Reckless Lover

by Carly Bishop

  “Because he wanted something untainted in his miserable, misbegotten existence?” Chris gibed.

  “That’s exactly right,” she returned, fighting tears, fighting the pounding in her head. “Because he is vulnerable to me. Because deep inside, all Winston Broussard craves is a little redemption.”

  “Oh, that’s rich, Eden,” be mocked.

  She shook her head. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense. Even your friend, Gelham, could see that. I want this to end, Chris, and if that means exploiting Broussard’s twisted need to have me around, then I’ll do it.” She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “I don’t want to live like this anymore, and I’ll do whatever I have to do, with or without you, to make it all go away.”

  “Broussard has to be dead and buried for this bloodbath to stop, Eden, and you know it.”

  “And you’re still willing to play executioner?” she demanded right in his face.

  “As willing as you are to play the virgin sacrifice,” he taunted cruelly. “Baby, it’s too late for that, and don’t think Broussard won’t smell it on you.”

  “You bastard!” she hissed. “Don’t you dare cheapen what we did, what we had, like that. Is that what making love to me was all about, Chris? Inventing an excuse to go off and murder Broussard? Can you do that?”

  He cocked his jaw and stood staring bleakly at the ground. Where his heart should have been, there was only the burning coal of pain instead. He’d been avoiding the question—avoided even asking himself the question—like the plague. He had no answer, and she knew it. He believed with all his heart that Broussard could not be stopped in any way short of his death. But she knew there were his two nephews he cared for too much to get himself killed or sent to the slammer for life—and that he was in love with her. He knew her question came down to whether he would flush all that down the toilet, because that’s what would happen if he took Broussard out.

  Chris had known all along what kind of sacrifice would be required. A trade-off. If he succeeded, he took the risk of losing his own life or freedom, but Broussard would be dead. Until last night, Chris could never have envisioned any reason not to kill Broussard and be done with it.

  Now, in Eden Kelley, he had the only reason he would ever need. With a single twist, like the turn of a kaleidoscope, everything had changed. Now he knew what love was, what was possible. He swallowed. Now if he sacrificed his life or his freedom, he would lose all that. And lose her.

  The greater risk was still that Broussard would kill her. Everything Chris stood for in life focused down to that one overriding fact. One of them would die. Eden or Broussard.

  Chris chose Broussard. So at last he told her. “I don’t need an excuse, Eden. I will do what I have to do.”

  “Then get in the car and drive away without me, Chris,” she said woodenly.

  “Oh, that’s a good idea. Like you’d survive out there alone for two minutes.”

  She crossed her arms over her breasts trying desperately to ward off the terrible pain. “Take me to the nearest police station, then. I’ll go in and ask for protective custody. Tafoya will come for me in a flash, I’m sure, and then you’ll be free to go commit murder.”

  Her blunt words hit him like a club. His neck and shoulders knotted at the prospect of leaving her alone. “You’ll be dead before the forty-eight hours are up.”

  She swallowed hard, shoving what amounted to a desperate bluff to the very edge. “That’s stretching credulity just a little, isn’t it? Broussard is deadly, I know that. No one knows that better than I do,” she cried fiercely. “But he can’t know everything. There’s no way he can know where we are. And David Tafoya managed to keep me safe for months before the trial.”

  Staring hard at her, he advanced toward her, the whites of his eyes glittering in the pitch dark. “Do you believe I won’t, Eden?” he asked, his voice gravel low and knifeedged.

  His tone was fraught with many more levels of meaning than she wanted to deal with. She wouldn’t let him intimidate her. “I didn’t mean he’s better than you—”

  “Good. That’s a start.”

  “Please don’t be sarcastic with me!” she cried. “You know I didn’t mean it that way. Tafoya had the advantages of a safe house and a dozen armed guards. But I’m not going to stay in protective custody and I’m not going to cower in fear from Broussard or go into hiding again for another minute of my life! I’m in love with you, damn it—”

  “Forget me. Just drop—”

  “And I will not watch you throw your life away on the likes of him.”

