Her Galahad (4 page)

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 Marshal'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 go."

"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 he why Beller blew up the car today: to stop them from meeting and swapping stories—but the plan backfired. Stupid jerk! He'd have been out of Tessa's life forever by now if Beller bad 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?