Her Galahad (6 page)

"Nothing I haven't seen or touched before," she retorted without thinking.

He looked at her—and she could barely breathe, reading the hot, urgent man's need in his eyes. She skittered farther across the floor. "Stupid comment," she mumbled through stiff lips.

After a long moment he nodded. Without looking at her again he headed for the bathroom. She fled to the kitchen, needing coffee to steady her nerves, and clear her turbulent confusion.

When he came back out, she almost spilled the hot coffee all over herself. Clad only in a towel, his dark coffee skin gleamed in the firelight, his wet hair dripped rivulets down his deep brown chest, broad shoulders and muscular arms, like hot sweat.

He walked straight past her, seeming completely unconscious of her fascinated gaze on his superb body—so superb it took her breath away even with the cuts and bruises marking it. "Sorry," he muttered as he passed, motioning to the towel, his nakedness beneath. "I should have picked up clean clothes from the bedroom first, but I was so tired I didn't think—" He turned at her continued silence. "Tess?" He made no movement, but somehow seemed closer by the power of the heat in his deep, dark eyes.

She lost the power to breathe. She returned his gaze, licking her upper lip in a fear that was paralyzing, yet delicious…

Like the first time she'd seen him.

Her lips parted, as the sweet rush of erotic memory filled her heart. Returning home from second-year exams at teacher's college. Attracted by the hammering and drilling, she'd walked around the corner of her house to the backyard. The carpenters her father had hired were tearing down the old gazebo to make way for a new one. Seeing Jirrah—David, as he was then—strip off his T-shirt and mop the sweat from his lithe, muscled body, she couldn't tear her gaze away, enthralled by an unfettered portrait of masculine beauty: a glistening sculpture of superb honed muscle and warm coffee skin. A purity of grace and perfection of form that could have belonged in Michelangelo's imagination.

Against her will, half terrified of shattering the moment, she'd kept walking to him, her heart pounding. She couldn't breathe, or think beyond reaching him. Nothing else had ever felt like this. No man, not even
Duncan
's friend Cameron, who was so handsome and so kind to her, had ever affected her this way.

He'd looked up as she reached him, with a quick half smile that froze on his face as he, too, stared. She saw then he was Aboriginal—or, judging by the lightness of his skin, of mixed Aboriginal-European descent; but her family's prejudice against the lower classes and indigenous Australians made no difference to her heart. She stood before him, struck almost dumb, drinking him into her heart with her wondering eyes.

"Hi," was all she could find to say, cursing her banal tongue for its stupidity; but he knew. He'd known from that first look all the need, the joy, the emotion in her heart she couldn't hide. She was his … and he was hers.

"Tess?"

She started to the present, and tore her eyes from him. "You must be starving. I'll serve dinner. Since I still can't cook, it's not much, just a canned stew on toast and coffee—"

"It'll be fine," he said quietly. "It's okay, Tess. I won't touch you."

The words dried on her tongue.

"I know," was all he said, his face filled with compassion. "How long have you been running from him? Did he hurt you?"

She stood frozen, rooted to the spot. Dear God, he was beautiful—but the gentle understanding and tender pity in his eyes seared her soul. Finally she turned away. "Don't be so nice to me. Compassion doesn't fit your new bad-boy image. It just makes me wonder when you'll tell me what else you want from me."

After a few moments' silence, she heard his rolling footsteps padding to the bedroom to dress.

* * *

Over the simple meal, she found herself blurting, "Why didn't you contact me from prison? Why didn't you write, or see me when you got out, if what you've told me is the truth?"

He looked up at the abrupt tone, his bruised face filled with shadows. "Don't ask the questions unless you're ready to hear the answers. They're not pretty."

She wouldn't turn away this time. She was tired of running and hiding and living in shadows. "I'm not stupid. Being brought up by banisters, you get to know the law reasonably well. With a criminal record you can verify your identity with fingerprints. Just by proving you're alive you can have Cameron and Duncan on charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and complicity in committing a felony—not to mention the bigamy. So if all you say is true, why didn't you do it?"

He looked in her eyes, biding nothing; and in the face that made her ache with its strong, dark masculinity, she saw years of festering hate and the ugliness of betrayal chilling his soul. "I don't think you want to know, Tessa."

She clenched her jaw. "Maybe not—but I
need
to know! You of all people should understand that."

He shrugged. "I have a family. Parents who are getting old. A brother with juvie priors. A sister with a troubled kid. A cousin who did two years in lockup for assault. They're making a success of their lives now, but that wouldn't mean squat to the cops if Beller and Duncan got up a conspiracy against them."

"Oh, dear God." She grabbed her glass of water, but gagged on the second swallow. "You must hate me for what they did to you."

He shrugged. "Let's
just say I've had a few doubts about your part in things since the day you slipped into the hardware store in Lynch Hill when a car pulled up behind you."

She lifted her face, searching for answers in his eyes.

He nodded, with a wry grimace. "Your face still gives you away every time. The fear in your eyes, the hollow look of a hunted woman, has stayed with me ever since.

"Is that why you watched me?"

