by Carly Bishop
He wanted to make love to Eden Kelley.
He exhaled. Hadn’t even known he was holding his breath. He rubbed his eyes and clenched his jaw. His body hummed in the wake of the swift, fierce desire.
He shoved in the clutch and backed out of the parking area and picked up Highway 23 heading east. In Otis he stopped again to phone Margo. Parking where he could keep an eye on Eden, he left her in the idling car. His sister-in-law picked up on the first ring.
His shoulders sank in sheer relief. “Can you talk?”
He knew she would recognize his voice. She hesitated less than a second. “Let me get rid of my other call.”
She clicked off. Chris stood there waiting. He watched a state trooper cruise by going in one direction, then a local cop heading the other way. His gut feeling was that they had nothing to do with him, but for the first time in his life, he had something to hide. Cops had a radar for fear like that. He took a deep breath and transformed his body language from the hunted to the hunter.
Margo came back on the line. “Chris? God, it’s good to hear your voice. Where are you?”
He could hear her lighting a cigarette. “Knock off the smokes, Margo. They’ll kill you.”
“No. Ed is going to kill me. He’s on one of his quiet little rampages.”
“Again?” Chris’s hold on the receiver tightened. “Why?”
He heard her dragging on her cigarette. “Over the kids, of course.”
He flicked the receiver to the ends of his fingers, making himself loosen up. He had to get a grip. He couldn’t remember ever being so rattled.
Local cops cruising by had nothing to do with him.
Neither did his sister-in-law’s husband’s tirades.
But Chris was dangerously tired and he had Eden Kelley’s life in his hands and he couldn’t afford mistakes, so every scrap of information entering his head filtered through the possibility of real danger, however remote.
“I need a place to crash, Margo. Somewhere no one knows to look for me.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“There is that,” he said, breathing out.
“Hurt?”
“No—but there’s a woman with me who is. I’m going to need some of Ed’s stash of drugs. Penicillin.”
“My God, Chris! Can you get here? Should I come get you?”
“No.” God bless her, he thought, for not requiring endless explanations. “I can get there. I’m just not sure how to get to the guest house without coming through the front drive.”
She lowered her voice. “Remember the private road— the rear access to our property? It’s ... let me think. Half a mile past the sign that says Holyoke Five Miles if you’re coming north. It’s paved but hard to see. I’ll have to shut off the alarm system zone. How soon will you be here?”
“Inside an hour.” He thought about making sure he didn’t run into Ed or the kids. He was crazy about Tiffer and Jake. He was the one who took them ice-skating for the first time, the one who gave them their first hockey sticks. But the boys were only eleven and five and Chris couldn’t risk their knowing he was there. “Margo, I don’t want you to have to get into it with Ed over this —there’ll be hell to pay if he finds out–”
“There’s always hell to pay with Ed,” she interrupted wearily. “I don’t even care anymore.”
“I know, Margo.” He stared at a beetle plodding along on the sidewalk under the street lamp. Neither one of them had made the most brilliant marriages, but Catherine was dead and Ed was very much alive. Utterly capable of making Margo’s life even more miserable, Ed Bancroft wouldn’t hesitate for one heartbeat to rat on Chris, either. “Still—stay away, okay? If you haven’t seen me, you haven’t seen me, you know?”
“Okay.” She dragged on her cigarette again. “I’ll bring some groceries and pills in the morning. Shall I just leave them on the porch?”
“That’d be great, Margo.”
“Chris, are you okay? You sound terrible.”
He swallowed and asked himself for the first time how likely it was that he’d succeed without getting himself or Eden Kelley killed.
Chapter Nine
“I’ve been better.”
“I hear you.” Margo gave a troubled sigh. “In case I can’t make it down to the guest house, the key is under the mat.”
Chris shivered. His eyes felt gritty. If he had ever been more worn out, he couldn’t remember the time. “Might as well leave the key in the lock, Margo.” He knew she would take the rebuke for teasing, which might reassure her that he really was all right.
