The Bride's Protector

by Gayle Wilson

  Hawk had known she was good, had acknowledged it from the first, but still he had gone along for the ride. Not many people through the years had succeeded in taking advantage of him. Not many had had guts enough to try.

  They probably had him on video, he realized. That’s what Cross meant about pictures. The hotel’s security cameras. A grainy black-and-white image of one of the government’s top covert operatives—a highly specialized black ops agent—walking through the lobby of the hotel where this morning’s assassination had been carried out.

  Whoever the hell that woman was, she had gotten him. Despite his initial instinct that she hadn’t been telling the truth. She had set him up, exactly as she’d been sent to do. And because of that aberration in his normally careful behavior, they were going to pin this assassination on him.

  I must be getting old, Hawk thought, shaking his head in disbelief. But despite his participation in his own destruction, he thought somebody owed him an explanation. And he might as well start looking for one from the person who had suckered him in. The woman with the violet eyes.

  TYLER PUT HER PURSE and the battered bag on the bed. The suitcase she’d picked out at the pawnshop where she’d hocked the wedding gown and her engagement ring looked right at home. But the Louis Vuitton purse she’d gone by her apartment to retrieve when she left the hotel looked totally out of place.

  She had taken a dangerous chance, she knew, remembering the pounding at the front door as she’d climbed out the window and hurried, knees shaking, down the fire escape. It had been a long way down, especially carrying the laundry bag and the purse. But she had known she’d need some ID to show the airlines, and the purse also contained her credit cards. She had transferred the essentials to the new purse Amir had bought for the honeymoon. She hadn’t thought she’d need her social security card or her credit cards, so thankfully they were still in this one.

  She pushed her fingers into the mattress of the bed, feeling it sag, hearing the reminiscent, metallic creak of the springs. She had spent the first seventeen years of her life in this room. And not much had changed about it, she thought.

  But change always came slowly to Covington. Despite the proliferation of fast-food places and discount stores, she had had no trouble finding her way from the interstate exit to the front door. The tree-shaded dwellings she passed on the way had seemed exactly the same, except for the colors of their paint or the variety of flowers wilting in their beds.

  Even the thick humidity was exactly as she remembered. Lying in this bed, night after night, trying to sleep despite the heat. The double windows would be open to let in any stirring of the heavy air, and the tree frogs would be almost loud enough to drown out the sound of her parents’ fighting. Almost loud enough.

  She took a breath, pushing those memories away. She interlocked the fingers of her hands at the base of her skull, slipping them under her hair and lifting it off her neck. She could feel the perspiration underneath the heavy mass of curls. She pulled her elbows forward and then pushed them back to stretch out the tiredness that had settled between her shoulders.

  As tired as she was, however, she wondered if she’d be able to sleep in the heat. Despite the money Tyler had sent home through the years, there was still no air-conditioning. Of course, Aunt Martha hadn’t been much inclined to change, either. No more than the rest of Covington.

  When her great-aunt had died in her sleep, at age ninety, Tyler had come home to make arrangements for the funeral. Instead of staying at the house, however, she had checked into one of the motels on the interstate. Before she returned to New York, she’d made arrangements for someone to clean the house, but she still hadn’t gotten around to putting it on the market.

  She didn’t really understand why she hesitated. Leaving this place twenty years ago had been no less an escape than the one she had made from New York this morning. Not just an escape from Aunt Martha and her eternal predictions of hellfire and damnation, but an escape from almost everything that had happened while she lived in this room.

  Her mother and father had married because she was already on the way, and they had both, at one time or another, expressed regret over their union. As a child, she had blamed herself for the unhappiness that permeated the very walls of this house. It had echoed in the darkness as she lay in this bed, night after night, trying to ignore their angry voices. Their endless quarreling.

  Her father had left for good when she was five. The shouting recriminations had disappeared, replaced by a grinding poverty, of body and soul, that her mother had never escaped. That’s when Aunt Martha had come to live with them. To help out, she used to tell people. To take care of the child.

  Tyler took another breath, realizing she had allowed herself to be drawn again into the past. Back to the sermons and restrictions and endless punishments. To the constant reiteration that she was simply a cross her great-aunt had shouldered because it was her Christian duty. Again, it had been made abundantly clear to Tyler that she was an unwanted burden. When her mother died, she had felt she’d lost the only person who had really ever loved her. She had taken what was left in the bank account and run. As fast and as far as she could.

  And yet today, when she had stood at the reservation desk at the airport, trying to think where she could go, where she’d be safe, she’d been drawn back here by the sense of sanctuary this house always seemed to provide.

  When she was a little girl, playing in someone else’s yard, she would often lose track of the time. Then, as shadows lengthened with the quick fall of summer night, she would run across lawns rich with the scent of mown grass, and over the rough warmth of sidewalks. Familiar textures under her bare feet.

  In the distance she would hear her mother calling, and she would fly toward the sound of that beloved voice, ignoring the lights that reached from the open windows of the houses she passed. And as soon as she climbed the steps of the front porch, she would know she was safe. Safe from the shadows. From the imagined terrors of the night. Safe from everything.

