Desire, lust. Muted, they were there, too, but they were only the faint light on the horizon next to the blaze of need that grew stronger with each moment he spent with her.
Lifting his head finally, he muttered, “We’re not done, Elly. You and I have unfinished business. Thisâ” he kissed her again quickly, tasting the softness of her mouth “âand the answers to those questions I asked earlier.”
“I know.” Resignation drained her of the color that had touched her cheeks briefly. “You’re right. We’re the eye of the storm. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But later.” Her glance at Tommy was significant.
“Yeah, later. For the next fifteen minutes, then, pretend I’m the love of your life and stick to me like shine on a mirror.”
“Tough job,” she retorted with a return to her usual mock-insults and an adoring tilt of her head. Her skin still looked skimmed milk pale. “Why are you the love of my life, 0 Wondrous One?”
“Because our job at the moment is to lose Mr. Tall, Dark and Ugly. Well, maybe not lose him and his buddy. Basically, we need to pretend nothing has changed, that we haven’t spotted them. We have to lull them into believing we’re as stupid as they think we are. Just until we can make plans and figure out what we’reâ”
“What’s this we, Kemo Sabe?” she asked with a faint smile, dredging up the punch line of an old, stupid joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto under attack by hostile warriors.
“We,” he underscored. “The three of us.”
“Maybe.” Nevertheless, she let her weight rest against him and slid her arm around his waist.
“Let’s go.” Trying to watch both thugs, Tommy and Elly, and slip through openings in the increasingly thick crowd all at the same time, Royal hustled Elly and Tommy away from the pavilion and down a packed-sawdust aisle. He hadn’t decided whether they should leave or wait for the cover darkness and the commotion the fireworks would provide.
Tommy tagged along at Elly’s side like a forlorn tugboat, and she curved into Royal so trustingly that Royal could almost believe her act was real.
Without Royal at Elly’s side, what would Tommy have done? He would have been terrified. Royal didn’t even want to consider what Elly’s stalkers would have done with her helpless and her son confused and frightened.
She needed him.
Tommy Lee needed him.
He’d never been anyone’s knight in shining armor before. That wasn’t his style.
But he found he wanted to be theirs, at least for a while.
For today, if not for tomorrow.
He wasn’t hero material. He’d already made mistakes, made decisions that affected Elly and her son, decisions that would make her despise him when she knew. And he would tell her. He had to.
The day of reckoning drew nearer with each passing hour, but for now, he was their only hope.
And that realization made him pity the woman in his arms. She deserved more than the husk that he was.
But he was all she had. Without him, she would be at the mercy of a cold-blooded killer.
And her ex-husband.
*
Chapter 10
« ^ »
Dust blew around her, into her nose, stung her eyes.
“We’re not going for the pony ride?” Tommy plucked at her skirt, and she looked at Royal, indecisive.
“Can we? Do we need to leave? Or stay?” She covered her face. “I can’t think. I can’t think!”
“Easy, sugar.” Royal’s palm slid under her hair, bumping against her hat. “Nothing’s going to happen here. For the time being, we’re safe unless we give ourselves away by letting our friends know we’ve spotted them.” He kneaded her nape, working down her shoulder, massaging out the knots in her muscles.
“Then what?” She let her head fall back against his palm, indulged herself and pretended for the moment that she wasn’t alone. Sometimes, pretending was all a woman had. “What happens when we leave this sanctuary?”
“Then we’ll use darkness to cover our behinds and give us some options.”
“We have options?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound as forlorn as Tommy. Royal’s touch drained her of resolution, weakened her because she wanted to believe in its solace. “We actually have some choices of what we’re going to do?”
His grin was daredevil brilliant, and the energy coming from him buzzed against her, exhausting. “Always, sugar. Until darkness, I don’t see any reason Tommy can’t ride the ponies. We can even go over to the ring and watch the bull rides. We’ll talk. We’ll figure out plans as we go. We’ll take it a step at a time now that you’re no longer in your elegant swoon. That suit you, Elly? Or do you have a better idea? I’m flexible.”