He would be, once he got there. The periphery of the estate was wired into a high-tech alarm system. And for a while, he would be able to keep Eden Kelley alive.
He hung up and got back into the Mustang. Eden was sleeping. He followed secondary roads for another twenty-five miles and found the back entrance to the Bancroft estate, though the wild foliage nearly concealed the turnoff. He doused the headlights and drove by the light of the moon. He parked the Mustang at the rear of the small brick guest house beneath a canopy of oak and ash trees and satisfied himself that the car could not be seen from the main house.
The cottage was dark, and as Margo had promised, he found the key beneath a welcome mat with a goose on it. He vetted the place in under two minutes without turning on any lights, then returned to the car and lifted Eden out.
She snuggled close, curling into him. He shoved the car door shut with his foot and told himself that it was the fever. That she didn’t know what she was doing. A part of him wished she did.
“Where are we?” she murmured.
He could feel her warm breath on his neck. “Somewhere safe, Eden.” Carrying her, he strode into the house, over the hardwood floor to the bedroom, and put her down, praying she’d fall asleep again. She got up to use the bathroom, washed her face and came out wearing only her panties and camisole.
Chris managed to get her tucked in beneath the covers, then went off to take a cold shower. He shaved for the first time in several days, then fell onto the bed beside her and finally—finally—slept.
Eden floated in and out of consciousness for almost forty-eight hours. Margo brought him a plastic bag of penicillin tablets and a sack full of groceries the first morning, after Ed had gone off to the hospital and before the kids were awake.
Eden had small chunks of time when she was lucid, when she remembered vague images of what had gone on after they went over the wall. The wail of the ambulance. The antiseptic smell of the emergency room. The pricking sensations. The smell of the leather seats in the doctor’s maroon Mustang. If she remembered telling the doctor Chris had saved her life, she didn’t speak of it.
The first time she woke for more than a few minutes, Chris had been sleeping on the bed next to her for several hours. He came instantly alert, helped her to the bathroom again and got her to swallow a couple of the penicillin tablets.
She lay back down in bed, watching him for a moment as he sat sprawled in an overstuffed chair, then put her hands together like a pillow beneath her cheek.
“What does the X stand for?”
He’d answered the question countless times so he knew she was asking about his name. “Xavier.”
Her eyes were still too bright. She smiled and murmured something that sounded more like “savior” than Xavier, then “fitting.” He felt sucker-punched.
She drifted off and slept another five hours. Chris paced. He knew how to sit still for hours on end. How to keep a vigil without going nuts. How to put a thing, even a woman, out of his mind, how to keep his nerve intact, his attention pitched and his goal in mind.
Watching over Eden Kelley shredded all that. He couldn’t sit still for more than an hour at a time. He’d forgotten how not to go nuts. He didn’t remember how to put everything nonessential to the moment from his mind.
Or maybe he did remember, and it was that Eden Kelley wasn’t nonessential.
The notion scared the hell out of him. He couldn
’t get centered in the way he’d come to expect of himself. Couldn’t help returning to the way she’d soaked up his kissing her like a dying desert flower soaks up rain.
When she woke again, moonlight was filtering through the trees surrounding the guest cottage, spilling through the picture window in the bedroom, and Eden was back to Mr. Tierney– not in a sarcastic way, but after “savior” ... a little distant.
He shook his head. What the hell are you thinking, Tierney? He reheated a saucepan of beef barley soup and coaxed her into eating a few spoonfuls.
She wanted a hot bath. He didn’t want to take the chance that a light might be seen by Edward Bancroft up at the main house, so he lit a thick candle he found in the pantry and ran the hot water for her. She insisted she would be all right on her own.
He sat in the dark outside the bathroom door in case she passed out. She did fine until she needed to rinse shampoo from her hair. He didn’t know what was wrong, but he heard her sniffing and he couldn’t make himself stay out of the bathroom.
In the candlelight, she looked as bedraggled and defenseless as a half-drowned kitten—from the neck up. She grabbed a washcloth, trying to cover her breasts.
