“That’s why it has to be us. Neither of us has worked with them. They’re among the few who don’t know I’m a Nighthawk. If we go undercover to find the rogue, they won’t know who we are.”
Feeling as though she’d loaded him with some chemical cocktail that had robbed him of the ability to think, he rubbed his scar. “Why do we have to appear married? What’s the full deal?”
“Think about it. Verity West is the most famous iceberg since the one that sunk Titanic. ‘The woman so faithful to Gil West’s memory she lets no man touch her,’” she parroted, mimicking her press. “Taking a lover would bring on rumors and speculation that could blow my cover. But marrying my ‘first lover’ should be a reasonable marriage in the eyes of the world.”
“And?” he pressed, trying to focus on the mission rather than the old obsession with them finally becoming lovers—and the instinctive knowledge telling him they’d be lovers hotter and more eternal than the fires of hell, as infinitely beautiful and unforgettable as the gates of heaven.
“And anyone can check our supposed history. Ginny’s version of our hot little teenage affair is documented in a hundred places.” She shrugged, but the soft rose touching her cheek and throat told Tal that, if she didn’t want him now, she sure as hell had back then. Did she hate herself for loving him once or—yeah, right, O’Rierdan—was she hiding the fact that she wanted him still? “So we’re legitimate. Our marriage won’t be questioned, nor the fact that we’re hiding out for a honeymoon.”
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, just to fill the silence. For the sake of saying something because he could never say it, could never ask her… Will it be real, Mary-Anne? Will we be lovers, as we both wanted so badly to be, once? “I guess they’re right.”
She held herself tense for a moment before she relaxed. He could feel her palpable relief, but he didn’t know why. What had she been so afraid he’d ask her, or say? “The certificate looks so real it will pass any scrutiny. The registry will keep it on file for a month. The press won’t find the celebrant—Nick’s flying in some Nighthawk friend or relative. Not that we’ll ever know who she belongs to, or where she lives.” The ironic twist to her smile told him she found Anson’s never-know-your-fellow-operatives rule as frustrating as he always had.
“And after?” He watched her closely. “What happens after the mission? Taking a lover might destroy your cover—but so will the act of getting married again. Even if we make the breakup look realistic, it shoots your reputation to pieces. Imagine the tabloids. Verity West’s Marriage Fails After Only A Week.”
“I know.” She sighed. “This is the most vital mission we’ll ever do. If it has to be my last, it’s worth doing. It’s more important than my feelings or yours, or even the rules on secrecy between operatives. If the Nighthawks are destroyed—”
He tapped his foot. “I know the drill. I did the introduction course, too. Nighthawks come first or regional stability is in peril. Lives could be lost.”
Her eyes burned into his. “Why are you talking like you don’t care? You always cared too much before, taking stupid risks to save people! Flipper and Braveheart told me about the time you belayed down a two-hundred-foot cliff during a freak storm to save six kids on that island off East Timor. None of the others would touch it, not even Braveheart. You nearly died, yourself, you broke your shoulder and severed your Achilles tendon, and got a severe concussion, but you saved them!”
He flushed again, stuffing balled fists into his pockets. “The guys are exaggerating again.” And he hadn’t saved them all.
“Why, Tal?” she insisted, her face vivid, alive with her lifelong passion to help others. “Why don’t you care now?”
He turned away, fighting the old longing again. “You tend to get less emotional when you’ve become a statistic, too.”
“I don’t believe it!” she cried. “You know how many people died the night the grenade hit you—but do you know how many innocent Tumah-ra people lost their homes and families? They’re not statistics any more than you are. I was there before the war, gathering information—I knew their names, I’d been to their homes, ate and drank with them, cuddled their kids…and now they’re gone! I—” She choked and wheeled away, dashing at her face—and she gave a wobbly little hiccup of distress, one that melted his heart, that made him care, made him want to be something better. For her. And, if he was honest, for them: the faceless sufferers that his girl took into her heart and soul and made real to him.
He couldn’t stand there as she ached and cried for the fate of people she didn’t know. The statistics she made so real by her vividly stark words. “Mary-Anne?” He touched her shoulder.
“Linebacker died last week,” she muttered, scrubbing at her face. “Shot through the head at close range.”
He staggered back until he found something to lean on: a rough-hewn post on the beach path. “My God. Linebacker was twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. He was a real nice kid—”
“He was such a sweet boy. He wanted to save the world.” Tal watched her tears well up and overflow without shame: a purity of grief he’d always associated with her. “I don’t want anyone else to die, Tal—not if I can do anything to stop it. I know what these people are feeling—and I’d do anything to stop it. Anything.” Without warning she turned into his body, burrowing against him, gulping so hard he could almost feel it hurting her throat. “I’ve lost someone I loved so much I wanted to die…”
The unforgettable Gilbert West. She’d met the pathologist at her last teaching hospital before graduation. Gil had adored her from first sight, married her within six months and created the legendary singer-songwriter Verity West from the cripplingly shy Mary-Anne Poole, by the simple act of believing in her. He’d entered her in a contest where she’d sung the haunting “Farewell Innocence.” Within weeks a major recording label picked her up, and when her first album, Nobody’s Lolita, went triple platinum, Gil gave up his career to manage his wife, to be beside her through good times and bad. And he was, until the day he died.
No wonder she’d written the poignant hit, “Making Memories,” when they’d got the shocking diagnosis of Gil’s impending death from multiple, inoperable brain tumors. Gilbert West had made all her dreams come true.
And this was totally the wrong time to be reacting, burning with the feel of her breasts pushing against his chest, the soft mound of her femininity pushing against him as she cried. Can it, O’Rierdan. She wants comfort from an old friend, that’s all.
But his rock-hard mate inside his jeans didn’t have a conscience, just one hell of a long-denied need for her—and an intense instinct that he’d finally find his way home in her soft warmth, so close beneath those flimsy layers of clothes.
A couple of tourists emerged from their huts. Turning the scarred side of his face away, he watched from under the protection of his hat. Did they recognize the famous trademark hair and statuesque beauty of Verity West? Was that the Iceberg, burrowed into the body of some island hick?
He could see the headline: The Iceberg Melts On The Cripple.
The reality of their situation cooled his libido in an instant. He’d be damned if she’d have to face another sleazy tabloid headline because of him. “Let’s get out of here.”
She nodded as he snatched up the bag beside her towel, grabbed the tape deck and towel with it. “We don’t want tourists grabbing free Verity West souvenirs,” he said dryly.
He took her along the path to his plane’s steel hangar and, once inside, slammed the roller door behind them. “So you’d do anything to help those people—even marry me?”
Had she flushed again, or was the color rising in her cheeks because of the heat of the day? “If that’s what it takes, yes.” The huskiness in her voice lingered. With the gentle flush in the valley of her cleavage, it made a lethal chemical