He shrugged again. "I don't think I trusted my own instincts until you pulled the gun on me today. But when Beller torched my car, I started thinking. It's a pretty desperate act for a respectable guy like him. I thought maybe he wanted to stop me from getting to you, to stop us from getting together and talking. I needed to get out of Lynch Hill—and—well, someone had to look out for you, get you out of his reach, give you somewhere safe to stay."

She closed her eyes, feeling the trembling work its way up from her fingers and toes. "Why would you do that for me? You think I betrayed you. I saw it in your eyes all afternoon."

"Because I looked in
your
eyes, Tess. I could see what you tried to bide." His eyes glimmered, soft and tender. "I know how it feels to be hunted down like an animal. I've lived in a cage. I couldn't see it happen to you. I wouldn't hand a mongrel dog over to Beller, let alone a woman I'd once loved. I've been watching you for the past week, making sure you were safe at the school, getting home at night."

She almost laughed at the irony. A man who'd hated her for years was protecting her from the men who claimed to love her.

She swallowed a sense of bitter betrayal he didn't deserve.
A woman I'd once loved…

Of course he didn't love her now. Only a man as warped as Cameron could still love her—but Cameron loved a creature of his own imagination, a girl who'd never existed—not for him. She wasn't an innocent, trusting woman-child now, and she wanted nothing to do with that twisted emotion some people called
love.

I wanted Jirrah to touch me just then.

That was something she couldn't deny, much as she wanted to.

Her heart was a seething mass of longing and fear, guilt and anger, sadness and a deep, painful confusion. She couldn't sort out truth from lies until Jirrah proved his story to her.

Maybe I
don't
want to hear it. Maybe I just want to run and hide again, turn my face from truth. Weak fool…

She made herself smile, weak and shallow, an ineffective cover for the turbulence of emotions even she didn't understand. "Thank you, Jirrah, but what I need is the truth," she said in gentle, cool dismissal. "I don't need a hero for hire."

"What makes you think you can buy me?"

She stared at him, taken aback by his sudden burst of incomprehensible anger. "I didn't mean it like that—"

"Yes, you did. You meant exactly that." He shoved his plate away and got to his feet, his eyes glittering dark ice. "The high and mighty Theresa Earldon of the rich and powerful Earldons and Bellers, who think everything has a price—even justice, or a man's integrity."

At the contempt she didn't deserve, something sparked inside her. "You forgot one name in that pretty liturgy. Oliveri," she snapped. "I'm not and never was Theresa Beller. Like David Oliveri, she doesn't exist. So unless by some miracle you got a divorce without having me sign papers, I'm Tessa Oliveri, or McLaren, or whatever you call yourself now
—your wife.
And I don't buy anything I can't earn with my teacher's wage since Cameron froze my assets and took power of attorney." She turned to the wall, fighting the urge to heave. "So don't talk to me about buying justice. I've
been
bought, and I'm all too well aware of how powerless I am!"

Soft clapping made her start. She whirled around to face him. He was grinning. "Good girl. You worked it out. You've decided to trust me. Now we can move out of the past and go forward."

She frowned. "Why should you think I trust you?"

"Don't you?" He moved toward her. Fascinated by the look in his eyes, the hypnotic smile, she couldn't move. "I provoked you—deliberately riled you with that buying justice crack—and you snapped back. You knew I wouldn't hit you or hurt you." He took another step. Her limbs felt paralyzed; all she could do was move her tongue over dry lips, and watch him come. "You let me walk to you without shying back like a nervous filly. I've been watching you for a week. You back off from men, from fathers of kids or storekeepers." He squatted on his haunches before her. "I'm here in front of you, and there's wariness in your eyes, but no fear. Even with all he put you through, you know not all men are like him."

His fingers were a hair's breadth from hers.

"You said—go forward," she choked.

He nodded. "It's time, Tessa. The only way to go forward with our lives is to go back. We have to find out how your family did this to us, and how they managed to get away with it."

Something inside her turned cold and dull. "I see."

Jirrah saw the frozen darkness inside her, and knew he had the fight of his life on his hands, right here and now, to convince her he was right. "They destroyed our lives and got away with it. The only way to get our lives back is to take control."

She bit her lip. "You want your name back."

"I want my
life
back." He got to his feet and paced the room, feeling like a caged tiger. "I want my name cleared. I want my builder's license, and a driver's license with my real name on it. I want a home loan, a credit card, to buy and register a dog, put money in the bank—to live my life in peace without worrying about the deranged lunatic obsessed with my wife." Hearing her gasp, he turned to her with a wry smile. "You were right. We're still married. I never divorced you."

"Why not?" she whispered.

He saw the shaking she tried so hard to hide, and oh, God, it hurt. He wanted to hold her, give her the comfort he sensed she desperately needed; but a deep instinct told him she wasn't ready for touch. He wasn't sure he was, either, if his full-on hard reaction to her tending his cuts earlier was anything to go by. He'd better back off fast, unless of course he
wanted
to live in a permanent state of unfulfilled arousal, since it sure didn't look like Tess was going to let him touch her in a hurry.

So he answered in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could manage. "I never got the chance. I was in lockup, then legally dead. Bit hard to do much when you're dead, you know."