by Carly Bishop
Her cheek still tingled where his whiskers had scraped her skin. She didn’t know how to behave or what to say. Or even what to believe was the truth about Christian Tierney.
He didn’t leave her wondering long. He cleared his throat and stepped back. The expression in his eyes hardened. Her crying jag was over, and so was his show of compassion.
Christian Tierney had his own agenda. The only thing that mattered to him was that she hang together long enough to fulfill whatever role was needed to further his intentions. His kiss, the hint of desire—even hers—were nothing but illusions.
She must have lost too much blood for her brain to function at all. Or else the constant, stabbing pain had short-circuited all her thought processes.
She swallowed and angled her head to look up at him again. His eyes were bloodshot and haunted and empty at once. He was beyond tired, beyond reaching. He still owed her an explanation. “I want to know what’s happened. Why I have to be relocated again.”
He dragged his gaze off her, plugged the drain and ran the small sink full. Ripping open a couple of packages of gauze, he soaked a couple of squares in the hot, soapy water. “This will hurt, Eden. No matter what I do, it will hurt. Are you ready?”
She clasped her hands in her lap and turned away, avoiding looking at the wound “Is Broussard out of prison?” she persisted.
“Yeah.” His jaw tightened. “They sprang him early last week. He served a grand total of seventeen months.” He handed her a cloth towel he found in the cabinet below the sink. “Here, hold the towel. This will be messy. I don’t want to spoil the rest of your...top.”
He didn’t know what to call her bustier. She felt embarrassed, caught in the not-quite-innocent pleasure of wearing such a garment. But she had never intended to be seen like this. By him. She nodded, clutched the towel to her breast and gritted her teeth, preparing for the worst. He brought the soapy gauze to her shoulder and held her hair aside with his other hand. When he touched the steaming hot, soapy cloth to her shoulder, it was all Eden could do to stay still and not flinch.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth and endured. It took him several moments of wiping and rinsing and drawing fresh hot water to clean away the mess.
He peered closely at his work. “It’s a very small wound, Eden. The nylon on your pack strap must have slowed the bullet and your bone did the rest. It must have nicked the artery just below the bone to bleed so much, but you were very lucky.”
Tears made tiny stabbing pains at the back of her eyes again. “I don’t understand any of this. How could this happen?”
He shook his head, working steadily along. “A lot of big, bad coincidences.”
She swallowed hard. Once, when she was in Sunday school with probably her third foster family, the teacher told them nothing happened except by God’s will. There were no accidents. God sent tests sometimes. He must test the children’s faith, else how would He know if they believed in Him?
She’d tried very hard to believe. After a while, it was easier to think there must not be any God at all. She focused on the door hinge behind Tierney’s back. “Do you believe that?” she asked softly. “In coincidence, I mean?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.” She shivered. “How did Broussard know where to find me, then?”
He tore open more gauze and set to work again. “Did you ever contact anyone you knew as Eden Kelley?”
“Oh, that’s good.” Her voice trembled. “Blame the victim.”
“I’m not blaming you, Eden,” he grated. “But the facts are simple. In the huge majority of cases, when a relocation fails, it’s because the witness couldn’t take the isolation anymore. It’s a fact, not an accusation.”
“Well, I’ve had a lot more practice getting jerked around than most people.”
His eyes met hers. “I know.”
She lowered her gaze. She didn’t want his pity. She already knew the extent of his concern. If he knew how many times she had been taken from one foster home to another, then he must know how experienced she was at shutting off her needs. “I didn’t contact anyone. Ever. Period.”
“You never sent a postcard or—”
“No.”
“Made a phone call or—”
“No.”
“Faxed anything?”
“Never!” Why didn’t he believe her? “I knew the rules and I followed them! I didn’t even call Dennis Shulander, not once, and I was told that I’d be safe.”
“No one, Eden? Are you absolutely sure?”
