He glanced at Tessa. The hand holding the wheel was shaking; her breaths came and went in sharp-edged ragged gasps, her terror so palpable it was hitting him in waves. “Tessa?”
She fingered the gun in her lap like a talisman. “He said he’d kill me if I left him,” she whispered. “But my God, what he’d do to me first…”
A sudden horn blast made her hand jerk on the wheel. The van skidded, fishtailing toward the red-mud shoulder of the road.
“He won’t have to, the way you’re driving—you’ll kill us both.” He grabbed the wheel for the second time. “Hold the bloody wheel straight, with both hands preferably, and ease off the accelerator. You’re spinning the van out. Keep it steady.”
“He’s right beside us!” she screamed.
He squinted, trying to see inside the tinted dark glass of the car pulling level with them. “Don’t panic yet. Slow down. Let him pass and see what happens.”
In a flash she sped up, holding the steering wheel in one shaking fist—and the gun was back in her other hand. “You filthy bastard, was that the plan?” She held the gun on him while trying to right the car. “Gain my trust by returning the gun, get me alone, let him overtake us and hand me over to him? Do you think I trust you any further than I could kick you?”
“Not any more than I trust you,” was his brutal rejoinder. “And any plans I might have don’t include getting you locked up for killing a half-tanked city cowboy out on a ’roo shoot. My plans didn’t include my truck getting blown up, or your rolling a van at high speed with me in it. If Beller offered a million bucks, it ain’t much use to me if I’m dead.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. I can accept that.”
“Then get on the right side of the road. Let the Ford pass us. I don’t think it’s Beller. Your wanna-be classy husband wouldn’t be seen dead in anything less than a Jag or Range Rover,” he said dryly. “We’re almost at the turnoff. If we have to double back on ourselves it gives Beller time to find us.”
He could almost taste the bile of fear on her tongue, but she nodded again. “Okay.” She slowed down, moving back to the legal side of the road and let off on the accelerator.
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 Marshall’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 ago.”
“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.