The Bride and the Mercenary Page 21

  “You’re wrong! You have to be.” She couldn’t allow him to go to his death believing that, Ainslie thought sharply. She stopped and turned to him, her body rigid and her hands clenched at her sides.

  “You didn’t kill Mocamba. I don’t care what proof you think you have—you couldn’t have killed him. I know you better than you know yourself, Malone, just as you always knew me better than I did. You’re the man I love, and I know you didn’t do it.”

  “No, Lee,” he said forcefully. “I’m the man who walked out on you. That’s the real Seamus Malone.”

  His expression was bleakly distant. He would never believe her, she realized hopelessly. Nothing she could say would refute the memory he had of seeing Mocamba targeted in the sights of his gun, and seeing the man die at his hand. But there was one crushing burden it was within her power to take from him.

  “Dammit, Seamus, you’re talking crazy again,” she said softly. “You never walked out on me. How could you, when I kept you safe in my heart the whole time?”

  A corner of his mouth lifted reluctantly. “You’ll go down fighting, won’t you, champ?”

  “I retired undefeated.” Her gaze was steady on his. “I intend to keep it that way.”

  “You took up a position in the steel girders above the stadium. When Mocamba was nearly at the podium, you squeezed off a single shot, Malone. I couldn’t have done better myself.” A few feet away from them Pearson shook his head admiringly. “I told you I’d researched you. You were good—maybe even good enough to beat me. That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  The brief spark of emotion in Malone’s eyes died. “So I was right. It’s hunting season.”

  “It’s hunting season,” Pearson agreed. “But unlike my late father and my brother, I never found much sport in pitting my skills against dumb animals. Man is the ultimate prey, the ultimate thrill.” He frowned thoughtfully. “I’ll admit that as a scholar there was an added challenge in knowing I’d actually had a hand in shaping the history I wrote about, although Brian seemed to think I would be content with helping him fulfill his insignificant ambitions.”

  “How much of a challenge was it to kill Paul Cosgrove, Pearson?” He was a monster, Ainslie thought. It seemed wrong that he should still look like the man she’d once thought she’d cared for, right down to the slightly chilly smile he now gave her.

  “Don’t you ever just do something for fun, Ainslie?” he asked softly. “I know Tara calls me stuffy, but I’ve got my impulsive side. Who knows, maybe one day the child will find that out for herself.”

  An icy shard of fear lodged inside her at his words. Then her internal temperature reversed itself, and hot fury rose in her. She fought down the almost overwhelming desire to launch herself at him, to rip the smile from his face, to see his blood on her fists. Malone put a warning hand on her arm, but it wasn’t necessary.

  “You just made the mistake that’s going to kill you, Pearson,” she said thinly. “Didn’t your father teach you never to get between a mother bear and her cub?”

  “Now that’s the spirit that once attracted me to you, my dear.” Pearson sounded gratified. “I was planning to kill you first, but going up against you might prove to be more challenging than I thought.”

  He frowned. “But we’re wasting daylight. Let me outline the rules, and then we can begin. I’ll give the two of you five minutes lead time. After that the hunt is on. Malone, I’ve decided to track you down first. Of course, the two of you can take your chances together if you wish, but that only makes it easier for me. Oh, and if either of you has considered doubling back to the house and making your escape that way, you should know that I’ve recently had the entrance gates and the brick portion of the perimeter modified. I turned on the power before I left the house, so I wouldn’t advise trying that route. I think that’s it. Any questions?”

  They’d suspected the wrong brother, but they’d been right about everything else, Ainslie thought. Pearson had lost it. If they could only elude him until the sun set completely, his chances of finding them in the dark would be—

  The harsh cries high above her sounded like a warning. She raised her eyes, looking past the skein of geese arrowing across the sky to the pale disk already climbing into view.

  It was a full moon. At this time of year it was called a hunter’s moon, she thought leadenly. He would have no trouble tracking them by its light.

  “Just one, McNeil.” Malone’s voice was expressionless. “I’ve come back from the dead twice. What makes you think that I won’t come back a third time, looking for vengeance?”

  “Because I’m a romantic at heart. I believe in the legend of the wild geese.”

  In a blur of movement Pearson aimed the rifle skyward, pulled the trigger and brought it back down again, levering the weapon’s bolt even as the shock wave of sound was still rushing at Ainslie’s ears. A second later something brushed heavily by her to crash at her feet, and to her horror she saw the broken body, mighty wings still outstretched in its final flight, on the ground in front of her.

  “You see? Even if you do come back, you won’t stand a chance,” Pearson said smoothly. “If that’s everything, let’s start the clock running now. You have my word that I’ll give you your five minutes.”

  “Lee, head for the trees.” Malone didn’t look at her as he spoke, but kept his eyes on Pearson. “Go on. As soon as you reach cover I’ll follow.”

  Slowly, Ainslie turned, and took a few hesitant steps. She looked back over her shoulder at him.

  “Malone, I—”

  “Now, Lee.”

