Simply Irresistible Read online

  Copyright Information

  Simply Irresistible

  Copyright © 2011 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published 2011 by WMG Publishing

  First published by Kensington Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright ©Elen/Dreamstime, Svetap/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  For Julius Schwartz,

  with love

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my husband Dean, whose adventurous life informs these books more than he realizes.

  ONE

  “WHY DO ALL SUPERHEROES have to look like Superman?” Vivian Kinneally asked as she studied the interior of her nephew’s comic book. She was sitting on the stoop outside her apartment building, her eleven-year-old nephew Kyle beside her.

  The sun cast its warm rays on the concrete steps and illuminated Kyle’s latest hand-drawn effort. In the week that Vivian had lived in Portland, the sun had been out every day. She had no idea how the city had gotten its rainy, gloomy reputation.

  “He doesn’t look like Superman,” Kyle said, craning his neck over the double-page spread that rested on Vivian’s knees.

  “Yes, he does.” Viv traced the hero’s chin, feeling the pen marks beneath her finger. “See? He’s got the same lantern jaw that Siegel and Shuster gave the original in 1938. He’s even got the dimple in his chin.”

  She loved that dimple. She had always thought—and never admitted aloud—that the Siegel and Shuster Superman, the original, was the handsomest man she had ever seen. Even if he was only a creation of paper and pen.

  “Superman doesn’t have a dimple,” Kyle said.

  “Sure he does.” Vivian smiled at her nephew. Kyle was thin and bookish, his round glasses sliding to the bottom of his nose. His fingers were stained with ink, and the fleshy side of his palm had traces of the red he’d used to color the book. “Take a look, especially in the first thirty years or so, before he got associated with Christopher Reeve.”

  “I didn’t want my character to look like Superman,” Kyle said. “Spider-Man doesn’t look like Superman.”

  Kyle wrapped his arms around his waist and leaned forward, extending his Nike-covered feet down three steps. Vivian’s brother, Travers, kept Kyle dressed like the athlete he would never be. Vivian wondered how Kyle would do now that she had relocated here.

  “Actually,” Vivian said, “they all look like Superman. They have to. They need the muscles and the strong chin. Could you imagine wearing one of those costumes if you had a weak chin? You’d look like—”

  “Michael Keaton in Batman,” Kyle said before she could. She’d made that argument before.

  “You said you wanted to know what I thought,” she said.

  “After you’ve read it,” Kyle said. “I think this one is really different.”

  Vivian smiled at him. Kyle’s greatest dream was to become a comic book writer. Travers said that was her fault. Vivian had the most extensive comic book collection of anyone she knew—and she knew a lot of comic book fans (although most of them weren’t twenty-seven year-old women).

  When she was a kid, comic books had been her escape. In them, she found people with secret identities and super powers, mutants who decided to fight on the side of all that was good and right. She had a super power too, although she had never thought of it as that, at least not when she was growing up. Then it had simply been something else that marked her as different.

  She hated being different so much. She was teased by her peers. She used to look at the superheroes and daydream that someday she would meet one, and he would sweep her off her feet.

  She could even imagine the panel art: an entire page with Superman or Batman or some other square-jawed (and dimple-chinned) superhero with a cape, carrying her in his arms.

  Vivian slid her own round glasses up her nose and stared at Kyle’s art. He was spectacular for someone his age. There was a confidence to his work that most young artists lacked. His stories were still derivative, but she knew that originality took time—and Kyle had plenty of time.

  She raised her head, seeing if she got a sense of her brother Travers. She was psychic, and there were some people she was particularly attuned to. Her brother Travers was one of them. So was her younger sister Megan. And, until a few weeks ago, Vivian had been attuned to her Aunt Eugenia too.

  “You okay, Aunt Viv?” Kyle asked.

  The family question. Everyone was always worried whether Vivian was all right. It had started before she could even remember. She would say things or get a funny look, and everyone would panic. Then, at thirteen, she’d started to black out, and her parents had taken her to specialist after specialist to see if there was some physical cause.

  Then her Aunt Eugenia had come to visit. Mysterious, wealthy Aunt Eugenia, whose age no one knew and whose exact relationship to Vivian’s mother was unclear as well. Vivian’s grandmother once said that Eugenia wasn’t a blood relation at all, but a close, close friend who had wormed her way into the family’s hearts through deeds of goodness.

  With family members who talked like that, was it any wonder that Vivian had fallen in love with comic books?

  She smiled.

  “Aunt Vivian?” Kyle was peering at her, his face owlish in the bright light.

  “I’m all right,” she said, the words so familiar she didn’t have to think about them.

  Aunt Eugenia had told the family that Vivian’s blackouts were normal, that her power was growing stronger. Vivian’s mother had gotten upset over the use of the word power until Aunt Eugenia made Vivian’s mother admit what she had always feared about her daughter—that Vivian had an amazing psychic talent, a talent that seemed to be growing worse (or better, depending on one’s perspective).

  The blackouts faded once Vivian hit high school, but by then, she was the weird kid. She wore glasses, she had been too skinny, and she had passed out all through middle school. Sometimes she blurted out things that other kids had only been thinking, and eventually they all stayed away from her.

