Can You Forget?

He’d given a quiet, unemotional promise to marry Ginny and left them to the champagne Max had brought—refusing to lie or to act happy about it—and he’d run to the tiny billabong, desperately needing comfort. Home from nursing college for the summer, Mary-Anne had come to him—but with tears streaming down her face for what they both knew would be their last time together.

“Ginny’s pregnant,” she’d cried, her pure, clear voice sweet even in her severe distress. “The whole town knows—and they’re all laughing at me. How could you? Why didn’t you make love to me? Why her? I thought…I thought—” She’d broken off then, her face ravaged and white, her eyes dark and burning.

He’d ached to comfort her…and to get comfort himself. Caught like an animal in a trap from one damn time he couldn’t remember. But he’d been in it then, for better or worse. Much worse. “I don’t love her. I—I don’t even like her,” he’d stuttered, desperately needing someone to talk to…aching to hold her, one last time…

“But you slept with her. You gave her your baby.” She’d flung off his touch, his pleading hands. “Go on then, marry her—have your baby—have a nice life with your skinny, pretty wife—but she’ll never love you the way I love you!”

The words he’d always longed for her to say as woman to man, said a day, a week, a year too late, while Ginny listened in from the shadows. Ginny, who’d thought she could cheat and lie to get him, and he’d love her anyway.

Ginny had made him pay for the love he’d only given to Mary-Anne. She and Max had made him pay every hell-filled day of the five years he’d been forced to stay with her, long after their mythical baby returned to the world of fairy tales and any real baby she might have had could have been any guy’s in town.

And Mary-Anne had disappeared into a fairy-tale ending. She’d hooked up to the stars, and dropped his Mary-Anne carelessly in some other galaxy where he’d never find her again.

As if dragged by magnets, he limped over to her now. “Well, I never thought I’d live to see this sight. Mary-Anne Poole is exercising of her own free will.”

“I didn’t lose those sixty pounds by crying in my coffee.” She turned her face to smile at him, sweet and unselfconscious. “And it’s rather hard to keep up a schedule of two hours of dancing and singing almost every night without some basic fitness skills.”

“I thought you famous pop-star types slept ’til midday.”

She smiled at that, too. “You’re still a farmer’s son, why shouldn’t I be a farmer’s daughter?” In a movement shimmering with tranquil beauty, she lifted her arms to a sky alight with the colors of sunrise. A gentle scent of rose and lavender floated to him, filling him with a sense of peace and rest.

“What are you doing?” he asked gruffly, gulping down a ball in his throat at the sight of her effortless grace, the fluid movements of her body. Oh, man, I’m losing it already…

“Tai chi. I finished my yoga a few minutes ago.” She sighed. “I feel like a sloth. I usually do an aerobic dance workout, run five kilometers and do an hour of weights, but I ‘officially’ have a throat infection, so I’m taking a week or two of R and R.”

He shook his head, laughing. “Mary-Anne Poole running five Ks every day and working weights. Is this the same girl who hid behind the equipment shed during phys ed?”

“No, it’s Verity West and Songbird.” Her tone measured, even. “I work out every day. I have to stay fit to keep my jobs.”

“And the jobs are so important to you?”

She gave him a look hard to interpret. “Verity West is my cover, like being a beach bum pilot was yours until you quit. I have to work hard at getting it right, but the life I lead for my cover is no less important to me than yours is to you.”

“Right. You lost the weight first. You were famous four years before you joined the Nighthawks, and you reveled in it!”

She didn’t blink at his knowledge of her life. “So you asked about me,” she said softly. “You found out about me after that day we passed each other in the hall at headquarters.”

He flushed. Had Anson told her about his attempted theft of her files, the suspensions he’d endured for refusing to drop what Anson called his obsession with her? Had she asked about him, or was the gnawing need for them to be together again only in his mind and heart? “Can you answer the question?”

“Fame was important once.” She swung her body around in another motion of unselfconscious confidence. So unlike the girl who hunched over to hide her breasts, walking with a shuffle, as if apologizing to the earth for being such an unwanted part of it. “I thought I’d feel better about myself, being accepted. But being chased and photographed by the press, or enduring endless speculations about my sex life—no, I don’t revel in it.” She shrugged. “I just wanted to be like everyone else.”

