A Bride For Saint Nick

by Carole Buck

  If she did, he knew a way to give it to her. And even if she didn’t…

  “Can you reach the marshal who’s in charge of your case?” he asked abruptly, coming to a decision.

  Leigh blinked, clearly taken aback. “I…have a number for him.”

  “Call it. Have him contact Drake Nordling and tell him to phone you here.”

  “Why?”

  “Tell him to tell the deputy director you’ve got some questions about John Gulliver.”

  Nordling’s call came through roughly thirty minutes after Leigh spoke with her relocation inspector. In the interim, she retreated upstairs to get dressed. She returned to the first floor carrying John’s shoes, socks and wallet. He accepted the items with a quiet word of thanks.

  They were sitting in the kitchen sipping Armagnac-laced tea and carrying on a very cautious conversation when the phone on the wall next to the refrigerator began to shrill. John waited to be certain that it was Nordling on the other end, then left the room.

  How long Leigh talked with his former boss, he never knew. There were some situations in which the traditional methods of measuring time—seconds, minutes, hours—had no application. This was one of them.

  His memory of what he did while he waited for the conversation to come to an end was equally uncertain. When awareness kicked back in, he found himself standing next to one of the living-room windows, staring out at Leigh’s snow-covered front lawn. The amount of condensation on the inside of the glass indicated that he’d been keeping watch for quite a while.

  Instinct told him to turn, and he did. Leigh was standing a few feet away. Whether-she’d spoken to him to alert him to her presence, he couldn’t say. But he’d definitely felt her approach.

  He scoured her fine-boned features with his gaze. Her face was pale and her eyes were puffy from the weeping she’d done, but she seemed fully in control of herself. He marveled again at the strength she’d acquired during the past five and a half years. He also reaffirmed his belief that Andy McKay had been blessed with a remarkable mother.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Leigh answered steadily, closing most of the distance between them. Then, to his utter astonishment, she lifted her right hand and caressed the scarring on his temple and neck. Although her touch was more soothing than sensual, it made his head start to spin.

  “Leigh—”

  Her fingers stoppered his lips. “Deputy Director Nordling’s still on the line,” she told him. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “I didn’t know she was pregnant,” Nordling said, the moment John picked up. “Not that day in the hospital.”

  John grimaced. There was no guilt in the other man’s tone. He simply wanted to set the record straight. “So Leigh told me.”

  “You believe her?”

  “Yes. Lucky for you.”

  “Is that a threat, Gulliver?”

  “An observation.”“

  There was a pause.

  “She says you traced her through a photograph,” Nordling eventually prompted.

  “That’s right.”

  “A snapshot some client of this travel agency of yours happened to take.”

  “Right again.”

  “So your finding her was purely a matter of chance.”

  “More like a miracle, Nordling, but I don’t expect you to understand that.”

  Another pause.

  “I warned her this was ill-advised.”

  “You mean you pushed for another relocation,” John translated, his fingers tightening on the receiver. He shifted his position without really thinking about what he was doing, balancing his weight, instinctively readying himself to absorb a blow. “Another identity.”

  “I recommended it, yes.”

  “And?

  Nothing.

  “And?”

  “And she said no. She said…she trusted you.”

  John’s knees nearly gave way. He sagged heavily against the side of the refrigerator. She trusted him! She’d told the son of a bitch she trusted him!

  There was a third pause. It was longer than the previous two. Nordling finally ended it with an announcement that there was something he needed to know.

  “Ask,” John responded, bracing himself again. A change in the other man’s voice had warned him that whatever was coming was the real reason he’d been summoned to the phone.

  “Did you ever make a run at any of the department’s data banks?”

  “What?”

  “I know you turned yourself into some kind of computer whiz while you were in the hospital. I also know you poked your nose into a lot of places it wasn’t supposed to be while you were doing it.”

  John stayed silent. Cyberspace had become a refuge for him during his long and arduous recovery. A keyboard didn’t care whether the hands that operated it were whole or maimed. A monitor didn’t give a damn that the face reflected in it was badly scarred.

  “I don’t care about that,” Nordling continued. “All I want to know is whether you’ve tried to hack into the system looking for information on Suzanne Whitney or any other individual in the Witness Security Program.”

  “No.”

  “Not once?”

  “I’ve done some digging recently you could prosecute me for, but I’ve never gone near anything -having to do with the witness program.”

  Nordling muttered something unintelligible.

  “Has somebody gotten into the files?” John questioned.

  “We…don’t know.”

  “Don’t know or won’t tell a civilian?”

  “There were indications of an unauthorized entrance on an old password about three years ago.”

  John clenched and unclenched his free hand, thinking about Dee Bleeker and Wesley Warren. Their lives had first intersected with Leigh’s within the time frame Nordling had just mentioned. Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

  After a few seconds he asked, “Did there seem to be a specific target?”

  “No. We’re not even certain anybody did anything wrong. It could have been a systemic glitch. God knows, we’ve had enough of them.”

  “Any repercussions?”