  Tyler had felt something of that same relief when she drove the rental car into the yard at twilight and parked it in the graveled driveway, right under the oak tree, which had once held a rope swing. Her swing. Her yard. Her mother’s house.

  She realized that she was still standing beside the narrow bed, and the room was in almost total darkness now. She reached out and clicked on the bedside lamp, welcoming its glow as another escape from shadows, those of memory this time.

  The base of the lamp was in the shape of a ballerina, arms reaching upward toward the bulb and pointed toes arching on the tarnished brass stand. The deep rose of its shade softened the ugliness of the room, just as it always had.

  Tyler ran the tips of her fingers slowly down the porcelain of the dancer’s body. There had never been enough money for lessons, of course, but that hadn’t kept her from dancing. Moving in a awkward parody of ballet around this crowded room. Pretending she was the ballerina on the lamp.

  Despite the poverty of her existence, nothing had ever stopped Tyler from pretending. She had had so many dreams, and most of them had been born in this room. She would lie in this bed, listening to the bitter voices, and gradually block them out with the glittering, impossible visions in her imagination.

  Images of what she would be when she was grown. Of where she would travel. Exotic places, always so far from this town, this house. Images of when she would finally be somebody. Little-girl dreams.

  Which had almost all come true, she thought with a sense of wonder. Perhaps desperation was the mother of ambition. Lives of quiet desperation. She couldn’t remember who had said that, but it fit the ones that had been lived in this house.

  What a useless and maudlin journey into the past, she thought, shaking her head. She walked over to the windows and pushed them open, hoping for a breeze. Instead, the familiar scent of honeysuckle whispered into the stifling room.

  How long had it had been since she had tasted the single drop of sw
eetness at the end of a honeysuckle stamen? That had been another childhood game, one that required no expenditure of her mother’s hard-earned money. Tyler had been good at those. Imagination was free, and hers had been her savior.

  A trill of childish laughter floated in, the distant sound traveling clearly through the soft twilight shadows. This rural Mississippi night didn’t seem any different from those of twenty years ago. The child she had once been had come home. Running from shadows. From the darkness. From her own fears and terrors.

  But this time those were not imagined. She had bought an afternoon paper at the airport, almost furtive about the ordinary purchase when she had seen the headline. The assassination of Sheikh Rashad al-Ahmad had been front page news.

  And only now, locked inside this house, so far from that hotel in New York, was she beginning to feel safe again. She had taken all the precautions she could think of to keep anyone from finding her. She had paid cash for the plane ticket, and it had been issued in her real name. She had used her social security card, which had never been changed, as identification.

  She hadn’t been Tommie Sue Prator in over twenty years, and thankfully none of the silly stones Paul had told made reference to the realities of this life. So she should be safe, she told herself. At least for tonight, and tomorrow she’d be able to think about what she should do.

  She would have to go to the authorities, she had finally realized, as she read the paper on the plane. They were equipped to sort out guilt and innocence. She didn’t have to accuse, but she did have to tell them what she’d seen.

  She was standing in front of the open window, her arms crossed over her breasts, running her palms slowly up and down her upper arms as if she were cold. As if the breath of air that brought the scent of the honeysuckle into the room had been the least bit cooling.

  Until she had returned to this reality, to being Tommie Sue again, she hadn’t realized that the life she had been living was like some fantastic dream. Amir. The limitless wealth. His whirlwind courtship and the hurried arrangements for the wedding. His father’s assassination.

  Those things were from a world so far away it had no relation to the dingy wallpaper and the sagging mattresses of this one. Almost no relation to her. Certainly no relation to who she really was. They seemed literally from another universe. An alternate reality. And that realization was comforting. It added a little to the sense of sanctuary she had found.

  Despite the heat, she shivered, thinking about those men on the terrace. Seeing the rifle swing away from the man who had just been killed and toward her. Determined not to give in to her fears, however, she turned away from the open windows and the outside darkness. As she did, she caught a glimpse of motion in the mirror of her great-grandmother’s dresser, and it stopped her.

  The face that had graced dozens of magazine covers, its paleness highlighted by the shadows behind, stared back at her from the age-clouded glass. The famous violet eyes were wide and dark, of no discernible color in the gloom.

  No reason at all to be afraid here, she assured herself again, fighting another involuntary shiver. No reason at all.

  IT HADN’T TAKEN HAWK LONG to find his mystery woman. He had some advantages, of course. Computers made this kind of search easy and fast. As always, he was surprised at the amount of information available about the lives of ordinary people. And at how simple it was to find it. He had started with the story she had told him about running away from her wedding. He had assumed it was a lie and there would be nothing in it worth pursuing. What he found was something very different.

  There had been a wedding scheduled to take place at the hotel today, and that wedding was the reason Sheikh Rashad al-Ahmad had come to New York. To attend a civil ceremony between his oldest son and heir, Amir, and a woman named Tyler Stewart.