“I faxed things to New York all the time—to Judith’s agent, but—”
“Who was that?” he interrupted sharply, dumping a gauze near the sink.
“Britta Nielsen. But she only knew me as Lisa Hollister. She’s a literary agent, Tierney, not some pipeline to Winston Broussard! She’s a little old lady—a shark, but hardly a likely candidate.” The towel at her breast was soaked. She folded it once. The warm water was beginning to feel good, but inside, she felt threatened. Uneasy. Where was he going with this? “What are you getting at?”
“Sheila Jacques, Eden.” He straightened, stretching his shoulders, tilting his head from one side to the other, watching her.
“Sheila? What has she got to do with anything?”
“You tell me.”
“Sheila is my best friend. Her parents were the closest thing I had to a family —but I haven’t communicated with her since...well, since months before the trial. Did you think I called her?”
“Did you?”
“Of course not! Are you implying she had anything to do with this?”
Opening the bottle of peroxide, he ignored her question. “How did you communicate with her before the trial?”
“David Tafoya let me write her a letter. I understood that he was going to have it hand delivered. It was just...just a goodbye note, really. I wasn’t even allowed to say that I was in protective custody.” Eden hesitated. “I don’t understand. Are you saying Sheila knew something? Anything? That she’s somehow involved in this?”
“I don’t know.” He broke off and stood back, massaging his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He stopped, crammed his hand into a pocket and blinked. “What I am saying, Eden, is that Sheila Jacques has become Winston Broussard’s mistress.”
Chapter Six
“Oh, my God, no.”
Her cry took Chris apart more efficiently than the sight of her ravaged, creamy flesh. He couldn’t begin to guess how he knew, but it wasn’t the possibility that Sheila Jacques had betrayed her that made Eden cry out. It was dread for her friend, pure and simple.
She didn’t doubt for a heartbeat the cunning of Winston Broussard to dazzle and win over to his side her closest friend. The malignant charisma would be dispensed like candy to a naive and innocent child.
Her dark brown hair, thick as a sable pelt, hung straight and true despite having flown wildly on his cycle, framing her face, making her seem even more pale, more delicate than her blood loss could warrant. Her wide gray eyes glittered with tears, like droplets condensing on a steamy mirror.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. She dragged in a deep breath. “How do you know?”
He forced his attention back to her mangled flesh, but that only intensified his awareness of her. He could not deal with her wound and not see in his peripheral vision the swell of her breasts beneath what seemed to him a frankly erotic piece of clothing.
He registered this purely masculine reaction as the truth, but counted it reckless and irresponsible even to have noticed. All the same, closing in on the bullet wound, catching the nuances of her dismay, he found himself wanting to protect Eden Kelley.
To spare her.
To cushion the emotional blows.
She had already been treated to more death and devastation up close and personal than anyone should ever be. But the truth was an ugly check on reality. She had to understand that.
He told her how Sheila Jacques had resigned
from her inner-city teaching position, about the forty-thousand-dollar silver sports car. He told her that the lease on Jacques’s tiny garret apartment in an old house in the Back Bay had expired and not been renewed. He described the number and duration of visits Jacques made to the country-club prison where Broussard had served his time.
He described the way Eden’s closest friend had dropped out of sight as only someone with money enough to burn can do, and then he drew the inevitable conclusion. “Your friend has gone over to the enemy, Eden. There’s no way of getting around it.”
He thought she did understand. She sat quietly, the delicate features of her pretty, heart-shaped face pinched, the dark lashes around her gray eyes damp with tears she blinked back.
She gritted her teeth when he touched a soapy swab near the bullet wound. “I don’t doubt that what you said is true, but it doesn’t mean what you think. You’re wrong if you believe Sheila would betray me.”
He wadded up a spent gauze and flicked it at the trash, hoping to shake off his growing aggravation with her along with it. “This is not something open to any innocent interpretation, Eden.”
“You don’t know her.”
