Her Galahad (32 page)

"I have clothes at Mrs. Savage's. You can pick me up there in the morning."

He swung around to her. The quiet restraint in her voice, the stiffness of her presented back, warned him something was very wrong. "You can't stay there. She can't protect you from Beller. He knows where you lived before—and if he knows where Tani is—"

"Oh, that's right. It's always for me." She swung around to face him, hands on hips, legs akimbo. "You're always putting me first. My protector. My dark knight." Her face was white, her eyes blazing. "Well, I don't
need
you to arrange my life."

"What in tarnation are you talking about?" he demanded. "All I did was get a room—"

"You told John Sutherland we're married!"

He blinked, then burst out laughing. "I've never heard a woman accuse a man of destroying her reputation by telling people they were married! Skewed logic, or what? I mean, so what if I did tell them? It's the truth. We
are
married!"

"And the news will be around town by tomorrow that the local teacher's married—how long do you think it will take for Tani to find out? Why did you do that?" she cried, her voice throbbing in passionate emotion. "How could you
do
that to your daughter?"

He scratched his head. "Why not? How can it possibly hurt Tani to know her parents are married?"

"What if she wonders why married people gave her up? And what if she expects us to stay married? Sooner or later she'll find out we're getting a divorce. She's already lost one set of parents!" Her voice broke. "How could you do that to her?"

"Divorce." The breath whooshed out of him. He grabbed her arms to stop himself from falling. "You want to divorce me?"

She jerked out of his hold. "You'll be the one to divorce me."

"No." He kept his distance, but held her gaze, trying to show her he was sincere. "I don't want a divorce."

"Not now—not yet," she muttered, shaking him off. "But when you meet the right woman—"

"I met the right woman seven years ago," he answered, just as low. "I married her a year later." He reached out to her, but her shuttered expression held him back. "I lost you for six years, Tess, but I never forgot you. Never stopped wanting you, or—"

She put up a hand—and the terror in her eyes halted the words about to burst from him. "Don't," she mumbled, her voice shaking. "Don't say things you'll regret later."

"I can't regret the truth. I'll be damned if I'll leave it like this. I love you, Tess! I always have. I always will."

"No—no," she muttered, her face white, her eyes shattered. "Don't say that. You'll get over it one day."

"No," he replied strongly. If he knew anything, it was this. "If in the six years we were apart I never stopped loving you—even believing you'd betrayed me—do you honestly think I will now? I'm going to love you the rest of my life."

A tiny silence, as if she was thinking it through. Then she did a total about-face on him. "I see. You always loved me," she sneered, her tone cold enough to freeze him. "And no doubt that explains why you moved in with Belinda and got her pregnant after you knew I'd left Cameron—when you knew we were both free!"

Belinda.

The shock hit him, the twin waves of guilt and regret. The torn loyalties that had, until now, kept his lips sealed. He wouldn't speak now, if anyone but Tess had asked. She was the only one who needed to know about Belinda. He'd never break her barriers without telling her the whole, sorry mess of what he did to an innocent woman.

He wheeled away, looking out the window to the dark, unlit street, feeling the velvet darkness envelop him. "I met Belinda a week after I left lockup," he muttered jerkily, feeling as if he was betraying a dead woman, the mother of his son. "I'd already been to your place—Sam got the address for me against his will—and I knew you were gone. I had nothing, Tess. No money beyond the couple of hundred the Government gave me on parole, no one who wanted to help me find you. I was legally dead. I couldn't get assistance anywhere. My family said if I was going to keep up what they called my stupid obsession over you, to go it alone. I couldn't get work. No one would take me on without my carpenter's license. If Earldon and Beller wanted to beat me down, it looked like they'd won. I didn't know what to do." He leaned against the window, drawing in deep, ragged breaths. "So I walked into a pub and got drunk. Crazy, roaring drunk. I fell off the stool at closing time." He leaned against the window, drawing in deep, ragged breaths. "Belinda was a barmaid there. She told me to go home. I told her I had no home. I think she took pity on me. She took me home." Leaning on the windowpane, he passed a tired hand over his brow, wishing it all could be left unsaid. "I apparently talked all the way to her place. She said I needed comfort—and she comforted me. I was desperate enough to take it."

A dog barked in the silence. Tess didn't speak.

After a while, he went on. "I stayed. I had nowhere else to go, nothing to do. I didn't go back to the pub. I started fixing up her house to thank her for putting up with me. I worked night and day, avoiding her when I could, talking like a maniac when I couldn't. I didn't sleep with her again for a long time. She was—kind to me. I didn't want to use her, especially after I met my agent through her cousin Peter—he's an artist. Pete saw me carving your Dad's eagle from a spare piece of wood I'd hauled from the council dump to fix a door, and Dolphin Art was born. I thanked her for everything, and packed to move out." He felt Ike a traitor as he blurted, "Then she told me she was pregnant."

The deep quiet of the night laid over them like a blanket, punctuated by the occasional laughter of people leaving the pub beneath them. "So you stayed."

"I couldn't marry her. Staying was the only thing I could think to do for her."

"You cared about her."

He shrugged. "She was good to me. She was having my child."

"So you made love to her, then?"

