The screech of pain echoed throughout the countryside. “This is your last chance, Baron. My patience has run out.” He flipped the knife from one hand to the other. “Was Jessica crazy?”
“Christina,” the Baron shouted. “How can you let him terrorize me this way? I’m your father, for God’s sake. Have you no mercy? Do you really want him to slit my throat?”
“No, Father,” Christina denied. “I don’t want him to slit your throat. I’d rather he cut your heart out, but Lyon does have his preferences, and I must let him have his way.”
The Baron glared at his daughter. He stood up. A gleam appeared in his eyes, and he actually started to laugh. “No, Jessica wasn’t crazy.” He laughed again, a grating sound that chilled Christina. “But it’s too late to do anything now, Lyon.”
“Terrance MacFinley would have recognized that it was you sneaking around the wagon train. Isn’t that right?” Lyon challenged.
“Your deductions are most amazing,” the Baron said with a chuckle. “Yes, Terrance would have noticed me.”
Lyon pushed the box towards Stalinsky with the tip of his boot. “One last question and then you may leave. Were you behind the Brisbane murders?”
The Baron’s eyes widened. “How did you—”
“You outsmarted our War Department, didn’t you?” Lyon asked, trying to sound impressed and not sickened. He was deliberately playing upon the Baron’s vanity, hoping the bastard would feel safe enough to admit the truth.
“I did outsmart them, didn’t I? I lived off the money Brisbane had received for the secrets he’d sold, too. Oh, yes, Lyon, I was smarter than all of them.”
“Was Porter involved in your scheme, or did you act alone?” Lyon asked.
“Porter? He was as stupid as the rest of them. I always acted alone, Lyon. It’s the reason I’ve survived these many years, the reason I’ve been such a wealthy man.”
Lyon didn’t think he could stand to look at the man much longer. He motioned to the box, the backed up several paces. “Pick it up and get out of here. If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”
The baron scurried over to the box. He flipped it open, barely glanced at the contents, then slammed it shut with a snort of pleasure.
“Are you finished, Lyon?”
Richards, surrounded by his men, strolled out from their hiding places.
“Did you hear?”
“All of it,” Richards announced. He touched Lyon’s shoulder before walking over to the Baron.
“Damn your …” the Baron shouted. He stopped himself, then glared at Lyon. “I’ll make certain your wife’s humiliation is complete. I promise I’ll say things in court about her mother that will—”
“Close your mouth,” Richards bellowed. “We’re taking you to the harbor, Baron. In fact, Benson and I shall be your travel companions on your trip back to your homeland. I believe you’ll get a nice reception. The new government will undoubtedly be happy to let you stand trial.”
Lyon didn’t stay to listen to the Baron’s demands to be given a trial in England. He took hold of Christina’s hand without saying a word and started walking toward their mounts.
Richards was right. They were using the back door to gain justice. Baron Stalinsky would be returned to his homeland, where he would be judged by his former subjects. It would mean a death sentence. And if, by some chance, the new government proved to be just as corrupt, then Richards and Benson were prepared to take care of the Baron.
By the time he and Christina returned to their London townhouse, she was looking terribly pale.
He ignored her protests and carried her up to their bedroom. “You’re going back to bed now,” he told her as he helped her get out of her clothes.
“I will be better now,” Christina told him. “It is finished.”
“Yes, love. It is finished.”
“I never believed Jessica was crazy,” Christina told Lyon. She put on her silk robe, then wrapped her arms around her husband’s waist. “I never believed that.”
The sadness in her voice pulled at his heart. “I know you didn’t,” Lyon soothed. “Jessica can rest in peace now.”
“Yes. In peace. I like to believe that her soul lingers with the Dakotas now. Maybe she waits for Merry to come and join her.”
“I don’t think Black Wolf would care for that hope of yours,” Lyon said.
“Oh, he would join them, too, of course,” Christina replied.