  The slowly materializing images on the screen, appearing in answer to his requests, confirmed that Tyler Stewart was indeed the woman who had entered his hotel room. Some of the pictures were prewedding publicity shots, but most came from the covers of magazines or ad campaigns in which she’d appeared. In those she was tastefully, and yet somehow almost always provocatively posed, showing off the body he’d examined today.

  Her attitude in these pictures was quite a contrast to the modesty she’d displayed when he’d broken down the door. An act? he wondered. If so, she was a damn fine actress. But he had already figured out that much, Hawk acknowledged ruefully.

  As he continued to read, he realized that at least another one of his initial impressions had also been correct. Tyler Stewart was totally outside his previous experiences with women. Successful, with a long international career, she was probably very well off in her own right. Not in comparison to her bridegroom, Hawk thought, but certainly in comparison to him.

  And her wedding had lured al-Ahmad the father out of his desert stronghold and right into the sights of an assassin. His son was already blaming extremists. The sheikh had been the target of coups in the past, including a couple of assassination attempts. If the hastily arranged wedding had been set up simply to provide the opportunity for another...

  Then someone was working in league with the fundamentalists. Nothing Hawk read about playboy Amir al-Ahmad indicated that he was interested in pursuing Sharia, the Moslem equivalent of the straight and narrow. And after all, if a fundamentalist revolution succeeded in his country, as it had in Iran, no one would have more to lose than Amir. Which brought Hawk back to the other party in this wedding. Right back to Tyler Stewart.

  Since no one had yet thought to cancel his clearances, Hawk had access to databases that would have been difficult for the average searcher to utilize, but he still couldn’t find anything to tie Stewart to the extremists. However, information about her background before she began modeling was vague and contradictory. Apparently she had told a variety of stories about her past.

  And according to the papers, no one had seen her since the assassination. The reporters who had broached the subject to Amir al-Ahmad had gotten some story about her being overcome by shock and sorrow. Which might be true.

  But maybe, Hawk thought, she had done just exactly what she’d told him she was going to—get out of the hotel and away. Just exactly what she had conned him into helping her do. At the same time putting him on the hotel security tapes.

  When he checked, however, there was no Tyler Stewart listed as a passenger on any of the flights out of the New York area this afternoon. He did run across a name on one of the lists that triggered a memory. Something he’d seen when he was researching her background. And when Hawk backtracked, he found it. Just what he had been looking for.

  When he left the university computer center, Hawk went straight to the bus station in Alexandria, where he retrieved his emergency kit from the locker he’d rented. The small nylon gym bag contained money and everything else Hawk would need to create a new identity.

  He used part of the cash to purchase a change of clothes and some toiletries, which he stuffed into the bag. And the other thing Hawk bought with the money was a plane ticket to Mississippi. A ticket that would take him to the same city into which a woman named Tommie Sue Prator had flown this afternoon.

  Chapter Five

  When Tyler awoke, coming out of sleep too quickly, she had been dreaming about something she knew she should remember. Something she wanted to remember. She lay for a long time in the darkness, trying to reenter the fabric of her dream, before she finally admitted it was gone. Irreparably destroyed.

  She wondered if that dream could have had anything to do with the man who had kissed her yesterday. She remembered, almost against her will, how his lips had felt. And his tongue, demanding, making slow, heated contact with hers, its movement as controlled and assured as the man himself.

  That same heat flooded her body now, stirred by memory. Tyler stretched languidly, savoring the unaccustomed feeling. Still trying to remember if she had been dreaming about him. It had been pleasant, she knew, so she wondered why she h
ad been drawn away. Usually when she awakened like this, jerked from sleep, it was because of a nightmare, something from which her subconscious needed to escape.

  She glanced at the clock beside the bed. It was a little after four. Not yet dawn, but the lesser darkness that was its herald. She closed her eyes, but they wouldn’t stay closed. The hint of disquietude she had felt on awakening was still here, hiding in the once-familiar shadows of the bedroom.

  She rolled onto her side, pushing the limp feather pillow into a more comfortable position, attempting to find a cool spot on its cotton case against which to rest her cheek. She closed her eyes, thinking how easily she had once been able to block out all the unpleasantness of her life.

  Now that old magic was gone, swallowed up by the darkness. By the events of yesterday. Or by the fact that the dreams she had once had no longer offered any promise for the future. They represented the past, and she had not been able yet to formulate others for the years that lay ahead.

  All she had come up with was her agreement to marry Amir. She was still amazed by the depth of that self-deception. Why had it taken her so long to realize her own motives? And to know how wrong they were? She had been afraid, she admitted. Afraid of whatever came next. Of facing it alone. So she had convinced herself, or let others convince her, that marrying Amir would be smart. Safe. And even moral. Now she knew it would have been none of those things.

  She pushed the sheet off her legs and sat up on the edge of the bed. She put her bare feet on the smoothness of the hardwood floor, the only cool surface in the room. With both hands, she lifted her hair off the back of her neck.

  It was too hot to sleep. Too hot to get comfortable. Maybe that’s why she had awakened. Maybe it was just the heat. Warm milk had been Aunt Martha’s standard cure for insomnia. Although the thought was unappealing in the stifling humidity, Tyler decided it was a better solution than worry.