  The sharpness in his voice galvanized her into action and she started running toward the wooded area surrounding the field, expecting at any moment to hear the flat, deadly crack of Pearson’s rifle taking down the man in front of him. She slipped behind the concealing trunk of a massive oak, and saw Malone look over in her direction. He took a step back from Pearson, and then another, the dead bird seeming to mark some dividing line between them. He turned and began jogging toward the trees.

  She knew what he would be feeling—the bullet smashing through his spine, himself falling, the blood exploding from his heart as he died. In her own imagination he died a dozen times during the seconds it took him to cross the hundred yards or so of open field to her.

  He caught her as she flew at him, his arms tightening around her. For the briefest of moments they stood locked in a silent and desperate embrace, Ainslie feeling the tenseness in his biceps as he clasped her to him. Then he released her.

  “You’re going to get out of this alive, Lee,” he said quietly. “I’m going to make sure of it.”

  “We’re going to get out of this—” she began, but he put a finger to her lips.

  “No, honey.” He shook his head. “This is the end of the line for me, and that’s how it should be. Last night you told me that if I was looking for redemption I could find it in stopping the Executioner. I can stop him, Lee. But he’s going to take me down with him. There’s no other way, and even if there was it wouldn’t matter. He was right. I’m no different than him—except for the fact that I always had you, and he never did.”

  “You didn’t kill Mocamba, Seamus. He lied about that. He knows you’re the only man who can defeat him—he’s always known that—and right from the start he’s used your doubts as a weapon against you. Don’t you see that?”

  “I see a good man in the crosshairs of my rifle.” Malone’s voice was edged with pain. “Maybe after today I won’t see that anymore.”

  He shook his head. “But we don’t have time for this. I’m going to lead Pearson away from this area, and while he’s tracking me I want you to make your way back to the house.”

  “His gun room.” Ainslie’s eyes widened. “Of course! Circle around and end up back here, Malone. I’ll meet you with whatever weapon I can find and—”

  “He would have thought of that. He wouldn’t have left anything lying around that we could use and anyway, I want you
as far away from him as possible. Burn his house down, Lee.”

  He was speaking faster now, his words low and hurried. “Get a rag and stuff one end into the Mercedes’s gas tank. Light the other end and run like hell because it’s going to blow sky-high. That wooden veranda’s going to catch, and then the house will start blazing. It’ll be seen for miles, and every fire department in the county will send out trucks. All you have to do is find a place to hide until they come.”

  “It’s a great plan except for one thing.” She looked at him stubbornly. “You’re coming with me. We’ll do it together.”

  “Yeah, that might work.” A shadow crossed his features. “We might even get away alive, but so might Pearson, Lee. I can’t let that happen, and you know it.”

  “No more barriers, Malone.” Ainslie felt suddenly immensely tired, as if she had gone through ten gruelling rounds with an opponent who had finally proved too tough for her. She felt the tears come to her eyes, but with the last of her strength she managed to bring a shaky smile to her lips. “Not anymore. Not between us. It’s not only Pearson you can’t allow to leave here alive. It’s yourself. Even if you could stop him and still survive, you wouldn’t, would you?” She didn’t need to hear his answer, she thought. It was there in the brilliant green gaze meeting hers.

  “Two weeks and two days,” she whispered, raising her hand to his cheek and laying it lightly against the roughly stubbled jawline. “How incredibly lucky I was to have had even that much.”

  She brought her face close to his, and then, as if he needed to obliterate for this one final time any distance between them, his mouth came down on hers. His hold on her tightened almost painfully, but all Ainslie was aware of was the taste of him, the feel of him, her own breaking heart. Malone lifted his head, and gently put her away from him.

  “I love you, Lee.” He let his hands slip from her shoulders. “Don’t go to the funeral, champ. Remember me this way, okay?”

  She nodded mutely. He looked at her one last time, and then he turned away, slipping between the trees and melting into the deepening shadows until she could no longer see him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Time was of the essence, Ainslie thought. She had to make her way to the house, find material and matches to ignite a fire with and then deliberately start a conflagration that the most insane arsonist might envy. And after that she had to come back here to find Malone.

  She had no intention of letting him go up against the Executioner alone.

  She didn’t want a dead hero, she told herself with a quick spurt of anger. She wanted a live Seamus Malone to make a family with, to build a future with, to grow old with. No matter how well Pearson had covered his tracks, once the investigation into his killings began his deceptions would start to unravel. There would be some scrap of evidence to prove he’d assassinated Joseph Mocamba.

  She glanced nervously up at the moon, still low in the sky, but so full and bright that the landscape was bathed in its glow. Leaving the cover of the trees, she moved swiftly across the field, keeping as low to the ground as she could. She’d almost reached the lawn when she tripped over something and fell heavily to the ground.

  She found herself staring into Brian’s sightless eyes, only inches away from her horror-stricken gaze. Her outflung arm was lying on one of the mallards bound to his wrist.

  Nausea rose in her throat. She scrambled to her feet, almost falling again in her haste, and all of a sudden the night around her seemed crowded with the ghosts of the Executioner’s victims. She could feel their hopeless gazes on her, as if they were trying to tell her that she wouldn’t succeed, that no one could succeed against the man who had destroyed them.

