The Bride and the Mercenary Read online

  She wanted to overwhelm him. She wanted to blot out everything else in his mind until all that existed for him was the way she tasted, the way she felt, her mouth on his body.

  She pulled back slightly from his kiss, and flicked her tongue lightly at the edge of his bottom lip, licking it slowly and then moving past it to the still slightly stubbled line of his jaw. She heard him catch his breath and hold it. Beneath her outspread hands the muscles in his chest tensed. She ran her tongue back up to his mouth, gently took the fullness of his lower lip between her teeth, and lightly bit down.

  The breath he’d been holding came out in a harsh gasp. A convulsive tremor ran through him, as if whatever remaining bonds of self-control that had bound him had suddenly frayed and snapped. Ainslie felt that same tremor race through her. Whatever he needed, she thought faintly, closing her eyes and pressing a kiss to the corner of the lip she’d just nipped. Whatever he needed of her he could have. Whatever he needed, she needed, too.

  “Aw, hell,” he whispered hoarsely against her mouth. “I wanted to be smart about this, but I’d rather be stupid right now.”

  “I don’t want smart, either,” she murmured dazedly, finding it almost impossible to string the words together coherently.

  A moment later all coherent thought fled for good as he shifted slightly and she felt him, hard and more than ready, against her thigh. Liquid desire rushed through her and for a second it seemed that his hold on her was all that was keeping her upright.

  And then he pulled back, drawing in a short, shallow breath.

  “Good, honey,” he said raggedly. “Because with me smart obviously isn’t what you get. We’ve got to talk. I’m in bad trouble, and it looks like I’ve dragged you into it, too. I have to figure out some way to get you to safety.”

  Her eyes flew open in disbelief. Staring up at him, she saw dull color ridge the lines of his cheeks. The pulse at the side of his throat was still rapid, and his lips, the bottom one slightly swollen, were still parted, as if his body hadn’t yet completely disengaged from their kiss. But even as she watched, the hard color faded and his mouth tightened to a grim line.

  Letting her hands fall to her sides, she stepped abruptly away from him, feeling as though the heat inside her had just been doused with a bucket of freezing water.

  “I think you’re pretty smart, Malone. You know how to avoid giving me any straight answers, at least, but I’m not going anywhere until I get them.” She folded her arms across her chest, willing herself not to tremble. “So am I close? Did the Agency find out you’d become involved in something dirty, and wash their hands of you?”

  “Close enough,” he said stonily, his eyes on hers. “I think you’ve got to be pretty damn near to the truth, actually.”

  Bile rose swiftly in her throat, and she fought to keep it down. She didn’t believe it, she thought. She wouldn’t have believed it—if it had come from anyone else. But why would the man damn himself in such a terrible way if it wasn’t true?

  “Sully was right, then. This was about drugs.” Her voice sounded rusty and strange to her ears. “That’s why they’re after you.”

  She turned, not wanting to look at him for one second longer. When she felt his hand grip her shoulder she stiffened.

  “I don’t know what they want me for, dammit!” His grip was painful enough that she was forced to face him. His gaze, as it met hers, was dark with anger. “But it isn’t drugs, for God’s sake. If I thought I had that kind of blood on my hands, I’d give myself over to them willingly.”

  Relief flooded through her; close on its heels came confusion. “Then I don’t understand.” She searched his features, her expression anguished. “Who’s trying to kill you? And after all we were to each other—after what I thought we were to each other—why couldn’t you let me know you were alive?”

  Her voice faltered, and pain flashed across his face.

  “I said I’d tell you everything,” he said softly. “And I will, starting with the night I left. But I want you to know right from the start that I didn’t put you through this deliberately, Lee. What I told you earlier was true—Seamus Malone died the night he walked out of your arms.”

  She felt the anger spark inside of her again, and this time she didn’t try to hide it. “I’m from the same background as you are, Malone, so cut the cryptic Irish crap. Dead man walking—is that what you’re trying to tell me? Because a couple of minutes ago I could have sworn I felt a pulse.”