“I’m out of ideas.” Elly took a breath and tried to think. “I have my car. If I can get to it, I’m prepared.” With her car, she could go anywhere, become anyone within hours. He was right. She did have options. “I’ll go get the car.”
“I don’t think they’re going to let you do that, sugar.” His voice was terribly gentle.
“You’re right. They’re not going to let me run away again.” She was alone. That much she understood very clearly. Royal’s arm around her waist was an illusion. She couldn’t forget that fact. No matter how tempting it was to think she could depend on him, she couldn’t.
She couldn’t let herself trust the treacherous sweetness of his kisses, of his touch. She couldn’t let herself trust him.
She couldn’t trust anyone. Blake’s tentacles stretched far. His influence was too pervasive. Anyone could be an enemy. And those who weren’t, those who tried to help her, would be caught in the cross fire. Like Royal. Either way, she would be responsible.
She curled her fingers around his hand for an instant before lifting his arm. “Okay. I understand.”
“No, sweetheart, you don’t.” He cupped his hand over hers and drew her closer. “Smile, Elly. Remember, everything we do is being watched.”
She smiled with dry lips.
“Elly,” he said, turning her toward him and keeping Tommy between them, “I’m not going to walk away from you. I have a score to settle with these guys.” His smile glittered with menace.
“Because they beat you up.” She couldn’t swallow. All the danger she’d sensed behind his bright charm was there in full force, no longer hidden. She’d known he was dangerous. She’d had only a hint of the darkness in Royal Gaines. She was glad she wasn’t the object of that glittering smile. She was mortified to realize how grateful she was that his energies were directed against her enemies and not her.
“Take a breath, sweetheart. We’ll make plans.” He leaned forward and whispered into her ear, his breath raising the hairs along her arms and curling her toes. “We’ll make the bastards wish they’d never tangled with us.”
Again, that we. But there was no we. She couldn’t drag innocent people into the danger zone of her life. That would be unconscionable. She poked him in the ribs and wanted to grab him around the waist and beg. She didn’t. She’d learned the hard way: ask no quarter. She would handle whatever was coming. By herself. “This isn’t your problem, Royal.”
Ignoring her, he kept walking, shortening his long stride to match hers. “Now let’s stroll on toward the ponies and let Tommy forget what happened here a few minutes ago.”
“All right,” she said dully, defeated by his insistence on including himself in her disaster. She would answer Royal’s questions, and then he’d be gone. Risk taking might be part of his life’s blood, but even he wouldn’t think the odds were worth his life. But she was more grateful than she wanted to admit even to herself for his strength, for his knowledge today. He’d given her a chance. His skills had discovered their pursuer. Even as cautious as she was, she would have missed the men Blake had sent after her.
They would kill her when they were ready. And take Tommy back to Blake. She was now beginning to understand that she would never escape.
A scrap of Popsicle wrapp
er blew across her foot, stuck to the tongue of her shoe, and she stooped to pick the sticky scrap off. The temptation to sit there and never move again was so enormous that it frightened her. If she lost that stubborn, one - foot - in - front - of - the - other desire to keep moving, Blake would find her. If it weren’t for Tommy, she’d give up. She was so tired of running, of thinking and planning and never having a chance to let down her guard.
No matter what she did, Blake kept closing in on her, boxing her in, herding her into an increasingly narrow tunnel. How much longer could she keep going on like this? Her resources were dwindling.
And Tommy wasn’t a baby who could be carted around willy-nilly. He needed stability. Roots. He needed a home that would be there, not only from morning to night, but from month to month. Like Royal’s house, which melted into its environment as if it had always been there, peaceful. She couldn’t give Tommy that kind of security. That kind of peace. Not now.
Not while they were living on the run, changing homes every couple of months in the middle of the night, picking up and abandoning their few belongings in a moment of suspicionâthat was no life for him, for anyone. Even if she survived another year, Tommy had to start school. And each time she sent down roots, she established a paper trail that Blake could follow.
