by Carly Bishop
But Eden Kelley was strong enough to resist this unwitting female response, and Chris was awed. He found he wanted nothing more than to be the kind of man she could trust to treat her as an equal if... when he took her in his arms again.
If he took her to bed.
“You mean it, don’t you?” he said quietly.
“Yes.” She shifted the pillow in her arms. “I mean it. I don’t want to be taken care of, Tierney. I won’t. I want more than that or nothing at all.” She stared out at the rain battering against the window. “You can’t kill him, Chris,” she said after a while.
It didn’t escape him that she’d used his given name for the first time, but he didn’t want her to misunderstand him. “Watch me.”
“No. I won’t watch you and I won’t help you do it.” She shivered hard, as if the fever and chills had reclaimed her. “It will make you into what he is.”
He turned away from her and sank heavily back into the cushions, making himself soften his warning tone. “I’ve heard the argument before.”
“Then maybe you don’t understand—”
“I understand.”
“How can you say that?” she persisted, her voice cracking with emotion. “How can you say that you understand, when in your heart you must know that what you’re planning to do will make you a monster?”
“Just drop it, Eden.” He wanted her to drop the discussion cold. If she could stand there having had a bullet in her that had missed her heart by less than six inches and still believe that taking Broussard out put Chris in the same breed, then he couldn’t change her mind.
But she wouldn’t leave it alone. She came to him, shoved the ottoman out of her way and knelt down before him. “Chris, listen to me. Please. Everything in my memory of the day that Catherine was killed is just...brutally clear.
“I was in this sort of emotional wasteland. Right there in open court, Broussard crushed an orchid blossom and flicked it over his shoulder. I knew then he intended to kill me. The judge was furious and kept banging his gavel, and every time it hit I flinched inside. I left the witness stand and it took everything I had not to run. I was escorted out of the courtroom surrounded by half a dozen marshals and I flashed on how many times I’d been down halls exactly like that with the Social Services caseworkers.” She paused, then let go of the pillow and laid her hands flat on his bare thighs just above the knees. “Chris, more than any of that, do you know what scared me the most?”
His gut tightened. “No.”
“I turned that corner and there you were, spilling into the hallway with Catherine and your friends. You were laughing and joking and carrying on.” Her voice went low and tight. “I was so scared because I knew that nothing Broussard could ever do to me, even if he succeeded in tracking me down and killing me, nothing could hurt so much as never belonging with someone else like that. Like Catherine belonged with you. Like you all belonged together.”
“I grew up with Gary Dilts, Eden—”
“But don’t you see? I didn’t grow up with anyone! And I knew I would die without ever having had that, without ever being part of a couple who loved and respected each other like you did.”
Chris went cold deep inside, finally certain of her meaning. She hadn’t said “belonged to.” She’d said “belonged with.” He didn’t know where the line was that he’d crossed over between telling himself the truth and telling someone else, but suddenly it mattered that Eden Kelley get it.
“If you believed, Eden,” he said carefully, “that when Broussard’s assassin killed Catherine he destroyed a storybook relationship, a man and a woman who—how did you put it?—who loved and respected each other—”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Then you were wrong.”
Eden blinked, then swallowed. “But you said you loved her—more than life.”
“That’s true. I did.”
“You loved her...and then you didn’t?”
“Nothing is that simple, Eden.” Nothing was ever half so clear. Now he knew better, but then? “Then I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know? She was your wife. She was pregnant!” Eden protested. “I heard you laughing and joking about it. I saw your friends congratulating you. Are you saying now that you don’t know if you really loved her?”
He sank deeper into the chair as if he were sinking again into the morass of emotions he’d felt the day Catherine was murdered. The hopelessness, the sense of her terrible betrayal, the rage. And the guilt. His feelings had been no more sophisticated than those of a child who wished someone would die, and then they did.
A flash of lightning revealed her look of perplexity. “Eden, you know things are not always what they seem.”
“Some things, yes, but—”
He held up a hand to forestall her argument. He wanted her to know the truth. “What you saw and the sense you made of it is not even close to the way it was between and Catherine and me.”
Doubt suddenly stilled her expressive features. Tiny baubles of light and shadow cast by raindrops on the window played at her parted, dampened lips. “How was it, then?”
“The truth,” he answered, “is that I didn’t know Catherine was pregnant when she came into my office that day.”
“But what a lovely surprise!”
“Eden, don’t!” he commanded harshly. “Catherine didn’t take me aside. We didn’t go to lunch. We didn’t go look at baby things or maternity clothes at Filene’s. I heard about the baby at the same time my whole unit heard.” It wouldn’t have been a lovely surprise even if any of those things had happened, but he stopped short.
Eden stared up at him, then bowed her head. The sky lit up again and silvery rays glinted off her hair. He’d thought he could give a fair recital of this much without betraying the pain, but the quality of Eden Kelley’s silent empathy proved he was wrong.
“Tell me the rest,” she urged softly.
He took a deep breath. He would rather have sat there and laced his fingers with hers on his thighs, but he got up and began to pace. Even that wasn’t enough. He knew he ought to walk away from this conversation. What had gone down between Catherine and him had nothing to do with Eden, nothing to do with Winston Broussard or Chris’s own intentions now.
