Runaway

by Heather Graham

  Tyler cleared his throat. “Jones has a warrant, Jarrett,” he said unhappily.

  “Alas, my wife is not here.”

  “It’s a lie!” Carter raged.

  Jarrett stared at him, arching a brow. “Apparently this fine Bostonian gentleman is not well versed in the proper behavior of a guest in a southern household.”

  “Don’t you double-talk me, McKenzie. You tricked my men in New Orleans—”

  “Where was your warrant then, Mr. Carter?”

  “I had to find her to see that it was served!” Carter snapped.

  “Perhaps you had no warrant at that time. Perhaps you still believed that you could kidnap her, drag her back—and then threaten her with the hangman.”

  “How dare you—” Carter began, approaching Jarrett.

  It was exactly what he had wanted. In fact, he was dying just for the opportunity to flatten Carter’s nose against his face.

  “Gentlemen! This is no way to solve things!” Tyler Argosy intervened, stepping between the two men.

  “I want my wife!” Carter roared to Tyler. “And if you don’t manage to see to it, Captain Argosy, I’ll see to it that you’re stripped of rank and demoted to digging latrines for the rest of your natural life!”

  One of Tyler’s golden brows shot up. “You do whatever you feel you must, Mr. Carter. Mr. McKenzie says that his wife is not here. His word is good enough for me.”

  “It isn’t for me!” Carter snapped. “Where the damn hell is she?”

  “On a religious retreat,” Jarrett said blandly.

  “What?” Carter snapped.

  “She’s in the swamp somewhere, Carter,” Jarrett told him. He smiled. “With the Indians. There’s a war on here, you know. Tell him, Tyler, if he hasn’t managed to grasp the fact. The Seminoles are hard on the warpath, anxious to kill, maim, mutilate—scalp. She’s out among them.”

  “Don’t you try to dissuade me, McKenzie,” Carter warned him. “I’ll have you hanged for being an accessory.”

  Jarrett arched a brow. “He’s pushing it, isn’t he, Tyler?” he inquired. He lifted his hands. “After all, I haven’t even been in Boston in over a year.”

  Carter started to lunge for him again. Tyler was going to let him do it.

  Jenson Jones caught him by the coattails. “Mr. Carter, this doesn’t solve anything!”

  But Carter waved a fist beneath Jarrett’s nose anyway. “I don’t give a damn about your idiot Indians. I’m going after her, and these army boys will take care of your Seminoles. And I warn you, McKenzie, I will find her, and when I do, I’ll come back and prosecute you to the full extent of the law.” He swung around to stare at Tyler. “I want the house searched!”

  “I’m telling you—” Tyler began.

  “Search the house!” Jarrett said softly. “I promise you, Carter, she’s not here. You’ll never find her.”

  “Have the place searched from attic to cellar!” Carter demanded. He turned around, slamming out of the room, Jenson Jones at his heels.

  Jarrett shrugged at Tyler. “There is no cellar, you know that, of course.”

  Tyler offered him a weak smile. “Jarrett, sweet Jesus, this is bad! He has a warrant. I was commanded to come here, he has legal papers!”

  Jarrett sighed. “The warrant may be real. The marriage certificate isn’t. Did you see the signatures on it?”

  “Jenson performed the ceremony,” Tyler said with a nod, “as magistrate.”

  “Supposedly Jenson performed the marriage—and Julian Carter and some woman named Sara Teasedale stood as witnesses. Well, Julian is dead. And I’ll warrant there’s some story behind Sara Teasedale as well.”

  “The marriage certificate is a fake—the arrest warrant isn’t,” Tyler said.

  “She didn’t do it,” Jarrett said flatly.

  “Jarrett, for the love of God! I want to believe that as well, but apparently there were witnesses when Julian Carter was shot and killed.”

  “She didn’t do it.”

  “Well, Carter is demanding that I take him into the interior until we find her.”

  Jarrett was silent.

  “That’s where she’s gone, isn’t it?” Tyler asked quietly.

