The Scent of Shadows Free with Bonus Material by Vicki Pettersson Page A

exceedingly well. To the outside world it appeared she slept all morning, spent her days shopping or lunching with the ladies, and partied all night. But most of the time she could be found here, and this, I’d realized, was Olivia’s warrior side. The part of her that flipped the bird at Xavier and everyone else.
    “See,” she was saying, pointing at a graphic flashing at the top right corner of the screen, “there are multiple levels to break through in order to access your birth records. Shouldn’t take more than an hour. We’ll see if Mom covered her tracks as well as she thinks she has.”
    I nodded like I understood, but was distracted by the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. Another screen was currently in use. “What’s that?”
    Her gaze followed my own, and I thought I saw her body jolt. The screen had my name on it. Mine and another.
    “Nothing.” A quick dance of fingers and it vanished.
    “Olivia,” I said, slowly enunciating each syllable of her name. “What was that? You’re not trying to find that…that child, are you?”
    “No!” she said, too fast, and crossed her arms. It was more a protective move than a defiant one. I stared at her, hard. Olivia might be queen of the computer, but I knew body language.
    “Don’t play affronted bimbo with me.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. “What’re you up to?”
    Her cell phone rang just then, the theme from Pretty in Pink saving her from reply. I raised one brow, indicating we’d pick this conversation up later. Some things, and some people, were best kept in the past. She quickly turned her back to me and flipped the phone open. “Hello?”
    I turned my attention back to the screen, letting thoughts of unwanted children fade from my mind. Slowly, the computer was working through the records at Sunrise Hospital. I studied it, toying absently with the chain at my neck as I watched the dates and files flash in front of my eyes, and wondered how Zoe had fooled everybody so thoroughly about my parentage for so long? And why?
    Had she cheated on Xavier, and didn’t want to risk losing him, or his money? But then, why just up and leave sixteen years later? And why, at least, had she never told me? She knew there was no love lost between he and I.
    “But it’s almost midnight,” I heard Olivia say in her best bubblehead voice. This was followed by a sigh that said the person on the phone already knew this and didn’t care. “Look, it’s just not a good time, Butch.”
    She rolled her eyes when she saw my expression, and I shook my head. Butch? She was dating someone named Butch? “My sister’s over and we’re just having—”
    I heard the timbre of a masculine voice arguing his point, but the boom of thunder drowned out the words. I picked upLuna, whose tail had gone bottle-brushed at the accompanying flash of light, and tried to stroke her fur back down into something resembling feline. Outside, rain began to pour in sheets over the glass walls.
    “Yes, I know it’s raining,” Olivia was saying. “No, you can’t stay until the storm passes. You can pick up your things, but then you have to go. ’Bye.”
    She threw the phone across the room and it landed on a pink sea of down comforter and frilly pillows. Then she stalked over to her closet and pulled out handcuffs. And a whip. I stared, openmouthed.
    “Don’t ask,” she muttered, adding a studded dildo to the loot. “I thought it would be fun. That was before the condom broke. I panicked at the thought of wading around in his gene pool, you’ll see, and threw him out without giving back his toys. He’s come to collect.”
    “Must have found a new playmate.” She gave me a sharp look, and I grinned. “No pun intended.”
    “Fine with me. He was too obsessive for my tastes anyway. He wanted to lick me in the weirdest places. And he could spend hours smelling me. Not to mention he had more hair than a woolly mammoth.”
    “Aren’t those extinct?”
    “So we