  “Eden, you can’t—”

  “Yes, I can! Don’t you get it by now? I will not stand by and watch one more person I care about be murdered on Broussard’s command. You can either help me and stay with me and love me, or you can get the hell out of my way and leave me. So choose, Chris, and do it now.”

  He clamped his mouth shut, his chin sticking out in that impossible, implacable position. He grabbed her by the arm and pushed her back into the passenger seat of the Ghia, then got in and exploded backward down the rutted rural lane, backing onto the blacktop without caring who or what else might have been coming down the road.

  He drove hard. It was a stupid risk. He knew that, but if speeding got him pulled over, he’d be arrested and Eden could have her way. They’d throw away the key on him and turn her loose. She could have the arresting officer call Tafoya and she would be free to make her own choices and do what Gelham suggested—what she thought she wanted to do.

  He almost wished for that outcome, because getting himself tossed in jail would be a hundred times, a thousand times easier than making the decision to give up his plan to kill Broussard and let Eden try to get him her way.

  Which was the right way.

  The straight-arrow way, the only way he could ever explain to Tiffer what the hell he’d been doing to get his face plastered all over the morning news as an armed and dangerous man holding captive a woman he’d taken as hostage.

  There was no radio in the little car so the silence after Eden’s ultimatum hung heavily between them, and heavy on his soul. He’d been driven for so long by passions he could not placate that he didn’t know how to let go. He hadn’t known how to let go of Catherine, so she’d gone out and done the one thing sure to force his hand.

  How desperate she must have been. Catherine didn’t have the time of day for Tiffer or Jake. She wouldn’t have allowed a child of her own to make a dent in her life-style, either, whether the baby was his or whether it wasn’t.

  In the end, Catherine knew exactly which of Chris’s buttons to push to get what she wanted, which was out of any commitment to him or their marriage. She just hadn’t lived long enough to experience his reaction or savor her victory.

  Chris had nowhere to take his own betrayed, howling rage but to the streets, but when even that didn’t appease the demons inside him, he started out to get Broussard. To punish the man who’d robbed him of the chance to have it all out with Catherine.

  She hadn’t been worth fighting for. Margo had tried to tell him that so many times it was a joke gone stale. And then, right beside him, beside her decorated United States marshal husband, Catherine had been shot to death.

  What Broussard and his thugs had done to Chris’s life, he’d done to Eden’s over and over again, piling on her the guilt for the lives lost that Broussard didn’t regret for a heartbeat. Dan Haggerty, Judith Cornwallis, and those were only the ones he could name.

  But Chris’s insides were eaten up with the other side of all of this. He could make a logical case for accepting Eden’s terms, but he knew in his heart he couldn’t allow her to do what she wanted.

  Broussard would kill her. He might spend a lazy afternoon taunting her first, making her see the error of her ways, but in the end he would kill her. Either way, Christian Tierney and Eden Kelley had no future.

  If he’d never met her, he would still sooner or later have taken Broussard out and done the worl
d a big favor. He would willingly have paid the price civilization demanded, if it came to that. He would never have known what he’d missed.

  He wanted to howl at the Fates, to shake his fist at God. What kind of depraved universe foisted on him a woman who turned him on and then inside out when he looked at her and when he listened to her—because she loved him for all the right, straight-arrow reasons?

  He had saved her life, made love to her, come to know her for a woman who demanded respect and craved commitment and had given herself to him with no thought of gain or making him pay for loving her.

  It was going to kill him to have had all that within his grasp and then have to turn around and walk away in order to spare her life. But he would do it. He had only thought he knew what pain and sacrifice meant when Catherine had died in his arms, pregnant with some other man’s baby.

  Chris came up suddenly on a much slower car, a brown sedan, so he slowed, then encroached into the oncoming lane and passed the car. The driver was on a cellular phone, not paying attention to the road. All at once feeling intuitively uneasy, Chris brought his own speed down to within the limit. He couldn’t afford to attract unnecessary attention or be stopped and get himself tossed in jail.

