Her Galahad

A wailing voice halted her flight at the base of the stairs. “Miss Honeycutt! Please! What can I say to him to keep him here? I’m not clever, like you. I can’t think what to say, and I—”

One minute. She turned on the babbling woman, holding her skinny shoulders. Human contact is nice to elderly people. She’s scared. Reassure her. “Just act normal, Mrs. Savage. Give him coffee. Talk about your life. Tell him I’ll be home soon. Tell him I’ve gone to one of my pupils’ houses after school, or there’s a Neighborhood Watch meeting you forgot about, or Amy’s day changed for art lessons. Make up something. Anything to keep him looking for me in Lynch Hill until tomorrow. Just don’t tell him I came home, or you told me he was here!” She released the woman, hoping to God she could trust her. She picked up her sack. “Please. I’m begging you. Tell him nothing.”

“Y-es.” Mrs. Savage nodded, her eyes still bewildered. “I—I—y-yes. I understand. I’ll do what I can to keep him here.”

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.”