The Bride and the Mercenary

by Harper Allen

  “Malone made that promise—and he didn’t keep it! He did leave me! He didn’t come back!” Hardly knowing what she was doing, she raised her fists and slammed them against the immobile chest of the man in front of her, the tears streaming down her face, her gaze fixed and brilliant on his. “Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but he broke his promise. He died—don’t you get it? He died, and not even Malone can come back from the dead!”

  “But I did.” The husky voice was shot through with pain. This time when he grabbed her wrists he didn’t let go. “Don’t you get it, Lee? I was dead—I’ve been dead for two long years. But I didn’t break my promise to you. I’ve come back. I’ve come back, dammit!”

  At his last words, the thundering in her head came to a shockingly sudden stop. In the abrupt silence she heard him suck in a ragged breath, as if he’d been running for too long and had used up the last of his strength. The elevator came to a jolting stop.

  The doors slid open. He flicked a quick look out at the lobby, and then focused once more on her.

  “Okay, say I’m lying about who I am.” He spoke quickly, his tone so low it was almost inaudible. “That doesn’t change the fact that right now we’re only seconds away from being killed. Will you trust me that far?”

  “No.” She was trembling, Ainslie realized, but from the outside it wasn’t visible. The tremors were on the inside, and they were almost shaking her apart. She stepped out of the elevator. “I don’t trust you at all. Everything you’ve said is a lie.”

  Without looking back, she started to walk away. She had to get out of here. She had to get away.

  She was almost at the doors when she heard him call out to her.

  “Lee.”

  There was no urgency in his tone. She took another step forward and then, almost against her will, found herself hesitating. She stopped. She didn’t look around.

  “I get it now, Lee.” The huskiness was more pronounced. “You wanted Malone to stay dead. He left you, like your father and your brother did, and some part of you never forgave him for that. You need him to be dead, Lee. That way he’ll always be a perfect memory, and he’ll never be able to leave you again.”

  Ainslie remained rigidly still. He was wrong, she thought numbly. She’d never wanted Malone to stay dead. She’d wanted him alive so desperately that she hadn’t been able to accept his death. She’d prayed every night for him to come back to her. Now he had.

  And he was nothing like the memory she’d held in her heart for so long.

  The realization of what had just gone through her mind didn’t register for a second. Then her eyes widened painfully, and her fingers flew to her mouth. She pressed them tightly against her lips, as if by sealing off her very breath she could delay the full impact of what she’d just acknowledged to herself.

  About to turn to meet his gaze, she saw two men scramble swiftly out of an ambulance that had just pulled to a stop outside. They were both wearing suits, and one of them was speaking into a hand-held radio. As they strode purposefully toward the entrance, the glass doors slid open with a quiet hiss. The walkie-talkie emitted a burst of static, plainly audible as the two men were now less than ten feet from the open doors. Ainslie saw the man wince, say something into the radio and listen intently.

  From over the radio came a grating voice. At Ainslie’s distance the words were unintelligible but clearly urgent. The man with the radio looked up and caught her watching him.

  “Malone—they’re here!”

  Unsteady, her voice carried across the crowded seating area, and as she swung her gaze Malone’s way she saw a brief flash of some undefinable emotion cross his features. His eyes locked on hers, and for just a second it seemed as if they were the only two people in the lobby.

  Then the moment passed. Three strides brought him to her side and she felt his hand on the small of her back, propelling her quickly around the corner and down a small corridor she hadn’t noticed before. The corridor ended in a blank wall.

  “Malone, it’s a dead end! They’ll trap—” She broke off abruptly.

  “I scouted this out earlier. It’s only used by the hospital staff.”

  The same utilitarian shade as the walls, the gray-painted metal door he impatiently pushed open was barely noticeable. Ainslie stepped out into near-blackness, and Malone bent to pick something up from the ground.

  “This won’t stop them for long, but it’ll do.” Grunting with the effort, he shoved what looked like an iron bar through the vertical metal handle of the door. “Take my hand, Lee—we’ve got to move fast.”

  He’d been expecting this, or something similar, Ainslie absently realized as his hand wrapped around hers and he pulled her into a run. She could hear angry pounding on the door behind them. And he’d not only had one plan of escape—he’d mentioned something about a wheelchair, she remembered—he’d also scouted out a contingency route. That iron bar hadn’t been a handy coincidence.

  “There’s the car.”

  Beyond the short stretch of grass they were speeding across was a deserted but adequately lit street. The only car at the curb didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a getaway vehicle, she thought as he released her hand and sprinted around to the driver’s side.

  But it was a car. Three hours ago he’d let her believe he was a vagrant, his only possessions an assortment of junk in a shopping cart. Three hours ago he’d told her he’d never seen her before in his life. Three hours ago he’d denied his very identity to her.

  He leaned over and opened the passenger side door for her. Even before she was fully in, the car’s engine roared to life and the headlights flicked on, and while she was still fastening her seat belt Malone shot away from the curb.

  Ainslie’s hands had twisted together in her lap, her nails digging cruelly into the skin of her interlaced fingers. The damned trembling had started up again, she thought dispassionately. She didn’t look over at him as she spoke, her voice sounding too loud in the silence.