“Why?” To him, she’d always been a miracle, a true human in a world of wannabes. A girl who just loved him for what he was, in a town where everyone adored him in an awed manner as Cowinda’s sports star and valedictorian. In their anxious eyes, he was only as good as his next performance or exam result, his university entrance mark and the beautiful girl on his arm.

“Being normal has its merits, Tal.” She lunged down, her arms reaching out, fingers reaching to emptiness—but it didn’t seem to bother her, the emptiness. But she’d never had the emptiness inside, like him.

“Why are you here?” He had to end this farce, the pretense that they were still friends, soul mates—anything but the lovers he couldn’t stop aching for. “What does Anson want?”

“Are you sure you’re ready to hear it?”

He shrugged. “I know Anson. Always expect the unexpected.”

She scouted the area to be sure they were alone. Then she looked him in the eyes with her usual directness. “Here’s the deal. We have a whirlwind public courtship, then do a fake marriage ceremony in either Sydney or Cowinda within three days. Then we begin a European honeymoon where, under the cover of a happy couple, we investigate the activities of a black market arms dealer and an apparent houseguest wanted for murder.”

The world swung around him like her body in that Tai chi movement. Oh, man. Was this a twelve-year dream coming true or yet another king hit from life? Trying to reorient himself, he lifted his brows and sucked in a breath. “O-kay,” he said for the sake of saying something, vaguely proud of the fact that he hadn’t fallen over. Yet. “Why us?”

She gave him a resigned grin. “The tabloid stories Ginny sold. What else?”

He felt the flush creep up his neck. After he’d left her three years ago, Ginny had made a fortune by selling stories to TV, radio and the print media that her husband had taken the Iceberg’s virginity by a billabong. When the story grew cold, she’d added her belief that Mary-Anne was cold to all other men because she was still, and had always been, wildly, madly, deeply in love with Tal O’Rierdan—even when she was married to Gilbert West.

“But the stories are lies,” he argued.

“And no one knows that but you, me and Ginny,” she said quietly. “You and I won’t argue, and Ginny’s not likely to recant the story. Nick thinks we can use it to our advantage.”

He shook his head. “But it’s breaking all his you-can’t-know-your-fellow-operative rules—and it’s bloody dangerous for both of us. We know too much about each other—homes and families, our backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses. This is crazy. The mission had better be something right outside the box.”

“Um, you could say that.” She looked around the beach again, checked the path. When she spoke, it was low and urgent. “One of the Nighthawks is working with the arms dealer and his houseguest—an international criminal who’s out to destroy us. Operatives are dying or disappearing on the most basic missions. Some found alive were loaded with a chemical cocktail that left them with no memory of who they’ve been with or what they’d been doing. Top-secret information’s reaching the wrong people—stuff that could only come from a Nighthawk. It can’t be us, since you’ve been in hospital and here, and I was on the Blue Straits tour. Through a few loyalty tests, Nick’s narrowed the field down to three probabilities—Solomon, Angel and Jack.”

“I don’t know any of them,” he remarked, frowning.

“That’s why it has to be us. Neither of us has worked with them. They’re among the few who don’t know I’m a Nighthawk. If we go undercover to find the rogue, they won’t know who we are.”

Feeling as though she’d loaded him with some chemical cocktail that had robbed him of the ability to think, he rubbed his scar. “Why do we have to appear married? What’s the full deal?”

“Think about it. Verity West is the most famous iceberg since the one that sunk Titanic. ‘The woman so faithful to Gil West’s memory she lets no man touch her,’” she parroted, mimicking her press. “Taking a lover would bring on rumors and speculation that could blow my cover. But marrying my ‘first lover’ should be a reasonable marriage in the eyes of the world.”

“And?” he pressed, trying to focus on the mission rather than the old obsession with them finally becoming lovers—and the instinctive knowledge telling him they’d be lovers hotter and more eternal than the fires of hell, as infinitely beautiful and unforgettable as the gates of heaven.

“And anyone can check our supposed history. Ginny’s version of our hot little teenage affair is documented in a hundred places.” She shrugged, but the soft rose touching her cheek and throat told Tal that, if she didn’t want him now, she sure as hell had back then. Did she hate herself for loving him once or—yeah, right, O’Rierdan—was she hiding the fact that she wanted him still? “So we’re legitimate. Our marriage won’t be questioned, nor the fact that we’re hiding out for a honeymoon.”