  Jarrett didn’t get a chance to answer. Jeeves had come to the door. Jarrett swung around and stared at him expectantly.

  Jeeves arched a brow toward Tyler. Jarrett shrugged.

  “Sir, she was gone.”

  “What?” Jarrett said.

  “I didn’t have to tell Mrs. McKenzie that she needed to get out. She was already gone.”

  Jarrett lowered his head. Damn. Sweet Mary, he’d wanted her gone, but he’d needed to know how to find her as well! Carter was ruthless in his determination to come after her. Jarrett had to reach her first!

  “Jarrett,” Tyler said firmly, “you know that I’m going to have to bring Tara in. There’s no way around it. What you need to be doing is finding a lawyer, the best damn attorney in America. And maybe you should find someone from the Massachusetts Commonwealth.”

  “I’ll find her an attorney, Tyler. When the time comes.”

  “Jarrett—”

  “Right now, Tyler,” he said grimly, himself turning and heading for the door, “I’ve got to find my wife—before you do.” He started out the door and turned back once again. “My wife, Tyler. Mine. I promise you, Tara was never married to that pompous ass. And somehow I’ll damn well prove it!”

  Chapter 21

  Peter came with her to the deserted Seminole village where James had once lived with his family.

  Where Jarrett’s cabin still remained.

  “I’ll keep watch tonight,” Peter told her.

  She smiled. She wanted to tell him to go back, that she would be all right, that she wouldn’t be afraid where she was, but Peter had his pride, and he was determined to look after her.

  She had planned to come alone. Peter had stubbornly set out with her, and she realized that he was probably much more comfortable with the terrain than she was, and besides, she hadn’t had time to fight him, not then. Now, she wondered if she shouldn’t still be running. How had Jarrett felt when he discovered Clive Carter on his doorstep—with an arrest warrant for his wife?

  She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to wonder if Jarrett did or didn’t believe in her. It was night, and she was so exhausted, she couldn’t even seem to light a fire in the cabin.

  Peter appeared in the doorway she had left open, ready to help her. She let him make the fire, and she thanked him when he left her. She sat and stared at the blaze. James and his people were barely gone, yet the place seemed so cold, so lonely, filled only with the ghost echoes of the laughter and the dreams that had been here before.

  Her stomach growled. She realized that she was hungry, and that this was a very different way to run. Always before, she had depended on the rush and bustle of cities themselves to save her. She’d worked; she’d spent her income wisely, and she’d never had to steal anything. Even when danger had threatened, she’d always survived.

  Until Jarrett. She wouldn’t have survived that night in New Orleans. Not without him.

  Dear God, but this was so different! There wasn’t a bite left to eat around the place; the Seminoles had known that they would need all their food to survive as they trekked south into the swampland. It didn’t matter. She suddenly felt that she might get sick if she tried to eat anyway.

  But just as she was thinking that, Peter tapped on her open doorway again. She turned and smiled at him in the darkness. He came in, smiling very proudly, lifting what appeared to be a ball of fur. “Rabbit—for you,” he said.

  “How wonderful, thank you very much!” she told him. But she felt ill again. The creature’s brown eyes were staring at her now. She knew what a great effort Peter was putting into trying to help her, but she didn’t think that she could skin and cook the damned thing.

  She started to rise, then sank back down, dizzy as well. She was so tired! She had d
one so much riding today.

  She had felt so much fear.

  And pain.

  “I’ll fix the rabbit,” Peter said, and left her.

  “Thank you!” she called softly after him. She managed to stand and make her way to the pallet with its soft furs, all left behind, and lie down. She lay watching the fire, feeling numb. Would he believe in her?

  Would he—could he—still love her?

  She closed her eyes. She might have drifted off. When she opened them, it seemed that the fire had burned down. She became aware of a rustling that seemed to come from just beyond the cabin and she sat up in alarm.

  Peter?

  But it seemed that someone was moving almost silently, furtively.

  She started to mouth the boy’s name, then caught her breath. Someone was moving just beyond the door frame.