She sighed into his jacket, then kissed him on the base of his throat. “It’s his destiny to meet Jessica in the Afterlife,” she announced.
“Yes, destiny,” Lyon said. “Now it’s your destiny to quit being sick every morning and night, my love. You’ve kept your promise to your mother. The treasure is being returned to the rightful owners. Richards is going to see to the sale of the gems and the distribution of the money. We’re going home to Lyonwood, and you’ll get fat and sassy. I command it.”
Christina really did try to comply with her husband’s commands. The sickness eventually left her. She gained weight, too—so much, in fact, that she thought she waddled like a duck. She wasn’t very sassy, however, for she spent most of her confinement trying to soothe her husband’s worries.
She denied being with child until it became ludicrous. Poor Lyon was terrified of the birthing. Christina understood his fear. He’d watched Lettie go through terrible pain. She’d died a horrible death, with the babe trapped inside her.
Christina used denial and then reason. She told Lyon she was strong, that it was a very natural condition for a woman to be in, and that she was Dakota in her heart and knew exactly what to do to make the birthing easier. Dakota women rarely died in childbirth.
Lyon had a rebuttal for each of her arguments. He told her she was too small for such a mighty task, that it wasn’t at all natural for such a gentle woman to have to go through such terrible agony, and that she was English, not Dakota, where it most counted—in her womb, for God’s sake, not her heart.
Ironically, it was Lyon’s mother who softened Lyon’s fears somewhat. The elderly woman was slowly returning to her family. She reminded her son that she was just as small in stature as Christina was, and that she had given her husband three fine babies without making a single whimper.
Christina was thankful for her mother-in-law’s help. She didn’t have to threaten to drag her new confidante outside into the forest to choose a burial site any longer. Lyon’s mother finally admitted she wasn’t quite ready to die yet. The woman still liked to talk about James, but she interlaced her remarks with stories about Lyon and Diana, too.
Deavenrue came to visit Christina. He stayed a month’s time, then left with six fine horses Lyon had chosen as gifts for the Dakotas. Three men eager for the adventure went along to help Deavenrue.
The missionary helped to ease Lyon’s mind about Christina, but once he’d left, Lyon was back to scowling and snapping at everyone.
Baron Winters, the family’s physician, moved into their house two weeks before Christina went into labor. She had no intention of letting the physician help her, of course, yet she had the good sense to keep that determination to herself. His presence calmed Lyon, and Christina was thankful for that.
The pains began after dinner, then continued into the night. Christina didn’t wake her husband until the last possible minute. Lyon had time only to wake up and do as Christina instructed. He was holding his infant son in his arms minutes later.
Christina was too exhausted to weep, so Lyon wept for both of them while their magnificent little warrior bellowed his indignation.
He wanted to name his son Alexander Daniel.
She was having none of that. She wanted to name him Screaming Black Eagle.
Lyon was having none of that.
In the end, they compromised. The future Marquess of Lyonwood was christened Dakota Alexander.
Pockets Books
proudly presents
HEARTBREAKER
Julie Garwood
from Pockets Books
The following is a preview of Heartbreaker…
It was hotter than hell inside the confessional. A thick black curtain, dusty with age and neglect, covered the narrow opening from the ceiling of the box to the scarred hardwood floor, blocking out both the daylight and the air.
It was like being inside a coffin someone had absent-mindedly left propped up against the wall, and Father Thomas Madden thanked God he wasn’t claustrophobic. He was rapidly becoming miserable though. The air was heavy and ripe with mildew, making his breathing as labored as when he was back at Penn State running that last yard to the goalposts with the football tucked neatly in his arm. He hadn’t minded the pain in his lungs then, and he certainly didn’t mind it now. It was all simply part of the job.
The old priests would tell him to offer his discomfort up to God for the poor souls in purgatory. Tom didn’t see any harm in doing that, even though he wondered how his own misery was going to relieve anyone else’s.
