The Stealth Commandos Trilogy (65 page)

Randy began to cry all over again.

The alley opened onto a side street. Stopping to catch her breath, she lifted her veil and flung it back over her headpiece. She wiped at her eyes, undoubtedly smearing her makeup into a hopeless mess. But before she could get the flow of tears stemmed, she heard a frighteningly familiar sound—the rolling thunder of a big motorcycle.

“On, no,” she moaned, refusing to look up for a moment.

The thunder came to a stop across the street from her, and when she finally brought her head up, she saw exactly what she’d been dreading. Geoff Dias was standing there, leaning against his parked Harley and gazing at her intently, his arms casually folded. “I guess I missed the wedding,” he observed.

“That makes two of us.” Randy gathered up her skirts and turned around, heading back down the alley. She was in no shape to deal with him now! How had he found her, anyway? He must have been following her, lying in wait. After the way they’d parted company in Rio, it wouldn’t have surprised her if he’d come to gloat over her misfortune.

She heard the roar of the Harley’s engine behind her as she walked down the alley. The point was he
had
found her, and he wasn’t the type who was discouraged easily.

He rolled up alongside her on the bike, dogging her unsteady footsteps. “Why the tears?” he asked, throttling the engine down.

“Because I just walked out of my own wedding, that’s why! There! Are you happy? I didn’t marry Mr. Fortune Five Hundred.”

“As a matter of fact, I am happy. Why don’t you get on the bike, Randy? We need to talk.”

“No!”

“I’m not going anywhere until we do.”

As they continued down the alley, she in a tearstained wedding gown, he on a massive motorcycle, she was aware of how similar this situation was to the first time they met. She was reasonably sure he’d noticed it too.

“Are you going to stop and talk?” he pressed.

Randy hushed him, realizing they were nearing the circle of little girls, all of whom were watching them, wide-eyed with interest.

“Are you going to marry
him
, lady?” one of them asked, gazing up at Geoff with wonder in her eyes. Randy knew just how the child felt, but she wasn’t about to admit it.

“No,” Randy assured her, “I most certainly am not.”

A redheaded moppet with a squeaky voice jumped up and offered her doll, outfitted in a wedding dress. “If she doesn’t want to marry you, mister, my Dream Bride Barbie will!”

“Well, thank you, sweetheart,” Geoff said. “That’s real tempting, but”—he indicated Randy with an offhand grin—“this one’s got my heart.”

“Too bad for you,” the redhead commiserated. “She looks kinda mean.”

Geoff exhaled a gust of laughter. “Treat me right,” he told Randy under his breath. “You have a competitor for my affections.”

Randy stared at him in shock, missing the humor altogether. What was that thing he’d said about having his heart?

He revved the bike’s engine until it roared, then spun around in front of her. “Get on the bike. Randy,” he said softly.

“No, thank you.”

“
Get on the bike
.”

Randy glanced at the little girls, aware of their rapt anticipation. Their hushed excitement echoed her own, she realized. Why was her heart pounding? And why did this feel like one of the single most frightening moments of her life? She could have been drinking champagne at a fabulous reception by now!

With the craziest feeling that she didn’t want to disappoint the redheaded moppet with the bride doll. Randy gathered up her skirts and got on the bike behind Geoff. The girls gasped in concert, and she could hear their squeals above the roar of the engine as the Harley sped off.

“Where are we going?” she called out, taffeta bunched up to her chin as she clung to Geoff’s denim jacket.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said.

They swooped down a freeway exit, flew through the tree-lined streets of exclusive San Marino and on into the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains before Geoff slowed the motorcycle. Randy was more than curious as he pulled onto the grounds of an estate that had gone badly to seed. The grass was a foot high, the rose gardens overgrown, and the main house, a once-stately English Tudor with turrets and shuttered windows, was in a state of terrible disrepair.

Geoff parked the bike in the driveway of a small stone house just behind the mansion. “The caretaker’s cottage,” he told Randy, helping her off the passenger seat.

“Who lives here?” she asked, following him to the door.

“Nobody has in a couple of years.” He took a key from under a clay pot on the steps, unlocked the front door, and waved her inside. “I was the last tenant.”

