Til Death Do Us Part

by Beverly Barton

  “Eventually,” he admitted. “But not yet. Not until I know you aren’t in any danger. I’m going to stay as long as it takes for us to catch both our problem maker and our would-be killer.”

  “I see.” She sighed deeply. “You still think they’re two different people, don’t you? Well, if that’s the case, you might have to hang around longer than you’d intended. You wanted to be gone before my pregnancy became advanced, didn’t you?”

  “You knew from the beginning that this marriage was temporary,” he said. “You hired me for specific reasons, and once I’ve done my job I’ll move on. I have plans for my future that don’t include a wife or a child.”

  Cleo could not control her tears. They gathered heavily in her eyes and spilled over, running down her face in torrents. “I—I don’t mean anything to you, do I? What we’ve…these three weeks together, making love, sharing our days and nights, learning to truly like and trust each other. Has it all been a lie? Was being my passionate lover just a little something extra you threw in for no extra charge? Dammit, Simon, have you been pretending to care about me?”

  Why was she doing this? Why couldn’t she just accept things the way they were? Why did she have to analyze their relationship to death? Because despite her cool, levelheaded, businesswoman demeanor, Cleo was a loving, giving woman. A woman who felt things deeply. A woman who, when she gave herself fully and completely to a man, gave him her heart.

  But he didn’t want her heart. And he had no choice but to give it back to her, broken into pieces.

  “I wasn’t pretending,” he said truthfully. “I do care about you, Cleo, just not the way you want me to care. And not enough to stay with you and be a father to your child.”

  She doubled over with the pain of understanding. She loved Simon Roarke. He did not love her. What could be more simple?

  When he saw her double over, he rushed across the room and reached out for her. She jerked up and spread her hands in front of her, warning him off.

  “Don’t touch me.” She spoke the words in a low, calm, chillingly frosty voice.

  “I want you to understand.” He dropped his outstretched hands to his sides. “I owe you that much.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, except to finish your job.” She turned around and went back into the sitting room.

  Roarke followed her. “Don’t walk away from me, Cleo. Even if you hate me right this minute, give me a chance to explain.”

  She sat down on the love seat and crossed her arms over her chest. “What’s there to explain? I thought that there was something between us, something strong enough to build a real marriage on, but obviously I was mistaken. You want to finish this assignment and then you want out.”

  Roarke entered the sitting room. “Yeah, you’re right. I want out. I don’t want to be married. And I do not want to be a father.”

  “Fine. Good. We understand each other perfectly. Enough said.” Cleo clenched her teeth, trying not to cry. A lump the size of Texas formed in her throat, threatening to cut off her breathing.

  Roarke sat down in the wingback chair across from Cleo. “You know that I was married once, a long time ago.” Why are you doing this? he asked himself. What good will it do to bare your soul to her? It won’t change anything.

  “Married and divorced,” Cleo said. “Yes, I know. That information was in your files.”

  “What the files didn’t tell you is why my marriage ended and why, sixteen years after my divorce, I’m still taking care of my ex-wife.”

  Cleo uncrossed her arms and sat up straight, staring inquisitively at Roarke. “What do you mean you take care of your ex-wife?”

  Leaning forward, he rested his arms on his thighs and dropped his clasped hands between his legs. “My mother died when I was too young to remember her, and my father got killed in a tractor accident when I was nine. He’d been a good guy, treated me okay, but wasn’t much on affection. His sister and her husband raised me. They treated me like a hired hand on their farm. I couldn’t wait to get away, so I joined the army at eighteen and never looked back.”

  “What does your childhood history have to do with your ex-wife?”

  “No one had ever loved me. Really loved me.” He bowed his head, hesitant to make eye contact with Cleo. “I met her when I was on leave, on vacation, in Florida. She was blond and beautiful and she smothered me with love.”

  “Your ex-wife?”

  “Hope. Hope Allister. We had a wild fling. I thought we were both in love. Before my leave ended, we got married. That’s when things changed.”