She almost welcomed a confrontation with her ex-husband. A confrontation would bring an end to this limbo of her existence.
And Tommy? Blake would have Tommy.
She would do anything to prevent that.
Straightening, she dropped the scrap into a trash barrel and kept walking, Royal beside her, keeping her aware of him, bumping his hip against hers. There, beside her, brushing her skin, her hair, with quick, skimming touches.
*
Pretending, creating an illusion for Tommy, she and Royal bought cotton candy. They bought hot dogs. Elly couldn’t eat hers. Her bottomless pit of a son gobbled his and begged for french fries. The three of them waited in line for the enormous Ferris wheel, which gave them a view over the whole fairgrounds and parking lot.
“I see the car. As far as I can tell, no one’s there right now.” Royal smiled. “Having fun, sweetheart?”
“Buckets.” Her knuckles were white on the bar holding them in. “I hate this.”
“I love it.” Royal’s grin was as brilliant as the fierce blue sky burning down on them.
“Me, too. I love it. Me and Royal love fairy wheels.” Tommy tried to lean over the metal bar.
Royal’s hand moved even faster than hers. “Sit.”
Tommy sat, his face glazed with mustard and happiness.
He rode the ponies. Five times, Elly and Royal circling the rink with him.
The three of them watched the grand finale of the parade, Tommy whooping and shrieking with all the other kids as the clowns pitched bags of red-and-blue candies toward them.
They were the image of a normal family in all the red, white and blue of the Fourth of July. Watching the spray of candies flying around them, Elly wished for one heart-filled moment that the illusion of normalcy was real. Candies sparkled in the air.
“I caught one, Royal,” Tommy screamed, clutching a white mesh bag in one fist while Royal kept a firm grip on the seat of Tommy’s shorts. “This is my very best day of my whole life.” The tag end of Tommy’s rib wrap hung below his shirt, and Elly refastened it as Tommy rattled the bag of candies in her face.
“Good hands, kid.”
“I was going to play Tee-ballâ” When Elly didn’t stop him, Tommy continued. “But ⦠we moved. Right, Mommy?”
“Right, honey. We moved.” She hugged him and kissed the tip of his nose, her heart splintering for her child.
As the evening shadows filtered over the fairgrounds through the tree branches, Elly noticed that Royal’s calculated route took them closer and closer to the parking lot, to the area where she’d left her car. Along the posts of the fence separating the parking area from the fairgrounds, strings of red, white and blue flags fluttered in the breeze, signaling an elusive coolness. The ripple and snap of the flags punctuated the increasing chaos and noise around her.
She would have preferred quiet.
Crowds were safer. She was pathetically relieved by the mass of people and their cheerful pandemonium.
Near the entrance to the ring where the bull riders and bronco-busters would perform, Royal stopped near a Sno-Kone stand and lifted Tommy back onto his shoulders. “I’m going to page Beau, Elly.”
“Beau?”
“Beau Bienvenue. A friend of mine from the old days in the department.”
Anxiety whipped through her. “Why are you going to call him?”
Increasing her apprehension, Royal didn’t answer immediately.
She hadn’t anticipated he would make a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and decide to involve the police in her affairs after all. Foolishly, she’d thought she’d escaped that trap last night. She’d miscalculated. “Are you calling him because of me and Tommy? If that’s the reason, forgetâ”
“Hold on, Elly. Keep our audience in mind. Don’t let them see you’re upset. Beau’s on duty today at the parade, not playing desk jockey, so I have to page him and wait for him to call me back. We need his help.”
“No. Absolutely not.” She started to walk away from him and came up short, stopped by his arm around her waist. “It’s too dangerous. You don’t know what’s going on. Who’s involved.”
His eyes narrowed. “I know these men are hired killers. I know we need Beau’s help if we’re going to get past them.”
“And you trust him?” She wrinkled her face in dismay. She hadn’t counted on having even more people involved.
