She pressed her lips together, trying hard not to laugh. “I didn’t do it deliberately.”
His brow lifted. “So you gave poor Aunt Miranda a few real Freudian slips?”
Laughter bubbled out of her then, rich and true, its joyous beauty making him laugh, too. “I guess it’s just as well I can afford a housekeeper these days. I still hate picking up after myself, and as for cleaning or mopping…” She gave a dramatic shudder. “Cooking, I can handle. I even like it, much to my cook’s disgust when I invade his kitchen. But there’s only so much fancy food this Outback girl can handle. I like spaghetti or lasagna or just a steak and salad now and then.”
A shaft of some deep emotion sliced through him at the unconscious reminder of how far apart their worlds were now. He had to face the truth: if she was so far above him now, it was his own fault. He’d had the chance to keep her with him forever, and he’d blown it with his own naiveté. If he’d demanded to see the results of Ginny’s so-called blood test—
Yeah, well, you never asked, did you, Tal? He could still hear Ginny’s taunt that day, ringing clear with all the contempt and hate she felt for him. You didn’t ask because you wanted to show the world a poor farmer’s son could marry someone like me!
Even ten years on, he honestly didn’t know if Ginny had it right. Maybe she did—he’d only been twenty-one and still locked in that boy’s insecure need to prove himself to those he loved. But it was a habit he’d outgrown. The hell on earth that was his marriage to Ginny, and living with Max, had cured him of any need to prove anything to anyone but himself.
“Yeah, just as well,” he answered her, and even he heard the hollowness in his words.
“Miss West!”
In automatic mode Mary-Anne turned to face the call from a table near the doorway, with her trademark smile—but with one glance and no hesitation, Tal dived out of his chair and on top of her. “Get down!” he yelled, taking her in his arms and rolling under the table in one smooth motion.
As if by magic, the Nighthawks sitting at the other tables went into action, tackling the would-be shooter, others closed and locked the doors and curtains on the flashing cameras that lit the dark intimacy of the room like the sudden fury of an Outback lightning storm.
And still he held her beneath the shelter of their dining table. Mary-Anne felt trapped, pinned down by arms that felt like bands of steel. “I think you can let me up now,” she said, more shaken than she’d show.
He looked into her eyes for a long moment, and she realized—oh, no, she was trembling. But to her surprise, he said softly, “Sorry about that. Overkill,” giving her the dignity she deserved as a fellow operative. “Clear?” he called aloud.
“Yes, sir,” Nick’s voice spoke, low and respectful: a bodyguard’s tone. “Is Miss West safe? You, sir?”
“We’re both fine.” Tal loosened his hold on her.
Mary-Anne rolled out from under the table, needing space—needing him to keep holding her—oh, heck, she didn’t know what she needed right now, except maybe to slug the stupid jerk who’d ruined their dinner.
The stupid, gangly, pimple-faced little jerk currently lying facedown beneath a splay-legged Braveheart, whose massive form dwarfed him and knocked the breath and fight from him. “Let me up,” he whined in a Spanish accent. “I didn’t mean any harm, madame. I did not mean to frighten you, madame, or your husband…” the young man gabbled, his strained, red face paling in sudden and obvious panic. “I am no threat, I have only my tape recorder! I am a great fan of madame. I am a songwriter!”
At that, anyone who’d ever been on assignment with Mary-Anne groaned. Grumbling, Braveheart let the kid up.
“I just wish to play my song for her,” he went on earnestly. “I have written, oh, so wonderful a love song, just for Miss West’s glorious voice. It will take the whole world by storm, but her agent would not show her my work!”
The boy then rushed to the piano in the corner of the room and started singing in a thin, reedy voice about the impossible love of a boy for a girl too high for him to touch.
Wildman shook his head. “Loser alert,” he rumbled, shoving his weapon back in its holster.
“And before dessert, that’s just plain inconsiderate.” Braveheart rolled his eyes. “I wanted that bavaroise.”