“I don’t have to.” He wanted to shake her. How could she sit here with a bullet riddling her flesh and still believe goodness and mercy were following her around? “Every living, breathing human being has a price. Sheila Jacques is no exception.”
She swallowed. Their eyes clashed. The memory of their kisses wasn’t far off. Her chin went up, unwittingly exposing more of her delicate neck. “What’s yours, Tierney? Who else has to die for you to feel Catherine’s death is properly avenged?”
He went deadly still. Shock coursed through him. He flashed on the moment of Catherine’s death. Eden’s biting response shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did. He answered her question. “Only Winston Broussard.”
“Then why aren’t you tracing him? Tracking him down instead of me?” she cried. “Why drag me into this when you know Broussard will come after me?”
Chris didn’t even flinch. It was exactly because Broussard would come after her that Chris had taken her first. The truth no longer pricked his conscience. He knew the man. He knew Broussard would keep coming after her no matter where she tried to hide. He’d keep sending his hired guns until all the failed attempts on Eden’s life would goad him into coming after her himself.
When he did, Chris intended to be there. To see to it that Broussard paid in the most primitive and graphic terms for the lives he had destroyed.
For the hundreds or even thousands of nameless victims of the weapons Winston Broussard trafficked in.
For Catherine.
For the tiny, unformed life inside her whose very existence cleaved Chris’s heart in two.
He couldn’t guarantee what Eden would do, or ever hope to get the least cooperation from her, if he revealed any part of this to her. He ignored her “why me” questions and returned to the subject of Sheila Jacques’s betrayal.
“Use your head, Eden,” he warned in a flat voice. “People betray other people all the time.” He knew from extensive personal experience that this was true. He paused long enough to look straight into her rainy gray eyes. “Even you.”
Her lips clamped shut, he thought, to fight off the quivering. He knew it was a low, mean blow. She had betrayed Broussard, but she clearly counted it a different thing than real friends betraying each other.
“There’s no way, Tierney, that Sheila Jacques would do or say anything that would hurt me.”
“Oh, God, Eden! Grow up, will you?” The guilelessness in her blew him away. How she could have been exposed to such ruthlessness, such evil, and still have faith in anyone was beyond him. “Winston Broussard contaminated everything in your life. You think he’s somehow sparing Sheila Jacques? You think he didn’t pick her out with every intention of rubbing your nose in it?”
Her chin shot up. “What does it matter what his intentions were? He’s a monster. That’s not news. But he couldn’t buy me, Tierney. Not the real me. The heart of me.”
“He did, Eden, and you know it,” he reminded her harshly. “For a while, you bought into everything—”
“For a while, yes...but not long enough! I’m still here, inside. I’m still fighting. I walked away from the purchase price and I testified even when I knew they couldn’t put him away.” She coughed, and her long, slender fingers gripped the towel clutched to her breast. “Maybe he gave Sheila the keys to kingdom come,” she uttered fiercely, “and maybe she took them. Maybe she’ll never wake up to what a monster he is, but I will never believe she would betray me.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure there was a time when you believed Broussard would never harm you, either.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Damn straight it’s not. You’re right,” he snarled, done with trying to spare her. He could quote her chapter and verse of the Book of Fair. He’d subscribed himself. He’d bought into God and country and Mom’s apple pie. Truth and justice and...loyalty.
Men like Broussard perverted it all.
“Just think about it, Eden. Think about Broussard turning on that hot-blooded Cajun charm, making Sheila believe he’s a changed man, making her think he’s found her, but to assuage his freaking immortal soul, he needs to make amends to you. Think about him twisting what she knows and hopes to his own advantage.
“He feeds on people, Eden. Get this. Can you honestly believe for one minute that he wouldn’t exploit her, too?”
Her lips tightened. She met his relentless expression. Her eyes roamed his face, looking, he thought, for a trace of compassion, settling a moment, then a pulse beat too long on his lips.