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, just to fill the silence. For the sake of saying something because he could never say it, could never ask her… Will it be real, Mary-Anne? Will we be lovers, as we both wanted so badly to be, once? “I guess they’re right.”

She held herself tense for a moment before she relaxed. He could feel her palpable relief, but he didn’t know why. What had she been so afraid he’d ask her, or say? “The certificate looks so real it will pass any scrutiny. The registry will keep it on file for a month. The press won’t find the celebrant—Nick’s flying in some Nighthawk friend or relative. Not that we’ll ever know who she belongs to, or where she lives.” The ironic twist to her smile told him she found Anson’s never-know-your-fellow-operatives rule as frustrating as he always had.

“And after?” He watched her closely. “What happens after the mission? Taking a lover might destroy your cover—but so will the act of getting married again. Even if we make the breakup look realistic, it shoots your reputation to pieces. Imagine the tabloids. Verity West’s Marriage Fails After Only A Week.”

“I know.” She sighed. “This is the most vital mission we’ll ever do. If it has to be my last, it’s worth doing. It’s more important than my feelings or yours, or even the rules on secrecy between operatives. If the Nighthawks are destroyed—”

He tapped his foot. “I know the drill. I did the introduction course, too. Nighthawks come first or regional stability is in peril. Lives could be lost.”

Her eyes burned into his. “Why are you talking like you don’t care? You always cared too much before, taking stupid risks to save people! Flipper and Braveheart told me about the time you belayed down a two-hundred-foot cliff during a freak storm to save six kids on that island off East Timor. None of the others would touch it, not even Braveheart. You nearly died, yourself, you broke your shoulder and severed your Achilles tendon, and got a severe concussion, but you saved them!”

He flushed again, stuffing balled fists into his pockets. “The guys are exaggerating again.” And he hadn’t saved them all.

“Why, Tal?” she insisted, her face vivid, alive with her lifelong passion to help others. “Why don’t you care now?”

He turned away, fighting the old longing again. “You tend to get less emotional when you’ve become a statistic, too.”

“I don’t believe it!” she cried. “You know how many people died the night the grenade hit you—but do you know how many innocent Tumah-ra people lost their homes and families? They’re not statistics any more than you are. I was there before the war, gathering information—I knew their names, I’d been to their homes, ate and drank with them, cuddled their kids…and now they’re gone! I—” She choked and wheeled away, dashing at her face—and she gave a wobbly little hiccup of distress, one that melted his heart, that made him care, made him want to be something better. For her. And, if he was honest, for them: the faceless sufferers that his girl took into her heart and soul and made real to him.

He couldn’t stand there as she ached and cried for the fate of people she didn’t know. The statistics she made so real by her vividly stark words. “Mary-Anne?” He touched her shoulder.

“Linebacker died last week,” she muttered, scrubbing at her face. “Shot through the head at close range.”

He staggered back until he found something to lean on: a rough-hewn post on the beach path. “My God. Linebacker was twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. He was a real nice kid—”

“He was such a sweet boy. He wanted to save the world.” Tal watched her tears well up and overflow without shame: a purity of grief he’d always associated with her. “I don’t want anyone else to die, Tal—not if I can do anything to stop it. I know what these people are feeling—and I’d do anything to stop it. Anything.” Without warning she turned into his body, burrowing against him, gulping so hard he could almost feel it hurting her throat. “I’ve lost someone I loved so much I wanted to die…”

The unforgettable Gilbert West. She’d met the pathologist at her last teaching hospital before graduation. Gil had adored her from first sight, married her within six months and created the legendary singer-songwriter Verity West from the cripplingly shy Mary-Anne Poole, by the simple act of believing in her. He’d entered her in a contest where she’d sung the haunting “Farewell Innocence.” Within weeks a major recording label picked her up, and when her first album, Nobody’s Lolita, went triple platinum, Gil gave up his career to manage his wife, to be beside her through good times and bad. And he was, until the day he died.

No wonder she’d written the poignant hit, “Making Memories,” when they’d got the shocking diagnosis of Gil’s impending death from multiple, inoperable brain tumors. Gilbert West had made all her dreams come true.