  She stood quickly, her heart slamming against her chest, looking for something with which to defend herself. There was a large earthenware bowl near the fire. She snatched it up and eased herself around the cabin, trying to reach the wall by the doorway and to flatten herself against it.

  She managed to get where she wanted to be. She went flush against the wall and stood very still, barely breathing. She prayed that her heartbeat could not be as loud to others as it was to her.

  Someone was there. Not moving. Perhaps not breathing either. But someone was definitely there. She almost knew where he stood in the night. She could sense the breathing. She could feel the danger as it seemed to snake along her spine.

  There! A shadow! Darkness against the dark, yet she saw him. Against the fireglow the shadow moved into the cabin. Paralyzed, Tara still waited. She closed her eyes, swallowed, opened her eyes. Waited.

  Then suddenly, he moved. The shadow was within the cabin. She saw a dark-clad arm—a gun extended from it. The towering dark shadow was halfway into the cabin and she could wait no longer. She shrieked out, attacking with the bowl, crashing it down upon the shadow’s ink-dark head. He started to fall.

  She started to run.

  But hands reached out for her ankles, grabbing. She came crashing down.

  “Tara!” She heard her name in a growl, but terror had set in so deeply that she barely comprehended it. She thrashed and struggled.

  And all to no avail. Merciless, the hands stayed upon her. Inch by inch she was pulled back into the cabin.

  She tried to roll, tried to fight, to swing, to slap, to scratch, to kick.

  “Tara!”

  Hands fell on her shoulders. She blinked, looking up into the black eyes of the man straddling her, trying to save his face from the wicked flailing of her nails.

  “Tara, it’s me!”

  “Oh, Jarrett! Oh, God, Jarrett!” She flung her arms out to him. She started to feel the stinging damp burn of tears behind her lashes.

  He tried to disentangle himself.

  “Jarrett, I’m sorry. I’m so damned sorry. I never should have married you. I should have known that he’d never give up, that he’d be too stupid to realize that he shouldn’t follow me here!”

  “Tara, stop it,” he said harshly.

  She fell silent, swallowing, closing her eyes, going dead still once again, and offering him no resistance. “Are they with you?” she whispered. “Have they come to bring me in?”

  He shook his head, rising, reaching down a hand to pull her up to her feet. He rubbed his head, staring at her.

  “Damn,” he murmured.

  “You scared me to death!” she whispered. Then alarm touched her again. “Peter was watching!” she said.

  He shook his head. “Peter was nowhere around when I came. I thought it was you in the cabin, but Carter is on his way out here. I had to make sure.”

  She stepped past him, stiff with the sudden pain that seized her. He must hate her now. He had to.

  “Something must be wrong! Peter would never just leave me.”

  “I’ll find Peter. He must have had some reason for leaving you. But I have to deal with you first.”

  She felt as if an icy frost were descending upon her. “Perhaps I should just—go with Clive!” she said miserably.

  “I beg your pardon!”

  She spun back to face him. “Jarrett, I never meant to bring any of this down on you.”

  “Tara, you’ll go back with him over my dead body. But there’s one thing I want from you, and so help me God, I want it now.”

  “And that is—?” she whispered.

  “An explanation.”

  She bit into her lower lip and nodded. She turned away from him again, pacing into the cabin. “It’s funny,” she murmured, “I sometimes think about that night when Tyler came to dinner with sergeants Culpeper and Rice and everyone had an idea of where I might come from!”

  “Boston? And I’d thought it was a southern accent!” Jarrett mused harshly behind her.

  She didn’t look at him. She walked back to the fire, sat before it, and stared into the blaze. “Not Boston. I was born in Dublin.”

  “The song!”

  “What?” she asked, startled.

  He shook his head. “No matter. The morning you were singing on the boat, I thought you had a hint of the Irish to your tune.” His voice was dry now. “But I hear you are an excellent actress.”