  “So I was right, this afternoon when I ran out on my wedding.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him glance at her, but he said nothing. Still not looking at him, she persisted, her tone slightly lower.

  “I thought I was seeing a ghost—a dead man—but deep inside I knew it was really you, and that somehow you were alive. And I was right all along.”

  “You were right,” he said evenly. “But what you don’t know is—”

  “Then why did you lie to me?”

  Now she did face him, turning toward him so swiftly that her hair swung in blunt spears against her cheeks. Her hands were no longer in her lap, but clenched into fists by her thighs.

  “Why did you lie to me? Why did you walk away, letting me believe I’d made a terrible mistake—a mistake that no sane person would make? Why did you walk away from me, letting me think you were a complete stranger, a stranger I’d never see again?”

  It was funny, she thought with a detached part of her mind. For most of this day her tears had been either threatening, spilling over or being held back. Now it seemed they’d completely dried up. She’d cried a damn river over Seamus Malone the past two years.

  She didn’t feel like crying over him anymore.

  Slowly she unclenched her fists, and let out the breath she’d been unconsciously holding. Her tone almost conversational, she asked him the two most important questions of all.

  “Why did you let me think you were dead, Malone? And just where the hell have you been since I buried you?”

  Chapter Six

  He was in the bathroom. He’d been in there since they’d arrived, and that had been ten minutes ago. She could hear water running in the sink, and an occasional clinking noise, as if something metallic was being tapped against the porcelain rim of the basin. He was shaving off the last of that disreputable beard, Ainslie supposed.

  Except what he was really doing was stalling.

  He hadn’t answered any of her questions in the car. In fact, he’d gone on to pla
nt new ones in her mind by bringing her here. This apartment was his, obviously. The building itself was small and slightly run-down, and although the apartment was scrupulously neat, there was little in it but the bare necessities—some ugly furniture, a lamp or two, a kettle sitting on the stove in the galley-style kitchen. But it was his. He kept personal possessions here, because before disappearing into the bathroom he’d changed out of the hospital scrubs and into jeans and a sweatshirt. He’d seen her raised eyebrows at his attire, but he’d remained silent.

  She could wait, Ainslie thought coldly. The man couldn’t hide away from her forever.

  But of course, that was exactly what he’d been doing for the past two years.

  She heard the water being turned off in the bathroom and felt herself tense.

  While she’d been grieving, he’d apparently been creating a new life for himself, right here in Boston. She had no idea how he’d obtained the ID and references he’d shown her earlier, but his stories of crewing on a salvage ship in Florida and working in a garage in Idaho had to be part of his inexhaustible supply of lies.

  But just how inexhaustible were those lies? And had they started today, or when she’d known him? His reticence about himself hadn’t seemed evasive while they’d been together, but in the bleak months that had followed she’d realized just how little she’d actually known about him.

  Sully had been no help. He and Malone had been casual acquaintances only, she’d learned, with some business connections in common. Despite his obvious sympathy when she’d come to him with her questions a month or so after the funeral, her half brother had seemed uneasy about the subject, but that had been understandable. Any business contacts that might have existed between Sullivan Investigations and a man who worked for a government agency had probably been highly confidential.

  That hadn’t been the kind of information she’d wanted anyway. She’d wanted to know who his friends had been, how he’d gotten into his line of work. Malone had told her that he’d been raised in an orphanage, yet she’d wondered if he had any family, however far-flung, still living.

  Like Sully, Malone’s partner, when she’d asked him questions, had been bound by a code of silence. But as with Sully, she’d had the impression that there was little Paul Cosgrove could have told her about Malone even if he had been free to talk. She’d known at the time that the two of them had only recently been partnered.

  Of course, Paul had lied to her, too, she thought stonily. He’d told her he’d been there when Malone had been killed. He’d told her he’d seen his partner’s dead body. He’d stood beside her at that farce of a funeral. All the while he’d known that the man she’d been grieving over was walking around alive and well somewhere.

  There was a certain irony to the situation. The man she’d thought she’d known had turned out never to have existed. He hadn’t needed to fake his own death to turn into a ghost. He’d always been one.

  Even as the notion crossed her mind he walked into the room, looking solidly real. Real, and disconcertingly like the man she’d fallen in love with so long ago, she thought with an unwilling ache. The beard was gone. The hair that had fallen past the shoulders of the derelict’s tattered coat this afternoon now brushed the nape of his neck. It was still too shaggy, and even as she watched he wiped impatiently at a stray strand that had fallen into his eyes, but he was recognizably Malone again.

  Whoever Malone was.

  “So tell me, Lee—who was the man you came so close to marrying today?”

  Crossing to the window, he stood to one side of the drapes, parting them slightly and glancing cautiously out onto the street. He let the drapes close and turned to face her. Ainslie gazed calmly at him.

  “No, Malone, that’s not the way we’re going to play this game. I get to ask the questions. You get to try to lie your way out of them.” Her smile was humorless. “You know, this isn’t the way I used to imagine this miraculous reunion. Is this how you used to think it would be, coming back to me?”