Mary-Anne lifted a hand, listening intently to the words and music. Slowly she walked over to where the boy played, looked at the score sitting on the music desk and began singing along, hearing the gentle poignancy in this, a tragic sweetness that surely arrested everyone in the room.
The boy looked as if he’d die from joy any moment.
“She’ll take it,” Braveheart predicted to Wildman.
Wildman shrugged. “It’s pretty good—and at least we’ll get dessert while we’re waiting.”
Mary-Anne grinned. They’d spoken loud enough for her to hear even as she sang. They were right: for the first time with this kind of interruption, she’d take a song. If this boy had more songs like this, he had a magnificent career in front of him.
When she finished, she leaned over the boy and took up the score. “It’s a lovely song—what did you say your name was?”
“Miguel, madame,” the boy breathed, his eyes glowing.
She smiled down at him. “Well, Miguel, I’m going to send your name and phone number to my manager, and my record label. Once my husband and I are home from my honeymoon, of course.” She looked down at the score in her hand. “My personal assistant, Rhonda, will contact you. Now, I’m on my honeymoon, and my bodyguards get unhappy if they don’t get their sugar fix. They may punish you in a way that would relieve their feelings, but your fingers wouldn’t be good for the guitar for a few days.”
“But I have three more songs, and I would so love to hear you sing my—” The kid gulped, even his enthusiasm tamped by the sight of Braveheart and Wildman moving in on him. The kid was obviously no match for two big, hulking guys in the absolute peak of condition. He backed away toward the exit. “Good night. Thank you, Miss West. You are a beautiful and gracious lady.”
Anson unlocked the door and the kid bolted through it, past the multitude of flashing cameras and into the night.
Wildman’s dark, handsome face twisted with deep long-suffering. “Why do you always let ’em get away with it? If you’d do your Iceberg number on them, it wouldn’t get around that Verity West’s only soft spot is for desperate kids with tragic songs.”
She shrugged, feeling the flush creep up her cheeks. “I know how it feels. I was that kid once, writing songs I never thought anyone but my family or Gil would ever hear. I got my break.”
“You made your own break happen. Gil knew you’d win, or he wouldn’t have entered you.” The voice came from a darkened corner of the restaurant. “So this happens to you a lot?”
Turning around, she saw Tal sitting quietly at a table. With his face lost in the shadows, she couldn’t read his expression—but she shivered. “It happens to all celebrities, Tal.”
“Shall we go back to the hotel, Miss West?” Anson asked. “I feel every day of my fifty-one years right now.”
In one smooth movement the Nighthawks surrounded her in a fifty-one, ready to follow Nick’s hidden command. Tal moved into the inner circle, both for appearances and to protect his face and shoe from detection. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Nick paid the bill, then they crowded around her as the doors opened, cameras flashed and journos screamed questions, asking for anything from wedding photos to intimate details of their marriage.
Pushed and shoved one way and the other, staggering and almost falling but for Tal’s steadying hands on her arms, she moved forward, holding on to the moment she and Tal would be safe in the waiting car.
Sighing with relief when the doors locked behind them and Braveheart took off, she glanced at Tal. His face still had that unreadable look…and stress bloomed along her nerve endings like wildflowers on Cowinda’s dirt roads in spring. “It’s hard to cope with all t
his the first time. These people are in serious need of a life—and it seems it’s my life they want.” She tried to make a joke of it as Gil used to, but somehow it fell flat.
Maybe it was the look on Tal’s face. He seemed so cold and remote in the warm darkness, his face tense and brooding.
Stupid. Gil took a year to get used to this life enough to make jokes about it…and you’re still not comfortable with it. Sometimes she got scared that she never would be…that even the thrill of singing to thousands of people at once, and the joy of knowing people loved her songs, would become overshadowed by the constant intrusions into her life.
Tal spoke from where he sat half-sprawled in the corner of the limo, his voice as deep and quiet as the dark surrounding him. “How often do you let kids like Miguel get away with that?”
