Free Sweet Seduction Shield by Nicola Claire

happily. "Then when I suggest boring old 'biscuit'
or stuck-in-the-mud 'merino', Ben will think I'm a genius."
    "Ah," I said
on a laugh. "Good move."
    I suddenly
realised she'd stopped stirring and was looking at me, head cocked
to the side, face pinched.
    "What?" I
asked, immediately checking over my shoulder to make sure no one
else was there. Searching for the real reason why she looked
pained.
    Abi shook her
head and smiled again, the moment gone.
    "Is Ryan
staying for dinner?" she asked instead.
    It sounded
strange hearing Pierce called by his first name. I'd come to think
of him as only Pierce, or the Detective.
    "I guess so,
he said he'd stay for a beer when Ben asked."
    "Ah, Ben and
his beers on the deck. Do you know he used to live in a garage flat
when I first met him," she offered, a seemingly personal bit of
information. "None of the windows were low enough to look outside.
Now we have a deck and a garden and all this space and he wants
everyone to share it." She sounded so proud of him, like this was
an enormous accomplishment.
    What had these
two been through to bring them here?
    "How long have
you lived in this place?" I asked.
    "Two months.
He couldn't wait to find a home for us to both live in, he made an
offer on the first house he viewed."
    I smiled at
the roll of her eyes.
    "Did you want
to live here?" I couldn't help asking.
    "I would have
lived with him in the garage flat if he'd asked," she said
softly.
    I blinked my
eyes a few times to wash the sting of tears away. Why her story
affected me so much, I couldn't say. But there appeared to be a
depth of love between the two of them that I could only dream
about. The sort of love that gets you through the hurdles life
throws at you, gets you over the mountains you sometimes have to
climb. Makes it possible to survive anything.
    Makes you
place the other person first, above all else. Above money and
lifestyle. Above greed.
    "Are you OK,
Marie?" Abi asked softly, from right in front of my face.
    "Just
remembering," I said, the first thing to enter my head, thankfully
wiping the images away.
    "Does that
happen a lot?" she asked carefully.
    I sucked in a
deep breath, feeling like I was on uneven ground. But she seemed so
caring, so familiar, so nice. I found myself answering, without an
ounce of my customary shield of confidence at all.
    "Lately,
yeah."
    "Because of
McLaren?" She almost spat the drug lord's name out.
    "You know
him?" I asked, flicking a gaze towards Daisy who was busy outlining
her penguin mural on the other side of the room and humming to
herself.
    "You could say
that," she offered, and then I saw something flash across her face.
Something real and visceral. Something I recognised in myself.
Something that sucked all the air out of the room and made me take
a stumbling step back.
    "You...
you've," I stammered. Swallowed thickly, then felt a heat brace my
spine and across my shoulders, as Pierce's hands came up to grip my
upper arms and still my backwards escape.
    "Shhh," he
said in my ear soothingly, hot breath across my cheek. "Tell her
Abi," he instructed quietly, so as not to garner Daisy's
attention.
    "Marie," Abi
said heavily, as though the weight of the world was on her
shoulders. "I spent the past five years of my life running from
that..." she glanced over to the other side of the room at a still
oblivious Daisy, but thought better of the description she was
about to use, and instead finished with a ground out, "man."
    "Oh," I said,
unable to form another word in my mind.
    Then I lost
the ability to think completely, when she added, "I'm so sorry, but
I was there that night. I saw what he did to Rick."
    The world
turned dim, as I heard someone screaming and felt Pierce's arms
tighten around me.
    And as Daisy
cried out a tortured, "Mummy!"

Chapter
7
Oh, Fuck
    "Well, that
didn't quite go as you'd planned," a deep, gruff voice said through
the haze of my scrambled mind.
    "No," a
familiar male voice replied. The sound of it somehow