by Carly Bishop
Sooner or later, Haggerty would know Chris had been acting without any authority at all. When that moment arrived, it would be far better if Haggerty believed that he was doing the right thing himself.
“I don’t know about the pension,” he said. “But no one’s going to argue that we saved this witness’s life.”
The pilot shrugged and nodded, obviously willing to be counted a hero for saving a protected witness from an assassination attempt. “Hadn’t thought of it that way—but I’m going to have to call ahead. Let Tafoya know—”
“Where we’re taking her?” Chris interrupted. He shook his head.
Haggerty’s gaze roamed his control panel. “You think the woman’s in danger even now?”
“More than ever,” Chris said. “The hired gun missed, but the lowlife who wants her dead isn’t going to give up and go away.”
Haggerty’s expression hardened. “Probably add us to his hit list for good measure.” The plane hit an air pocket and the pilot watched his flight indicators for a minute. “Hacks me off,” he said, “firing at this aircraft. Whatever precautions Tafoya took weren’t enough. He damn well better get his act together next time.”
“There can’t be a next tune,” Chris answered grimly. “I don’t think even the director should know where we’ve stashed the witness until they nab the assassin and figure out how he got to her before we could.”
“How do you intend to pull that off?”
Chris thought quickly about what it would take to keep Eden Kelley’s whereabouts hidden not only from Winston Broussard, but all the cops in all the agencies of the United States Department of Justice. He might as well fly to the moon as undertake such a feat, but there were factors operating in his favor.
Right now he needed three things. He had to minimize Haggerty’s involvement and exposure. He needed a place where it would be possible to hide Eden Kelley for a few days, preferably in the northeast, not too far from Boston, or too close. And he needed a landing strip that would accommodate the Learjet—both landing and taking off again—even if that had to be some mostly deserted stretch of highway.
Simple.
It wasn’t, and Chris knew it. What he planned entailed taking on the vast resources of the entire law enforcement community. There had been nothing simple about any of this from the moment he first recognized that he wasn’t going to get to Eden Kelley before the FBI. Broussard’s hired gun only added one more deadly factor.
It was that, more than anything else, that cinched Chris’s resolve in the face of all the daunting complications. Catherine was dead. Ending Broussard’s lousy life wouldn’t change anything that had gone down. Chris knew that. But the attempt on Eden’s life this morning proved beyond any doubt at all that Broussard would not be content until the woman who had betrayed him was dead.
Chris grimaced. Winston Elijah Broussard III should have been content to serve his measly seventeen months and pick up where he’d left off—peddling death and destruction despite whatever unwitting innocents got in his way.
Chris couldn’t ignore it. He couldn’t let it happen anymore, not and live with himself. Broussard’s immortal soul belonged to his Maker but his murdering, miserable hide belonged to Chris.
He thought then about the piece of land sixty miles inland from Cape Cod Bay that Winston Broussard himself had once owned. Chris knew the place. He’d been there. He knew it just as he knew Broussard’s habits, his habitats, his vices—and it all went far beyond knowing Broussard had turned Eden’s best friend into his latest acquisition.
The hangar and sheds at the intersection of highways near Ware, Massachusetts, had been heavily used to warehouse the illegal munitions Broussard dealt in. FBI forensics had found trace evidence of everything from gunpowder to the most exotic plastiques. That evidence had been tossed out of court on a search-and-seizure technicality.
Broussard’s real-estate cronies had sold the property to a foreign cosmetics company as the site of a new production facility, but the investors and developers had been locked in some legal battle against the locals ever since.
The location was isolated and provided a landing strip. There would be no way to stash Eden there. Chris doubted there was even running water, but landing on the site appealed to his sense of dark poetic justice. And in practical terms, it put him close to the one place on the Eastern Seaboard where he knew he could take Eden and not be found.
His sister-in-law, Catherine’s older sister, Margo, lived on an estate a few miles outside of Holyoke.