  Part of Cleo wanted to know more, to know every detail of Simon’s life, then maybe she could make some sense of what was happening to them. Another part of her wanted to tell him to stop talking, that she didn’t want to know any more about Hope, the beautiful woman he’d once loved.

  “How did things change?” Cleo asked.

  “She wanted me to leave the army. She didn’t want me going away on assignments. She didn’t understand that I was doing what I wanted to do. That being in the Special Forces was my life. It’s what I’d trained for, what I’d gone through hell to achieve.”

  “So you got a divorce because she wanted you to leave the army and you wouldn’t,” Cleo said.

  “I wasn’t quite that simple. It might have been if…if Hope hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

  Cleo felt as though someone had hit her square in the stomach and knocked all the breath out of her. “Pregnant?” Suddenly her lungs filled with air. She gasped. “You have a child?”

  Not answering her question, Roarke continued, knowing if he deviated from the linear retelling of his past history, he might not be able to tell her everything. And Cleo had a right to know. Then maybe she’d be able to understand and someday forgive him.

  “Even though the relationship was doomed, I stayed married to Hope until Laurie was nearly two years old. Looking back, I’ve wondered why the hell, if I’d stuck it out that long, I couldn’t have just hung in there a few more years. Long enough to realize what was happening with Hope.” Roarke rubbed the palms of his hands up and down his thighs, then gripped his knees. “I was gone a lot. Off on assignments around the world. I thought our being apart would make things easier for both of us. It did for me, except I missed Laurie. But it didn’t help Hope. As a matter of fact, it made things more difficult for her.”

  “You have a daughter? She must be nearly grown now.” Cleo laid her hand over her tummy, the gesture purely protective maternal instinct. Her child had a half sister, one that she’d never know.

  “Dammit, Cleo, will you stop interrupting!” Roarke shot out of the chair, every muscle in his body tense, his back ramrod straight, his big hands clenched. “If I didn’t think I owed you this much—this truth about myself— I wouldn’t relive the past. I wouldn’t reopen all my old wounds. I wouldn’t do this for any other reason, for any amount of money.”

  Cleo slipped off the love seat and walked over to where Roarke stood gazing sightlessly out the windows, his back to her. She raised her hand, holding it over his back, but didn’t touch him. Knotting her hand into a fist, she lowered it to her side.

  Suddenly she knew, as if the truth had been staring her in the face all along, and someone had just now removed the veil from her eyes. Something terrible had happened to Roarke. Something so unbearable that it had changed his life forever and sealed off his heart, made it impossible for anyone’s love to ever reach him again.

  Something had happened to Laurie. Roarke’s little girl hadn’t grown up. She had died and Roarke had buried all his love along with her.

  “Go on, please,” Cleo said. “I won’t interrupt again.”

  His wide shoulders lifted and fell as he breathed deeply. “I found out later, from a distant cousin, that Hope had suffered from depression for years. Ever since she was around twelve and her father committed suicide. Hope had found his body. Her mother had a nervous breakdown shortly after that and died in a mental hospital.”

&n
bsp; “Oh, how awful.”

  “Anyway, when Laurie was two, Hope and I got a divorce. She even agreed to it. Of course she got custody of Laurie, and I got visitation rights. But I didn’t see much of Laurie that next year. I was away most of the time. My career was very important to me.”

  Cleo longed to put her arms around Roarke and comfort him, but she knew he wouldn’t welcome her embrace. Not right now.

  “Hope started drinking, but I didn’t realize how bad the problem was until it was too late.” Roarke fingered the moiré drapes, then shoved aside the sheers and looked down into the yard. “One evening she got in the car with Laurie. According to the police, Hope was so intoxicated—” Roarke paused. His body jerked several times. “It was a one-car wreck. Laurie was thrown through the windshield. When the ambulance arrived, she was dead. Her neck was broken.”

  Cleo laid her hand on Roarke’s back. He flinched. She eased her hand upward and gripped his shoulder. Sobs lodged in her throat. Dear God, what it must have been like for him to have lost his child. And how tragic that it had all been so senseless. So preventable. If Hope hadn’t been drinking. If. If. If.

