Walking The Edge: A Romantic Suspense/Espionage Thriller (Corpus Brides Trilogy Book 1) (17 page)

“What’s wrong?” She grew scared the more he remained stock-still. What in the parcel had affected him so? “Gerard, talk to me.”

*

His vocal chords must’ve been cut. By surprise, probably. He couldn’t utter a word.

Only once had he felt this way—when he’d heard of Mirka’s death. The world around him had stopped, along with his heart, for a second that had felt like a lifetime. When he’d realized he’s lost her...

Yet, how could it all have happened, when he had these documents in front of him? Proof only she could’ve known about.

He looked up at Amelia but failed to see her, since the identical pictures on the passports imprinted themselves in his mind.

Mirka’s pictures.

Chapter Eight

Croatia. Unnamed island off the southwestern coast, in the Adriatic Sea

Tuesday, December 18. 4:16 p.m.

Somewhere in the bright front room of a cottage on a sun-bathed coast, an alarm beeped with persistent intensity. The tall man with the long, dark ponytail and who occupied the house currently stood outside on the beach. He heard the sound but dismissed it. Time enough to go check that out soon. He gazed off across the water, towards the hinted outline of a fishermen’s island in the distance.

The land where his son lived in the care of a childless couple who presented the boy to the world as their own offspring.

Blimey, it had been seven months since he’d last seen his lad. Seven long months, and it hurt most that Seth thought him dead.

He’d had to fake his death because of a case he worked on, and though he could’ve let the boy know it was a sham, he didn’t dare. He couldn’t put his son’s life in danger.

A sigh escaped him. The same issue had been the bone of contention between him and Seth’s mother, Fey. She had wanted them to settle down when the baby arrived, but that just couldn’t be possible. In his line of work, any attachment meant a potential threat to the other person. A liability, too, to him. That he’d gotten embroiled with her in the first place had been asking for trouble.

But he hadn’t been able to resist her. At the thought, he chuckled. She could be very persuasive when she wanted to. She’d wanted him, and she’d nabbed him. Hook, line, sinker. Never mind that he hadn’t loved her back as she’d wanted, his heart—or what remained of it—consumed with never-expressed desire and love for another woman who could never be his...

And then Seth’s birth had approached, and she’d been adamant they both drop their respective occupations to become a family.

He couldn’t do that. When one chose the line of duty as he’d done, well, duty won all the time. She didn’t understand, but she should have; she’d made the same choice, too.

In the end, she hadn’t wanted to hear anything, and he’d done what he’d thought best. He’d taken Seth away from her. She thought the baby dead, thought he had killed the child, actually. Duty came before everything with him, and she knew it. It wouldn’t have been hard to imagine he’d take out any obstacle in his path, even his own child. She’d called him a heartless, ice-cold monster, and he’d let her vent her anger. She’d come close to killing him a couple times, but he’d made it through unscathed. After all, he’d taught her all she knew, and could thus anticipate her every actions. He had put their child in a safe and neutral situation. Nothing else mattered, really.

She’d brushed him off and gone back to the life she’d lived before getting pregnant, and he grew certain he’d done the right thing—she focused on her work, got the job done every time. Yet, he couldn’t bear to see the dark, abysmal shadow that always lingered in the depths of her blue eyes from that moment on. Eyes Seth had inherited...

Would he ever forgive himself one day for taking a child away from his mother? Seth had deserved a normal life, as had Fey, too, on some level.

He shrugged, trying to work off the remembrance of her. Why was he thinking of her? He never welcomed the thought of her during his conscious moments, because only she could make him doubt his stand. Had he made the right call when he took Seth away from her? That question plagued his sleep, so much so that he’d found a way to make do with only a few hours of shut-eye to keep the demons at bay.

He took a deep breath, wincing at the pain in his chest. The blow he’d taken to the solar plexus had hurt him. The reason he must be thinking of Fey, because he’d taught her the elusive move, had shown her how to modulate the strength in her blow to disable an adversary, or kill him, if need be.

The woman who’d hit him a few days earlier in a crowded mall in London had looked nothing like her, though, so why did he feel the nagging sensation that it could’ve been Fey? Seth’s mother was dead. She had died in a car crash seven months earlier, shortly after he’d had to go under the radar to get some answers.

Bloody hell—
every time he appeared to have grabbed on to the truth in the investigation he’d started close to a year ago, why did it feel like he’d only scratched at the surface of the true issue?