  He couldn’t allow Eden her straight arrow way, either. He would have to find a place to hide her away and then go after Broussard alone.

  He checked his speed again, then glanced over at Eden. He knew she wouldn’t look at him, knew she was waiting on his answer. He wanted his response to be different. He wished he could say I’ll help you. I’ll stay. I’ll love you.

  His chest tightened. The unspoken words sounded like vows to him, vows he wanted to make to her. The longing was so thick inside him that he almost pulled off the road again to say those things aloud to her, but he couldn’t. He could only make her believe he had changed his mind.

  He drew a deep breath. Lies in the line of duty came easily, smoothly, off his tongue. This one, the implication he was about to make, stuck in his craw. He cleared his throat. “Promise you’ll trust me, Eden.”

  She turned to look at him. Hope filled her voice. “Does that mean—”

  “I’m serious about this,” he interrupted, knowing he couldn’t give her a simple yes because that was too big a lie. Her willingness to believe him hammered craters in his heart. “You have to promise me you won’t go off and do something half-cocked.”

  “Okay.” The light that had flickered and guttered out in her eyes only a few hours before returned. She gave a brazen smile. “Fully cocked or nothing at all.”

  His heart was hemorrhaging but he laughed out loud. Should have known she could make him laugh, too. “Where do you want to start?”

  She took his right hand off the stick shift and held it in her lap, massaging his fingers and palm. “Ultimately, I want to go straight to Broussard wearing a wire like Gelham suggested. I’m sure David Tafoya will jump at the chance to help us nail him for murder.” She stared out the side window a moment, then went on with her thought. “Assuming, of course, that Broussard doesn’t gun me down on the spot.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  She gave a nervous laugh. “I think I can push him into taunting me with everything he’s done,” Eden went on. “All the hired guns, all the reasons I don’t deserve to live, all the reasons why he’s saving my immortal soul by his actions.”

  Chris grimaced. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. None of this was going to happen, but he had to come off sounding worried. “How can you possibly believe he won’t kill you on sight?”

  She swallowed. “I know Gelham and I are right, Chris. Broussard is obsessed with me. He won’t be satisfied until I’m dead, but he’ll want to rub my nose in my failures and shortcomings as a woman and a human being first. Most of all as a woman.” She hesitated, realizing all at once that Chris had forever changed her. In their lovemaking, she’d seen more clearly than ever her strengths as a woman. Her power. She would never again see herself as Broussard wished. “By the time he’s done with humiliating me,” she concluded, “he’ll have incriminated himself, and Tafoya can move in and make the arrest.”

  “You’re willing to stake your life that Broussard won’t blow you away on sight?”

  “I’m not wild about it, no.” She swallowed hard on a knot of very real fear in her throat. “I just know there is no other way. If there’s any justice—” she paused and shrugged “—then this will work.”

  Chris slumped in his seat. “Some days I’d settle for mercy.” He glanced over and touched a kiss to her nose with his finger. “So. Go on. Where do we start?”

  “I thought about trying to call Sheila. This can only work if Broussard believes I’m alone and desperate.”

  He didn’t know if that meant Eden now believed that her best friend would betray her. “Is it even possible to talk to her without Broussard knowing about it?”

  “No.” Eden shook her head. “I would bet Sheila’s calls are all screened or recorded. But that would be the point—to let Broussard think I’m alone and just desperate enough to come crawling back—and scared enough to ask Sheila for help.” Eden chewed worriedly on her inner lip. “I want to talk to Monique first.”

  Chris frowned. “Why?”

  “I know blood is thicker than water, if that’s what you’re worried about. Monique is Broussard’s cousin, but she has a mind and a heart of her own. She has never allowed him to dictate to her.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’ll cross him, Eden.”