He didn’t owe Eden his life story. He had no right to burden her with it, either. But the fact that she’d asked, that she recognized there was more he’d left unsaid, that she could even think beyond her own immediate, life-threatening problems to his ... all of it disarmed him.
He cared for her in some slowly spiraling and inexplicable way, but he hadn’t expected it to be returned. Not from her, not after all she’d been through at his hands.
“Catherine was having a fling,” he said before he could change his mind. “An affair. Her third that I know of. I went along with the smiles and congratulations just like she knew I would. She died before I could ask her if the baby was mine.”
Chapter Eleven
Long after Chris had stunned her with the truth of the way things were between him and Catherine, Eden sat watching the rain patter against the window. He slept uneasily, but he slept. She had promised him she would not try to run away.
Why was it so hard to know the heart of another person? Of all people, Eden reflected, she should have known that things were not always what they seemed to be.
It had seemed to her that her mother had loved her. Her father had abandoned the two of them, sure, but she didn’t think things had ever gotten so bad that her mother should have abandoned her, too. She had.
It had seemed to Eden many times between finding herself alone in the Boston Public Gardens and the time she went to work for Monique Lamareaux that no one was trustworthy, not the Sisters at St. Anne’s, not the priest, not her classmates. Only Sheila Jacques had managed to worm her way through Eden’s stiff defenses.
And it had seemed to Eden that Winston Broussard was trustworthy when he was not.
All delusions. But she’d made th
e mistake of placing herself at the center of the universe, believing she was the only deluded one. That she was the only one who repeatedly failed to see into the dark motives of those around her.
So she had left that courtroom, done with the testimony that would put Broussard in a country-club prison for a minimum term. She’d rounded that corner in the federal building in Boston, frightened to her deepest being. She was stiflingly familiar with being all alone. She knew the routine of being shuffled from one place to another, one so-called home to another, as well as she knew the North End streets and the cell-like room she had shared for four years with Sheila Jacques and two other girls.
Going off to a witness-protection relocation seemed remarkably in keeping with everything she knew so well and hated so much. How to be alone.
Seeing in that moment what she imagined was an intensely joyous moment was in reality Christian Tierney making happy over a baby he wanted more than anything but knew in his heart was not likely his.
Lightning cracked again, so close the thunder reverberated within only a few seconds. Eden hunkered deeper into the massive chair. Chris kicked the comforter off and groaned in his troubled sleep. He lay there on the bed wearing only a pair of thinly striped boxers. Dark hair covered his legs and chest and jaw.
Eden swallowed. He attracted her. His high Slavic cheekbones gave him a haunted quality that spoke to her. As did his warm hazel eyes, his thick, overly long black hair and eyelashes, even the stubble slashing across his angled jaw. His muscled shoulders and arms had both held her against her will and supported her when she would have collapsed.
She noticed now, when lightning pierced the dark, that his long legs were powerfully formed and his feet were as big as gunboats.
Maybe it was because she’d been sick and delirious and sleeping so much, but he seemed almost like a figment of her imagination, a man her subconscious had conjured up to satisfy and tempt every feminine instinct kept so long under wraps inside her.
But she could no longer disown her attraction to Christian Tierney, or chalk it up solely to infatuation or a physical appeal. She trusted him. She believed what he said. She wanted him to kiss her as he had on the jet he had hijacked for only one reason—to save her life.
She knew very well that he intended to kill Winston Broussard and that he would not be dissuaded from trying. She understood his dark desire to take justice into his own hands because God’s justice was just too slow. Broussard sold guns and bullets and had killed and would kill again. Would kill her.
But where she had failed to see Broussard’s sullied, self-serving motives, she saw Christian Tierney’s clearly. She knew his were somber reflections of a deeply honorable and truthful man betrayed by the woman he loved more than life and offended by the license of Winston Broussard to murder without answering for it.
She swallowed hard yet again, overwhelmed by Christian Tierney, by the man he was. She admired his strength, his kindness, his capacity to love too much, even the driven recklessness of what he stood for, the lengths he would go to stand up for someone.
To stand up for her.
The minute Chris had committed to protecting her from Broussard’s paid assassin, his plans to use her for bait, to lure Broussard from his evil, protected enclave, had gone up in smoke.
Unless he was certain she was again alone, Broussard would not come after her himself. He was too much a coward, too arrogant and dependent on his hireling thugs to risk exposing himself. Chris would have to go after Broussard, only Chris wasn’t a killer, so Broussard would win.
Chris would die.
She got up from the chair, suddenly aware of hunger pangs gnawing at her stomach. She stood for a while watching Chris Tierney thrashing now and again, softly snoring.
She straightened and gave a quick shake of her head. Her hunger wasn’t only for food; she realized it was far more complex than that. So complex it was impossible. U.S. Deputy Marshal Christian X. Tierney was still in love with the woman who had betrayed him. And still determined to kill Winston Broussard.
She put the pillow back on the bed and tiptoed into the small kitchen. She found a can of hearts of palm, her favorite, and half a loaf of crusty French bread, but when she’d eaten it all only her stomach pangs were eased.
