Her Galahad

by Melissa James

  Tessa kissed her soft, wrinkled cheek, inhaling her violet-scented powder. Another memory to store, another scent to conjure regret. Another unwanted goodbye. "Thank you."

  "He—won't hurt me, will he?"

  She swung back, realizing with a pang what the dear old lady was willing to go through for her. "No. I swear to you he won't." He'll save that for me.

  She pressed a fifty-dollar note into her landlady's hand. Do the drill fast. "Can you clean up my room before he comes back? Make it look like I'm still here? Keep my things for a week. If you don't hear from me by next weekend put it all in a charity bin. And please, please don't talk to anyone about this."

  She threw open the screen door, burst through the open space to the verandah and cannoned straight into a hard male body.

  She looked up, saw the face belonging to it, and screamed.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  « ^ »

  He was about to force his way inside the faded gray frame house when she bolted out the door and slammed into him.

  He staggered back under the twin impact of her body crashing against him and the bag she carried thumping into his gut. The echoes of her first scream still rang in his ears; her second, riding on its wave, hit a new note in piercing pitch.

  "Be quiet! I won't hurt you." He grabbed her shoulders to steady them both. "Where's your car?"

  She blinked and stared at him; her shrill cry stopped with shocking suddenness. Laughter replaced it, a wild sound of disbelief—but even the cynical twisting of her lips lit her exotic face with all its crooked charm. "You're really something, aren't you. 'Hi, Tessa. Long time, no see. Where's your car?'"

  He grabbed her arm, pulling her with him through the door to the verandah. "Where is it? We've got to get out of here!"

  The laughter snapped off like a shuttered light. "It was you—at the school today. I thought … I thought—it can't be him! Then you left … and—but you must have known it was me…"

  He pulled her off the verandah and down the stairs, around the faded English gardens to the barnlike garage at the back of the house. "We can talk about it on the road. Just run!"

  With the sudden fury of a lioness she lashed out, struggling to break free of him. One fist found its mark, attacking arms and chest already battered; her nails clawed at cuts still open and bleeding. "Get away from me! Don't touch me!"

  He grabbed her wrists, trying to hold her writhing body still. "Have you gone nuts? We've got to get out of here now!"

  She stilled, panting; then she jerked out of his hold, her face blanched, her eyes glassy. "I thought you were dead!"

  He rocked back on his feet. "What?"

  "You—they said you were dead—" she whispered.

  He blinked and frowned, reasserting mental control. Of course they did. Damn fool he'd been to not think of it before!

  Did that mean Tessa had never—

  He shook himself. "Well, you can see I'm not. Now that's established, which car is yours so we can get out of here?" He reined in the fierce desire to shake her—he had to get her trust, and bloody fast. "Every second counts. Get in your car!"

  She broke away, bolting to a beat-up brown van. "Thank God, a four-wheel-drive," he muttered as he threw himself onto the passenger seat. "We'll need to go over some rough roads to—"

  She leveled a small gun in his face. "Shut up."

  He shut up. Yeah, she'd changed, all right.

  "Good." She spoke with a fierce, terrifying quiet. "How much did he pay you to do this? Did you set this up, or did he?"

  His heart pounded in sickening rhythm, but he lifted a brow in a show of cool unconcern. If she saw the fear clenching his gut she'd leave him behind on the road alone and unarmed. "Which 'he' are you talking about? Your dad, your brother or your husband?"

  She held the gun before his eyes without wavering, her vivid, glowing face filled with grim hatred and desperate resolution. Terror lurked beneath the steel in her eyes, held at bay only by the force of her will. "Damn you, David, answer me!"

  He reached out to reassure her, but halted as she lifted the gun barrel to level right between his eyes. "Does it matter now? For God's sake, Beller's after us!"

  Her eyes glittered. "How much is he paying you this time?"

  "What?" Paying him? This time? "What the—"

  "I hope you asked for more this time. A resurrection's a rare occurrence. After all, anybody can die. It's Easter holiday, too—very appropriate. I hope you asked for double time, at least."

  He blinked again. "Are you insane? What the hell are you talking about? And why now? Beller could be here any minute!"

