by Carly Bishop
Eden nodded. “We shared a room for four years with two other girls. I learned to sew and I became good enough at it that when I graduated I was hired as a dressmaker’s assistant to Monique Lamareaux at her bridal boutique in Cambridge.”
“Treasures?”
“Yes. You know it?” she asked, surprised.
“Yeah.” He’d read about it in Eden’s witness profiles, but he’d been there, too. “Catherine bought her wedding dress there.” He switched subjects. “Isn’t Monique Lamareaux a cousin of Broussard’s?”
“Yes. They’re first cousins. It seemed everywhere I turned there was another cousin or aunt or uncle—family of some description. Cajun, you know, but very upscale, very different. They all had the attitude that home was home but not nearly grand enough to embrace their passions. Petites pommes de terre, chère! Broussard would say. Small potatoes... A mixed-language joke.” Eden gave a shake of her head. “Anyway, Monique took me under her wing and I moved into the fifth floor of her brownstone.”
“Which is where you met Broussard?”
“Yes. At a party Monique gave. He was so respectful and so gallant—more of a gentleman than I had ever met. I began to see him. He took me out for several months, and in all that time, he never touched me except to take my arm crossing the street and once in a while to kiss my fingers.
“After a year or so, he made the offer of my own boutique. Not long after that, he asked me to marry him. I ... he never expected...anything...from me.”
Chris felt the surprise, the shock, invade him. “Are you saying he never touched you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re kidding.”
She met his disbelief straight on. “No. I’m not.”
“Did you think that was normal?”
Her chin jutted up. “Normal? No. It went against everything in my experience with men from the time I was old enough to understand what they wanted from me ... from women. That’s why I thought Winston Broussard was extraordinary. I thought his gallantry, his restraint, proved that he loved me.”
Chris straightened in the chair. Alarms began to go off in his head. “What did he want, Eden?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Her eyes fixed somewhere beyond Chris. “I didn’t know. Eden’s! began to flourish. I was working very hard. I thought he approved of my success, but I know now he’d only expected it to be an interesting little diversion. A hobby to keep me occupied with something other than bonbons when he was busy. When Eden’s! became more than that, he began to get more and more distant. A little ... cold.”
Chris had the sudden urge to smash something. He knew he hadn’t heard the worst of it yet, nor did he want to, but he couldn’t shut her down. Couldn’t not listen to her. He gnawed on the inside of his lip. “Were you concerned?”
She looked at him, then looked quickly down. “It was terrifying. I confided in Sheila. We ... I thought he was getting impatient with me, that he was waiting for me to make a move, to indicate that I wanted...him. So I made the grand gesture. I chose a night when Monique was to be out and invited Broussard to dinner. I made a special Cajun-style meal for him. A quail dish and a crème au café for dessert.
“I had sewn a beautiful old-fashioned corset. It took days to complete. The stays alone...then the ribbons and lace.” Her voice thickened with emotion.
Chris’s jaw tightened. The garment, he thought, was everything to her. Something beautiful she’d created. A piece of herself. Everything she was in her heart. Heat spread through his chest. He knew what she looked like in such a garment. He’d seen her. The image of her breasts came readily to his mind. His own sex thickened. He didn’t want to hear what Broussard had done.
She wasn’t sparing herself though. “After supper we went to the living room and I began to unbutton my...blouse, to reveal the corset I had made. It was... He stared at me. His face grew–” her hands fluttered “—mottled...with anger. He told me to cover myself. I was confused. I never expected such displeasure. He looked at me and said I must not cheapen myself—as if what I’d done made me somehow dirty. He said I must keep myself pure for our wedding night. But he refused to set a date.” Tears welled in her eyes. “He said he’d know I was ready to marry, to ‘take him to my bed,’ when Eden’s! assumed its proper place in my life again.
“God, I hate this!” she cried. Swiping angrily at a tear on her cheek, she climbed off the bed. Still clutching the pillow to her chest, she began to pace. “I hate the way it sounds. Like if I had two brain cells to rub together I would have known what he was! But he never treated me with anything less than the utmost respect. He never did or said anything to make me feel sordid or ashamed of myself—until that night.”
And then, Chris thought, Broussard had shown his true colors. He sat watching her pace in the dark, stunned to his core, indecisive. He wanted to get up and take her into his arms and hold her. To comfort her and kiss her and make her know what a sick bastard Broussard was. But she knew that now, and he knew she hadn’t told him any of this so he could fix it for her.
He didn’t know what to do. She stopped a small distance behind him by the window. He turned sideways in the chair and slung his legs over the armrest. Still holding the pillow to her chest, Eden was watching thin streams of wispy, insubstantial clouds floating across the face of the moon through the canopy of maple leaves.
He wanted to take the pillow from her. He wanted to see the shape of her body silhouetted against the moonlight. She turned her head and looked at him, and though he couldn’t see her eyes, he felt caught out with his thoughts, with wanting her. Rationally, he realized it was impossible that she knew his thoughts, but a mighty awareness hummed between them and she didn’t turn away.
He took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you leave him then, Eden?”