Rain poured down from the eaves, overflowing the gutters. Restless now, she spied her backpack on the floor by the bed and sank to the floor beside it to search through her things for the mirror Judith had given her. She needed to look into its glass and find herself, the woman who needed no man, who was capable and strong and getting stronger every day.
Groping blindly in the dark through the pack, she stabbed her hand on a shard of something horribly sharp. She smothered a cry and plucked out the mirror. More jagged shards spilled into her lap.
Lightning crashed through the sky again and she saw what had happened. The butt end of a bullet protruded from the sculpted silver backing. The impact had shattered the glass. Judith’s mirror had stopped the bullet, but it was ruined.
Judith’s heirloom mirror.
Eden’s throat closed and she began to shake. Blood dripped from the base of her thumb. Rage bit into her, then the memory came rushing back, the horror of the blow, its force knocking her into Chris as she clung to him on the back of his Harley. She clenched her teeth and forced herself to breathe, to think, to stay in control and be strong.
She had to get out of here. She had to escape Chris and find David Tafoya and get him to help her. Broussard would kill her, or he would kill Chris and let her live because if he caught them together he would somehow sniff out that she was in love with Catherine Tierney’s husband.
And he would know the worst he could do to her would be to let her live after Chris was dead.
She scrambled to her feet and shed the luxurious white terry robe with a savage, determined calm. She heard the steady downpour drumming over Chris’s uneasy breathing. She wouldn’t look at him. Couldn’t—not if she wanted to leave him.
She never questioned the fact that she was in love with a man she had known less than seventy-two hours and under the ugliest conditions. She would trade her life to save his on the spot, which was all she knew and everything that mattered.
She sucked the blood from the base of her thumb and wrapped it in a dish towel from the kitchen. As quietly as she could manage, she pulled on her only pair of jeans and a cardigan she usually wore over something else. The stitches beneath her collarbone felt stiff and tight, but her skin was healing.
The only other clothing in her backpack was an extra pair of socks. She yanked them on, then began to search for her shoes. She blinked back sudden hopeless tears when she realized Chris hadn’t half trusted she would keep her promise. Or if he had, he’d already long since done something with her shoes to prevent her running away.
Panic gnawed at the edges of her determination. She took a deep breath and exhaled silently. Fear was good, panic was not. She had to keep herself under control or she would never manage this escape.
Where? Where would he hide her shoes? Maybe he hadn’t hidden them at all. Maybe they were in the car. Maybe she’d taken them off herself. She shook her head and made her way silently over the hardwood floor to the door leading outside from the kitchen.
The sound of the rain was so much louder, so much more intense when she opened the door that she bit her lip and scooted through it before the noise awakened Chris. Shaking now, she almost tripped over her shoes, which sat alongside his boots on the stoop, protected from the rain.
She bent and started to put one on, then jerked it off and went back for her pack, for the shattered mirror that would serve as a constant reminder of what would happen if she didn’t leave and leave now.
Crouched at the foot of the bed, she heard his troubled breathing. The scent of him on the bedclothes sapped her will to go. Her eyes darted to his powerful prostrate figure. Her heart twisted painfully in her chest. Her lungs seemed not to work.
She wanted to stay.
She wanted to know, for once and the first time in her life, what it was to make love with a man. What it was to be in love with a man like Christian Tierney and what it was to have such a man in love with her.
But she could not indulge such fanciful and dangerous desires. Recklessness was in her now, too, and she would have made love with him whether he loved her back or not, but this recklessness was born of needing more to do something, anything, to prevent him from putting himself in the line of fire again.
Winston Broussard would kill him.
Tears pricked at her eyelids. The thought of leaving him, of going it alone terrified her, but the consequences of staying terrified her more. She dared not risk another second of delay.
Her knees cracked when she arose. Holding her breath, praying Chris wouldn’t wake, she grabbed up her clothes from the bathroom floor and stuffed them into her pack. She took several bath towels to cover her head and shoulders, then slipped through the back door again, this time closing it behind her. Sitting on the stoop, she put on her shoes and eyed the dark-colored Mustang.
Why hadn’t she thought of it earlier? She didn’t know.
She clamped down hard on the temptation to go back and find the keys. Every moment she delayed, every chance she took digging through Chris’s things to find the keys while he slept, was a gamble she couldn’t afford. All she needed was to get to the road, hitch a ride to a telephone and put in her call to Tafoya.
A few hours at most. She couldn’t hide in the car, and by now, the authorities must be on the lookout for it. And if anyone knew to look for the Mustang, so did Broussard.
No. She would be far safer, far more likely to make it on foot.
Ignoring the fact that she was weakened from hours in bed, from the blood loss and having eaten almost nothing, she stood, flung her pack on her left shoulder and the towels over her head and shoulders, then plunged down the brick steps into the drenching rain.
She followed the heavily treed paved lane leading away from the house. Even though she kept to the side of the road under the partial protection of the trees, the going was brutal. Despite the barrier the leafy branches provided, the persistent downpour had saturated the grass and ground cover.