Upon entering, Teddy blinked. This couldn’t possibly be a room in Nina Statleon’s castle. It was pink—a millions shades of pink. Everywhere she looked it was pink, and ruffled, and so girlie-sweet, her teeth ached.
The queen-size bed featured a gauze and silk cotton-candy pink canopy cinched with a tiara at the ceiling that flowed over the sides of the bed, creating an almost cocoon of lush swirls. The quilted spread, complete with ruffles and yard after yard of silk fabric, fell to the plush pink carpeted floor.
Throw pillows in the shape of moons and stars in off-white were scattered over the surface and behind them, larger pillows covered in ruffled shams. A white rocking chair with a thickly padded seat sat by a window overlooking the hedge maze. Stacks of books sat to the left, everything from Goodnight Moon to Cinderella were piled high.
The walls were papered in white and pale-pink candy stripes with pictures of every Disney Princess ever and the arched windows with billowy pink curtains looked like they’d been stolen straight out of a fairytale.
A bathroom off to the left led to more pink and white tiles and a gorgeous porcelain pedestal sink in oyster with a shiny waterfall-like faucet at the center.
Teddy couldn’t help but smile. This room was amazing—every girl’s dream come true, and if she did nothing else, she intended to enjoy it until tomorrow, when she had to explain everything to Cormac.
Flipping the taps on the claw-foot tub, she gauged the water until it was nice and hot then dumped bubble bath, pink of course, by the boatload into the silky depths, smiling as the froth grew.
Stripping her dirty, bloody, torn shirt off, Teddy let it fall to the floor to inspect her wound in the mirror.
Almost all healed. The wound was nothing but a pink, puckered line along her side now, and by tomorrow it should be gone.
Kicking off her boots, socks and jeans, she grabbed some fluffy pink towels to drop beside the porcelain tub and slid in, groaning her pleasure at the instant ease her aches and pains were greeted with.
The aromatic scents of peonies and honeysuckle greeted her nose, making her close her eyes and inhale as she sank in up to her chin.
So Cormac. What did she know so far? Someone wanted him dead. He’d obviously been hiding out in the forest in Colorado for a reason. There was a person named Toni involved in all this somehow, and a guy named Andre had taken extreme measures to snuff him out.
And Cormac was delicious. Stoic, angry, sculpted, suspicious, maybe even a little resentful. But still delicious.
How did Nina, Marty and Wanda know Cormac? Was Toni the connection? She wished she had the gift of super-hearing like Marty and Wanda, but alas, bears were great trackers, scent being their biggest power, aside from sheer brawn. What had happened to his ring finger? Did that have to do with Andre, too?
Tomorrow, she’d have to find a way to call her brothers and explain—if that moron hadn’t already done it by then.
Closing her eyes, she wondered about Andre. Andre sounded like a French name, but he hadn’t spoken a word, so she didn’t know for sure. Was Cormac a Russian bear like she and her brothers? Why did he look as though she’d asked him if he put his hair in curlers every night when she’d asked about his sleuth?
That was off, too. Everything was off, from her instincts to her judgment.
Yawning, she let her head fall back on the edge of the tub, stretching her calves and pointing her toes.
Exhaustion was seeping into her bones, meaning, she needed to wrap this up before she drowned and all the answers to her questions were left without resolution.
But it was so nice and warm, she was reluctant to leave. With a sigh, she sat up and grabbed the washcloth on the ledge of the window beside the tub and squeezed some of the luscious bath gel she’d found on the sink into it, lathering it up.
Just as she lifted her forearm to begin soaping up, a sharp crack and the silence of a suspended moment before the crash of glass made her eyes swivel to the window. Pieces of the window’s heavy lead glass fell into the tub, sloshing bubbles and spraying water everywhere. A bullet skimmed her midsection before ricocheting off the picture on the wall opposite the bathtub.
Someone was shooting at her now? What the bloody fuck?
A million thoughts flew through her mind, but the foremost? Catch the son of a bitch who was taking potshots at her. Goddamn it, she was sick and effin’ tired of being shot at. Anger, rife and raw, skittered up along her spine.
She didn’t pay much attention to the screams of Wanda and Marty, or the commotion outside her beautiful bedroom door, or the pounding on the door by Cormac, all she saw was the color red.
She wanted the head of whoever was shooting at her on a pike.