And this was totally the wrong time to be reacting, burning with the feel of her breasts pushing against his chest, the soft mound of her femininity pushing against him as she cried. Can it, O’Rierdan. She wants comfort from an old friend, that’s all.

But his rock-hard mate inside his jeans didn’t have a conscience, just one hell of a long-denied need for her—and an intense instinct that he’d finally find his way home in her soft warmth, so close beneath those flimsy layers of clothes.

A couple of tourists emerged from their huts. Turning the scarred side of his face away, he watched from under the protection of his hat. Did they recognize the famous trademark hair and statuesque beauty of Verity West? Was that the Iceberg, burrowed into the body of some island hick?

He could see the headline: The Iceberg Melts On The Cripple.

The reality of their situation cooled his libido in an instant. He’d be damned if she’d have to face another sleazy tabloid headline because of him. “Let’s get out of here.”

She nodded as he snatched up the bag beside her towel, grabbed the tape deck and towel with it. “We don’t want tourists grabbing free Verity West souvenirs,” he said dryly.

He took her along the path to his plane’s steel hangar and, once inside, slammed the roller door behind them. “So you’d do anything to help those people—even marry me?”

Had she flushed again, or was the color rising in her cheeks because of the heat of the day? “If that’s what it takes, yes.” The huskiness in her voice lingered. With the gentle flush in the valley of her cleavage, it made a lethal chemical catalyst for his libido, sending it right back into hyperdrive.

“We’d have to make the marriage look like a real one in case any paparazzi break in,” he said bluntly, struggling to keep focused on the mission. “We can’t use two beds.”

“I know.” It might have been a trick of the light, but the rose in her face and throat seemed to deepen as she looked anywhere but at him. “It doesn’t have to be awkward, does it? We…we’ve slept together before.”

He chuckled. “Slept being the operative word, Mary-Anne. We were kids. We haven’t slept together since that night we camped by the billabong when I was sixteen—and I never touched you.”

“I know that,” she said—too quiet—and he wondered what was going on beneath the surface. Gentle, smiling, cool and calm one minute—erupting with mini explosions of passionate emotion the next. It was like playing Blind Man’s Bluff or Murder in the Dark. “We didn’t touch then, we won’t now.”

He wheeled around to look at the half-dark hangar wall, watching shadows of waving palms chasing each other through the window’s early morning light. “You might be able to control your passion for me, sweetness, but you’d better ask before you assume the same for me. I’m a man now, even if I don’t look like much of one—and I’ve still got a man’s needs.”

“I heard about your needs.” He jerked his head around to look at her. A flash of ancient pain, the sense of a wound too deep and raw to touch, crossed the banked fire in her eyes. Yet she met his gaze without flinching or apology. “Ginny made sure I knew all about those needs of yours. She gave me every detail.”

A helpless curse ripped from his throat, strangled fury that had nowhere to release. “Mary-Anne—”

“There’s no need.” Another careless shrug: a flimsy defense against this too intense conversation in a hangar that was way too hot, humid with diesel fuel, morning mist and late summer sun. She was all rosy now, flushed and damp, as if they’d spent the past hour— Oh, man, was he trying to kill himself? Why keep fantasizing about what he’d never have?

“What matters is stopping Darren Burstall and his rogue from taking down the Nighthawks one by one.”

He went totally still. Something cold and slimy touched him, slithering into his soul like hideous poison. “Burstall?”

She licked her upper lip, taking the sweat beading it, he noted absently. “Yes.”

“You’re telling me he’s not dead?” he muttered through stiff lips. “Anson left Burstall alive—and he didn’t tell me?”

“They chased him, but they had to save you, then he shot some villagers. They couldn’t leave innocent people there to die. Then Burstall hooked up with the rebels in Tumah-ra,” she sighed. “It seems he’s made interesting connections, rendering him useful to people Interpol would like to take down—people with billions in offshore accounts and vested interests in the oil off Tumah-ra’s shore. Too many reasons to keep those dumb rebel kids on the island rigged with weapons and stop the UN taking control.”

He barely heard her. Burstall was alive. Anson didn’t get him! Burstall was alive—the insane bastard lived and breathed, killing and maiming innocent people to feed his mania—and Tal’s rage, cold and flippant for so long, boiled over.