The sun dipped towards the horizon, signalling the approach of twilight. Night came all too quickly at this time of the year, and he turned and headed back to the cottage.

The sound echoing from his computer caught his attention fully as he approached the dwelling. A grimace contorted his face—he was slipping. He should’ve jumped on the alarm right away.

Gorblimey
. He swore as he glanced at the table. His bottle-green eyes stared back at him, wide with surprise, in the reflection on the blank screen. He turned on the monitor, typed in his password, and waited with bated breath as a sequential array of still photos filled the flickering surface.

He darted a gaze to the beeping device, the signal from a motion detector, one he’d written off a long time ago. The only person who knew about it was dead.

Or supposed to be dead.

The photos looked dark and grainy. It would take the software a few hours to clear the pixels on this obsolete machine so he could see details and faces.

He leaned closer to the screen, muttering a curse when strands of his long hair broke from his swept-back ponytail and blurred his vision. He needed the hairdo for cover, though; otherwise, his hair would’ve been shorter. Still in loose, heavy locks, like he’d always worn them, but not long enough for him to tie back.

He could already make out a man and a woman in the photo. They’d probably been unaware their picture was being shot, since they remained perfectly in the line of vision, at eye level with the safety box and the camera located in its depths.

Sitting back in his chair, he cursed. Marseille. He’d be going there very soon, to find out who had broken into the safe assigned to one of his dead agents. A dead agent who’d also gone rogue on them.

***

London. Hampstead Heath

Tuesday, December 18. 5:30 p.m.

In London, another dark-haired, green-eyed man—one with his hair expertly cut into foppish locks—cursed when he listened to the voice on the other end of the cell phone line.

“Someone enquired about the company we set up,” she said.

Shit
. “Who could know about it? The only one we fed the lie to is—”

“Fey.”

“Yes.” He paused. “They traced where it came from?”

“All we have is a general location. The enquiry came from Marseille. The person who led the probe sure knew what he was doing, barely leaving any mark.”

“Lucky, indeed,” he muttered. Marseille. Same place where he’d scraped her off after the car accident that had rendered her amnesiac.

What the hell is she doing back there?

“There’s more,” she said.

Just what we need.
“Tell me.”

“The Marseille police have reopened the investigation into Stepanovic’s case.”

The same town again. Too much of a coincidence. “She remembered she was working on that case.”

“Then we’re in deep shit,” the woman replied.

An understatement, if he ever encountered any. He sighed. “I think a little visit to the French Provence is called for; what do you say?”

“Kill two birds with one stone. Find out who’s on Stepanovic’s case again, and find Fey.” She paused. “And since you’re the one who fucked up in the first place, Max, it’s only logical this would be your job, right?”

He quelled the anger inside him at her derogatory tone. He’d show them, though. Go to Marseille he would, and he’d find that bitch, too. Even if it cost him everything. She would pay; he swore she would pay.

“I’m on it.”

Chapter Nine

Marseille.
Quartier de Saint Giniez
in the
8ème arrondissement

Tuesday, December 18. 6:00 p.m.

“Gerard? Are you sick? Talk to me, for God’s sake!”

Gerard looked at her, back to the picture on the passports, and then up to her face again.

A gasped exhale shuddered out of him. His body shook as the realization slid in.

Now that he could view both women at the same time, he could definitely make out the resemblance. Someone who hadn’t known Mirka as well as he had wouldn’t notice, but eyes, the windows of the soul, didn’t change. True, their shape looked different—this woman’s gaze wide and open, while hers had been narrow and hooded. The irises betrayed her, though.

Identical. That’s why she made him feel... This was the click that always eluded him around her previously.

Because it
had
been her, all along.
Putain de merde!
What the hell was this shit storm?

Concern filled those haunting blue eyes, and she stepped around the table, came up behind him, to place a hand on his shoulder.

Too much... He had to come to grips with it all. He couldn’t bear for her to touch him, not yet, and he shrugged away. He shot out of the chair and placed good distance between them.

She stumbled away, too, her back colliding with the wall. Her wide eyes and pale features gave the impression she feared him, or feared what he might say.

“Please, say something,” she begged.

He remained silent, battling with the storm unleashed inside him.

“Explain this,” he finally said, his voice a soft, dead whisper completely at odds with the violent gales blowing inside his mind and heart.

She bit her lip. “Explain what?”

He stalked back to the table, picked up the passports, and threw them at her. They bounced off her shoulder to fall onto the floor.