He shifted position on the hard oak chair, fidgeting like a choirboy at Sunday practice. He could feel the sweat dripping down the sides of his face and neck into his cassock. The long black robe was soaked through with perspiration, and he sincerely doubted he smelled at all like the hint of Irish Spring soap he’d used in the shower this morning.
The temperature outside hovered between ninety-four and ninety-five in the shade of the rectory porch where the thermostat was nailed to the whitewashed stone wall. The humidity made the heat so oppressive, those unfortunate souls who were forced to leave their air-conditioned homes and venture outside did so with a slow shuffle and a quick temper.
It was a lousy day for the compressor to bite the dust. There were windows in the church, of course, but the ones that could have been opened had been sealed shut long ago in a futile attempt to keep vandals out. The two others were high up in the gold, domed ceiling. They were stained glass depictions of the archangels Gabriel and Michael holding gleaming swords in their fists. Gabriel was looking up toward heaven, a beatified expression on his face, while Michael scowled at the snakes he held pinned down at his bare feet. The colored windows were considered priceless, prayer-inspiring works of art by the congregation, but they were useless in combating the heat. They had been added for decoration, not ventilation.
Tom was a big, strapping man with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch neck left over from his glory days, but he was cursed with baby sensitive skin. The heat was giving him a prickly rash. He hiked the cassock up to his thighs, revealing the yellow and black happy-face boxer shorts his sister, Laurant, had given him, kicked off his paint-splattered Wal-Mart rubber thongs, and popped a piece of Dubble Bubble into his mouth.
An act of kindness had landed him in the sweatbox. While waiting for the test results that would determine if he needed another round of chemotherapy at Kansas University Medical Center, he was a guest of Monsignor McKindry, pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Church. The parish was located in the forgotten sector of Kansas City, several hundred miles south of Holy Oaks, Iowa, where Tom was stationed. The neighborhood had been officially designated by a former mayor’s task force as the gang zone. Monsignor always took Saturday afternoon confession, but because of the blistering heat, his advanced age, the broken air conditioner, and a conflict in his schedule—the pastor was busy preparing for his reunion with two friends from his seminary days at Assumption Abbey—Tom had volunteered for the duty. He had assumed he’d sit face-to-face with his penitent in a room with a couple of windows open for fresh air. McKindry, however, bowed to the preferences of his faithful parishioners, who stubbornly clung to the old-fashioned way of hearing confessions, a fact Tom learned only after he’d offered his services, and Lewis, the parish handyman, had directed him to the oven he would sit in for the next ninety minutes.
In appreciation Monsignor had loaned him a thoroughly inadequate, battery-operated fan that one of his flock had put in the collection basket. The thing was no bigger than the size of a man’s hand. Tom adjusted the angle of the fan so that the air would blow directly on his face, leaned back against the wall, and began to read the Holy Oaks Gazette he’d brought along to Kansas City with him.
He turned to the society page on the back first, because he got such a kick out of it. He glanced over the usual club news and the smattering of announcements—two births, three engagements, and a wedding—and then he found his favorite column, called “About Town.” The headline was always the same: the bingo game. The number of people who attended the community center bingo night was reported along with the names of the winners of the twenty-five-dollar jackpots. Interviews with the lucky recipients followed, telling what each of them planned to do with his or her windfall. And there was always a comment from Rabbi David Spears, who organized the weekly event, about what a good time everyone had. Tom was suspicious that the society editor, Lorna Hamburg, secretly had a crush on Rabbi Dave, a widower, and that was why the bingo game was so prominently featured in the paper. The rabbi said the same thing every week, and Tom invariably ribbed him about that when they played golf together on Wednesday afternoons. Since Dave usually beat the socks off him, he didn’t mind the teasing, but he did accuse Tom of trying to divert attention from his appalling game.
The rest of the column was dedicated to letting everyone in town know who was entertaining company and what they were feeding them. If the news that week was hard to come by, Lorna filled in the space with popular recipes.
