    “You were very kind and very patient with me. I appreciate it.” She looked up and met his eyes and again smiled sunnily at him. He blinked and his face became even more wooden.
    “My pleasure, ma’am.”
    She rolled her eyes at him. “Lauren.”
    “Lauren,” he repeated dutifully.
    God it was fun teasing him. She tugged at the massive arm under her hand. “So come on, let’s go over to the blue wall.” They turned. “From what I can see of the frames, she did a magnificent—”
    And then it happened.
    And it cut her life in two.

Chapter Three
    A bright light went off in her eyes, blinding her. Another light went off, then another.
    “Great!” a cheery voice enthused. “Great shot! You’re a fabulous, unusual couple!” The man holding the camera was tall, rail thin, dressed in a very tight lizard skin jacket with a crimson red satin shirt underneath. That Mick Jagger vibe, only in a young guy.
    Lauren’s knees buckled, the lights in the room dimmed and all sound was cut off, gone. She couldn’t breathe; she was choking. It was exactly as if a huge invisible hand caught her around the chest and squeezed. Hard. She wheezed but no air came.
    She couldn’t stand. Her legs wouldn’t hold her.
    But she wasn’t falling either. Something strong, around her waist, was