He looked around, and saw no pain or anger, only the shimmer of gentle acceptance in her eyes. "Yes," he rasped.

"She loved you, didn't she?"

He closed his eyes and grated the word out, as if his throat were filled with sandpaper. "Yes."

"But you wished she didn't love you so much," Tess said softly. "You wished she'd blame you or hate you—even hit you. Then you could walk out without guilt."

As if she'd pressed a button, a bottled-up weight released itself, lashing at him with relentless force. All he could say was, "Yes."

"If she'd hated you, if you could have looked in her eyes and not seen that love—but that
need
in her always made you guilty. Because no matter how hard you tried, no matter what she gave you or said or did or hoped, you just couldn't love her. So you stayed and made love to her, even if you had to force yourself to do it because you had to give her something back."

Beyond words now, he nodded. Ah, God, those memories hurt—seeing the despairing love in Belinda's eyes as she lay dying…

"What happened to her?"

He forced the words out. "She had the baby. We called him Michael. I gave him the name Kalkara—'storm bird'—because he was born in a horrendous storm. The car flooded. I delivered him before the ambulance could get there. He was beautiful, and she was happy—for a little while. I thought we'd be okay. Then she got postnatal depression. She couldn't handle me being near her. She hated that I loved the baby, and not her. She'd tell me to get out, then she'd cry and beg me to stay. I hated myself for it, but I couldn't make myself lie to her. I told her I cared, I loved her, but it wasn't the love she wanted. She threw me out again one day, and I cracked. I started walking, not to leave for good, but just for an hour of peace. She chased me, the baby in the pram, crying and yelling for me to come back." His voice broke. "The car came out of nowhere, ran her down and kept going. The cops found the burned-out shell the next day. It was stolen by a fifteen-year-old kid high on amphetamines the morning it hit her." He shuddered. "All I could do was hold her as she died."

The warm softness of her body filled his back as her arms slid around his waist from behind. "So that's why you couldn't stand being in Sydney after she died," she murmured.

He nodded, drowning in the waves of shame washing over his soul, the never-ending regret for what he couldn't change.

"So you did understand my cage. I'm sorry I yelled at you the other night."

He leaned back into her, needing her warmth, her generous heart, her healing touch. "It's okay. I knew why you did it."

She laid her cheek on the back of his shoulder. "I don't understand why you don't hate me. It all comes back to me."

He lifted one of her hands to his mouth, caressing it with lingering sweetness. "I love you, Tess. I can't help it. Even when I wanted to stop, I had no choice. You took my heart the moment I saw you, and I never found a way to get it back."

Her arms tightened around him, until he couldn't feel a part of him not filled with her. "I wish you didn't," she whispered.

Jagged pain ripped him open. "So you want me to find someone else?" he asked huskily. "You want me to share my life with another woman, making love to her, letting her touch my body?"

He felt the shudder rip all the way through her. "Yes," she cried out, harsh, strangled.

"You're lying, Tess." He kissed her hand. "You can't stand the idea of me loving another woman any more than I can stand you being with another man without wanting to kill him. We belong together. Why are you denying it?"

"No," she cried, just as she'd cried "yes" moments before—as if her will fought her heart, her voice crying out the opposite of what she really wanted. "Stop pushing me, Jirrah."

"Don't go," he said quietly, just managing not to beg. "Your family's safe, Tess. They won't do time for what they've done, because I didn't force the issue. Do you still hold what I've done against me?"

She moved her cheek against his shoulder. "I can't blame you for anything you've done. I'm grateful you haven't gone for revenge, especially against Dad."

"Do you wish it all undone? Do you wish we'd never met again, or that none of this happened?"

"No," she murmured, holding him close. "It hurts. It will always hurt, what they did to us, but I don't want it undone. I'm glad we've had this time together."

"It doesn't have to end."

The shuddering breath she took hurt him. "Please don't make this harder for me."

He turned to face her, still in her arms. He cupped her face in his hands, looking into her eyes, scared spitless but needing to know the truth. "Are you saying you don't love me?"

A tiny cry tore from her throat. She hid her face on his chest. "You don't understand," she whispered.

"No, it's you who doesn't understand." He lifted her face, streaked with tears, to his. "I
love
you, Tess. You're all I'll ever want, all I'll ever need. I thought I was finished as a man. I thought what they'd done—losing you and Tani, what happened to me in lockup, and my time with Belinda—had warped me so bad I'd never be normal again. But in five days you turned me into a man again … the man I want to be."

She swayed, her face white. "No. I've done nothing. You—you've been healing me…"

He nodded, his thumbs caressing her jaw. "After all you'd been through because of me, I owed it to you to heal you of your hurts, thinking I'd never have healing for myself—but I forgot the power of your unspoken magic. In a single night, with a few words, you took my pain and threw it to the sky. With a single touch you took the filth in my soul and washed it clean. With your quiet faith and unflinching support of what I've been doing against your own family, you gave me back a belief in unselfish giving. You think I healed you—but you remade me. My bitterness is gone, my anger a thing of the past. Because of you."

"I'm glad I could help." Her voice wobbled. "I'm glad I gave something back. We both have good memories of our time together."