  She shook her head, showing her teeth in a fierce smile. "So you'd better prove to me I'm safer with you than him, and fast. Or you're on the road. Don't move, David. I know how to use this—and don't think I won't. Did you work out this plan, thinking I'd be so shocked by your sudden resurrection from the dead I'd go along with anything you said without question? How much is Cameron paying you to bring me to him? How much?" She was screaming now, her forehead beading with the perspiration of intense stress.

  He could feel tiny drops of sweat breaking out on his upper lip; he watched in wary fascination as her finger curled around the trigger, her thumb pulled off the safety catch. "I've never taken a cent from your father, your brother or Beller. I'd never sink as low as that."

  The gun wobbled in her hand. "They told me you were dead—and you never came for me," she whispered a second time. "Why?"

  The half-terrified, confused betrayal in her eyes was something he understood—he'd been there. He'd hated this woman every minute of the past six years, and her look, her words said she didn't exactly hold tender memories of him, either. "When we're safe I'll explain," was all he could think to say.

  Explain? What a joke. Could anyone understand the crazy mess his life had become since meeting Tessa?

  "This is a scam." Her voice was a hoarse croak. "You can't pull a trick on me he hasn't already tried—and I'd rather die now than go back to him."

  He finally lost it. "Tessa, for God's sake will you look at me? It's not just you he's after!" With a lightning movement he had the gun in his hand, jamming the safety into place, checking the barrel for bullets. "Don't scream—if I was going to shoot you I'd have done it years ago. Now look at me, woman," he snarled. "He did this to me because of you!"

  Eyes wide with horror gradually unclouded. She seemed to look at him, to take in the blood trickling down his temple, the swollen eye and torn lip, the contorted purpling masses on his arms, chest and thighs through his torn T-shirt and ripped jeans. "If I had a car left I wouldn't be here. Beller blew up my truck, right in the middle of town. God knows how—I was only gone three minutes. Thank God whatever he used had a faulty timer."

  Or maybe it didn't? He frowned. Maybe Beller didn't want him dead—just disabled. Unable to reach Tessa in time.

  I thought you were dead, she'd said…

  There's no time to think!

  He handed her back her gun with the bullets still in the barrel, sweating on the hope she'd understand the significance of his act. "Your landlady's watching us from the back window. How long do you think we've got until he charms her into spilling her guts? When he knows what type of car we're in and which way she saw us go, we're stuffed until we can get a new car. So can we please get the hell out of here now before he kills both of us?"

  Her eyes searched his for a moment—the strange, unforgettable eyes of amber and gold that still visited his dreams after six years. Then she started the car and screeched away from the house. But she left the loaded gun on her lap—and whether it was to use on him or Beller he didn't know.

  Right now he didn't care. He was safer taking his chances with Tessa than an obsessed maniac like Cameron Beller. On a blown-out quiet sigh he said, "Head for the northern highway. We can stay at my place tonight."

  Her voice filled with disbelief and contempt. "We? You think I'd stay with you? I'll get you out of
town, but that's it."

  "We don't have time for this," he snapped. "When we're away from here and safe we can take a stroll down memory lane, throw a few recriminations around. I've got a few questions I wouldn't mind asking myself. But let's work at keeping alive first!"

  "We'll talk? About what, David?" Her voice quivered with fury; her hands clenched and unclenched on the steering wheel. "About how you walked out on me? How you disappeared without a word, leaving me to believe you were dead until now?"

  "Keep your eyes on the road. I didn't escape a car bomb to have you slam me into a pole." He put out a hand, steadying the steering wheel as the van flashed past farms on the northern edge of town. They hit a straight stretch of open road, flanked by flat brown paddocks and half-rotting fences. He kept an eye on the road behind them, throwing up a fervent prayer for a quick sunset, a sudden autumn storm or miraculous fog; but the sun kept shining and the van could be seen for a mile either way. "And don't call me David. I go by the name Jirrah now. Jirrah McLaren. David Oliveri no longer exists. And I didn't lead you to believe anything. I had no idea you thought I was dead."