  “No. You’re right. It doesn’t. But she never came to the trial to stand by him, Chris, and there were fifty or more of his family and friends and business associates in the courtroom every day. Monique never came.”

  Concentrating, Chris flexed his hand in her lap. She began rubbing the base of his thumb. “Tell me why you want to see her.”

  “Two reasons. One is that I think she may know who it was that Broussard ordered to kill me after I left the courtroom that day.”

  Chris took his eyes off the road and stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Why would Monique know such a thing?”

  “I don’t mean Broussard told her, just that if I describe the killer to her, she’ll know who he was. They all know each other, Chris, all of Broussard’s minions. They all come from the same place. They all speak the same Cajun-French dialect....” Eden shrugged. “If Monique doesn’t know, I bet she knows someone who does.”

  “Eden, that shooter wasn’t carrying any ID. He had no driver’s license, no parking stubs, no receipts, no permit to carry a weapon and no fingerprints on file in any jurisdiction. He had no ties to anyone even remotely involved —in fact, half the investigating officers believed the guy was on some wild-eyed vendetta against me—that he meant to get Catherine.”

  “Didn’t they eventually conclude that I was the target?”

  “Yes. But there was no way to make a case based only on your having seen the shooter in Broussard’s office so many months earlier.”

  “Well, all any of that means is that Broussard sent home to New Orleans or Baton Rouge for fresh blood,” Eden said. “That’s the way he operates. He trusted no one who doesn’t owe him—big time. And the ones who owe him are family members and friends of family that he’s plucked out of some pretty god-awful, impoverished lives.”

  “Almost sounds noble,” Chris sniped. “If you ignore the fact that he plucks his own family from one ugly habitat and turns them into mindless-robot killers in another.”

  “He commands a lot of loyalty, Chris. I never heard of anyone complaining about life after getting transplanted to Boston.”

  He downshifted and sped around a van, then settled back into the eastbound lane. “Okay. Explain this. Why didn’t David Tafoya know Broussard’s family tree up one side and down the other by the time you were done spilling your guts to him? Why wouldn’t he have followed up on your instincts about the shooter?”
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  Eden opened her mouth to respond, then closed it, trying to remember. “The subject of Broussard’s family connections never came up in that context. In the first place, my direct testimony had far more to do with his international customers than with the drones in his own organization. Also, I met dozens of cousins and uncles and their wives, but I rarely saw any of them more than once or twice.”

  “So you didn’t really know them?”

  “No. Not at all. I would have been doing well to remember their names, and I sure didn’t know how they were connected to Broussard or what dirty work they did for him. Everything I’m telling you now, about how he operated, about how he only worked with people who owed him, those were all Monique’s observations, not mine.”

  “How did you recognize the shooter, then?”

  “Only by his eyes. The night I left Broussard, this guy was in his office. I remember thinking Broussard didn’t even want me to see the other man, but I saw his eyes. It was the same man, Chris. I know it was. Monique will know, too.”

  Chris heaved a big sigh. “I still don’t understand, Eden. If you believed Monique could identify the shooter, then I don’t know why Tafoya didn’t go after whatever information she could give him.” They’d reached the I-95, which circled the western edge of the metropolitan area. Chris drove on through Waltham, staying off the Circumferential interstate. “There is no statute of limitations on murder, so it’s never too late to start building a case against Broussard. That’s the plan?”

  Eden nodded. “Yes. Plus, I would like to know more than he thinks I do when I confront Broussard.” She heard Chris draw an uneasy breath. His jaw tightened. Even in the dark, Eden could feel his resistance to the idea. It reminded her of coming up against that solid brick wall. “I know. It’s very scary.”

  “Scary.” He was mocking her.

  “Yeah, Tierney. Scary. Like bad dreams and monsters hiding out in your closet,” she snapped. “You know scary.”

  “Yeah, Kelley. I know scary.”

  “Good!” She clasped his warm hand in both of hers. “Chris, I don’t mean to be flippant about this, but I don’t want to think about how scary. Does that make any sense?”