Her Galahad

Chapter 3

In the deep velvet hush of an unlit country night, they arrived at their temporary sanctuary.

Through the light of the van’s headlights, Tessa surveyed the place, taken aback. David—um, Jirrah once took such pride in creating beauty from bricks and wood. The small, wood-plank house was crude, filled with the sense of simmering fury she felt inside its owner: a rough-made house with an uneven front verandah, surrounded by dense brush except for a coarse, bumpy dirt track. All was dark and quiet. There were no streetlights, no sealed roads, no near neighbors she could see. She almost felt like she’d stumbled into a fairy tale—except Jirrah’s home was no enchanted forest cottage—more like the abandoned shack in the back of beyond. A bush-ranger’s retreat: Ned Kelly’s hut, or Captain Thunderbolt’s hideout in the hills.

Yet once upon a time, she would have been happy here, making Jirrah’s house a home, because he’d built it for them. Planting flowers, painting the wood planks rich cream and the windowsills a soft yellow. Working side by side with him to fix the roof, as she had when they were lovers: Tess the carpenter’s mate, he’d dubbed her, solemnizing the event with her own tool belt and hard hat. Fitting in work between kisses. Oh, together they could make this place a home he’d want to come home to—

“Do you have a flashlight?” Jirrah asked, interrupting her reverie. “The generator might be dead by now. It’s pretty old.”

“What a pity you didn’t think of it before,” she snapped, exhausted with the day’s stress, embarrassed by her little daydream. “Now I’ll spend the night imagining us playing blind-man’s buff with Cameron in a dark, isolated cabin!”

He made a small, savage sound of impatience. “Look, I just spent three hours driving on lousy roads after your fruitcake husband car bombed me. I’m hungry, I have a headache the size of a Mack truck, my wrist’s throbbing and I’m covered in cuts and gravel burns. I want food, a shower and sleep before I have to outrun Beller yet again. So I’d appreciate it if you’d cut the complaints and tell me if you have a flashlight or not.”

She yanked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Yes, I have one. I’ve also got food and a first-aid kit. I’ll bring my gun inside, too. At least one of us was prepared for this!”

“Yeah, well, any preparation I might have had blew sky-high back at Lynch Hill, so don’t expect any apologies from me.”

She flushed in the darkness. “You want to compare notes? I was carjacked today by somebody I thought was dead, with a Ripley’s story about my family for his excuse! If I’d had time to get you out of the car I wouldn’t be here now!”

He looked at her. “If you didn’t believe me you wouldn’t be here, and neither would I. You’d have shot me.”

A sudden jab of anguish landed over her heart, robbing her of breath. Was he right? “I’m still thinking about it. I don’t shoot people without at least giving them a hearing. I still have the gun…and you have tonight to prove you’re telling me the truth.”

He held up a hand. “I get the picture. We’re both overwhelmed and stressed now. Can we call a truce and get the flashlight?”

“Fine.” In moments she handed him the torch. “I have aspirin, antiseptic and bandages. I’ll bandage your wounds inside.”

“Thanks.” He flicked it on, and led the way in.

When the light came on, Jirrah sighed in relief. “Thank God for that. The last thing I needed was to wrestle with that crazy generator tonight. You hungry?”

Tessa looked at the house, with its rough walls, unfinished windows and loamy scent of damp earth rising from between the imperfectly laid floorboards, and frowned. Then she noticed a wood carving set on an upturned crate. An enormous kangaroo made of a deep red eucalypt wood, one of a pair. The other stood on a similar platform in a shadowy corner. “These are magnificent—exquisite pieces,” she said softly, wondering at the incongruity of their surreal and radiant beauty living within the dark shadows of this sad, neglected shack. “They’re so real they look like they’re actually in flight.”

He nodded. “I like them. You hungry?” he repeated.

Looking at him she saw the pain, the total exhaustion, and realized the toll the past few hours had taken on him, driving over unlit roads after a brush with death. “I keep tinned food in my van. I’ll heat some up while you rest. You want coffee?”

“Sounds great.” He fell back on an old brown-and-black striped sofa, just about the ugliest she’d ever seen. He closed his eyes—one eye purple and contorted with swelling.

She left the room, disturbed by the sight of him looking like that. He’d been hurt because he’d come to find her.

Moments later, she touched his shoulder. “Here.” She handed him two tablets and a glass of water.

“Thanks.” He downed the tablets, and closed his eyes again.

Never anybody’s cook, it took Tessa almost half an hour to get the food heating in the gorgeous but impractical Kookaburra wood-fire oven. Soot striped her face and top from trying to light it. By the time she’d cleaned herself up the coffee was cool in the Bodum plunger—so he was still a fresh-coffee addict—and she had to make it fresh. “Where the hell’s a microwave when you need one?” she muttered, dumping the coffee grinds out the window, since there was no drain in the kitchen.

Why did Jirrah live in a hovel like this? If she could just have a week here, he wouldn’t have to. It would be a home—

Don’t think like that. Don’t go there. That’s in the past.

She returned to the living room with her first-aid kit.

A small open fire blazed behind a grate in the corner. Jirrah lay sprawled on the long, ugly sofa in a deep sleep, looking so much like her David she ached with it.

He’s Jirrah. David’s gone. This man is no more the boy I loved than I am the girl he married.

Fighting a second wave of grief over him, she put the water and bandages on the crate before the sofa and tended to the cuts on his arms and chest through the gaping tear in his T-shirt.