  “There was an incident with one protected witness, but he’d violated security guidelines so frequently he was basically walking around with a bull’s-eye on his back.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Cleaned up the mess.”

  John grimaced with distaste. “About the computer situation.”

  “Oh. That.” The other man cleared his throat. “We brought in a specialist. He said the system was secure.”

  “Any problems since?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing nothing or the kind of ‘nothing’ you try to feed to Congress when you trot up to the Hill to testify?”

  “Nothing, none of your business. You resigned, remember?” It was a retreat to the official line, a signal that Drake Nordling had gone as far as he was going to go. If truth be told, he’d gone a hell of a lot further than John would have predicted. Maybe he felt a little bit guilty, after all. “Leigh McKay and her son remain under the protection of the U.S. government. We don’t intend to allow anything to happen to either one of them.”

  “Glad to hear it,” John riposted in the same razor-rasp tone he’d used on Wes Warren during their encounter outside Leigh’s home less than one week ago. “Because neither do I.” Then he broke the connection.

  He returned to the living room a minute or so later. Leigh had taken up his post by the window. She turned when he entered, her expression uncertain.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be asked to go back on the Justice Department’s payroll anytime soon,” he commented softly.

  She gave him a crooked smile. “Were you hoping to be?”

  “No.” He crossed to her. They stood for several wordless seconds, staring deeply into each other’s eyes. It seemed to him that the air began to vibrate.

  Gently, he slid his arms arou
nd Leigh’s slender waist. She stiffened slightly but didn’t pull back. More gently still, he drew her to him. After giving her every chance to rebuff him, he dipped his head and brushed her lips with his own. She opened to him on a shaky sigh, her breath blending with his. The taste of peppermint teased his tongue.

  “John…” she murmured.

  The kiss deepened by mutual accord, building in intensity by honeyed, heated increments. They were both trembling when it finally came to an end.

  “I want a chance with you and Andy, sweetheart,” John confessed huskily as he lifted his mouth from hers. His body was throbbing with arousal but he warned himself against pressing for assuagement. “To make a family. A future. You know that, don’t you?”

  Leigh gazed up at him, her face soft with emotion, yet strangely shuttered. “Yes,” she acknowledged after a moment or two.

  “What do you want?”

  Something flickered in the depths of her sapphire eyes. The muscles of John’s belly clenched in a sudden pang of fear. What if what she wanted was for him to go?

  Then he would, he told himself. Last time, he’d decided what was “best” for the woman he loved. This time, the choice had to be hers.

  “Leigh?” he asked, willing his voice to remain steady. It was strange, he reflected fleetingly, how the name “Suzanne” no longer rose to his tongue.

  “I want some time, John,” came the quiet response. “The last five and a half years of my life have been predicated on lies. Lies about me. Lies about you. Lies about what we had together. I need time to face up to that. I need time to come to terms with the truth about the past. Our past. Or maybe I should say, Suzanne and Saint Nick’s past. I don’t know. That’s part of what I have to get straight in my head. Because until I do that, I can’t think about the future.”

  “Our…future?”

  “Any future.”

  He inclined his head. “What can I do?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  It hurt like hell, but he did.

  “I didn’t know you were going to kill them!”

  Anthony Stone looked from the corpses of two U.S. marshals to the panicked face of the Justice Department computer expert who’d finessed his release from captivity. The same computer expert who’d hacked into government files to locate Suzanne Whitney for him and discovered she’d borne a son. His son.

  “Of course, you did,” he responded, showing his teeth. “You just didn’t want to admit it to yourself.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.” Anthony Stone snagged the man’s tie and yanked him off-balance. The synthetic feel of the tie’s fabric offended his fingers. It should have been silk, he thought with contempt, given the amount of money he’d paid out.

  “Please—”

  “You probably don’t want to admit you know I’m going to kill you, either.” A second yank of the cheap tie. The man started to choke. And struggle. “Do you?”

  Of course, he didn’t.

  But he died anyway.

  Suzanne Whitney was going to die, too, former Federal Prisoner No. 00394756 told himself, staightening his cuffs and smoothing his hair. But before she did, she would admit to knowing what was about to happen to her…and why.

  Chapter 12

  Leigh brought her station wagon to a halt in front of Andy’s preschool. Two weeks, she thought. It had been just two weeks since John Gulliver had entered—reentered, to be more accurate—her life.

  It seemed longer. Much, much longer.

  It seemed much longer than forty-eight hours since she’d asked John Gulliver to leave her alone, too. More like forty-eight years. Unfortunately, she was still struggling with the questions that had compelled her to make her heartfelt plea for solitude.

  Leigh gripped the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  To tell or not to tell. That was the first question.

  The second question revolved around how to deal with the consequences of her answer to the first. Because there would be consequences, whichever option she chose.

  Consequences for the woman who’d been born Suzanne Whitney.

  Consequences for the man who’d once claimed to be Saint Nick Marchand.

  And consequences for Andy, who might or might not be—

  “Mommy?”