She jumped, startled out of her reverie, and sighed. “I don’t know.” Helplessly, she shrugged. “What do you do, Tal? They’re kids with stars in their eyes. They’re desperate to make it, and I think to myself, if the receptionist for my record label hadn’t been in the audience at the contest Gil entered me in—”
“Would it have been so bad?” he asked, still quiet. “Was your life so unhappy when you were a nurse? It was all you ever wanted once.” After his classic hesitation, he plunged in. “Are you happy with the life you have now? Does the smell of leather in these seats, the dresses and diamonds you wear, the jets and limos and all the adulation give you what you need? Because except when we’re alone together, I never see you smile with your eyes. I don’t hear you laugh from the heart.”
Damn that surgical knife of his, cutting away self-delusion to the truth beneath—reality with a cutting edge. “I was happy nursing, but winning the contest and recording Nobody’s Lolita changed my life. My career provides a cover that gives me access to inner circles. It allows me to perform covert ops for the Nighthawks that no one else can,” she said, her voice suddenly filled with intensity. “I play my part for regional peace, and I live a life most people only dream of. Why shouldn’t I be happy?”
Was it a trick of the night or did he move farther into the darkness? He was slipping away from her in more ways than just the physical… “You tell me, Mary-Anne. Do you ever play ‘what if it never happened?’ Do you like being Verity West? Do you feel happy—I mean, on a personal level—being a Nighthawk?”
The limo pulled up in front of the hotel and the unanswered questions hovered between them, underscored by the crowd of journalists waiting outside and the Nighthawks standing at the ready to escort them inside.
Tears rushed to her eyes. She turned her head away from the scene in front of her and Tal’s eyes probing her face in the dark. Maybe he was right, her life was all about other people—but wasn’t that a good thing? Why shouldn’t she be happy?
Are you? a little voice whispered. She tasted the vile metallic tang of blood in her mouth from where she’d clamped down on her lip too hard.
“So what’s the number for a celebrity in-scape?” Tal asked wryly. “Or are we inventing new numbers for this assignment?”
Taken off guard, she laughed and turned to him. “Want to make up a number for it? I think we’re up to seventy-five.”
“Seventy-five sounds good.” He touched her jaw, his eyes looking deep into hers. “Chin up, kid. We’re in this together.”
As always, his use of “kid”—the careless nickname he’d given her when someone had hurt or embarrassed her when they were children—warmed her. “Are we, still?” she whispered.
“You haven’t lost me yet.” He cupped her chin in his hand. “Just takes a little getting used to, this kind of mission…but man, it has its perks.” Leaning forward, he kissed her, a quick, hard thing that left her flushed and aching. “If Ghost thinks he’s putting surveillance in the bedroom, he’ll have a fight on his hands,” he muttered. “We’re not spending the whole time in the shower, hiding out from him. I want a bed, and the right to make love whenever and wherever we want to.”
“Within the bounds of decorum, of course,” she added, smiling up at him. Oh, how she was looking forward to their time on the yacht. She had a feeling that “whenever and wherever” would be constant, exciting and inventive… “Flipper may object to our using the engine room, or the cook might want the galley.”
“Yes, of course, dear,” he agreed, his eyes hot with promise. “Since Ghost threw his rules out the window on this, he’ll have to accept that we’re lovers for as long as this mission lasts.”
She felt her heart thud and boom against her chest at the stark pain his final four words invoked, but before she could answer, Braveheart had opened the passenger’s door and the unofficially numbered “celebrity in-scape” swung into motion.
Chapter 11
“Do you mind if I run for a while?” Mary-Anne asked the next day, as they walked along a blooming cliff path—Nick insisted the more exposure to the press right now, the better.
“Sorry,” Tal returned bluntly. “We’re on our honeymoon. It’ll look suspicious to anyone watching us if I don’t run with you.”
Stupid! She almost smacked her forehead. “I’m sorry, Tal. That was a dumb question.”
He shrugged. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry.”
The look on his face said it all. Making love added a layer of cosmetic work to his battered sense of self, but the self-disgust was still strong. The shoe insert and makeup he had to don each day were constant reminders that he’d never be the man he was two years ago.
“It’s only a run, Tal,” she said quietly. “There are more important things to worry about in the world than that.”