He’d grown up with Margo. Their friendship had gotten him through more troubled days in his marriage to her younger sister than Chris cared to remember. Her husband was a doctor, and such a cold, aloof, self-centered bastard that he barely knew Chris existed, or that Chris knew more about his wife’s hopes and fears and dreams than he did.
Chris could conceal Eden in the guest house buried deep in the woods at the back of the Bancroft estate for days and the man would never know it. He knew Margo also had access to the closet full of sample prescription drugs Edward Bancroft kept at home for treating the children the minute one of them turned up with a runny nose or scraped knee.
Eden was going to need antibiotics to make sure no infection took hold. But Chris didn’t know yet whether Haggerty would tumble to this strategy or not.
“Are you saying you’re willing to duck Tafoya till I can get the woman stashed?” he asked at last.
“No.” Haggerty shrugged. “But I sure as hell don’t want to run into another ambush and end up like Paglia. I’ve got a wife and three little girls.”
“Yeah.” Chris’s jaw cocked to the side. He knew the feeling. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just wanted the feeling so much that he’d blinded himself. “I had a wife.”
Haggerty lifted a brow. Chris didn’t want to get into it.
He outlined his plan instead. All Haggerty had to do was shut off his encoding transponder, fly below the positive control altitudes, maybe fourteen thousand feet, and follow his original flight plan. There wasn’t much likelihood of drawing any real attention, and if the pilot deviated off course long enough to fly them into the private airstrip, he could continue on and then tell Tafoya he’d dropped them off somewhere in the middle of Kansas, maybe cuss and moan about the transponder failing.
“Is that all?” Haggerty mocked softly. “Tell me this. How can you be sure I won’t rat out on you and tell Tafoya exactly where you are?”
“Because Eden Kelley’s life depends on it.” Chris looked Haggerty straight in the eye. Man to man. “Because you have little girls.”
Haggerty breathed deeply and straightened a bit. Chris could see that his answer had hit Haggerty where he lived.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not saying if you did call ahead to bring Tafoya up to speed that we would run into another assassination attempt. That would be pretty frigging unbelievable.
“I’m not saying Tafoya is a screwup, either. I think he’s genuinely concerned for Eden’s life—but her life won’t be an issue much longer if something we do now somehow sets her up for the kill. Tafoya can raise hell, but in the end, all you’ve done is keep this witness alive.”
Haggerty chewed on the problem for a while, then shrugged. “What the hell. It’s just a pension.”
EDEN SAT ON THE FLOOR of the passenger compartment, her back to the bulkhead, listening to the murdered woman’s husband smooth-talking even the FBI pilot.
Chills racked her body. Her heart pounded and its beat echoed in her ears. Her right arm had gone numb from either the bullet at the top of her shoulder or the weight of her pack still bearing down. Or both.
She scarcely knew which way was up, which down. Christian X. Tierney, United States deputy marshal, a man sworn to uphold the law of the land, had sworn off instead and gone recklessly renegade. And if he’d saved her life, he’d also refused to release her afterward. Now, he’d convinced even this pilot to circumvent David Tafoya, the one man who had earned her trust.
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Tierney needed her.
She needed her freedom. Some way out of this nightmarish experience. A trapdoor. An escape hatch. A stageleft departure and an unforgettable exit line.
It wasn’t Tierney’s fault that her choices had led her to this end, where she was more a prisoner of the system than Winston Broussard would ever be. She would never forget the agony etched in Tierney’s features when he’d held his dead, pregnant wife in his arms a year and a half ago.
Her freedom had nothing to do with “nothing left to lose.” Her life was at stake, vulnerable as the orchid blossom Winston Broussard had so crudely crushed and flicked over his shoulder.
She wasn’t much better off in the hands of Christian Tierney. Though he was a lawman and a supposedly honorable man, he still considered himself above the rules. He hadn’t saved her out of any noble intentions. The only scenario she could envision him needing her was if he somehow used her to find Winston Broussard to exact his own deadly justice.