  A corner of his mouth lifted wryly. “You felt more than a pulse, honey.” His grin faded. “Lee, I’m beating around the freakin’ bush because I know you’re not going to buy this. But from that night to just after I left you today, my memory’s been a complete blank. I didn’t know my name, where I’d lived, why I was being hunted. And all I knew about you was that when I saw your face in my dreams, it felt as if I was being torn in two.”

  “You’re right, Malone. I don’t buy it,” she said in flat disbelief. “This isn’t a soap opera. People don’t just get amnesia for no reason at—”

  “I was shot that night. It was a head wound.” His voice was tense. “I don’t know what you were told, but Paul and I walked into an ambush that night. We were supposed to meet an informant, and instead we found ourselves pinned in an alley, being shot at by a sniper on a roof. Cosgrove probably didn’t make it, and I only survived through sheer luck and the skill of the surgeon who operated on me.”

  “Paul made it.” Her knees suddenly weak, Ainslie sank down onto the sofa behind her, her gaze not leaving his face. “Paul didn’t get a scratch. He went to your funeral. He told me he saw you die.”

  “I see.”

  His voice was carefully toneless, his expression blankly unreadable. Then Ainslie saw him suddenly flinch. He pressed the heel of his left hand to his eye, as if to block some terrible pain, as she remembered him doing earlier. She half rose, intending to go to him, but he shook his head at her.

  “That wasn’t a bad one.” He took his hand away and sighed. Walking over to a small table on the far side of the room, he picked up the wooden chair that was shoved carelessly against it. Bringing it back to where she was, he plunked it down in front of her and straddled it backward, his forearms resting along the chipped wood of the rail, his wrists hanging loosely.

  “For about six months after the shooting, the pain was so bad I thought I’d go crazy. It’s been building again lately, but today it came back in full force.”

  “Do you have any medication for it?”

  “Yeah. But I won’t take it unless I have to.” His eyes darkened in memory. “Like I said, I was rushed into surgery. From what you just told me, Paul had to be responsible for getting me there. I came to in a private hospital room—or, at least, that’s where I figured I was. There was an intravenous drip beside the bed, and my head was bandaged up. About three seconds after I opened my eyes I realized I had no idea who I was.”

  From the street outside came sudden shouts, and Ainslie saw him tense and grip the chair back. A girl’s high, teasing laughter mingled with the other voices, and a moment later there was the sound of a car driving away. Malone relaxed.

  “Nothing else that’s happened since came anywhere close to terrifying me as much as I was at that moment. The door to the room was open just enough so I could hear two men talking out in the hall. I was about to call out to them—I knew I’d been in an accident of some sort, and I guess I was hoping that someone could fill in the blanks for me—when I caught what they were saying.” His smile was tight. “I was wrong just now. That was the worst moment. They were arguing over the best way to kill me and dispose of my body.”

  Ainslie’s hands flew to her mouth. “Dear God! Are you sure you heard them right?” She shook her head immediately. “But of course, you must have.”

  “I heard them right. And besides, their agenda’s still the same.” He shrugged. “Anyway, through some miracle I got away from them that night. The details are pretty hazy, but I remember cold
-cocking a male nurse and taking his clothes, and then something about a laundry chute. I got a couple of blocks away from the hospital—not the same one as tonight, by the way—and then I must have collapsed. I didn’t regain consciousness that second time for nearly a week, and when I did I found myself looking up into the face of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

  Ainslie blinked. Then she managed a smile. “You must have thought you were in heaven,” she said with a touch of stiffness. Watching her, Malone gave her his first real grin of the evening.