There weren’t any secrets in Holy Oaks. The front page was full of news about the proposed town square development and the upcoming one-hundred-year celebration at Assumption Abbey. And there was a nice mention about his sister helping out at the abbey. The reporter called her a tireless and cheerful volunteer and went into some detail describing all the projects she had taken on. Not only was she going to organize all the clutter in the attic for a garage sale, but she was also going to transfer all the information from the old dusty files onto the newly donated computer, and when she had a few minutes to spare, she would be translating the French journals of Father Henri VanKirk, a priest who had died recently. Tom chuckled to himself as he finished reading the glowing testimonial to his sister. Laurant hadn’t actually volunteered for any of the jobs. She just happened to be walking past the abbot at the moment he came up with the ideas, and gracious to a fault, she hadn’t refused.
By the time Tom finished reading the rest of the Gazette, his soaked collar was sticking to his neck. He put the paper on the seat next to him, mopped his brow again, and contemplated closing shop fifteen minutes early.
He gave up the idea almost as soon as it entered his mind. He knew that if he left the confessional early, he’d catch hell from Monsignor, and after the hard day of manual labor he’d put in, he simply wasn’t up to a lecture. On the first Wednesday of every third month—Ash Wednesday he silently called it—Tom moved in with Monsignor McKindry, an old, broken-nosed, crackled-skinned Irishman who never missed an opportunity to get as much physical labor as he could possibly squeeze out of his houseguest in seven days. McKindry was crusty and gruff, but he had a heart of gold and a compassionate nature that wasn’t compromised by sentimentality. He firmly believed that idle hands were the devil’s workshop, especially when the rectory was in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. Hard work, he pontificated, would cure anything, even cancer.
Some days Tom had a hard time remembering why he liked the monsignor so much or felt a kinship with him. Maybe it was because they both had a bit of Irish in them. Or maybe it was because the old man’s philosophy, that only a fool cried over spilled milk, had sustained him through more hardships than Job. Tom’s battle was child’s play compared to McKindry’s life.
He would do whatever he could to help lighten McKindry’s burdens. Monsignor was looking forward to visiting with his old friends again. One of them was Abbot James Rockhill, Tom’s superior at Assumption Abbey, and the other, Vincent Moreno, was a priest
Tom had never met. Neither Rockhill nor Moreno would be staying at Mercy house with McKindry and Tom, for they much preferred the luxuries provided by the staff at Holy Trinity parish, luxuries like hot water that lasted longer than five minutes and central air-conditioning. Trinity was located in the heart of a bedroom community on the other side of the state line separating Missouri from Kansas. McKindry jokingly referred to it as “Our Lady of the Lexus,” and from the number of designer cars parked in the church’s lot on Sunday mornings, the label was right on the mark. Most of the parishioners at Mercy didn’t own cars. They walked to church.
Tom’s stomach began to rumble. He was hot and sticky and thirsty. He needed another shower, and he wanted a cold Bud Light. There hadn’t been a single taker in all the while he’d been sitting there roasting like a turkey. He didn’t think anyone else was even inside the church now, except maybe Lewis, who liked to hide in the cloakroom behind the vestibule and sneak sips of rot whiskey from the bottle in his toolbox. Tom checked his watch, saw he only had a couple of minutes left, and decided he’d had enough. He switched off the light above the confessional and was reaching for the curtain when he heard the swoosh of air the leather kneeler expelled when weight was placed upon it. The sound was followed by a discreet cough from the confessor’s cell next to him.
Tom immediately straightened in his chair, took the gum out of his mouth and put it back in the wrapper, then bowed his head in prayer and slid the wooden panel up.
“In the name of the Father and of the Son …,” he began in a low voice as he made the sign of the cross.
Several seconds passed in silence. The penitent was either gathering his thoughts or his courage before he confessed his transgressions. Tom adjusted the stole around his neck and patiently continued to wait.
Julie Garwood - [3 Book Box Set] Page 108