  Leigh opened her eyes with a start. Disciplining her expression, she turned toward her son. “What is it, sweetie?”

  “Are you not feelin’ good?”

  “Not feeling—?” she echoed blankly, then shook her head. A moment later she wondered whether she’d fallen prey to the vagaries of preschool syntax and inadvertently confirmed her little boy’s obvious concern. Summoning up a smile she said, “I’m just fine.”

  “Really?”

  Her memory flashed back to the core of the conversation that had been resonating within her for nine days.

  You telled me to always tell the truth, her son had reminded her.

  And you always should, Andy, the man who believed himself to be her son’s father had concurred. But you have to be careful how you tell it…and to whom.

  “Yes, really,” she replied.

  Andy studied her for another few seconds, his lower lip jutting ominously. Then he dropped his gaze and began yanking at the buckle of his seat belt as though he couldn’t wait to get away from her. Leigh felt a scalding surge of remorse, knowing she’d just been branded a liar.

  “Andy—” she began unhappily, placing her hand on her little boy’s snow-jacketed left shoulder.

  He shrugged off her touch with an angry grunt, then raised his expressive eyes to meet hers once again. As he did, she caught a glimpse of the man he would one day become lurking beneath the soft contours of his unfledged features. If there was a clue to his paternity in what she saw, she couldn’t decipher it. For good or ill, Andy remained uniquely himself.

  “If you’re fine, how come you cried last night?” he demanded, his treble voice vacillating between injury and accusation as the momentary illusion of maturity faded. “And don’t pretend like you didn’t, cuz you did. I heard you, Mommy. I got up cuz I didn’t want to wet my bed again and I heard you. I was gonna come in and ask you what was the matter, only I got a-scared so I goed back to my room and put my fingers in my ears.”

  Oh, dear God, Leigh thought, appalled. She’d spent most of the weekend trying to recover from the tumult triggered within her by John Gulliver’s revelations about their shared past. Stressed to the snapping point by the effort required to disguise her feelings in front of her son, she’d finally broken down late Sunday night in what she’d thought was the privacy of her bedroom. She’d never dreamed that Andy would be up and about…and listening at the door.

  “Did I do somethin’ bad that maked you cry?”

  “Oh, h-honey,” she responded shakily. “Oh, Andy. No. No. You didn’t do anything bad.”

  But she had. Or so she’d believed in the darkest corner of her soul for the past five and a half years. And the thought of confessing her shame terrified her.

  I love you, John had said to her over and over again Saturday morning. I love you so much.

  And she loved him in return, although the burden of her guilty secret had kept her from saying so. But how much would her love count for if she admitted the truth about what had happened the night Nicholas Marchand supposedly had been killed? Would John still want that “chance” of which he’d spoken so feelingly Saturday morning if he learned that the child she’d borne might not be his?

  “Did John do something bad?” Andy pursued with devastating single-mindedness.

  Leigh bit her lip as her pulse performed an erratic hop-skipjump in reaction to this forthright inquiry.

  Andy was aware that John had come to their home for dinner Friday night. The discovery had upset him at first, sparking a lot of indignant questions about why he’d been excluded from the fun. He’d calmed down once she’d pointed out to him that he’d had a previous engagement—specifically, attending his first-ever sleepover birthday
party.

  Unfortunately, the restoration of tranquillity had been shortlived. Andy had soon begun pestering her to let him phone his grown-up buddy so he could tell him all about his exciting overnight adventures. She’d fobbed him off as best she could, hoping that he would lose interest in the idea. He hadn’t. He’d even repeated his request as he’d been getting ready for school this morning.

  “Did he, Mommy?” Andy pressed, clearly upset by the possibility. “Is that how come you telled me I couldn’t call him up?”

  Leigh drew a slow, steadying breath and met her son’s distressed gaze. “No, honey,” she answered. “John didn’t do anying bad. The reason I said we had to wait to call him was that he told me Friday night he was going to be very, very busy with his work all weekend.”

  “Then why did you cry?”

  They were back to square one.

  “Sometimes mommies get sad, Andy,” she hedged after a few moments, selecting her words with care. For once in her life, she regretted her son’s perceptiveness. “It’s not because anybody’s done anything bad to them or because they’re feeling sick. They just get in a blue mood and they cry. That’s what happened to me last night. I’m sorry you heard. I’m sorry it scared you. And I’m especially sorry you went back to bed and put your fingers in your ears instead of coming in and talking to me.”

  Andy gnawed on his lower lip for several seconds, then asked very tentatively, “It would have been okay? My comin’ in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? Truly?”

  “Really, truly.”

  There was more lower-lip chewing. Then finally, very quietly, he said, “I didn’t want you to cry.”

  “I know that, sweetie,” she responded, deeply touched by his compassion. “I didn’t want to cry, either. But like I said—”

  “Mommies get in blue moods.”

  “Exactly.”

  There was a long silence. The atmosphere in the car eased, at least on Andy’s side. Finally he inquired, “Do mommies get in moods cuz they’re…girls?”