  “My drunken, mentally unbalanced ex-wife put my three-year-old baby girl in her car and I didn’t do a thing to stop her. And you know why?” Roarke’s voice rose to a shout. He spun around, knocking Cleo’s hand off his shoulder. He glared at her with dry, pain-filled eyes. “Because I was halfway around the world playing soldier. I was in the middle of a jungle with a Special Forces group doing a dirty little job for Uncle Sam.”

  “Oh, Simon.” Tears distorted her vision so completely that she could barely make out her husband’s face. “You blame yourself. You think Laurie’s death was your fault.”

  “It was my fault.” His tone lowered to a soft, calm lifelessness. “I was more concerned about my military career than I was about my child. I left Laurie alone with a woman who couldn’t even take care of herself, let alone a three-year-old.”

  “You didn’t know. You said you had no idea how much Hope was drinking, and you didn’t realize that mental instability ran in her family.”

  “I didn’t take the time to find out. I had more important things to do. My daughter was not my first priority. She should have been.”

  “How long ago did Laurie die?” Sniffling, Cleo swallowed her tears.

  “Nearly fifteen years ago.”

  “Where is Hope now?” Running her fingertips under her eyes, Cleo wiped away the moisture.

  “She’s in a private sanitarium in Florida. She’s been there over fourteen years, and the doctors say that after all this time, there’s not much chance for a recovery.”

  “And you take care of her,” Cleo said, understanding her husband more completely now than many women understood their husbands after years of marriage. “You pay all her bills, don’t you?”

  “I let Hope down. She needed help back then and I just didn’t see it. Maybe if I had—”

  “Don’t do this to yourself.” With quivering hands, Cleo reached out and cupped Roarke’s face. “You’ve been living with this guilt all these years and it’s nearly destroyed you.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Cleo.” He covered her hands with his, then pulled them away from his face and held them between their bodies. “I should have known I was playing with fire when I agreed to take this job, especially when one of the stipulations of our agreement was that I father your child.”

  “You must have had a very good reason for agreeing.”

  “Yeah, I thought they were good reasons. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Security for Hope?” Cleo asked, certain of his answer.

  “Partly.” He held Cleo’s hands, encompassing them with his. “I’m nearly forty. I want out of the cloak-and-dagger business. I told you that last year I got shot up on an assignment and nearly died. If something happened to me, there would be no one to pay Hope’s expenses.”

  “So you agreed to marry me, be my bodyguard and father my child so you’d have the money to take care of Hope after you retired from the Dundee agency?”

  “I’m going to buy a small farm somewhere.” He released Cleo’s hands. “The rest of the money is going into a perpetual trust for Hope.”

  “Thank you for telling me about Hope and about Laurie. I know it must have been painful for you. I’m sorry.”

  “You had a right to know.”

  “Yes…well…I—I appreciate your…”

  He didn’t touch Cleo. He didn’t trust what he might do if he touched her now. She looked so small standing there, so forlorn and lost. He’d done this to her. He’d taken the light out of her eyes. She had thought something magical was happening between them, and selfishly, he hadn’t been honest with her. He’d let her believe.

  “I won’t leave until you are no longer in danger. I promise you that.” He looked directly into her moss-green eyes and saw the rage inside her. Outwardly she was calm, totally unemotional. Roarke knew she’d already put up a defensive barrier between them. He had hurt her. She wasn’t going to allow him close enough to ever hurt her again.

  “Thank you.” She walked away from him, then paused as she stepped into the bedroom. “I think I’m going to lie down and take a nap. I’m very tired, and I want to make sure I get plenty of rest. I intend to take very good care of my baby.” She emphasized the word my.

  Her sedate composure worried him far more than if she’d thrown a temper tantrum. He wished she’d throw something at him. Beat her fists against his chest. Call him names. But that wasn’t Cleo’s style. She had a temper, but it had a low boiling point and her expression of anger was more subtle than hysterical outbursts.