“You?” She stepped into the cottage, squinting to see in the darkness. She could make out some furniture with dust covers, but little else.

As Geoff moved around the room, opening the shuttered windows and letting the sunlight pour in, Randy saw an image that astonished her. On the wall opposite her was a picture of someone familiar. Thinking her eyes were playing tricks on her again, she blinked to clear her vision. That’s when she realized the entire wall was a gallery of women in various poses, some of them erotic, all of them beautiful ... all of them her.

“What is this?” she asked, barely able to speak. The words floated out of her, as light and dizzy as she was.

“Somebody I met once.” He stood back, as if wanting to give her some space. “A gypsy bride.”

“You did this, all of them?”

He nodded. “I’m the tormented artist. I had nothing else to remember you by,” he said, his voice going husky. “Nothing but the images in my head. At first I thought I could release them that way, exorcise them by getting them on paper, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked.”

Something strange was happening to Randy’s heart. It had been going too fast before, but now it was slowing, hardening, hurting, as if in anticipation of some future disaster. She knew what was happening to her. She just couldn’t believe it. She was falling—no,
plummeting
—for a mercenary soldier with holes in his pants. For a biker! Oh, Edna!

Randy’s heartstrings pulled even tighter as she caught a flash of sweet, sexy need in Geoff’s eyes. Why was he looking at her that way? As if he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her tight. As if his heart was hurting too.

She turned back to the gallery, searching for something that would release her from the turmoil that was building inside her. But just as the artwork hadn’t released him, it couldn’t free her either. They were images of a woman who was frightened and rebellious, a woman who was fiery and sad and love-be-damned angry. He had caught every angle, revealing things about her she barely knew herself ... the heartbroken bride, the yearning child who’d always wanted a shiny swing set. He had touched the soul of Randy Witherspoon—sad child, proud woman, survivor.

“I love you, Randy,” he said softly. “I do, baby.”

“Oh, Geoff—” She turned to him, tears welling, silently pleading with him
not
to love her,
not to make her love him
.

The anguish she felt was filling her heart with choked pain. “What will become of me?” she asked. “I don’t want to live like Edna—all those men leaving her, longing for something she never got—and I don’t want to die like her either.”

“You’re not Edna, Randy. And I’m not all those men.”

Randy could hear herself breathing, raspy, aching. She could hear him breathing, too, and hardly knew which was which—his breath or hers?

“Let go of the past, Randy,” he urged. “It’s Edna’s past you’re clinging to, it’s Edna’s dream. Let go of all that and deal with what’s happening here, now. Deal with us.”

She shook her head, laughing sadly, torn. A biker? One of Edna’s men? This was too crazy to be believed. She could hear his voice echoing in her head, the incredible things he said to her that night in the alley in Rio.
The “baby” on my bike is singular. It’s you. Randy. Baby, it’s you
.

“What do you want, gypsy?” he asked. “Who do you want?”

A terrible, aching lump closed her throat as she looked up at him and nodded. “You.” It was a commitment that both freed her and paralyzed her with fear, an acknowledgment that she was going to risk it all. She shuddered as he started toward her.

“You aren’t going to break my heart, are you, Geoff?” she asked brokenly, smiling through the tears that washed her face. “You aren’t going to love me and leave me?”

He pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, his heart hammering against hers. “No, baby, no,” he said, pressing his lips to her hair, cradling her against him with a tenderness that must have sprung from the pain of his own needs. “I’m not going to do any of those things,” he promised. “I’ve been loving you too long for that.”

He held her for a long time, just held her, both of them seeming to need that kind of comfort. Finally he turned her face up and brushed her lips with the warmth of his.

She moaned with the sweetness of it. And then the tender touches of his mouth deepened to a kiss that burned with passion and promise. It held the startlement of sudden love and the harsh, sweet truth of dreams ... their dreams?

When Randy opened her eyes and looked up at him, she saw so many things that she had never allowed herself to acknowledge before. He was a good man, even a gentle man. He had the sensitivity of an artist and the honesty and integrity to live a life based on his own beliefs and convictions. Biker or not, he was a better man than Hugh, she realized, surprised that she’d been so blinded by her need to see people as she believed them to be, rather than who they actually were.