“Yeah.” His voice was stark. “Like saving people in need. Like hunting murderers on the run.”
“What part of that aren’t you doing? Joel St. Bremer is a boy in need. The men we’re hunting are murderers.” Feeling as if she was hitting her head against barricades of bricks, she went on doggedly. “You’re performing a vital work right now.”
“Yeah, with Nighthawks to protect me because I can’t protect myself.” He swept a hand at the men forming a barrier around them at a discreet distance. “I used to be one of them. One of the protectors. Now I need bodyguards.”
“You still are. What if that kid had had a real gun last night? You’d have saved my life.”
“But he didn’t. I panicked over a stupid tape recorder.”
“You panicked for me,” she said softly, “and you don’t know how much that means to me.” She held her breath, hoping that her words would penetrate the wall surrounding him.
He turned to her with sudden fierceness, gripping her hands, his eyes burning. “Next time I may not be fit or fast enough. I can’t run or carry you more than a few steps if you’re hurt. If my leg packs it in, you’d be the one carrying me. I’m a liability here. I’m putting you in danger by being here.”
Her eyes stung, but sympathy was useless: it would only cause his barriers to lift even higher. “We wouldn’t even be here but for you. Joel St. Bremer wouldn’t even have a chance but for you. You’re central to the whole assignment, and you’re taking bigger risks than the rest of us because of your injuries.”
“My risks are taken by all of us. You know none of the guys would leave me to die or get taken,” he muttered, his face dark. “I can’t carry my weight on any assignment, and you know that, too. I’m just window dressing to streamline your job, thanks to Ginny’s tabloid lies three years ago.”
“You’re the one who’ll be finding and saving the hostage,” she replied, feeling adrift in a turbulent sea of emotions. “And—is it so bad, being with me again, Tal? Even if it came about thanks to Ginny’s lies?”
“Bad?” He swore softly. The others melted into the background to give them space. He dragged her into his arms, holding her fiercely. His whole body was taut, wired. “Not you. Never you…”
She closed her eyes and leaned against him, and right now, it was enough. A memory to hold when he was gone again.
“I wa
sn’t talking about us,” he murmured, caressing her hair. “Three years after I got free, her revenge still affects what I do. Will she never stop manipulating my life with her lies?”
She gasped and blinked. Did he mean…? What was he saying…? Her stomach churned in time with the pounding of her heart. “She got away with lies before the tabloid stories?”
He wheeled away, looking over the knife-edged cliff to the brilliantine dapples of sunlight on the Mediterranean. “Yeah, and she got paid for it, too. Got paid real well.” He shoved his fists into his jeans’ pockets, every line of him tense, brooding.
Hesitantly she touched his shoulder. “Tal—”
“Dumb-arse jerk.” He leaned against a tree beside him, plucking off leaves and tearing them up. “I knew she was a liar. I knew she’d stop at nothing to get what she wanted—me on a platter—and still I believed her. I gave up my life for five bloody miserable years so she could play doctor’s wife, and it was just another one of her lies, orchestrated by Max to bring the poor farmer’s son to heel.”
The world suddenly spun slower, making her stagger. “She…she wasn’t pregnant?”
His laugh held no humor, a short bark of sound. “Well, if she was, it sure wasn’t mine.”
Putting a steadying hand out onto the tree trunk—for she’d swear later that the earth beneath her had just rocked—she frowned. “It…wasn’t yours?”
“Couldn’t have been, is the more correct term.” He threw a dark, intense glance over his shoulder at her. “She taunted me with it years later. She thought it was hilarious that a medical student not only didn’t ask to see the blood test results, but didn’t know when he’d done the deed or not. She climbed into bed with me when I’d passed out.”
Oh, dear God… She blinked, trying to reorient her mind. “So—you’re saying…you didn’t—”
“Not for want of trying, apparently, but no. I was out of it, dead drunk, and she couldn’t wake me. So she set the scene. I couldn’t remember anything the next morning but waking up with a massive hangover and her beside me in bed. And I fell for it.”
Can You Forget? Page 13