  He followed her out of the sitting room.

  “Lock the door behind me. I’m going to Kane’s room to discuss a scheme we’ve been working on to capture our problem maker at McNamara Industries.”

  “Fine. Go ahead. You can tell me all about it later.”

  Roarke walked outside. Cleo closed the door and locked it. He leaned back against the door, resting his head for a second. He’d give anything if he could take away Cleo’s pain, the pain he’d caused. But he couldn’t ease her suffering. Hell, he couldn’t even ease his own.

  Suddenly, he felt something moist on his face. He touched his cheek, removed his hand and looked down at his fingers. They were damp. Wet with his tears.

  But that wasn’t possible. He hadn’t cried in fifteen years.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CLEO INSISTED THAT she was well enough to go to work. Nothing Roarke, Beatrice or Pearl said changed her mind. She reminded Roarke that just as he had a job to do, so did she. He thought if he heard her say one more time that people were counting on her, he’d shake her until her teeth rattled.

  They’d slept in the same bed last night. The bed they’d shared since the first night of their marriage. The bed in which they’d made love so many times. But he hadn’t touched her. He knew that if he had, she would have refused him. He’d been right all along about Cleo. She was the kind of woman who’d get sex and love all mixed up.

  “What if your and Kane’s little scheme doesn’t work?” Cleo placed her empty cup down on the tray. “You don’t know for certain that Trey or Hugh is the person we’re after, and even if one of them is, he might not step into your trap.”

  “Ellen Denby has been playing the blond airhead around Trey and Hugh, letting bits of so-called secret information accidentally slip out.” Roarke tossed his napkin down on the tray beside his breakfast plate. “She’s led them to believe that she’s totally incompetent and can be easily manipulated. She’s even hinted that for the right amount of money, she’d be willing to look the other way while someone tampered with the computer again or created another accident.”

  “Do you honestly think Trey or Hugh is gullible enough to believe her?” Cleo asked. “Don’t you think they’re smart enough to figure out that she’s lying? After all, they know Kane is a professional. He’d hardly hire a bimbo to be on his
security force.”

  “You don’t know what a talented actress our Ellen is. She’s pulled the wool over brighter minds than Trey’s or Hugh’s. Believe me, she knows what she’s doing. She’s implied that her intimate relationship with Kane is what got her the job.”

  “Something my cousin and future cousin-in-law are just the types to believe.” Cleo got up and walked into the bedroom. She picked up her black jacket off the bed, put it on and fastened the gold buttons. “If you’re right, then tonight we should know who was behind all our problems at the plant.”

  “Maybe. If we’re lucky,” Roarke said as he followed her into the bedroom. “Ellen’s going to let it slip that she’ll be alone on duty tonight inside the plant and there’ll be no one else around except for the guard at the front gate.” He lifted his holster from the nightstand, removed his Beretta, checked it and replaced it, then strapped on the holster. “We’re giving our saboteur a perfect opportunity to wreak havoc at the plant without getting caught. Or so we hope he thinks.”

  “Hugh and Trey both have security clearance at the back entrance, so they could enter the plant without the guard seeing them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So it’s possible that by morning, all my problems will be over and neither I nor McNamara Industries will be in any more danger.”

  “If we catch our man,” Roarke said. “And if he and the person who’s been trying to kill you are one in the same.” He lifted his jacket off the back of the chair.

  “If he is, then your job will be finished and you can leave. You can get a divorce, collect your payoff and be long gone before I even have a bout of morning sickness.”

  “Yeah. Sure. That’s what we both want, isn’t it?” Roarke put on his jacket, walked across the room and opened the door. “Are you ready to leave for the plant, Boss Lady?”

  THE DAY HAD seemed endless. Cleo discovered that ignoring Simon Roarke was easier said than done. She found it impossible to pretend he wasn’t around when he was at her side constantly. After all, he was her bodyguard. And he could hardly guard her if she was one place and he another.