  “Honey, she was about sixty-five, more than plump, with a face like one of those dried-apple dolls. And she was still gorgeous to me.” He sobered. “Her name was Anna—Anna Nguyen. She was from Vietnam. She told me she knew a man on the run when she saw one. She’d found me on the street outside her grocery business, and somehow she’d hauled me inside to the little apartment she lived in at the back of the store. She said the police had come around a day later, asking if anyone had seen someone going by my description. She’d lied and said no. When I asked her why she’d taken such a risk for a stranger, she told me that forty years ago men in uniform had taken away her father and her brother, and she’d never seen them alive again. She didn’t trust uniforms, she said.”

  “She saved your life.” It was hard to speak past the sudden lump in her throat. “I’d like to meet her one day. You’re right—she must be a beautiful woman.”

  “She was.” His glance had fallen to his hands, still resting along the edge of the chair back. He looked up and met her gaze. “When I came back to Boston several weeks ago I went to see her. Her grandson told me she died last year.”

  He was silent for a minute, lost in his thoughts.

  Silent herself, Ainslie studied him. Even discounting the beard and the hair and the clothes he had been wearing when she’d first seen him, it wasn’t so impossible to understand her earlier confusion as to his identity. His ordeals had left their mark on him. His face was leaner, its angles harder. He’d always been tautly muscled, but now that muscle was even bulkier. The sleeves of his sweatshirt were pushed up, revealing the weight and broadness of his forearms and wrists, and the seams of the shirt pulled tautly across his shoulders.

  But most noticeable of all was the air of strained alertness about him—the same air of tense desperation that an animal forced to flee for its life might have, she thought, like a timber wolf or a cougar or any other predator with a bounty on its hide.

  He’d been a hunter. Now he was the hunted.

  She caught herself. Malone was being hunted now, yes, but he hadn’t been the one doing the hunting before. She’d never known much about his work for the Agency, but he’d stressed to her that it consisted mainly of tedious routine. Sullivan had been a hunter. Her father, who’d also been a mercenary and who’d died in battle, had been a hunter. Their lifestyles of war and death and violence had been repellent and incomprehensible to her, which was why Malone’s reassurances about what he did for a living had so relieved her, and why she’d had no inkling, the night he’d left her, that he might be going to his death.

  But there was still too much he hadn’t explained.

  “Even today you insisted you were someone called John Smith.” She frowned. “You seemed convinced of that.”

  “I was.” He lifted his shoulders in an absently weary gesture. “Anna Nguyen said that was the name of the man the police were searching for. They left a copy of the artist’s sketch with her to put up in her store, and it was me, all right, so I assumed that was my name. I got the ID later, through unofficial channels, and John Smith was ordinary enough so that I didn’t feel I had to change it.”

  “You worked under that name down in Florida and out in Idaho?” His litany of jobs had been a minor part of his story, but for some reason, finding out that they really had existed was important.

  “And in about ten other states.” He took a ragged breath. “Sometimes only for a week or so, sometimes long enough so that I’d start to feel safe. But however long it took, each time the day would come when something would alert me to the fact that they were closing in on me. A waitress at a coffee shop would tell me that some old friends of mine had been in, asking about me, or I’d answer the phone at work and get a dial tone after I said hello.”

  “That’s why you had the hotel rigged up the way you did,” Ainslie said flatly. “The lights, the signals, the booby traps.”

  His eyes remained shadowed. “Yeah, but today it almost wasn’t enough, or maybe my reflexes weren’t working the way they should. Like I said, the pain had come back so bad I wasn’t thinking straight. By the time I left you in the parking garage, I barely had time to make it to another hideout before I passed out.”

  His tone was so matter of fact, he could have been talking about the weather, but Ainslie wasn’t fooled. How much sheer strength and dogged determination had it taken for him to get her to safety today? she wondered. Would any other man have been capable of managing that hair-raising, split-second escape while coping with the twin burdens of excruciating pain and an unforeseen, unwilling companion?