Tears clogged her throat. She planted a foot and shoved herself to a straighter position against the wall between the cockpit and passenger compartment. She eased the heavy pack from her shoulder and the bag fell with a thud to her side.
Her entire right side prickled viciously as her circulation was restored. The pain in her shoulder splintered back to life. Tierney’s black cashmere scarf slid to the floor caked in her blood.
He wanted Broussard’s blood.
What she most feared was her own willingness to help Tierney exact his lawless revenge. She had no life so long as Winston Broussard lived and breathed and wanted her dead out of his need for revenge. But if her help was what Tierney was after, and she cooperated, she would have sunk as low as Broussard had himself.
She jerked the pack across her lap with her good left arm and shoved aside the covering flap, looking for her small pot of lip balm.
Chris ducked out of the cockpit and found her digging fruitlessly through her stuff. By some trick of light at whatever altitude this was, his shadow fell over her.
Shrugging out of his scarred black leather coat, he sank to his haunches beside her. “Eden, what are you doing here on the floor?”
She tried to ignore his effect on her. Everything about him unnerved her. His gravelly voice, his size, his body heat, the way his heavy, muscled thighs angled about her. He must know she’d been listening. “I want you to get me back to David Tafoya.”
He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen, sweetheart.”
“Well, make it happen!” His mocking familiarity made her stomach clench. “And don’t ever call me that again. Not ever.”
She couldn’t breathe. Damn it, where was the lip balm? It wasn’t as if she had brought so many possessions that it should take even five seconds to find any one of them.
“Let me help you.”
“If you want to help me, get Tafoya on the phone,” she snapped. “Otherwise, I think I’ve made it clear. I don’t want your help.” She still didn’t look up at him.
He exhaled sharply. “Suppose you just admit that you need help whether you want it or not.”
She shook her head and dug deeper. “I don’t need it, either.” Tears blurred her vision, and if the small pot of balm had leaped up at her she wouldn’t have seen it. Her entire right side felt numb, and even her left hand trembled now. She gritted her teeth. Damn it, why was so simple an act beyond her? A tear spilled over her cheek. Losing ground here... She swallowed. “I just–” she cleared her throat “—my lips...”
He took the backpack from her lap. Peering inside, he came up with the miniature jar within a few seconds and opened it for her. “Here.”
Though he held it easily within her reach, her hand trembled violently and she knocked it out of his fingers. He snatched it up off the floor before the small pot could roll away, wondering why he was bothering with the thing. Jabbing his own finger into the balm, he scooped a dollop out of the pot.
Eden’s already shallow breath caught in her throat. He brought his finger to her windburned lips.
She desperately needed the bullet removed from her shoulder. She needed the wound to be cleansed, antiseptics and pressure bandages applied and something to deaden the pain, and it was going to be bell enough to stifle her anger and determination not to submit to any man’s help even for that.
But she needed the soothing balm on her lips like a parched and dying man craves water.
Everything in her cried out against allowing the vengeful widower to soothe her or ease her pain or act toward her with even so small a kindness as this.
Her protests wouldn’t come. Her thinking was out of sync with her actions and she didn’t turn her face away when she had the infinitesimal chance.
He didn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t. He wasn’t the sensitive sort. He wouldn’t ask her permission. He didn’t care whether he had her consent or not.
He just began greasing her lips impatiently, like a man, intent only on slathering on the stuff to be done with it, but suddenly, he slowed. Eden uttered a low, witless sigh. Her eyes were drawn to his weary face, to his eyes. Lids lowered, his eyes followed the course of his fingertip.
He might have been ministering to a whiny child. This was nothing more than lip balm. Nothing half as intimate as he had forced in the small airport terminal. But he was still touching her lips when their eyes met and the kindness became something more, something very nearly dangerous, triggering a bolt of awareness between them.
His breath locked in his throat. Eden pulled back.
He exhaled harshly, stood and scooped her up in his arms as easily as if she had been a small child. “Haggerty says there are first-aid supplies in the head.”