  “I never thought about it.” His reply was clipped to the point of harshness, and at it she felt as if she’d been sucker-punched.

  A moment ago she’d been thinking of him as a ghost, she thought numbly. But she’d been wrong. A ghost would at least hold some echo of the man he had once been. She never had known the real Seamus Malone.

  “So nothing was ever true.” Her words were edged with pain, but behind the pain anger flickered and grew. “Tell me, Malone, have you ever been even a little bit honest with me?”

  “I’ve been as honest with you as I know how to be.” His tone was still devoid of any emotion, but as he spoke she saw a muscle twitch at the side of his jaw.

  “Have you?” Her coolness was becoming harder to sustain. “Let’s look at that, shall we? We’ll skip the really big stuff for now—you know, like setting up a damn funeral for yourself and disappearing off the face of the earth. How about just concentrating on what you told me today? How is the salvage business down in Florida, anyway? Or the garage business in Idaho?” She saw him blink, but his expression remained grimly remote. “Or what about the phony ID you shoved at me, with the name John Smith plastered all over it. Was that being honest? Was that your conception of being up front with me?”

  “Back off, Lee.” The hard light in his eyes intensified, and his warning came out in a hoarse mutter. “It was all true. John Smith was my name, as far as—”

  “Stop it, Malone! Just stop the lying!”

  Jumping to her feet, she covered the distance between them in two swift strides, all attempts at detachment abandoned. Grabbing the front of his sweatshirt in both of her fists, she brought her face close to his.

  “Sully thinks you’re involved in drug dealing. Is that what this was all about? Is that why you had to disappear, why you’ve got identification in another name, why you’re running for your life?”

  With every unanswered question, her tight grip on his shirt jerked him closer.

  “Did the Agency you worked for find out you were dirty, and go along with that faked funeral rather than letting it get out that one of their people had betrayed them? Am I getting close to the truth, Malone? Am I even warm?”

  Her voice rose and cracked on the last few words. She still had a few tears left out of that river, she realized with quick chagrin, feeling them wet her cheeks but not bothering to dash them away.

  His mouth was only inches from hers, so close that she could see a tiny scar on his bottom lip, so close that she found herself taking in the very scent of his skin. Beneath her clenched fists she felt the beat of his heart against the solid wall of his chest, felt the rise and fall of his breathing. As their gazes locked and held—hers spilling over with frustration, his dark with something that looked like anger—she could see every single shade of green in those unreadable eyes, could practically feel the spiky sweep of those thick, black lashes.

  His jaw tightened. He inhaled sharply.

  “I’ll tell you everything, dammit.”

  His voice was so low it was little more than a harsh whisper. Under the hoarseness was the barest spark of emotion, but it flowed to her and back to him again like an arcing, uncontrolled current. The light behind those brilliant eyes caught, was instantly banked, and then flared fully into heat.

  “I’ll tell you it all in a second, Lee. But this has to come first.”

  His hands came up and cupped the sides of her face, his thumbs slicking tightly over the wetness of her tears. His lashes flicked to the high ridge of his cheekbones, a small sound of impatient defeat rasped from the back of his throat, and he brought his mouth down hard onto hers.

  Immediate desire slammed through her with the force of a body blow.

  This wasn’t how she’d imagined it would be, Ainslie thought with white-hot clarity as she felt her lips part under his, felt him move farther into her with no warning at all. She’d dreamed of this a thousand times, and he had always come to her slowly. Tenderly. He’d touched her face, touched he
r hair, traced the line of her lips with the softest of kisses, and then gradually taken his kiss deeper, his tempo perfectly attuned to hers.

  Whether or not that considerate dream lover had any existence in reality, she didn’t know. But he wasn’t in this room with her right now. This Malone was someone she’d never dreamed of at all, or if she had, she’d buried those feverish dreams somewhere deep in her subconscious, rather than admit to herself that her desires could be so dark.

  This wasn’t how she’d imagined it in the past. But this was how she needed it to be now.

  She felt his mouth move greedily against hers, felt him impatiently taste the soft underside of her lips, felt his hands spread wide and tighten against the back of her head. He pulled her to him even closer, his mouth opened wider, and against her cheek she felt the sharp spikiness of those dense, fanned lashes.

  And she moved into him.

  Immediately her need escalated past desire, past hunger, past want, and into a pitch-black realm of elemental sensation. Images flew across the unlit expanse of her consciousness—dark images, unidentifiable images, images that came and disappeared so quickly that she was left with only shockingly fragmented impressions.

  Her palms slid damply down the well-worn softness of his sweatshirt to his jeans, and then slipped up and under, her fingertips splaying against the coarse arrow of hair on his stomach. She spread them farther, slid them higher, pushing his shirt up until she could feel the moist heat of his bare skin against her.

  She wanted to take him. The thought spilled through her mind with a raw bluntness that was utterly unlike her, but its very crudity was apt. She wanted to take him, wanted to bring them both to their knees right here and now, wanted to urge him over the far edge of need. She didn’t want to sink onto a bed with him, didn’t want cool sheets and soft pillows beneath them, didn’t want to make love to him.