He gritted his teeth and started through the door.
“Don’t come in here, Tierney.”
The cloth didn’t come close to covering her. “How are you going to get out, Kelley?” he snapped, tired of Tierney and Mr. Tierney and feeling his groin tighten. The situation was just too damned ridiculous. The woman was on and off death’s door. What he knew of her he knew from government-witness documents, but he was half in awe, half in love with the woman no dossier could reveal by half.
His blood pooled painfully at the sight of her bare breasts.
The washcloth clung to her shape as faithfully as a second skin and the glow of the candlelight only heightened his awareness. He hadn’t been with a woman in nearly two years —not Catherine, not any woman, and now the pent-up sexual energy made him hostile.
“How are you going to get the shampoo out of your hair? Huh?”
Her chin quivered. Her gray eyes filled with tears. She swallowed. He watched her throat muscles move in her slender, long neck.
“I don’t know.”
“Me, neither.” He shrugged, dismissing the standoff, picked up a bath towel and stood over her, offering a hand. “This is crazy, Eden,” he murmured. His voice was thick. “Let me help you.”
She breathed deeply, then took his hand and stood. He couldn’t help seeing her breasts or the deeply feminine lines of her torso and bottom or the slender length of her leg. He wrapped her in the bath towel for his sanity as much as her modesty.
He pulled the drain and stripped off his jeans, then stepped into the tub and sat in his boxer shorts on the side. Laying her across his lap, her head in the crook of his arm, he rinsed the lather from her hair with the spray attachment so the warm water flowed off her hair into the tub. By the flickering light of the candle, he saw that the stitches were doing fine, that her flesh had begun to heal.
She had on one of Margo’s expensive discarded bathrobes, a thick white terry cloth embossed at the breast with a coat of arms, when she climbed beneath the fluffy goosedown comforter on the bed. Chris sank into the chair. Eden stared for a while at the LED numbers on the bedside clock. “How long have we been here?”
“Two nights.” Wearing only his boxer shorts, he lay back and put his feet up on the chintz-covered ottoman. Holding her in the candlelight wrapped in nothing but a bath towel, rinsing her hair, combing out the tangles, carrying her against his body—had worn on him like coarse sandpaper on a fine patina.
“Two nights? You’ve been taking care of me all that time?”
He nodded. “Nearly.” Enough hours that he’d begun to expect pursuit. But he hadn’t seen Margo at all, and she would have come to warn him if there was news of a manhunt in search of a kidnapped protected witness. Tears suddenly glistened in Eden’s eyes. He cursed the moon for scattering enough ambient light that he could still see the glitter of her tears in the darkness. And cursed himself more for allowing her tears to matter. His throat tightened. “What is it, Eden?” Why ask, you fool?
The silence was so complete he could hear her swallow. “Nothing.”
“Did you think David Tafoya would have rescued you by now?”
“No.” She stared at him. “I wasn’t thinking of David at all. I was thinking how lucky Catherine was. Not...I mean, not when she died, of course, but to have you to take care of her... to be there for her.”
“Yeah,” Chris answered, but he flinched inside.
“How. do you bear it?”
“What?”
“The loneliness. Being without her.”
He shoved himself out of the chair and walked to the window. He stood there staring out, fending off reactions, harsh responses he might make. “It doesn’t concern you, Eden.” He wanted her to be quiet, to go back to sleep.
She didn’t seem inclined to do either. Instead, she was wakeful now, and talkative.
“With Broussard,” she said, “I was lonely all the time. I just didn’t realize it. He had this way of making things seem exactly the opposite, you know?”
Chris turned back and leaned against the window casing. It was easier to face her even in the dark when she wasn’t on the subject of Catherine. The sash bars on the windows cast shadows in the moonlight on the bed. “A real stand-up guy. And then he gave you the boutique.”