“Anson’s a noble, interfering, self-righteous jerk!” His fists slammed into the hot steel wall so hard it buckled outward and his knuckles scraped raw and bleeding. “Why the hell didn’t Anson tell me all this? Didn’t he know I’d want to go after him myself—and not just for me, but for what he did to Skydancer, Countrygirl and all the poor villagers he shot in Tumah-ra?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.” With folded arms, she watched him destroy the hangar wall, her high-lipped rose mouth rimmed with a touch of fastidious distaste.

“So the Iceberg’s wondering what sort of husband she’s got after the sainted Gilbert?” he sneered, baiting her. “Well, look on the bright side, sweetness—it’s all a game of pretend. You can dump me at the end of the mission, guilt-free.”

She didn’t bother to answer his taunts. Instead her lips curved in a slow smile. “I’ve got something more constructive for you to do than breaking walls, Tal,” she breathed, “and I think you’ll agree that it’s a lot more fun.”

She moved a step closer, her eyes dark and slumberous, her body radiant, as if in the afterglow of hours of scorching-hot lovemaking. “It’s something I want—something I wanted so badly for years—but I never found the courage to go after.”

Rage took wings as he watched her move toward him, her eyes alight, her mouth curved in promise. His heart slammed against his ribs. His head spun with the hope his body wouldn’t let him ignore. What was she saying—that for all those years, she wanted him…that even now, looking like he did, she’d—

Uh-huh. He got real turned on looking at himself in the mirror every day. Why wouldn’t she?

But the cynicism wouldn’t take hold. His man’s need, hot and hard and urgent, kept hammering at him, Do it, do it, do it. Ask her. Touch her. Take her. So many years wanting her, needing her, and she’s so close…so damn beautiful it hurts. Do it!

It almost killed him to speak, but he managed to say, “Well?” in a strangled croak.

She moved to him, step by slow, sultry step. She lifted her mouth to his ear and whispered, in the gentlest, most seductive of tones, “Revenge…”

Chapter 3

“I’m on. I’ll take Burstall down—for Linebacker’s sake, if nothing else.”

Mary-Anne—for though the rest of the world saw her as icy Verity West, she never had, could never think of herself as anything but plain old farm girl Mary-Anne—sighed in quiet relief at his words. She’d been pretty sure he was hooked even before she spoke Darren Burstall’s name—but it was hard, so hard, proposing this mission to Tal.

She couldn’t show him how she ached for him, that she had all the empathy in the world for his suffering. Growing up different, plain and overweight but with extraordinary talent, gave her some insight into how he must feel about his injuries. Golden-haired, olive-skinned Tal, handsome, athletic and brilliant, Cowinda’s pride and joy, must be chafing so hard against the physical restrictions he couldn’t change.

But the harsh, dark-souled man in front of her, so unlike the sweet, caring, tongue-tied boy he’d been, could still fire her rebellious body’s response to him like fast-melting honey…

With the exception of her poignant four years with Gil, she’d only ever wanted one man to be her lover—and if anything, his scars made her want Tal more. If he was less of an angel now, he was all male—all strong, dark, tense man. The brooding depth gave him a raw, pulsing sexuality that left her screaming for fulfillment. Tal was her sweetest taboo, the forbidden fruit: her best friend, confidant and rescuer too many times to count, pain and rejection and dark, hot temptation rolled into one man. Fantasy and reality in blue jeans and black T-shirt, his muscles bunching in riveting, superb maleness as he buckled the hangar walls with a punch.

How could she tame her heart or stop the midnight call of her body? Within a year of Gil’s death, the dreams she’d had of Tal all through her teen years started again—and all the guilt in the world couldn’t kill off the wanting. And five years later, Gil was a faint, sweet memory…and she called another name when she woke up at night in a sweat of fevered, aching need, after white-hot erotic dreams of the man she could never have.

“Okay, let’s get out of this sauna and make arrangements. I have the license. Nick faxed it to me last night,” she said crisply to hide her pounding heart and sweating palms.

“He always counts on getting his way,” was all he said. Then he gave her a curious look. “Nick? That’s…unusual. He’s always Ghost or Boss to the rest of us—or sir.”