The first time she’d touched a man’s body in over two years, and she didn’t want to now; but Jirrah had risked his life to help save hers today. She owed him, big time.

It seemed she owed him even more if he was telling her the truth about Duncan and Cameron’s setup.

He’s alive, and I have a death certificate Duncan gave me. Isn’t that enough?

She continued cleaning the wound with warm water, frowning.

Jirrah started half-awake when her fingers connected with his chest. “Tess,” he mumbled, capturing her fingers with his.

Magic.

A sleepy word, one sleeping brush of his fingers, and all she’d tried to forget the past six years arose from slumber. One unconscious touch, and warm, dark, unpredictable magic lit the very air she breathed—

And it terrified her.

She jerked her hand away, and kept dabbing the antiseptic on the long, ugly gash on his chest.

“Ssssss.” He jerked to full awareness with the stinging touch, sitting up and glaring at her. She scrambled back across the rough floor, hot and cold with panic.

“Tessa? You okay?”

Unable to drag her gaze from his, she saw him watching her with a look she didn’t want to define. She pulled herself together and nodded, feeling sick, hurt, betrayed by the sting of his unwanted pity. “You just startled me.”

“It wasn’t the best way to wake a man, Tess.”

Trying to disguise the little quiver of unwanted pleasure at the intimate nickname he’d given her seven years before, she pointed to the inflamed cut. “It’s infected. I was just trying to help.” She handed him the cotton pad soaked in antiseptic.

He looked at the wound, and nodded. “Thanks.”

She turned away, fighting another unwanted surge of sorrow. They’d been so happy once…now they were just awkward. “Dinner’s almost ready. Do you want it now, or after you’re cleaned up?”

“I’ll take a shower. I need to get the dirt and gravel and glass out of the cuts—and some of them are in places you don’t want to clean,” he added, with a wry grin.

“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 barristers, 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, hiding 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 hide.” 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.”

She looked at her feet, scuffing her toe against a knot in the floorboard. “They must have tried to make you divorce me.”

“Not since my conviction. When I got out, all they wanted was for me to crawl in a hole and forget we were ever together.”

“I see.” She scuffed harder, kicking a chip out of the wood he’d never polished. “So you gave in. You went away, and left me with them.”

He knew he deserved the accusation in her voice—but he wasn’t ready to tell her the whole truth. “You married Beller only five weeks after I was arrested. I despised you for that. I was angry, bitter, and you betrayed me in the worst possible way. I’ll never forgive you for what you did to the baby.” He dropped to his haunches before her, a torrent of passionate words bursting from his heart. “But I never thought he’d hurt you, Tess. I thought it was only me he wanted to destroy. I knew he couldn’t stand the idea of me being your lover.”

But Tessa wasn’t listening; she’d blanked out before he’d even finished his words. She swayed in her chair, her face pale, her eyes glazed. “The—the baby?”

The choking force of useless, bitter rage hit him again in its unrelenting tide, forcing him to remember his most compelling reason to despise this woman. “Yeah. My daughter,” he grated. “I know what you did to her—what you did to me.” He extracted a well-folded piece of paper from his wallet, and slammed it on the table. “That’s your signature,” he grated. “Don’t deny it!”

“My—my what?” Tessa’s bewildered gaze followed his stabbing finger down to the paper. As if in a daze she unfolded it, and scanned its contents.

The signed permission to give up a child for adoption.

The last vestiges of color drained from her face. She seemed deathlike, a mask, her eyes dull and blank, fixed on the scrawl of ink at the paper’s base. She swayed in the chair again; then her body gave a hard jerk forward. “Yes.” A strained, harsh whisper. “It’s my signature.”

Chapter 4

“Yes,” she admitted in the lengthening silence, her voice rough, scratchy. “It’s my signature.” Her body spasmed again.

Jirrah snarled, “So you admit it. You gave our daughter to strangers like she didn’t matter. Like I never mattered enough to you even to keep my child, or even name me as her father! Explain that form of bloody grief to me if you can, Mrs. Beller!”

But her reaction floored him.

Her knuckles gleamed white as she gripped the sides of the table; her eyes burned like zealot’s gold in a wraithlike face. “I—I…oh, God, my baby, my baby…my Emily’s alive. A-adopted…”

Her body lurched out of the chair in a final jerking spasm. She stumbled toward the bathroom but fell to her knees outside the door and emptied out her stomach in slow, violent retching.

Jirrah closed his eyes, whacking his forehead with an open palm. “Oh, you bloody idiot. You stupid, brainless jerk.” He ran to wet a facecloth and towel.

When he returned with the cloths and a glass of water, he found her leaning against the wall beside the door, ineffectually wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

He cleaned her face with the wet cloth, then handed her the glass. “Here, Tess. Sip it, don’t gulp, or it’ll come back up.”

She took the glass in a trembling hand, and rinsed her mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered: a threadbare sound.

He cleaned the mess with brutal efficiency. “Don’t sweat it. I deserve it for being such a dumb-arse jerk. I actually believed them.” He took the towels and threw them in the trash.

When he came back she’d slumped sideways, the fallen glass creating a slow puddle over the floor, and on her shorts. So he carried her to the sofa, laying her down and covering her warmly; but she broke into fits of shivering beneath the blanket. He pulled her close, swearing beneath his breath at the way his body reacted to the feel of her soft curves laying against him.