She breathed deeply, as well. Weariness pervaded her. She combed her fingers through her hair and held it back that way for a long time. “I should have. I knew that night that Broussard was not the man he pretended to be. That Cajun charm, the respect he showed me, the courtesy, the kindness—was all a sick game with him. I knew what I had suspected all along was true. There were strings attached to everything. I had just refused to see them. But I thought I could save Eden’s!”
Chapter Ten
Winston Elijah Broussard III wasn’t sleeping well. He paced the length of the veranda off the master bedroom suite, sipping at a fine, aged brandy, listening to the waves lapping against the beach below. Well sated as all his appetites were, he should have been soundly asleep by now. Instead, inside himself he felt this constant buzz ever intensifying, a foreboding that rode through his nerves like too much electricity humming down too few transmission wires.
He blamed Eden Kelley. She haunted his every moment. His little garden of secret delights had concealed a viperous nature he still couldn’t fathom having overlooked.
Like some vengeful wraith, her visage rose from out of his dreams to persecute him at every turn. He didn’t know why this should be so. Hidden away, terrified for her life, she represented no realistic threat to him.
And yet, she consumed him.
What to do with her? How to make her image cease plaguing him? He was tempted by his Cajun roots to seek out a black-magic remedy. Voodoo. Potions.
Evil spells.
She had twice escaped certain death.
She, along with the self-styled smoking gun, Christian X. Tierney, had eluded capture, as well —for nearly seventy-two hours now. Web had not been content to sit back and let the FBI do its job and apprehend them. His resources were not more extensive than those of the government, only more sophisticated, and more motivated.
In his organization, among whom he numbered a good many of his extended Cajun family, heads would roll should Eden Kelley escape again with her life. Such sanctions were not possible on the other side of the fence. The government couldn’t go around exterminating its failures.
Agent Daniel P. Haggerty, for instance. Veteran of numerou
s government positions, a first-class pilot, a man with a family, a stalwart believer in Mom, apple pie and the American way. He should not have thought he might get away with aiding in the escape of Eden Kelley. Brave almost to the end, he had finally been persuaded to reveal the nature of the Hudson Valley estate where he had left Eden Kelley and Christian Tierney.
Broussard made a mental note to have flowers sent to the grieving widow and daughters. A nice, civilized touch in the wake of an admittedly harsh judgment.
He took immense satisfaction in certain niceties and civilized amenities, and considered himself for the most part extremely genteel and civilized, only ruthless as in the case of those like Agent Haggerty, who could not be left alive to tell his tales to his compatriots in the FBI.
No, Broussard thought now, pulling a cheroot from a box and lighting it. He was only necessarily ruthless. Left to his own devices, he wished only to live in peace and joy, savoring the company of one beautiful and compliant woman after another, imbibing a superior wine and enjoying a cleverly prepared meal.
All such predilections put him several notches higher on the evolutionary scale than those who bought his deadly armaments, which would be bought in any case from someone. It might as well be his own coffers that overflowed as someone less ... civilized.
And, as with Eden Kelley, he liked things nicely sewn up.
She represented an intolerable loose thread in his scheme of things. She could not be allowed to live on.
He puffed on the cheroot and returned to the wrought-iron table where his cellular phone awaited his use, reflecting on the absurd ease of his endeavors to date. It had been a simple matter of phoning the Jackson Hole airport to determine the identity of the hijacked jet and its pilot. Easier still to locate the man himself, after what must have proved an unsatisfactory debriefing with his superiors.
And once Broussard knew where Haggerty had dropped his passengers, the hospital was only a few logical deductions away. There were certainly enough disgruntled hospital employees these days to find one willing to sing to the scandalmongering media of an admission purged from hospital records.
He knew, then, that Tierney had Eden Kelley stashed somewhere between Saugerties and the Atlantic. Broussard took a moment to salute the ingenuity and persistence of Christian X. Tierney, who did not yet understand that in Winston Broussard, he was not dealing with some half-witted fugitive from the laws of chance.
In truth, Broussard had now, tucked away in his safe, a dossier so complete on the formidable federal marshal that Broussard could reasonably surmise exactly where Tierney had gone to ground with Eden Kelley.
Broussard’s decision at this moment was whether or not to inform the FBI clods and leave it to them to flush Tierney and Kelley from their lair, or merely to send in yet another assassin and be done with it. There was a certain appeal to the latter, but he found the buzzing inside his body somehow less intense when he considered prolonging the chase.
He could more happily envision the unfolding scenario in which the FBI cornered his quarry. David Tafoya, a prince among fools and a desperate man, must be frantic by now, covering his ass, making sure he would be the first to get to Eden Kelley.
Broussard smiled. He could almost see the horror in sweet Eden’s eyes when she learned of the tragic fire in which Judith Cornwallis expired, and of Agent Daniel P. Haggerty’s demise.
Broussard could almost smell her subsequent desperation. People had died in her wake, and because she was a smart little cookie, too smart for her own good, she would understand that so long as she lived and breathed, others would die and never breathe again.
Because he knew her so well, Broussard could comfortably predict Eden Kelley’s choices now. She would shake Tierney and elude David Tafoya’s protection. She would come back to Broussard, crawling. Begging him to put an end to it all. Her conscience could not tolerate more deaths, all because of her.