“I don’t know,” she cried.

Fury blazed inside him. She must take him for an idiot.

Had she always thought him a
con
? All along?

“You want me to believe your words?” he threw out. “God knows who you really are!”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, almost shrinking into herself as she backed once more into the wall. “I don’t understand why you’re so angry. It’s not my picture on those documents.”

He froze, and it hit him straight in the gut. The breath whooshed out of him. “You really don’t remember.”

She threw her hands up and straightened to glare at him. “What the hell have I been telling you all this time?”

You have to remember!
he yearned to shout.

“My past is a big black spot, and I don’t have the first clue how to shed some light in there!” she exclaimed.

You
have
a clue. You remembered
us
.
Couldn’t she reckon that? “Being in the dark is sometimes a blessing, Mirka.”

Her turn to freeze; she stopped where she stood, staring at him with her mouth agape. “Wha..what did you say?” Then, suddenly, she tore her feet from the ground and stalked up to him, clutched his shirt, and shook him. “Talk!”

“What’s the point?” She didn’t know. She didn’t remember
them
. All they’d had.

A lie? He couldn’t bear that thought. Slow, dark death claimed him once more, filling his soul with its coating, sticky slime.

He grasped her hands, shoved her away, then grabbed his coat from the back of the chair and stormed out.

He lifted the garage door high enough to pass under and walked out into the cold winter air, willing the oxygen to clear his mind.

Mirka had left him for another man.
That’s
what it came down to.

He almost expected her to chase after him. But he had to acknowledge she wouldn’t come when he reached the bistro and she still hadn’t appeared.

A bottle of the hardest liquor sounded exactly like what he needed to drown the throbbing in his head, and, surprisingly, in his chest. Yet, alcohol would bring no solace. Didn’t he remember this from the time when he’d thought she had died?

He caught up with a couple of his officers coming out of the bistro.

“Give me a ride to the
commissariat
,” he said. Work would be his salvation, as it always had been.

Putain de merde
, he kept cursing throughout the ride. What the hell had she gotten them into?

***

Back at the garage, she’d slumped onto the couch, barely registering his leaving.

He’d called her Mirka.

She closed her eyes, thinking back to the dream she’d had of him, the vision that triggered everything happening so far.

“We can’t keep going on.”

“No. Don’t say that.”

“You know we never expected it to come this far between us. Mi—”

She had interrupted him with a finger to his lips, and he’d not finished speaking the name. Now, she knew he would’ve said Mirka—not Millie, like Peter called her, like what she’d thought Gerard had called her, too.

The name felt familiar, and she tried hard to remember.

Wisps of memories took shape in her mind, and she gulped in deep breaths, trying to hold on to the images and make them clearer.

He leaned against the railing of a boat, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt moulded to his well-defined chest. The early evening breeze ruffled his sandy hair, and she gasped softly at the sexy, attractive picture he painted against the rosy, golden sky of twilight on the French southern coast. He resembled a loner; a very dangerous, terribly seductive bad boy.

A waiter carrying a tray of champagne idled past her on the deck where she stood. Without pausing to think, she grabbed two flutes and walked up to him.

“You look like you’re in need of some company,” she said when she reached his side.

He turned towards her, startling her with the vibrant hue of his aqua eyes. First time she was seeing him in the entourage she frequented—she’d remember such a gaze, especially the way it made her knees go weak with sudden longing. No man had ever had such an effect on her.

He straightened, and she found herself having to crane her neck to look into his handsome face. A trace of golden stubble roughened his jaw and cheeks, adding to his sexual charisma.

She handed him a flute of champagne, which he took, then introduced herself. “Mirka Lehmans.”

He smiled, a slow, lazy grin that twisted her stomach into knots. The man embodied pure sin...

“I know who you are.” He paused. “Matthias Pires,” he added, before putting out his right hand.

She shook it, sparks shoot through her whole being from the slight touch of his skin against hers.

“It’s a pleasure,” she heard herself saying.

The memory faded, and other, vivid recollections came to mind. The two of them passionately making out against a wood-panelled wall of the same boat. Making love on a creaking bed in a run-down apartment. Snuggling up against him, spooning with his big, warm body.

And all along, there remained the certainty that she shouldn’t be with him, that what they were doing was completely wrong. How could something that felt so right be wrong?

Then, she reckoned the reason. Another man involved in the whole thing; another man she was supposed to be with. Being with her lover amounted to betrayal; going beyond the line she shouldn’t cross.