  “I must have been unconscious for an hour or so.” He still sounded detached, but the edginess had returned to his voice. “When I came to, the pain was almost completely gone. On top of that, a big chunk of my memory had returned. I knew who I was, who you were, and why I’d felt compelled to come back to Boston. I knew about the existence of this apartment, where I’d hidden the key to it, and that both the rent on it and on the garage where I kept a vehicle would have been automatically taken out of an account for the past two years, although I couldn’t remember setting the arrangements up and I had no idea why I would have done such a thing. I even knew why it had been so important to me to search the newspapers every day while I’d been on the run.”

  “The newspapers? Why? What were you looking for?” Ainslie stared at him. Everything he was telling her was confusing, but this last made no sense at all.

  “News of you, Lee.” His expression was grim. “Any news of you I could find, although I didn’t know it at the time. But that must have been how I knew to be at the church today—I had to have seen an announcement of the wedding.”

  “But why?” She heard the tremor in her voice, and controlled it. “You didn’t even remember who I was at that point. Why would you be looking for any mention of a woman whose name would have meant nothing to you?”

  “I don’t know.” He raked back his hair in a suddenly frustrated gesture. “Dammit, there’s still too much I don’t know, and I’m not even sure where to look for the answers. But I think I came back to Boston for the same reason I had to show up at your wedding today, Lee.” He met her eyes, and the gaze he turned on her held the same anguish she’d seen from the steps of St. Margaret’s that afternoon.

  “They’ve been hunting me all this time, and they couldn’t catch me. I think they’ve given up. I think they’re after you now.”

  Chapter Seven

  Ainslie rose swiftly from the sofa, pressing her palms against her jeans. Needing suddenly to do something—anything—to dispel the irrational dread spreading through her, she strode toward the window. Out there was the normal world, she told herself forcefully—her world. Malone’s world might include mysterious enemies who were hunting him down for no reason at all, but her world didn’t.

  “Don’t open the drapes.”

  His warning was so harsh that she jumped. Then she spun around, her nerves strained past the breaking point, but as she looked at him her retort died in her throat.

  His features were etched with sharp fear—fear for her. He’d been able to live with the knowledge that he himself was in danger, she thought slowly. It was tearing him apart that now she could be, too. For no reason at all, she remembered the way he’d kissed her this afternoon, when he’d still thought he was John Smith, and that he would never see her again.

  That kiss had had his soul in it. And whether he’d known it or not at the time, it had been Mal
one’s soul he’d been handing her. A few minutes ago she’d told herself that this wasn’t the way she’d imagined him coming back to her, and it wasn’t…but the circumstances weren’t important.

  He was back—back from the dead, back from the grave, back in her life again. Nothing else mattered. And whatever his world included was part of her world, too.

  Except now they were fighting his enemies together—and she was pretty sure she knew who at least one of those enemies was. She walked back to the sofa.

  “Paul lied about your death. That means he has to be part of this—that the damn Agency has to be part of this, and that it’s you they want, not me.” A note of anger crept into her voice. “You had to have stumbled upon something that you weren’t supposed to know, Malone. They’re not targeting you because they found out you were dirty, they’re targeting you because you found out they were. What the hell did you learn that made you so dangerous to them?”

  Green eyes clouded, and then his gaze slid away from her. Abruptly he stood, pushing the chair aside and jamming his hands into his back pockets.

  “I don’t know.” His words were clipped. “Look, Lee—there’s a good possibility I’ll never get everything back. Yeah, I remember our time together, every minute of it. I remember bits and pieces of my last couple of weeks at the Agency, but most of that’s foggy. Anything prior to meeting you is still almost a complete blank, like what it was about my lifestyle that made it seem natural to me to have set up a safe house like this for myself. At best it’s like a collection of snapshots that don’t mean a thing to me—quick pictures of places I don’t recall visiting, faces of people I must have once known.”

  Briefly he closed his eyes, as if by sheer will he could force his past to resurface. Or as if he was trying desperately to keep it submerged, Ainslie thought suddenly.

  She thrust the foolish notion aside. “Then we’ll start with Paul,” she said firmly. “We’ll go see him tonight.”