Her gaze flew back to his. Tension arced between them, magnified by the power of spent, reckless kisses. She broke off, lowering her gaze, and he could swear he heard her heart pound. “No.”
“No. I didn’t think so.”
She reached distractedly with her right hand to shove her hair back from her face. Pain bit into her, reaching her eyes in a split second. A cry escaped her lips. Her hand dropped like lead to her lap. “I...”
He swore beneath his breath. She’d caused fresh bleeding. Applying pressure, he steadied Eden. And caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the sink. It was an unnatural wonder she sat still for him touching her at all. “Just be quiet and let me finish this.”
The jet hit a patch of turbulence and shuddered for fifteen or twenty seconds, but she held her body stiff and motionless—the level of her pain, he thought, ensured that—but she didn’t stay silent long.
“It doesn’t matter anyway. Sheila couldn’t have betrayed me because she didn’t know where I was.”
“Tafoya believes she did know.” Chris frowned, struggling to recall Maroncek’s description of his encounter with Tafoya in the presence of the attorney general. Some fragment of that conversation was at odds with Eden’s dead certainty that Sheila Jacques knew nothing of her whereabouts.
He tossed aside the bloodied swab and soaked another in peroxide. “Jackson Hole is a world-class resort area. A little rough around the edges, still a fairly well-kept secret. Just the kind of place Broussard seeks out —for the anonymity, if nothing else. Suppose he sent Sheila on a nice little retreat and she did spot you, walking down the street, or in a movie theater or a bar.”
Eden winced, her expression pinched and hurting. “I thought you didn’t buy into coincidence.”
“I don’t—but Tafoya is not a fool, and I can’t explain how Broussard got an assassin in place if there’s no other way he could have known where you were.”
Eden’s expression pinched. “There is another way.”
“Yeah?” He picked up another towel and dried his hands. “What would that be?”
She adjusted the towel again. For a moment, Chris could see the sturdy wet fabric clinging to her breast and the dark shape of her nipple.
“Broussard’s hired gun could have followed anyone.” She swa
llowed. “He could have followed you.”
Chris dragged his focus from her breast and looked up at her. “It didn’t happen that way, Eden.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure that you didn’t lead him right to me?”
“Because I didn’t even make it to Jackson until the time Paglia met up with the deputy. I saw him park and get into the deputy’s vehicle at the corner across from the convenience store.” He reached for a fresh swab. “I followed them. The shooter was already in place, Eden, and that doesn’t happen without some serious planning.”
She gulped. “You’re saying Broussard’s assassin was ahead of all of you?”
“Yeah.” Chris inclined his head and doused the swab in peroxide.
“Yes? Just yes? What good are you people?” she cried. “What good are any of you? What kind of promises do you make? ‘We’ll keep you safe from harm, dear witness, right up until someone really wants to get at you’?”
Chris exhaled heavily. He knew the failure to adequately protect her was an ungodly fluke. He knew one failure couldn’t impeach the whole of Witness Protection. But if he hadn’t been there, hadn’t snatched her away for his own purposes, their failure would have cost her her life.
“Look. Eden—”
“No.” She shook her head. He didn’t know where she found the grit to talk at all. “I don’t want to understand you.”
He decided to forget making any attempt to explain and drew the swab along the edges of the bullet wound. The peroxide foamed madly, trickling onto the exposed nerve endings and raw edges of her flesh.
A whimper seeped out of her. Still she didn’t stop. “I don’t trust you.” Her voice broke. “I don’t want you anywhere near me. I don’t care if you saved my life. I don’t even care if it was your fault that Broussard’s assassin found me at all. I just want out.”
He applied more peroxide, a soaking gauze this time, and she cried.
He forced himself to do what had to be done. He’d managed to shut off her tirade but he hated himself. Hated all of it. She had a right to blow off the steam, the anger. “I’m sorry. I have to do this.”