She opened her eyes and stared at the darkened interior of Gerard’s garage.

Gerard, or Matthias, as she’d known him then. The chill in the room invaded her. She brought her hands up her arms, rubbing the skin to try to warm herself.

She’d wanted answers, and she’d found nothing but more questions. If she was Mirka Lehmans, as Gerard said—and as she herself had remembered—what, then, did she make of the three different aliases on the passports? The pictures also looked nothing like her.

Had they changed her appearance at the Switzerland clinic? Peter, or whatever his name could be, had said she’d had plastic surgery because of the burns caused by the bomb blast. The story would hold the line, if there had been a blast in the first place.

What did she do now?

Call him
, a little voice whispered in her head.

He had stormed out of the garage, and she had no idea where he could be. Like an idiot, she still didn’t have his mobile number, too busy getting into bed with him when strange whispers coming from nowhere and directing her to hidden stashes weren’t obliterating her mind.

She could try the
commissariat
. A long shot, but worth a go.

To her surprise, the operator put her straight through to his office, and she hitched in a breath when he answered with a sharp, “Besson.”

No
commissaire
or anything. He didn’t play up his position.

She took a deep breath. “We need to talk...Matthias.”

*

Gerard sat up straighter in his chair.

She remembered.

Maybe now, he could get some answers, too. Blood pounded at his temples when he thought of the possibility of learning the truth; one he knew inside, but which he needed confirmed, if only to be able to pull the shutter down on that episode of his life.

“Are you still there?” Her voice sounded small, hesitant.

“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m coming home.”

*

Her throat closed.
Home
. It’s what she’d wanted to have with him.

The certainty sliced itself through her at the same time she brought the receiver down into its cradle. More than a little tryst or game of seduction took place between them, so why were they apart? What had happened?

He would know, and she could only bide her time and wait for him to give her some answers.

Little bits and pieces of recollection from her past flittered through her mind as she waited. Most of them she couldn’t make sense of, but they proved to be parts of a whole that would fit into place when she had all the pieces of the puzzle together.

To think—simply a name had triggered everything.

Mirka. Could it be her real name, or an alias, too?

***

Had the Mirka he’d known been real, or a fabricated identity?

No, he wouldn’t think of this. He would go insane with everything already crowding his brain.

Gerard pushed the garage door open without making a sound and stepped inside. He brought the panel down behind him but didn’t let it click, for it would alert her to his presence. He didn’t want her to know he’d come back. Not yet. He needed a moment to come to grips with the notion that she’d returned into his life again. That he hadn’t lost her. Reality would intrude only too soon, and he craved to cling on to his fantasy for just a little bit longer.

She stood near the kitchenette, and he had a clear view of her back. Her shoulders appeared straight, as if to say she’d face the world head on and without fright. He had always felt this about her, that she had a reckless streak in her threatening to overtake her. She, however, heeded caution in her every move, and the adventurous, borderline-crazy tendency in her hovered under the surface, like a dormant, but none-the-less-deadly edge.

The only time he hadn’t felt this bristling energy had been on the day she’d left.

Mirka... She had come back to him, unbeknownst to her. Something had made her recall she could trust him, and she’d run to his side in her time of need.

Why couldn’t things be simple between them? Instead of this shifting bog...

She turned then, as if sensing him. Their gazes locked, and as he found his legs taking him to her of their own accord, he reckoned nothing except that she was there. Alive. With him.

She fell into his arms and he held her, wanting with all his heart and all his soul for the universe around them to melt away and leave the two of them alone.

*

Outside the garage, a tall, dark man with a ponytail hovered in the shadows. He cursed softly as a lock of hair brushed his face. Pushing the strand back, he glanced at the tiny opening at the bottom of the garage door, which let a sliver of light pass onto the pavement.

How careless. Wasn’t the bloke in there thinking straight? Trust a good cop to have his wits thrown to the pigs when he had a beautiful woman in his midst.

A curse escaped him.
He
couldn’t let his guard down—he dealt with high-profile players here,
blimey
.

When the picture on his screen had cleared, he’d had a good look at the man in the image, and the gorgeous woman accompanying him. The same person he’d been tailing in London just last week—the realization had knocked the breath from his lungs. He’d had his eye on her since the day she had suddenly materialized in the entourage of Max, an agent he knew all too well and whom he’d had in his sights. A hunch, coupled with some inconclusive intel, had told him to keep tabs on Max.