“He wanted to give me the boutique,” she corrected, “but I drew the line there. I would only accept a loan. I needed the boutique to be mine.” She fell silent for a few seconds. “David Tafoya said that was my fatal mistake, trying to have something of my own. Why Web started wiring money and orders and invoices through Eden’s! accounts.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Chris said softly, “whether Broussard gave you the boutique outright or not. The business he did through your channels represented less than a percentage point of his operation.”
“I know.” She nodded and lifted herself up on one elbow. “Tafoya told me the FBI believed Broussard had been arming terrorists, citizen militias and mercenaries for a long time before I met him.”
Chris gnawed on the inside of his lip, thinking there was some element to Broussard’s motives she hadn’t begun to touch upon. “You’re saying Tafoya chalked Broussard’s action up to arrogance —that he used your international connections because they were there.”
“Yes.”
“But you think there was more, something else?”
Eden blanched. It wasn’t as if Chris could see any color in her face by only the moonlight coming in through the window, but her cheeks seemed to go translucently pale and he felt a level of panic coming from her.
“Tell me.”
She sat up and drew the covers with her. “It doesn’t really matter why he did what he did. It only matters that in the end he used me and I betrayed him.” Her voice strained, fading to a whisper. “He would forgive anything but that.”
Chris cleared his throat. It turned him stone-cold inside to think Eden Kelley would die if Broussard succeeded in exacting his pound of flesh. “You didn’t betray him. You only tried to stop him from dealing death without a backward glance.”
“But that came later.” Her fingers idly went to the stitches the doctor had put in beneath her collarbone, exploring, massaging. “I don’t know why I couldn’t see how much power Broussard had over me. How controlling he was. He didn’t try to dictate what I did or where I went. I would never have gone along with that.
“Instead, little by little, he gave me things—everything I had ever wanted in my life—even the loan to start the boutique. I guess I wanted it all too much. And I believed he loved me.”
Chris sat again in the overstuffed chair. He couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t seen the trap coming, either, but he had none of her life experience at being a ward of the state, never belonging anywhere, never having anything of
her own. “It felt safe, I imagine. Secure.”
“I suppose.” Her expression hardened, and she shivered.
“What went wrong, Eden?”
Her shoulders slumped. “I knew. Somewhere inside me, I knew that it was all wrong. I knew there would be a terrible price to pay for letting Broussard take care of me. But I had spent my whole life mistrusting people, and after Monique took me in, I wanted to believe that was all behind me. I thought what I had with Broussard was extraordinary. Sheila thought so, too —and I wanted to believe that I didn’t have to mistrust everyone all the time. That I finally belonged.” She sat cross-legged now, clutching one of the pillows to her middle. “That’s all I ever really wanted ... just to belong somewhere.”
His chest tightened. Catherine hadn’t wanted a safe haven or a place to belong, hadn’t wanted what Chris had to offer her. He’d wanted to believe otherwise himself, but even before Broussard’s assassin mistook her for Eden, the time for lying to himself was over. He’d seen it coming at him like a freight train out of control. He’d thought he could still avert the disaster with Catherine, but he couldn’t.
“I was very wise, you see,” Eden was saying. “Or at least I thought I was. I thought I’d seen it all. Awful things go on in orphanages. Not so much now, I guess, but twenty years ago they did. And I’d lived in foster homes where the dad would ... come after me.” Her voice quavered. She breathed deeply, then plunged ahead. “Twice I was sent away—thrown out, really—because those foster dads said I was behaving inappropriately. Because I was coming on to them.”
Chris grimaced. He hadn’t grown up knowing there were men who preyed on children, but he’d known better for a lot of years now. “Did the Social Services people believe them?”
“They didn’t know what to believe.” She shrugged. “I was only ten the second time it happened. They had no choice except to move me.” She took a deep breath. “Somehow I dodged all those bullets. Years went by. Then I went to St. Anne’s—you know, on the North End?”
The Boston parish ran an all-girls school and boarded homeless adolescents. Chris knew from her witness profiles that Eden had attended St. Anne’s. He shifted his weight in the chair. “Is that where you met Sheila?”
