She stomped on Broden’s instep hard with her high heel, and even as he yelped in pain and loosened his hold on her, she hit the heel of her hand against his gun arm, jerking it to the right. The gun discharged, the bullet going wild.
“Get away from him!” Gabe yelled, and she knew he wanted to take a shot.
“No, don’t do it!” she yelled.
Gabe’s footsteps slapped against the roofing as he ran toward them.
She struggled against Broden, who still kept a hold on her. He danced away from her feet, so she couldn’t get a solid kick in. The best she could manage was to keep his gun hand moving. Then, in desperation and with a great gathering of strength, he threw her off him. Even so, she kicked high and made contact with his arm. The gun went flying and though she tried to duck, Broden caught her in the throat with a glancing blow.
Gasping for air, Renata went down to her knees.
“Renata!”
“Gun…” she rasped out.
Broden dived for the gun, but another blast reverberated through the night and the gun jumped in her direction. Gabe’s shot had sent it spinning. Still gasping for air, Renata crawled toward Broden’s gun and snatched it.
Broden cursed and ran.
And Gabe was coming for her.
“Broden!” she croaked out, getting to her feet, waving him off.
Without blinking, Gabe switched directions.
Her throat relaxing from the blow, Renata took a careful breath and turned to see Broden clamber onto the wall. What the hell?
“Broden, don’t do it!” she yelled.
But her plea went unanswered. Broden jumped. Expecting to hear a scream of agony, Renata only heard a hard thump. And then Gabe was scrambling up on the wall.
“Gabe, no!”
But the words were barely out of her mouth before Gabe went flying, leaving Renata terrified as to his fate.
Chapter Sixteen
Unwilling to let his brother’s murderer escape, Gabe had stuck the gun his waistband and had jumped after the bastard. His stomach now did a nosedive as he flew down to the roof of the adjoining building. He landed square on both feet and rolled, then came back up in one fluid motion.
Broden was ready for him with a roundhouse kick. Gabe took a step back and grabbed the other man’s foot, but Broden jumped and plowed his free foot into Gabe’s thigh hard enough to make him let go. Broden went down, but when Gabe came for him, he kicked out with both feet and caught him in the gut.
Gabe flew back and landed hard. The breath whooshed out of him, reminding him of Renata. He chanced a quick glance back and was relieved to see her looking down from the wall of the S.A.F.E. building.
Then Broden came for him, and Gabe rolled to his feet and straightened, only to meet a fist. His head snapped back and blood spurted from his nose.
Broken…and he didn’t feel a thing…must be the adrenaline. Or the training. Before he’d escaped his father’s influence, he’d been taught to take pain. He’d been taught to fight hard and dirty.
He’d been taught to kill…not that he ever had…not yet…
He drove forward, pounded Broden with both fists. The man fought back but Gabe didn’t feel these punches either. He had him…the man who had snuffed out his innocent brother’s life…and he was too focused to know anything but the burning anger that had simmered in him for months. Without even thinking, he popped Broden’s knee as his father had taught him to get the man off balance and turn him just enough to get a blow to his kidney.
“For Danny,” he grunted as the man staggered back and hunched over.
Knowing that he would be groggy and helpless—as helpless as Danny had been to stop that bullet— Gabe drew Renata’s gun from his waistband and aimed it at the murderer’s head. “Danny deserved to live. You don’t!”
“Gabe, no!” he heard Renata plead.
He held steady but didn’t squeeze the trigger. “Look at me, Broden.” He wanted to see the man’s face when Broden saw the bullet coming.
“If you shoot him, then you’ll be like him,” Renata said. “You’ll be like your father, justifying any action to get what you want. But I know you’re not! You’re not like either of them, Gabe! You’re nothing like Joshua Hague. Let the justice system take care of Broden.”
“I don’t believe in the justice system!” he shot back, trying to hang on to enough anger to do what he had to.
“Then believe in me! You told me to believe in myself. I did and we found the killer. Now it’s your turn. Believe in yourself, Gabe, and in me. I’ll make sure Broden pays for everything he did. Just don’t shoot!”
Gabe didn’t know how long he stood there with his finger on the trigger. He hadn’t set out to kill anyone. He’d thought he would help bring down Mulvihill. Nothing had prepared him for facing the man who’d murdered Danny. Nothing had prepared him for this rage.
All his life, the fear that blood would tell had shadowed him. His father had excused the things that he’d done by saying he was protecting them all—his family, the people who followed him, the country, all against the government—when it had simply been an excuse to seize power and put himself above the law.
If he shot Broden—no matter that the man was a criminal of the worse sort—he would be repeating history, the act anathema to the man he had become.
Besides, he did believe in Renata. That woman could do anything she set her mind to.
“Believe in yourself, Gabe!” Renata yelled at him.
Gabe stepped down and felt a horrible dark weight lift from his soul.
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a week can make, Renata thought, as she walked through the S.A.F.E. office to get exuberant greetings from myriad coworkers. She gave them no more than a polite smile—more than they deserved considering how badly they’d treated her pre-Broden. But here it was, barely a week later. Broden was incarcerated, and the media had acclaimed her and Gabe as the new American heroes.
Gabe…the only cloud on her horizon…they still hadn’t settled things between them. They’d been so busy between giving depositions and trying to reassure loved ones that they hadn’t found time for each other.
Yet.
She stopped outside Mulvihill’s door and took a deep breath. He’d already stopped to see her on his way in, while she’d been typing up what she planned to give him now. In a complete turn-around, he’d not only been ingratiating but had said he’d had faith in her all along.
She’d kept her own counsel and had smiled at him, too.
She knocked and without waiting for a response, walked into the director’s office.