Carrying her, he strode the length of the passenger compartment to a lavatory three times the size of an ordinary aircraft washroom and put her down so that she was sitting on the countertop, nearly at eye-to-eye level with him.
He pulled a paper cup from the dispenser beside the soap, filled it with water and dropped a few ibuprofen tablets from the medicine cabinet into her shaking hand. “Here. Take these.”
She didn’t think he was surly again so much as exhausted. She managed to take a drink without spilling the cup and swallowed the pills by herself while he splashed his face and scrubbed his hands.
He found a first-aid kit. No sterile gloves, but there were a set of tweezers, gauze, peroxide, rubbing alcohol. “Can you get out of the sweatshirt yourself?”
Eden nodded. It was clear to her now that she did need help. That she couldn’t even take care of dry and cracked lips, much less a bullet wound. As soon as she could, she would find a way to escape Christian Tierney, but this was not the time or place—with a bullet lodged in her flesh— for bravado or false modesty.
She held her right arm as still as if it were broken, and reached with her left hand beneath the sweatshirt. Easing the right sleeve past her elbow, down the length of her forearm and off her hand, she lifted the sweatshirt off over her head.
Her pink-ribboned bustier was soaked in her blood from the satin shoulder strap to the soft material covering the upper curve of her right breast.
She turned sharply away, closed her eyes tight and bit her lip but she couldn’t keep from crying out. The pain was daunting, but seeing the damage, seeing her blood-soaked clothing was even worse.
Chris swore. Moving between her legs, he cupped her nape with his hand, drawing her head toward him to steady it against his and close off the sight. He held her, his jaw pressed to her cheek. He had seen far worse, but he also knew what it was to see the reality of one’s own flesh ravaged and bloody.
Hot tears slid down her cheek and off his jaw. “Shh, Eden,” he murmured over and over again, stroking her hair. “Breathe. That’s a girl. You’re all right. It looks worse than it is.”
He felt silent sobs rack her body. He knew how close she was to hysteria, how badly she needed to get all the pent-up rage out of her system. He knew exactly how alone and traumatized, ba
ttered and vulnerable she felt. He suspected her tears had far more to do with being outraged at being unable to control anything happening around her.
The same sort of rage was a part of him, too. Or had been. Only this was Eden Kelley, a woman whose life he’d saved, but whom he didn’t know and had no business holding.
He couldn’t let her go. He held her, absorbing her anguished, silent cries.
“Oh, God, Eden. Don’t cry.” He whispered soft reassurances to her and stroked her back. “You’re all right. You survived the bastard again.” He brought his lips to her cheek and kissed her there—not for any reason but to comfort her, but it didn’t stay that simple.
She turned her face toward his kiss like a flower strains toward the sun, seeking things so basic to survival as warmth and water and air.
He understood. She needed more. Something stronger, deeper, human. Eden needed his kiss as a matter of survival.
He was no less needy.
He kissed her again and again and, closing his eyes, inhaled the scent of her and dragged his lips over the soft, sweet texture of her cheek to her lips.
Eden moaned and clung to the back of his plaid flannel shirt with her left hand and took his kisses like balm to her ragged soul. The fullness of his lips pressed to hers, the warmth, the moisture, the wallop of conflicting emotions—desire and fear and anger and need—took her aback like a sudden squall. Like lightning crackling in the air, making it come alive, making her come alive, making her forget the pain and anxiety.
After a while, her tears stopped and she pulled back. Resting her forehead against his, she felt confused and uncertain. The pain intruded again, and the real world. The dull, constant hum of the aircraft engines. The stale air. Her heartbeat slowed. Her tears dried.
She couldn’t remember a time in all her life when a man had given her a thimble’s worth of comfort. Or when any man had kissed her and eased the soul-deep weariness inside her and then aroused her, too. This man, Catherine Tierney’s widower, this dangerous, reckless, hell-bent, vengeful man had done both.
