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 numerous 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 intolerEole loose thread in his scheme of things. She could not he allowed to live on.
He puffed on the cheroot and returned to the wrought-iron table where his cellular phone awaited his use, re-fiecting on the absurd ease of his endeavors to date. It had been a simple matter Of phoning the Jackson Hole airport to determiriethe 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 scandalmongerhag 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 an other 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. foya 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 he'd, where Sbeila 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, ! 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'd, 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 had no idea what it was until I went to the FBI--and of course, David Tafoya knew instantly."
"Did Broussard know you-4ooked 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 in-fleet ion imitating Broussard's thick New Orleans drawl. In
Chris could see 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 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 wont 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 arid 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.
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'tyou?" he said quietly.
"Yes." She shifted the pillow in her arms. "I meafi 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 e~very 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'~ 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 conversafiom 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.
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