  Vivian put her arm around Kyle. He was going to face that horrible world in a few years. There was nothing worse than middle school, especially for a sensitive kid.

  “Dad’s coming, isn’t he?” Kyle asked, looking down the street. This was a side street downtown, with a great view of the mountains, rivers, and bridges, and the added benefit of very little traffic.

  “I don’t sense him yet,” Vivian said.

  Travers had taken the car into the local Jiffy Lube to make certain it was ready for the long drive home. When he returned, he expected Kyle to be ready to leave.

  Travers wanted to stay with Vivian—and Kyle had argued for it—but they had other obligations. School was starting next week, and Travers had enrolled Kyle in some expensive gifted and talented program that no one had even imagined yet in Oregon. Kyle was heading home, and Vivian didn’t argue with the decision.

  She had a sense, just a sense—and she wasn’t even sure if it was accurate because her senses about herself often were not—that staying in Portland would be dangerous.

  “You’re going to mail me your next comic, right?” Vivian asked.

  Kyle’s gaze returned to hers. His eyes were a pale blue, like his father’s. He would be reedy and handsome someday, just like his father. The relationship sho
wed.

  Of course Kyle’s relationship to Vivian didn’t show. Vivian, like her brother and sister, had been adopted. All three looked very different. Vivian was small, skinny, and dark. Travers was tall, slender, and blond, and Megan was a green-eyed redhead who, at twenty-five, still hadn’t lost her baby fat.

  “Mail?” Kyle made that sound as if Vivian were talking about communicating by Pony Express. “I was planning to scan it and e-mail it to you.”

  She ran her hand gently over the comic he’d just given her. “I like the way this feels. I can see the work you’ve done, watch the paper curl—”

  “And my original can get lost in the snail mail. C’mon, Aunt Viv. Let’s move into the twenty-first century.”

  It was an old tease and an accurate one. It had taken Vivian years to get a computer. She had refused to buy a VCR, and now VCRs were almost obsolete. When she moved here, Travers had given her a DVD player as a housewarming gift, and Kyle had made certain she knew how to use it before they left.

  They were both afraid she’d be lonely. They were right. She’d never lived so far from her family before.

  But it wasn’t just her family she would miss. She had no friends here. All her friends in L.A. thought she was moving for a man. But there was no man either. There never had been.

  That loneliness seemed permanent.

  Then, for no particular reason, she thought of Travers, his hands on the steering wheel of his SUV, the radio playing Clint Black’s “No Time to Kill.” Travers was thinking about the words, worrying about Vivian, and trying to figure out a way to get her to come back to L.A.

  “He’s almost here,” Vivian said to Kyle.

  “Can’t we just stay here with you?” Kyle asked. “I’m scared for you, Aunt Viv. Dad told Aunt Megan that the old lady was murdered. What if that same person comes after you?”

  “Aunt Eugenia wasn’t an old lady,” Vivian said. At least, she never seemed like an old lady, although she had to be at least eighty. She had looked the same all of Vivian’s life—and, apparently, all of Vivian’s mother’s life as well.

  One of Vivian’s many tasks would be to track down a birth certificate—if that was possible. Aunt Eugenia’s mansion had burned down the morning after the police found her body.

  “But what if, Aunt Viv?”

  Travers had turned onto Burnside, which wasn’t very far away. He had the radio blaring in his SUV, and now the station was playing Alan Jackson. Vivian wanted to put her hands over her ears, but knew that wouldn’t solve the problem. Somehow Travers’ environment was leaking into her own.

  “Aunt Viv?”

  “Sorry,” Vivian said. “Your dad’s listening to country again.”

  “Yech.” Kyle wrinkled his nose. “I’m not going to listen to that going home.”

  “Good luck,” Vivian said.

  “You’re not going to answer me, are you?” Kyle said. “Are you scared, Aunt Viv?”

  “Scared?” She turned toward him. She was scared, but not of dying. Of living in a strange town for several months. Of testing new skills with her psychic powers. And trying to figure out all the clues Aunt Eugenia had sent her the week before she died.

  Oh, and visiting the attorney who had contacted her about Aunt Eugenia’s will—the one that dated from the day Vivian was adopted. Apparently, Eugenia had left her entire estate—worth several million dollars—to Vivian.

  Vivian couldn’t believe that Eugenia hadn’t updated the will after Travers’ and Megan’s adoptions. There had to be another version somewhere. She just had to find it.

  “I’m not scared,” she said to Kyle. “Not of being murdered, anyway. They think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I don’t,” Kyle whispered. “I think she knew something.”

  That dramatic comic-book imagination of his. Vivian would have to quell this right away. “Why do you think that?”

  But as she asked the question, Travers’ SUV turned onto her street and sped past the parked cars in front of the other apartment buildings. He drove twice as fast as anyone in Oregon, and Vivian was afraid he’d get pulled over.

  Oregon cops wouldn’t be lenient on Travers. He had California plates and a California driver’s license. She’d learned, in her short week in Portland, that the only people Oregonians consistently discriminated against were Californians.

