Her Galahad

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 Marshall’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 ago.”

“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.”

She mopped the laughter-tears from her cheek. “Thank God we’re in the country—if we got pulled over for random breath test or speeding, and neither of us can say who we are!”

“Crazy,” he agreed, with a grin.

He could feel her eyes on him: her old, lynxlike gaze of unnerving honesty. “Duncan and Cameron did this to you, didn’t they? They set you up so Cameron could have me.”

He nodded, swamped by the magnitude of his relief. He’d half expected her to deny it all, dump him by the roadside when he told her what Beller and her brother had done to him. But with the integrity typical of the girl he’d known, she recognized the truth, no matter how tough it was to accept. The inescapable fact that she’d committed bigamy was the linchpin on which he’d based his hope, and he’d been right—helped along, no doubt, by the death certificate he didn’t know they’d given her.

That must be why Beller blew up the car today: to stop them from meeting and swapping stories—but the plan back-fired. Stupid jerk! He’d have been out of Tessa’s life forever by now if Beller had left his car alone.

He frowned. Beller had played a star part in his prosecution, and trying to prevent his parole; but it had been a respectable, plausible part. The fierceness of this sudden rampage—acting himself instead of using a hired goon, taking such risks—told him Beller was bloody scared. Scared of losing his life. Losing the support and admiration of Sydney society. Losing his wife.

This time, Beller would be out for blood. His blood.

He negotiated the rocky terrain of the untarred back road in silence, waiting for her to work out the rest. He knew she would. Tessa might be many things, but she wasn’t stupid.

She drew a deep breath, and said the words he’d expected. “When did they set all this up?”

“The cops arrested me on the way to your dad’s house.”

It had finally been spoken, her worst fear: the connection in time between the wedding and his arrest. Tessa slumped in her seat, reliving the slow horror of that morning.

The day after their secret marriage.

She’d had to come alone to tell her widowed father about her marriage to an Aboriginal carpenter. Only she could tell him that she, his most cherished and beloved child, had gone against his will in a way he’d never forgive. Keith Earldon, millionaire barrister, loving, overprotective father and inconspicuous racist always had, always would consider David Oliveri to be a man far beneath his daughter, in every possible way.

It was hard, so hard. She endured her father’s pleading, his recriminations and coldness; she even took his eventual disowning of her in unflinching silence. With tears streaming down her face she packed her bags, knowing this choice had been inevitable from the moment she met the man she loved. She dearly loved the father and brother who’d brought her up, but her heart belonged to David. They’d surely come around….

She’d stood outside the gates of the exclusive beachside acreage, waiting for her husband to come for her. Waiting with all the sweet confidence of young love. Waiting. And waiting.

And then the slow, chilling realization came creeping into her soul. David wasn’t coming to face her father with the reality of their marriage. He wasn’t here to take her away, to start their life together. He wasn’t coming for her at all.

She’d never forget the utter desolation of the next three days, the confusion, fear and unwanted sense of betrayal, not knowing what happened to the man she loved. Then Duncan told her about the fatal accident. “Baby, I’m so sorry,” her brother had murmured, rocking her while she sat stunned, silent, too empty to cry, the certificate held like a priceless treasure in her hand.

The certificate of death that was as fake as her brother’s sympathy for her.

“Like hell he was sorry,” she muttered. “He set it up. He handed me to Cameron like—like a human sacrifice.”

“Beller was in on it, as well,” he informed her grimly. “They were the star witnesses for the prosecution in my court case. I apparently robbed Beller’s apartment and hit him over the head with a crowbar. I got five years but made parole after three and a half for good behavior.”

“A-assault—with…?” She blinked, trying to clear the thick cloud of confusion dulling her brain. She looked at him—at his splendidly muscled body, then up to the face filled with dark, masculine strength, the single stud earring and the curly hair worn in the bead-banded ponytail he’d had when they were lovers. After all these years, his nearness could still draw her gaze to him like a magnet, fill her with a blooming of feminine warmth she thought she’d never know again. Even with the new lines on his face, and a slight hardness in his eyes, his face and body—his mere presence—still shook her as no other man ever had.

Strange to call a man beautiful, but it was the only word for Jirrah. Strong, masculine, with a dark male beauty beyond definition, beyond words.

He still looked the same.

Had he changed so much inside that he’d set up this whole insane scheme? Or had her own brother—maybe even her father—destroyed her life without a single twinge of conscience?

“Cameron came to see me after you, um, disappeared. He had stitches. He said he’d been attacked, that he’d pressed charges. That was you?” He nodded. “I don’t understand. With an alibi, and no eyewitnesses…surely they couldn’t frame you?”

He shrugged his shoulders—the broad, sculpted shoulders she’d once loved to touch. “They claimed I did it when I was waiting for you before our wedding, at the park. I was alone. And your brother was the ‘eyewitness’ to my crime,” he informed her, curt and clipped. “They found his stuff in my truck. My fingerprints were all over Beller’s place, and his things. They conned me into doing a job there the week before.”

Her voice shook as she asked; but she had to know the truth. “Did you ever see my father? Was he a part of this, as well?”

A little silence. “I haven’t seen your father since the week before our wedding.”

She hung on to the handle above the door as the van careered around a pothole, then up and over a gradient full of rocks. “But you suspect him. You’re so obsessed, you even think Dad broke the law to get rid of you! I understand why you suspect Duncan, but what did Dad ever do to hurt you? I know he thought you weren’t good enough for me because of your background—”

“Despite the fact that he married a woman who had a native Canadian background,” he put in. “Don’t you think it’s weird that he has such an aversion to having an Australian Aborigine in the family when he married a Canadian one?”

She frowned. “I—I don’t know. Dad and Duncan never speak about my mother.” Even now, she knew little about her mother apart from the words on the memorial stone in her father’s garden. Rachel Beckwith Earldon, beloved wife of Keith, loving mother to Duncan and Theresa. She knew nothing of her mother’s heritage. She’d only discovered Rachel’s family ties when Duncan lost his temper during a fight over her relationship with David.

Not David—Jirrah. This quiet, intense man, so focused on revenge, wasn’t David, the happy-go-lucky young man she’d loved. If his story was true, she wasn’t Theresa Beller, either. Her brother, a staunch upholder of the law, had committed a felony. As had Cameron, maybe even her father. Respected barristers were the real criminals. Jirrah, the ex-con, was an innocent man.

Was nothing as it appeared any more?

“Haven’t you ever wondered why they never talk about your mother, and her background?” Jirrah said quietly, interrupting her turbulent thoughts. “Haven’t you thought about why you had to find out about her the way you did?”

A fleeting memory of sobbing the sad little story in his arms crept into her mind. Then she swept it out. “No, I don’t, and right now I don’t care. Why do you want me to suspect my father? Do you honestly believe my whole family went to the crazy lengths of having you locked up just to get you away from me, or do you want to leave me with no one to believe in, no one who cares about me? Do you hate me that much?”

“We don’t have time for this right now,” he said through a clenched jaw, holding his temper with an obvious effort. “Let’s get to the house before we play Twenty Questions. I have some questions myself, as I said. But I can’t carry on an emotional argument while I’m trying to stop Beller from killing us!”