“I love you,” she said, barely able to get the words out.

He laughed. “Don’t make it sound so painful.”

“It is ... I’m so frightened.”

“Then that makes two of us.”

Another myth exploded, she realized, gazing into his eyes. Geoff Dias could be frightened. He was as fearful of opening his heart to her as she was to him, as eager to be accepted and loved for who he was.
Edna, I’ve found him
, she thought, tears burning her eyelids.
I’ve found the prince
.

Her welling tears spilled over, flooding his fingers as he tried to dry them. “I love you,” she told him again, and this time the words ached with heartfelt conviction.

Moments later, with a shaky sigh, she turned in his arms, needing to look at the pictures again, to drink in their moody brush strokes and dreamy eroticism. “I haunted you so much that you had to paint me?” she asked him, still not quite able to believe it. “Over and over again? That’s terribly romantic.”

“That’s me,” he laughed, “a terribly romantic guy.”

They were silent for a while, holding each other, reminded of their past by its evidence on the wall ... until he released her and walked to one of the cottage windows. “Come here,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’ve got something else to show you.”

Randy knew what he was going to say even before she joined him. “This is yours, isn’t it?” she asked him, looking out at the neglected grounds and the Tudor mansion.

“It’s mine now. My parents left it to me.”

Sensing his reluctance to talk about what had happened, she turned her attention back to the window. “If you’d rather not, Geoff—”

“No, I want to ... but prepare yourself. It gets pretty ugly.” He drew her close, pulling her into the crook of his arm as he stared out the window. “My father committed suicide when I was sixteen. He was a partner in a Wall Street brokerage, and he got embroiled in a financial scandal before those things were fashionable. He was too proud to go to prison, too proud to do anything but put a gun to his head, apparently.”

“Oh, Geoff, I’m sorry.”

He nodded as if to say it was all right. “My mother never recovered,” he told her after a space of silence. “Two months later, she was dead too. An overdose of sleeping pills. The doctors said it was accidental, but I knew she didn’t want to live without him. They were that close. Sometimes even I felt like an intruder.”

Randy laid her hand over his and looked up at him. “What did you do?”

“I lived with an uncle for a while, finished high school, even gave college a shot. My father’s family was originally from northern Spain. They came here dirt-poor, with nothing to their names but their belief in the American dream. They made their fortune here, so naturally, I was expected to restore the family’s honor, carry on the proud tradition. They’d assumed I’d become a broker, or if not that, a lawyer. Maybe even a hotel magnate, like Hugh.”

She was beginning to understand his antipathy toward the things she’d wanted desperately, and especially toward her former fiancé.

“Not everyone gets an up-close and personal look at the dark side of material success,” he explained. “I saw how wealth bred the desire for more to the point that even a man like my father could become corrupted. It wasn’t his sense of honor that killed him, it was shame. In his suicide note he admitted he was guilty of everything he’d been accused of.”

Geoff exhaled heavily. “So I said to hell with it all and joined the Marines.”

She turned in his arms to face him, wishing she knew how to convey the compassion she felt. “I’m sorry, Geoff. That must have been terrible for you, to lose your parents, to lose everything.”

“It was rough,” he admitted. “I was a big, strapping kid, but I
was
a kid, and it hurt like hell.”

He kissed her lightly as if to assure her that time had healed the wounds, that he was okay now. “There’s just one thing you need to understand. I didn’t lose everything. There’s still a lot of money involved. It’s being managed by attorneys, held in trust ... for me.”

“For you? A lot of money? You’re—”

“Rich, I think you could say.” He grimaced. “Filthy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would you have done if I had? I didn’t want to have to compete with that dream of yours. Or to be put in the position of having to outbid Hugh for your affections.”

The man had a point, she admitted. Being Hugh’s wife had become an obsession. He’d been her fantasy of the perfect man, the answer to all her fears and insecurities. She had come terrifyingly close to marrying him as it was. Her only regret was that it had taken her so long to see the mistake she was making, and that she’d had to hurt Hugh before it was over. She regretted that deeply.