  Ainslie shook off the hysteria that threatened, knowing that to give in to it, even for a second, would be fatal. She ran the last stretch of field without even bothering to stay low, diving into the shadowy bulk of some shrubbery as she got to the edge of the lawn.

  From then on it was easier, although she had one bad moment when she realized that the Mercedes’s gas cap needed to be unlocked with a key. But the SUV gas tank was accessible, she found after a few minutes of fumbling around in the dark. It would do just as well.

  She didn’t dare switch on a light, and at one point she was about to open the sports utility’s door to look for something to use as a fuse when she stopped herself just in time, her palms damp with nervousness. Even the briefest sliver of light would be visible to Pearson if he was anywhere in sight of the house, she told herself. It seemed to be an eternity before she came across a single greasy piece of rag on a low shelf at the back of the garage.

  She hurried back to the car, wadded the rag up into the open gas tank and let as much of it trail down the side of the vehicle as possible. She would have to move fast once she lit it, she thought apprehensively. The rag itself would flare up instantaneously, and the resulting explosion would follow almost immediately.

  But first she had to light it. Ainslie bit her lip in frustration as she realized that the one thing she didn’t have was a match.

  There would be matches somewhere in the house. But in the dark it would take her far too long to locate them, she thought, feeling a thin bubble of panic begin to rise up in her. And using the car lighter from either of the vehicles would pose the same problem that she’d faced when she’d been looking for the rag.

  She knew exactly where she could find a lighter—somewhere on the body of the dead man lying not more than a hundred yards from where she stood, wasting time.

  “You have to do it,” Ainslie said out loud. “There’s no other way. Malone’s out there with a killer stalking him. You have to do it, dammit.”

  It was as terrible as she’d thought it would be. Brian’s body had already started to stiffen, and she had to roll him over onto his back to get to the front pockets of his vest. Her hands were shaking so badly when she finally felt the heavy shape of his gold lighter that she nearly dropped it. Just as she stood again, wanting only to leave as quickly as she could, she thought she heard the faintest rustle of movement from the edge of the woods, and she felt her limbs turn to water. She held her breath, waiting for the sound to come again.

  But it wouldn’t, she told herself impatiently a moment later.

  She sped back to the garage, the lighter clutched tightly in her hand.

  She was almost certain it had been St. Augustine who’d asked God to make him good, but not yet, Ainslie thought disjointedly, holding the lighter to the end of the grease-soaked rag. Right now her prayers were running along similar lines.

  “Make it catch, God,” she muttered through lips that seemed suddenly dry. “Just don’t let it go up too fast, okay?”

  She flipped back the top of the lighter, put her thumb on the tiny wheel, and spun it. The small flame flared up immediately and, already on the balls of her feet ready to run, she touched it to the end of the rag.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  Shock tore through her as the rag burst into an immediate sheet of flame, and she sprinted toward the open doors of the garage, the toes of her sneakers digging into the dirt floor in a frantic attempt to propel her to safety. She put on a final, impossible burst of speed and then it happened.

  It was as if a giant hand had come up behind her and dealt her a massive blow between her shoulder blades. She felt herself being lifted off her feet, felt herself cartwheeling crazily through the air, felt the super-heated rush of air blasting through the thin material of her T-shirt.

  And then she slammed heavily into the earth of a nearby flowerbed, her fall partially broken by the leafless branches of a bush. She got to her knees and looked back.

  The garage was a ball of fire. Flames were already running along the overhanging limbs of the maple tree that grew between it and the house, and even as she watched Ainslie saw a flurry of sparks settle on the shingles of the larger building’s roof. Belatedly she remembered that there had been two vehicles, not one, in the garage, and she got to her feet and
staggered a little farther away—just in time, she realized a moment later.

  The second blast was even more forceful than the first. The mullioned windows on Greystones’s ground floor shattered in the aftershock and fell, with a sound like a thousand icicles breaking, to the veranda. The roof was now blazing away merrily, Ainslie noted, backing up a few steps as the heat reached out for her. Malone had been right. The fire would be visible for miles.

  There was nothing more she had to do here. She turned and began running across the lawn to the field, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in her ankle.

  Reaching the cover of the woods, she halted, momentarily disoriented by the contrast between the unobstructed moonlight of the open field she’d just left and the zebralike striping of silvery illumination and black shadows here among the trees.

  Everything happened at once.

  “Pearson! Over here, damn you!”

  Turning in shock toward the sound of Malone’s voice, Ainslie felt herself being wrenched back by a crushing grip around her neck even as something cold and hard pressed painfully against her temple. At the same moment the very shadows themselves seemed to take shape just in front of her, and with horror she saw the shadows turn into Malone himself, Brian’s shotgun steadied against his shoulder and aimed at her.

  “Malone, no!” she screamed as Pearson pulled her completely in front of him. “Don’t shoot—it’s me!”

  Only the arm across her neck kept her from falling. Pearson jerked her head farther up as Malone froze, his finger still on the trigger.

  “Put it down, Malone,” Pearson rasped, pressing the barrel of Watkins’s automatic even more firmly against her skull. “I said I’d kill you first, but under these circumstances I might reconsider.”