  "What do you mean you don't exist?" Tessa drove one-handed; the other caressed her brow, as if soothing herself. "What did you think I'd believe when you didn't show up? They said—"

  "If you haven't worked out by now that your family are lying, cheating sons of bitches, you're a fool." He flicked another glance back. "There's a car coming up behind us. Fast."

  With a high-pitched gasp she floored the accelerator.

  The car, a dark Ford sedan, sped up until it was right behind them. It weaved toward the other side, came back again, too close behind. Trying to find a way around them.

  He glanced at Tessa. The hand holding the wheel was shaking; her breaths came and went in sharp-edged ragged gasps, her terror so palpable it was hitting him in waves. "Tessa?"

  She fingered the gun in her lap like a talisman. "He said he'd kill me if I left him," she whispered. "But my God, what he'd do to me first…"

  A sudden horn blast made her hand jerk on the wheel. The van skidded, fishtailing toward the red-mud shoulder of the road.

  "He won't have to, the way you're driving—you'll kill us both." He grabbed the wheel for the second time. "Hold the bloody wheel straight, with both hands preferably, and ease off the accelerator. You're spinning the van out. Keep it steady."

  "He's right beside us!" she screamed.

  He squinted, trying to see inside the tinted dark glass of the car pulling level with them. "Don't panic yet. Slow down. Let him pass and see what happens."

  In a flash she sped up, holding the steering wheel in one shaking fist—and the gun was back in her other hand. "You filthy bastard, was that the plan?" She held the gun on him while trying to right the car. "Gain my trust by returning the gun, get me alone, let him overtake us and hand me over to him? Do you think I trust you any further than I could kick you?"

  "Not any more than I trust you," was his brutal rejoinder. "And any plans I might have don't include getting you locked up for killing a half-tanked city cowboy out on a 'roo shoot My plans didn't include my truck getting blown up, or your rolling a van at high speed with me in it. If Beller offered a million bucks, it ain't much use to me if I'm dead."

  After a moment, she nodded. "Okay. I can accept that."

  "Then get on the right side of the road. Let the Ford pass us. I don't think it's Beller. Your wanna-be classy husband wouldn't be seen dead in anything less than a Jag or Range Rover," he said dryly. "We're almost at the turnoff. If we have to double back on ourselves it gives Beller time to find us."

  He could almost taste the bile of fear on her tongue, but she nodded again. "Okay." She slowed down, moving back to the legal side of the road and let off on the accelerator.

  With another horn blast, the Ford roared past them down the empty highway. The van shuddered in its wake.

  Tessa wiped her face with her sleeve. "W-where's the turnoff?"

  "Left in about two minutes. There's a back way to Marshal's Creek. I reckon he'll be searching the highway for us tonight. He'll expect us to be together by now."

  "How long have you been in Lynch Hill?"

  "Just over a week."

  She flashed a look at him, a look of magnificent fire, and he rocketed back in time to his first sight of her.

  A golden-skinned pagan goddess in cut-off shorts and tank top, her silky dark hair flying around her face like an aura of dangerous magic in the warm wind of a summer's day, her strange, beautiful eyes devouring him, drinking him in like ambrosia and nectar of the gods.

  A vivid face, full of life—every emotion inside her so easy to read. One look and he was gone. She exploded inside his heart, catching hold of the flying pieces in her loving hands; and in all the years he'd hated her, he'd never found a way to take them back.

  Her voice of furious scorn jerked him back to a less tender present. "…and you never let me know. You leave me for six years, don't bother to contact me until he shows up and then you say, 'Hey, Tessa, I'm alive. Let's leave town together'?"

  He shrugged, fighting a half urge to grin. "Yeah, well, expect the unexpected. At least I'm never boring."

  Again that quick, flashing glance of molten gold, searing his veins with her inner fire. "No, I never had time to be bored with you. I only grieved for you!"

  "Oh, yeah, you must have grieved for me real bad," he shot back. "A whole month, wasn't it, before you became Mrs. Beller—no, sorry, I heard you actually waited a whole five weeks out of respect for my memory. Nice grief, Tessa."

  She flushed. "If I'd known you were alive—"

  "What? You wouldn't have committed bigamy, or you'd just have divorced me first?"

  She gasped and hit the brakes, making them both jerk forward and back in their seats.