A virgin sacrifice. How touching. How rare in this debauched day and age. His decision came easily. He would not call the Federal Bureau of Incompetence. David Tafoya would happen on the information himself sooner or later, just as, sooner or later, Eden Kelley would selflessly give herself up to him.
To that delectable end, Broussard could afford to wait. Her personality virtually assured him the guilt of so many dead would consume her.
The buzzing inside him fizzled to an end. His nerves, by contrast then, felt as light as spider silk.
He crushed out the cheroot and put down the cellular on the glass-topped wrought-iron table. Returning to his bed, where Sheila Jacques had left behind her scent, he dreamed the dreams of the hunt.
EDEN STOOD SILENTLY at the window, holding a little less tightly to the pillow. Chris exhaled. For an instant, the sky lit up with lightning, and in the distance he heard the crack of thunder. The air seemed charged.
Eden shivered hard. “I just had the worst sensation.” She turned to him. “Tierney, I need to know if Judith is okay.”
Chris nodded, sensing this was not a request she considered negotiable, or one, for that matter, that he could refuse her. “In the morning we’ll find out.”
Her head tilted. “Do you promise?”
“I said we would,” he answered. “You can believe what I tell you, Eden, without asking for promises.”
She stood very still, then gave a reluctant nod. “All right.”
He nodded back, feeling somehow better than her hesitancy to trust him warranted, but it was a start. “Will you go on? Tell me what happened when you tried to save Eden’s!”
She turned back to stare out the window. Rain began to pelt the windowpanes. “There’s not much.” She shrugged. “I worked very hard, and when I took a closer interest in the business end of Eden’s!, I began to discover wire transfers routed through my accounts, incredible amounts of money and long-distance charges that appeared to be mine but weren’t.”
“Broussard must have believed that you would never understand what he’d done, even if you uncovered the proof,” Chris guessed.
“Of course. He didn’t go to much trouble to conceal what he’d done, so at first I didn’t think any of what I found could mean what it seemed. I thought if he were really into criminal activities, he would have been more careful.”
“Then you didn’t know that it was guns and munitions?”
“No.” Lightning streaked through the sky and thunder cracked, nearer now. Wind began making the tree limbs flail and scrape at the windows. “I bad no idea what it was until I went to the FBI—and of course, David Tafoya knew instantly.”
“Did Broussard know you looked for other financing? To pay off your debt to him?”
Eden pursed her lips and shook her head. “I didn’t want him to know until I had an offer in hand. And he didn’t give me that much credit. I don’t think the thought entered his bigoted, chauvinistic brain that I would ever try to make a go of it alone.”
“What a disappointment you turned out to be.”
“Yes,” Eden reflected, giving a bittersweet smile that Chris could see only in shadows. “He intended to rub my upstart, ungrateful little nose in the harsh realities. If he’d wanted to, or if he’d thought I might try to get out from under his thumb, he could have called in the note and shut Eden’s! down in a day.” She buried her chin in the pillow a moment before going on. “He wanted me to see the ‘full measure of the error of my ways,’ ” she quoted, her inflection imitating Broussard’s thick New Orleans drawl. In profile, Chris could see her lower lip was trapped between her teeth. “The first time he said that to me, the first time,” she uttered fiercely, “I went to the FBI.”
Chris let his head fall forward. He had believed there was no way he could despise Winston Broussard more than he had when Catherine had died in his arms and when he’d buried her in that cemetery on Chestnut Hill, and certainly not after all these months with rage and resentment festering inside him.
He was wrong. Eden’s story made it all just that much more squalid.
Broussard had virtually dared her to defy him. To betray him. “Would you go so far as to say he made no effort to conceal what he was doing?”
“Almost none,” she agreed, “right up to the moment I left. The last person I saw with Broussard was the assassin he sent—the man who killed Catherine instead of me.” Eden sighed and straightened as if the burden of her secrets had fallen off her slender shoulders. A tear brimmed over onto her cheek. She brushed it away and gave him a wry smile. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but ... you know what they say. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Chris swore out loud. The platitude made him want to shake her. “You know he won’t quit until you’re dead. You know it won’t matter how strong you’ve become.”
“It does matter!” she returned fiercely. “I never gave up. I would have gotten financing and I would have paid him off. I wasn’t helpless. I knew what he wanted by then—and when I uncovered all those transactions, I knew what I had to do and I did it. I got stronger every day, Tierney, and I haven’t stopped yet. With or without you, I will survive, so don’t you dare count me out!”
He sat there wanting to get up and soothe her, but he already knew not to count her out meant not patronizing her, either. If she were another kind of woman, he thought, she would have flown at him, lashing out in her anger till he took hold of her and trapped her flailing fists and stopped her angry cries with his kisses —all because of some female genetic code expressing a subconscious desire to get herself taken care of.
Cynically, he expected it. He was no genius when it came to women, but he understood this much. He even got the not-so-flattering opposing side of the male-female picture. He’d goaded her into flying at him—with his own you-won’t-survive-out-there-without-me-babe attitude — so he could play the big hero, take her in his arms and comfort her and then take her to bed and keep her there.