LITMIR.BIZ

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laughed at the naiveté of her questions. “Um, I’m dead, Tessa. Last I heard, you can’t do time for that.” He turned into a side road, heading northeast. “But doing three and a half years in lockup for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon—” He heard her high-pitched gasp, and grinned in savage bitterness. “Yeah, I suppose that tends to make a man see the legal system from a more negative side of the fence than an average, decent, law-abiding bigamist like yourself.”

      “I’m a bigamist? I—oh shoot, so I am!” She made a tiny choking sound: the enchanting gurgle of suppressed laughter he’d once known so well, and loved to hear. “What a farce!” Half laughing, hysterical tears ran down her face. “I’m a bigamist! And I always thought I’d lead a boring, unadventurous life!”

      He’d hated this woman for years; he hated her still for what she’d done to him. Yet he felt a grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. Well, the whole situation was absurd; and he’d always responded to her quirky sense of humor that shone out at odd moments. “We’d better stick to the speed limit. If the cops put my driver’s license through a computer, they may notice that I’m supposed to be eighty-one.” He grinned. “Jirrah McLaren was my grandfather on my mother’s side who died two years ago. My cousin put my photo on Pop’s ID and fudged the birth date. It was fairly easy since we were born just about fifty years apart.”

      She mopped the laughter-tears from her cheek. “Thank God we’re in the country—if we got pulled over for random breath test or speeding, and neither of us can say who we are!”

      “Crazy,” he agreed, with a grin.

      He could feel her eyes on him: her old, lynxlike gaze of unnerving honesty. “Duncan and Cameron did this to you, didn’t they? They set you up so Cameron could have me.”

      He nodded, swamped by the magnitude of his relief. He’d half expected her to deny it all, dump him by the roadside when he told her what Beller and her brother had done to him. But with the integrity typical of the girl he’d known, she recognized the truth, no matter how tough it was to accept. The inescapable fact that she’d committed bigamy was the linchpin on which he’d based his hope, and he’d been right—helped along, no doubt, by the death certificate he didn’t know they’d given her.

      That must be why Beller blew up the car today: to stop them from meeting and swapping stories—but the plan back-fired. Stupid jerk! He’d have been out of Tessa’s life forever by now if Beller had left his car alone.

      He frowned. Beller had played a star part in his prosecution, and trying to prevent his parole; but it had been a respectable, plausible part. The fierceness of this sudden rampage—acting himself instead of using a hired goon, taking such risks—told him Beller was bloody scared. Scared of losing his life. Losing the support and admiration of Sydney society. Losing his wife.

      This time, Beller would be out for blood. His blood.

      He negotiated the rocky terrain of the untarred back road in silence, waiting for her to work out the rest. He knew she would. Tessa might be many things, but she wasn’t stupid.

      She drew a deep breath, and said the words he’d expected. “When did they set all this up?”

      “The cops arrested me on the way to your dad’s house.”

      It had finally been spoken, her worst fear: the connection in time between the wedding and his arrest. Tessa slumped in her seat, reliving the slow horror of that morning.

      The day after their secret marriage.

      She’d had to come alone to tell her widowed father about her marriage to an Aboriginal carpenter. Only she could tell him that she, his most cherished and beloved child, had gone against his will in a way he’d never forgive. Keith Earldon, millionaire barrister, loving, overprotective father and inconspicuous racist always had, always would consider David Oliveri to be a man far beneath his daughter, in every possible way.

      It was hard, so hard. She endured her father’s pleading, his recriminations and coldness; she even took his eventual disowning of her in unflinching silence. With tears streaming down her face she packed her bags, knowing this choice had been inevitable from the moment she met the man she loved. She dearly loved the father and brother who’d brought her up, but her heart belonged to David. They’d surely come around….

      She’d stood outside the gates of the exclusive beachside acreage, waiting for her husband to come for her. Waiting with all the sweet confidence of young love. Waiting. And waiting.

      And then the slow, chilling realization came creeping into her soul. David wasn’t coming to face her father with the reality of their marriage. He wasn’t here to take her away, to start their life together. He wasn’t coming for her at all.

      She’d never forget the utter desolation of the next three days, the confusion, fear and unwanted sense of betrayal, not knowing what happened to the man she loved. Then Duncan told her about the fatal accident. “Baby, I’m so sorry,” her brother had murmured, rocking her while she sat stunned, silent, too empty to cry, the certificate held like a priceless treasure in her hand.

      The certificate of death that was as fake as her brother’s sympathy for her.

      “Like hell he was sorry,” she muttered. “He set it up. He handed me to Cameron like—like a human sacrifice.”

      “Beller was in on it, as well,” he informed her grimly. “They were the star witnesses for the prosecution in my court case. I apparently robbed Beller’s apartment and hit him over the head with a crowbar. I got five years but made parole after three and a half for good behavior.”

      “A-assault—with…?” She blinked, trying to clear the thick cloud of confusion dulling her brain. She looked at him—at his splendidly muscled body, then up to the face filled with dark, masculine strength, the single stud earring and the curly hair worn in the bead-banded ponytail he’d had when they were lovers. After all these years, his nearness could still draw her gaze to him like a magnet, fill her with a blooming of feminine warmth she thought she’d never know again. Even with the new lines on his face, and a slight hardness in his eyes, his face and body—his mere presence—still shook her as no other man ever had.

      Strange to call a man beautiful, but it was the only word for Jirrah. Strong, masculine, with a dark male beauty beyond definition, beyond words.

      He still looked the same.

      Had he changed so much inside that he’d set up this whole insane scheme? Or had her own brother—maybe even her father—destroyed her life without a single twinge of conscience?

      “Cameron came to see me after you, um, disappeared. He had stitches. He said he’d been attacked, that he’d pressed charges. That was you?” He nodded. “I don’t understand. With an alibi, and no eyewitnesses…surely they couldn’t frame you?”

      He shrugged his shoulders—the broad, sculpted shoulders she’d once loved to touch. “They claimed I did it when I was waiting for you before our wedding, at the park. I was alone. And your brother was the ‘eyewitness’ to my crime,” he informed her, curt and clipped. “They found his stuff in my truck. My fingerprints were all over Beller’s place, and his things. They conned me into doing a job there the week before.”

      Her voice shook as she asked; but she had to know the truth. “Did you ever see my father? Was he a part of this, as well?”

      A little silence. “I haven’t seen your father since the week before our wedding.”

      She hung on to the handle above the door as the van careered around a pothole, then up and over a gradient full of rocks. “But you suspect him. You’re so obsessed, you even think Dad broke the law to get rid of you! I understand why you suspect Duncan, but what did Dad ever do to hurt you? I know he thought you weren’t good enough for me because of your background—”

      “Despite the fact that he married a woman who had a native Canadian background,” he put in. “Don’t you think it’s weird that he has such an aversion

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