“Completely.”
“I don’t know him. How can I trust him? Don’t bring him into this, Royal. I won’t let you.” She tried to pry his hand loose, but he’d wound his fingers into the fabric at her waist. Short of ripping off the skirt of her dress, she was effectively chained to him.
Studying her, his gaze lingering where her pulse beat furiously at her neck, he waited a long moment. “You trust Leesha, don’t you? Like I said earlier, you leave Tommy with her every day. As far as I can tell, you don’t leave him alone with anyone else. You consider her a safe person.”
“Of course I do. Otherwise, I’d never leave him at the center. What does that have to do with your policeman friend? Anyway, I thought you didn’t have any friends left on the force and that was why you didn’t want me to call the police last night.” Her words tumbled out as she felt the net closing around her. Blake had connections to the police. If the police knew where she was, Blake could, within hours. And she couldn’t get to her car. Her hands clenched, she covered her mouth to keep from screaming at Royal, to keep from terrifying her son still riding on Royal’s shoulders.
“Elly, listen to me.” Pulling her hands free, Royal covered them with his. Then, his voice empty of emotion, he spoke so calmly that he caught her frantic attention. “Leesha trusts Beau. She’s going to marry him once he figures out that Leesha is a long-term lady and not a weekend woman.”
“Terrific. I’m happy for both of them. But it doesn’t make any difference to me. In fact, that’s an even better reason for keeping them out of this mess.”
“I have three friends in my life, Elly. Leesha and Beau are two of them. Maggie Webster Barnett, my ex-fiancée and former partner, is the other. I trust them with my life.”
“That’s your decision. Not mine.” The thought of Royal with a fiancée gave her a pang, a small, unexpected hurt. “But I can’t trust them. I don’t want them involved in what’s happening.”
He reached down and brushed her hair away from her face, his warm palm cupping her cheek and soothing her alarm. “Elly, whether these men following us make their move against us tonight or tomorrow isn’t the issue. They’re coming after us, sooner or later. We have a better chance if we set the time and place. We can’t do that without help. I don’t like asking for help, either. But we
have to. Without some help, we’re going to be real big newspaper headlines real fast. Because these men will find us. Or someone like them will. Someone we’re not prepared for until he rises up out of the dark to ambush us. I don’t want Tommy there when that happens. You don’t, either.”
“No,” she whispered, defeated. “I wouldn’t want Tommy to see that. It wouldâ But asking for help? Involving all these people I don’t know? Who don’t know me?” She was losing control. Royal was forcing her to trust him and his friends. To keep Tommy from being caught in the middle of a firestorm, she had to reach out to these strangers. Frustration raged through her. All her decisions were being removed, one by one. Anger pitching her voice higher than she wanted, she said, “Call your friend, Royal. Do what you have to do.”
He brushed his hand lightly along her cheek. “I’m not trying to force you into anything. But we have a problem. To me, this is the best way to deal with it for both of us. But it’s your decision.”
It wasn’t, and they both knew it. Events were propelling them past the boundaries of choices and decisions.
“You’re hustling me.” She pushed his hand away. “And I don’t like it. Everything’s being taken away from me, and I’m this puppet thing controlled by an unseen hand.”
As if they had all the time in the world to debate the issue, he smiled. “Okay. I get the picture.” He shrugged, but she knew him well enough now to read the lines of tension at the corners of his mouth. “What do you want to do?”
There was an enormous impulse to walk away from him, walk past the men who’d been following her for God only knew how long, and walk to her car as if her life were normal. By pricking the balloon of her anger, Royal had given her the illusion that she had to make some of the decisions, that she was more than that puppet she felt like. “At least you have a plan. I don’t. Make the call.”
“We’ll get a Sno-Kone first. We’re in no hurry, right, Tommy?” Royal glanced up at Tommy. “It’s the Fourth of July. We’re celebrating.” His warning gaze was for her as he lowered Tommy to the ground.
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