  He laughed again, but it was a harsh, jeering sound. "Yeah, that's right, princess—little Miss High Society Theresa Earldon-Beller's a bigamist. How much time do they do for that? Surely with a daddy, brother and husband as barristers, one of them checked out the facts for you before you walked down the aisle for the second time in just over a month?"

  "I didn't know you were alive!" Her cry throbbed with passionate denial. "Duncan gave me a death certificate! Dad even held a memorial service for you!"

  He had to believe that. Her terrified screams at the sight of him, her words of half an hour before confirmed it, if he hadn't already known what her family were capable of.

  "I thought you were dead!" she'd said, in that stunned voice. As if she hadn't known where he'd been all those years. As if she hadn't betrayed him for wealth, success and a handsome face.

  Maybe she hadn't?

  He didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to know. "And where did they say my body was conveniently hiding?" he asked in a conversational tone. "Just for interest's sake."

  Another choking gasp. "They—they said a car accident—your body incinerated … nothing left to bury…" She swung the van off to the side of the road and buried her face in trembling hands. "I can't drive and talk about this."

  "Swap," he said succinctly. He stalked around the front to the driver's door as she slid over to the passenger's side. He swung back onto the road, checking every few seconds for cars. "Go on," he grated. "So they told you I burned to death, and you believed it. How convenient for you, and for Beller. I die just in time for the society wedding he had ready. I read all about it in the paper. My wife the bigamist's glittering socialite bash."

  She gazed out the window as slow darkness rolled over the eastern sky. Her ebony braid, falling to her waist, glowed like sable in the brilliant half light of the setting sun; her golden skin shimmered, playing the colors of an outback sunset across her slanted cheekbone. The pagan princess glowed even in shadow, thrumming with the pulsing beat of her inner life and heat. "David, I didn't know they lied to me. I had no idea anyone could fake a death certificate for a living person until today!"

  A delicate touch of spring
flowers wafted to him in the car's heated air. It always seemed an anomaly to him that exotic, spicy Tessa loved such a gentle perfume; yet it suited her once. His innocent Tess…

  Was she still so innocent after all these years?

  He switched on the headlights. "The death certificate's not a fake. It's a legal document. As far as the world's concerned, David Oliveri died two and a half years go."

  "But…" Flicking a glance at her, he saw the helpless confusion in her eyes. "But don't you mean six years ago? They gave me a death certificate three days after you—disappeared."

  He shook his head. "That one's fake. Has to be. But the one I've got is legal, all right." He eased off the accelerator to negotiate around a clump of rocks on the dark country road. "So call me Jirrah from now on. I could do six to twelve months inside on a felony charge just for using my name."

  He felt her frowning gaze on him in the gathering gloom. "That's the second time in five minutes you've mentioned prison sentences," she said slowly. "Is that why you never showed, six years ago? Is that why you're on the run now? Did you break the law somehow? Are the police after you?"

  He laughed at the naiveté of her questions. "Um, I'm dead, Tessa. Last I heard, you can't do time for that." He turned into a side road, heading northeast. "But doing three and a half years in lockup for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon—" He heard her high-pitched gasp, and grinned in savage bitterness. "Yeah, I suppose that tends to make a man see the legal system from a more negative side of the fence than an average, decent, law-abiding bigamist like yourself."

  "I'm a bigamist? I—oh shoot, so I am!" She made a tiny choking sound: the enchanting gurgle of suppressed laughter he'd once known so well, and loved to hear. "What a farce!" Half laughing, hysterical tears ran down her face. "I'm a bigamist! And I always thought I'd lead a boring, unadventurous life!"

  He'd hated this woman for years; he hated her still for what she'd done to him. Yet he felt a grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. Well, the whole situation was absurd; and he'd always responded to her quirky sense of humor that shone out at odd moments. "We'd better stick to the speed limit. If the cops put my driver's license through a computer, they may notice that I'm supposed to be eighty-one." He grinned. "Jirrah McLaren was my grandfather on my mother's side who died two years ago. My cousin put my photo on Pop's ID and fudged the birth date. It was fairly easy since we were born just about fifty years apart."