“Renata, what can I do for you?”
So it was Renata now rather than Agent Fox.
“It’s what I can do for you, Elliott.”
She’d never called him by his first name before, but he didn’t even blink.
“Sit, make yourself comfortable.”
He’d never asked her to sit before, either.
“This will only take a minute.” She set the folder down on his desk.
“More information about the case?”
“My resignation.”
“I don’t understand.” His expression seemed genuinely confused when he said, “We had some problems, but we’re past all that now.”
“Yes, we are.” She turned to go.
“Wait. Can’t we talk about this?”
Renata paused at the door. “The only talking I care to do will be to the prosecutors and the jurors when I testify against Broden. Otherwise, I’m through here.”
He was speechless when she left.
As was Gabe when she showed up at Club Undercover that night and told him what she’d done.
“Resigned?” he echoed. “Have you lost your mind?”
“No, I think I found it. I learned so much the last week, Gabe. I hate violence. I really hate guns. And I’m not too fond of the people who turned their backs on me when they were supposed to be watching mine. They should have backed me up, not forced me to bring y
ou into this.”
“I see.”
They were sitting at the bar. Blade set down a glass of red wine in front of her and winked, then went back to work.
Renata covered Gabe’s hand with hers. “No, I don’t think you do see,” she told him, her nerves tingling at the touch. “It wasn’t right involving you, no matter what your background or your reasons. But I don’t regret one minute I spent with you.” Now her mouth went dry when she said, “As a matter of fact, I would like to spend a lot more time together.”
“You would.”
She nodded. “Close together.”
“That can be arranged. How about now?”
Gabe slid off his stool and held out his hand. When Renata gave him hers and stood, he led her to the dance floor and took her in his arms. The deejay was playing a love song. How appropriate. She closed her eyes and thought how good it felt to have those arms around her, how she never wanted Gabe to let go of her.
“Are you sure about leaving S.A.F.E.?” he asked, his mouth close to her ear, his warm breath sending a delicious shiver down her spine.
“Positive. I talked myself into the job because of my dad.”
“To follow in his footsteps.”
“I thought so at the time. But now I know I had to banish the cloud hanging over our family since Dad died without clearing his name. I wanted Mom and Lucille to be able to make peace with all that.”
“You wanted to make peace with it.”
“And I finally have. We were in similar situations, Dad and me—disbelieved by our peers, the focus of the media. The responsibility I felt was tremendous, Gabe. I couldn’t put a name to it then. I just knew I couldn’t fail.”
“You didn’t.”
“Because of you. But now I don’t have anything left to prove. I’m free of my ghosts.” She looked up into his eyes and felt her knees go weak at what she saw there. “I want to thank you. You made me believe in myself.”
“And you returned the favor.”
He kissed her softly; her heart swelled and she thought she would be happy doing anything at all as long as it would keep her close to Gabe.
He brushed the hair from her cheek, saying, “And if it wasn’t for you, I would have killed Broden. I didn’t start out wanting to kill anyone. I only wanted some kind of justice for Danny. I strongly believed Mulvihill needed to be accountable.”
“I don’t like Mulvihill much and maybe he does need to be accountable for many things,” Renata said, “but no one could have second-guessed a Paul Broden, not even him.”
“I certainly didn’t expect to come face-to-face with the man who killed my brother. I lost it. Danny was eight when we ran, just learning to fight, to use a gun. But he forgot all that. Over the years, he forgot lots of things. The anti-government sentiment and the feeling of separatism we lived with every day. He even forgot how our father used to beat our mother. Not knowing his father ate at Danny, no matter what I told him. He wanted to judge the man for himself. That’s why he went to Embry Lake. I couldn’t stop him. And I realized that he had to decide for himself what kind of man Joshua Hague was. I didn’t think it would get him killed.”
“You couldn’t have prevented his death.”
But Renata knew Gabe felt he should have. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him, telling him with a brush of lips across lips how much she felt for him.
“So what now?” Gabe asked, sounding a little breathless.
“I don’t know. Maybe I could work at the club and become a member of the team.”
“I meant about us.”
“So did I.”
The brilliance of Gabe’s smile was reflected in his eyes. “I love you, Renata Fox, and want you to be part of my life.”
“Wherever that takes us, I’m ready.”
Epilogue
At the bar, Gideon watched Gabe and Renata on the dance floor, while Blade poured glasses of champagne all around—a toast to another job well done.
“Every time we get on one of these cases, someone falls in love,” Cass said.
But it sounded more like a complaint than an observation, Gideon thought. “You never know. Next time it might be you.”
She answered with a noncommittal “Hmph.”
Love, Gideon thought. A fleeting emotion. He’d only loved one woman in his life and didn’t expect he would be so foolish again.
The music ended and Gabe swept Renata off the dance floor. Gideon picked up two filled flutes to hand to them, but they kept going, not seeming to see him or Cass or Blade at the bar. They had eyes only for each other as they left the club.
“Well, more for us,” Gideon said, handing one of the glasses to Cass and glancing over at Blade. “To another successful case.”
Gideon glanced at the exit, but Gabe and Renata had already disappeared, no doubt to spend the night in each other’s arms. He and Gabe came from different lives and yet had so much in common that it gave him hope.
If Gabe could find love and happiness in this lifetime, then anything was possible, maybe even for him.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-3234-1
ON THE LIST
Copyright © 2004 by Patricia Pinianski
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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* The McKenna Legacy
† Sons of Silver Springs
** Club Undercover
Table of Contents
Letter to Reader
About the Author
Books by Patricia Rosemoor
Cast of Characters
Acknowledgments
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Copyright
On the List Page 18