  “When William and I were very small, my mother died. My father was a coal miner. He made it a few years past my mother, but when I was thirteen and William was eleven, Da died, too, and there was no one to take us in, and nothing left at all. We had both heard wondrous stories about the New World all of our lives, thrilling tales about the American Revolution and the great American adventure to be had! I had a fair voice; William can play any instrument, though his heart lies in his writing.” She paused for a minute. She would get back to that. “Anyway, we sang and danced on the streets of Dublin until we earned our fares on a ship bound for this country. It brought us to Boston.”

  “And you met Julian Carter?”

  Tara nodded. Then she turned to Jarrett. “I swear to you, I didn’t kill him. I cared for him very deeply. He was a good man. Nothing like his son.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “We were having trouble getting into the country. Someone in authority seemed to think that we’d just be another two little ragamuffins to feed—I don’t think he was terribly fond of the Irish. But Julian Carter happened to be there, and he somehow smoothed things along, and he bought William and me a wonderful dinner and talked about what a great country it really was. He would see to it that we found work.” Her voice hardened suddenly. “I remember, though, when he brought us home that night, Clive was there. He wanted nothing to do with us. I was fifteen then, William thirteen, but we’d been in the worst part of the ship for weeks and were surely the worse for wear. I certainly held no attraction for him that night! He told his father that he was a fool, throwing good money away on rotten little Irish children. But he didn’t stay long that night. William and I were able to clean up; Julian gave us clothing and promised that he’d find something for us. We wanted to repay him, so William played his flute and I sang for him, and the next thing I knew he was up and snapping his fingers, saying that he had the perfect thing. And the next day William and I were working for an acting troupe.”

  “And you were very, very good,” Jarrett supplied softly. She couldn’t read the emotion in his tone. Betrayal? He continued, “You learned to speak with no accent whatsoever. And, I assume, you learned your talent with a needle then as well?”

  “Costumes,” she said softly.

  “Of course. Go on.”

  “Life was very good for a while. There was always a great deal of work, but that was fine. We started doing whatever menial tasks needed to be done, then I started to perform and William started to write. We went from Boston to New York and down to Richmond, and back up again. Time passed, years passed. William fell in love with one of the actresses, a girl named Marina. Her parents are Boston merchants. They had been ready to disown Marina; they w
ere in despair over her acting. They were delighted with the wedding—Marina was going to quit acting and stay home and William was going to support them both through his work for the newspapers—and through his playwriting.”

  She paused again.

  “That’s when you came back in contact with the Carters?” Jarrett asked coolly.

  Tara nodded. “The troupe was in Boston. William had a wonderful new play. He’d written a part that he was certain I could carry off for him, about a spurned mistress who murders her benefactor … It didn’t seem so ironic at the time, of course. It was a very good play. I went to see Julian because we needed a sponsor for the play, because I knew it was excellent, and I knew, too, that if we first performed it in his drawing room, it would become a huge success. Julian agreed. He was very excited. But when I started to leave, I ran into Clive. And he didn’t seem to believe at first that I was the half-starved waif his father had brought in all those years before. When he did realize the truth of who I was, he began …”

  “Began what?”

  She shrugged uneasily, chills sweeping up and down her spine. “He was always there, of course. And we were staying in his father’s house again. He had a new proposition for me every day. He would make me rich. I could sing anywhere, dance anywhere—I could quit altogether. For days I did my best to ignore him. Then he started telling me that I’d never work again, that I’d starve. Well, I had already all but starved once as it was, in Ireland. So his threats didn’t really frighten me. But then …”

  “But then?”

  She almost jumped. He was standing right behind her. She hadn’t heard him move.

  “Then I interrupted a terrible argument he was having with his father. Julian was furious with him for many things—he squandered money terribly, he drank, he had too many women … anyway, Julian was threatening to disinherit Clive—and leave his fortune to me. Clive, of course, was incensed. Then Julian, perhaps reflecting that Clive was his blood, after all, and young, suggested that Clive should marry me, settle down, and I would mend his wild ways, and in turn, live happily ever after myself in wealth, comfort—and respectability.”