  “That’s Dad!” Kyle said, standing and waving as if Travers had forgotten where Vivian lived during the hour he’d been gone.

  The moment passed. Vivian clutched the comic book, careful not to crease its pages, and followed her nephew down the stairs. Travers stopped right in front of the building. The booming bass from his SUV’s speakers blended with the sounds in her mind.

  When he shut off the ignition, Vivian heaved a sigh of relief.

  Kyle stopped at the bottom of the stairs, waiting on the edge of the cracked concrete sidewalk. When Vivian stopped beside him, he whispered without turning his head, “I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t want you to either,” she said. “But there’s no point in staying. I might be home in a month.”

  Although she doubted it. Eugenia’s estate was a mess. The fire created even more problems, and the murder—well, there were things about the murder that Vivian hadn’t told anyone. Things she had seen, things she had felt, while Aunt Eugenia had been dying.

  In spite of herself, Vivian shivered.

  “You won’t be home in a month,” Kyle said. “I don’t think you’re coming back to L.A. at all.”

  Vivian peered at him. Her glasses had slid down her nose again and she saw a dual image of him—the young eleven-year-old, crisply outlined against the backdrop of his father’s black SUV, and a fuzzy, larger version, the man Kyle might become.

  Vivian shoved her glasses back into place, pushing so hard she poked a fingernail into the soft skin on the bridge of her nose.

  “You don’t know that, Kyle,” she said as she watched her brother get out of his car. He looked sleek, put-together, and expensive, something she always wondered how he managed to do on his accountant’s salary. “None of us know that.”

  “You’re psychic,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, but I’m not able to see the future. Just the present.” And sometimes that was more than enough.

  “I thought psychics see the future,” he whispered.

  “I wish I did,” Vivian said. “Sometimes I think it would make life a whole lot easier.”

  “I don’t think it does,” Kyle said, and for the first time in Vivian’s recollection, he sounded a lot older than eleven.

  She looked at him, feeling an odd sensation, as if she were missing something. But he was already running down the sidewalk to greet his father, as if they’d been separated for years instead of hours.

  Vivian followed, sighing. For the first time, she realized just how difficult life was going to be here. She wouldn’t have Travers’ common sense to rely on, or Kyle’s jokes to give her joy.

  But she didn’t want them facing the same thing Aunt Eugenia had faced. Vivian could take care of herself, but she couldn’t handle it if something happened to her family.

  Her sixth sense had been working overtime—and she knew Kyle and Travers were leaving none too soon.

  TWO

  DEXTER GRANT LOOKED INSIDE the filthy box sitting on top of his pristine countertop. Five mewling kittens nosed the crumpled newspaper as if it held the secrets of the universe. They were tiny, five weeks old at best. They hadn’t lost their downy fur yet and their eyes were barely open.

  “I don’t take animals,” he said to the woman who stood across the counter from him. She was meticulously dressed, wearing a silk suit that shone in the light from the hundred working aquariums that lined the walls.

  “You’re a pet store, aren’t you?” she snapped.

  He nearly corrected her—he wasn’t the pet store; he owned the pet store—but he knew that it would gain him nothing. And he already had a heck of a b
attle on his hands, one that was becoming all too familiar these days.

  So he thought he’d try a different tack. “These kittens are too young to be away from their mother.”

  “She’s dead,” the woman said flatly.

  Her son, who had been eyeing the exotic fish in the saltwater tanks, started. The boy had been Dex’s clue that something was wrong here from the start. Even though the woman was painstakingly put together, the boy was a mess—his hair uncombed, his skin dirty, and his shirt ripped. He was old enough to take care of himself—maybe thirteen at most—and old enough to rebel against an obsessed parent.

  “How’d she die?” Dex asked. Nursing mother cats rarely left their broods. It was unusual for one to die when she had kittens this young.

  “Squashed,” the woman said, moving her hand in dismissal. Bracelets jangled as she did.

  “Squashed?” Dex asked.

  The boy was watching closely now, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “And the kittens were unharmed?” Dex asked.

  “Miracles do happen,” the woman said without a trace of irony. “So how much are you going to pay me for them?”

  “Pay you?” Dex choked. That part was new.

  “They’re stock, and you’re a store. You should pay your suppliers,” the woman said.

  “They’re mammals, and I specialize in fish,” Dex said. “Besides, they haven’t been weaned yet.”

  “So wean them,” the woman said.

  As if he could snap his fingers and wean the kittens. Then he shook his head. He could do that—he had all sorts of magic powers—but he wouldn’t. The less he tampered with the natural order of things, the better.

  Still, this had already gone farther than he liked. He couldn’t very well give the kittens back to this woman. She would take them to every pet store in Portland, and when she discovered that stores didn’t pay for strays, she’d probably dump them beside the road.

  He truly despised people like her, but he couldn’t do much about her—at least through regular legal means. And the things he wanted to do would get him in trouble with the Fates. He’d spent the last few decades watching his back so that the Fates had nothing to hold against him.