A Bride for Saint Nick
Autorzy
Carole Buck
Lektury
16,0K
Rozdziały
16
Prologue
The photos arrived via courier at noon on the day before Thanksgiving, but the former Justice Department operative to whom they’d been sent didn’t get around to looking at them until late that evening.
There was nothing unusual about this. In the five and a half years since the reported death of his onetime alter ego, Nicholas “Saint Nick” Marchand, John Gulliver had embraced the night. He’d sought sanctuary under cover of darkness, away from inquiring eyes and awkward questions. Although he had not eschewed the daylight completely, the hours between dusk and dawn were the ones he’d come to prefer.
He’d chosen to be alone. To separate from so-called “ordinary life” as much as possible. Settling into an essentially nocturnal existence had made the achievement of this self-imposed isolation easier.
It also served to intimidate his employees. Not a lot. Just enough to make a point about his priorities. He knew that the time codes on the faxes and E-mail messages by which he generally communicated alerted people to the fact that he was up and operating while they were slacking off or sleeping. The transmissions tended to create the impression that he was committed to doing business twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
By inclination and training, John Gulliver was a man who calculated the odds and elbowed for advantage in every situation. He therefore relished the edge this always-on-the-job image inevitably gave him. It kept the folks who worked for him on their toes. He might be an absentee boss in the sense of seldom being on the scene, but he emphatically was not an oblivious employer.
There were those who objected to his modus operandi, of course. They didn’t last. Those who adjusted to his methods—who earned his professional trust—were well rewarded for their pains. He picked the best people he could find and paid them every penny they were worth. If they eventually developed an itch for entrepreneurial independence, he was prepared to offer them advice and investment capital.
The dispatcher of the photographs that arrived at John’s home on the fourth Wednesday in November was a woman named Lucy Falco. She was the office manager of Gulliver’s Travels, the Atlanta-based travel agency he owned. He’d hired her a little over three years ago. While her résumé credentials had been somewhat less impressive than those of the other candidates who’d applied for the position, there had been something about her frank and feisty attitude that had intrigued him. He’d gone with his gut and awarded her the job. He’d never regretted the decision.
Well, no. Not never. Because although Ms. Falco had “adjusted” to his methods in record time, she’d never fully accepted them. She seemed particularly determined to personally acquaint him with travel-agency clients whom he preferred to consider only in bottom-line terms.
Hence, her practice of forwarding the “Having a wonderful time!” postcards she received from Gulliver’s customers while they were on their agency-arranged trips as well as the effusive letters of appreciation they often wrote once they returned home. Ditto, her passing along of the souvenir photographs that frequently accompanied these gushingly grateful missives.
For a long time, he’d simply chucked such stuff into a wastebasket and forgotten about it. Recently, however, he’d found himself feeling a curious need to spend a few minutes skimming the notes and scanning the pictures before disposing of them.
John Gulliver had tried not to analyze the source of this disconcerting impulse too deeply. Instead, he’d reminded himself that assessing customer feedback was a time-honored business technique.
Expelling a restive sigh, he tore open the courier pack that contained Lucy Falco’s latest offering and spilled out the contents. There were a dozen-or-so color photographs, several letters, two newspaper clippings and a note penned on the travel agency’s distinctive stationery. He picked up the last item and started to read.
“Dear Mr. Gulliver,” the handwritten communique began. Although he’d made it clear that he had no objection to her using his given name, his office manager inexplicably insisted on using the formal mode of address in all their dealings. “Just in case you missed it, I’m enclosing an article from Monday’s New York Times on the prosecution of the people involved in our recent problem cruise.”
John felt one corner of his mouth kick up at the uncharacteristically understated choice of adjectives. The cruise in question, which Gulliver’s Travels had donated as a prize for a Halloween charity ball in Atlanta, had turned out to be a front for a drug-smuggling operation. The newlyweds who’d won it had been plunged into a modern-day pirate drama. To describe what had happened to them as a “problem” was akin to calling the hijacking of a plane to Havana an “unscheduled course adjustment.”
The note went on, referring to the groom who’d been entangled in the high-seas misadventure.
Josh Keegan has already approached the agency about planning a second honeymoon trip for him and his wife, Cari. His only stipulation: No boats!
On another subject: Abigail Davis’s decorating job at Gulliver’s Travels continues to draw raves from everyone who walks in. What a talent she has! You really should come and check her work out for yourself.
“Such subtlety, Ms. Falco,” John murmured sardonically, then continued reading.
The photos I include are from a terrific couple—MarcyAnne and Maxwell Gregg—who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary with a leaf-peeping expedition to New England. They’ve used Gulliver’s Travels many times in the past, so we tried to do something very special for them. I think we succeeded. Marcy-Anne says they had a fabulous time, seeing all kinds of gorgeous fall foliage and making some new friends along the way.
Fifty years of holy wedlock. That’s something to be proud of, don’t you think? My one and only marriage lasted barely fifty weeks!
But never mind about that.
I hope you have a very happy Thanksgiving. Planning on going anywhere?
Yours sincerely,
Lucy Falco
John Gulliver set aside the note, then reached slowly for the Greggs’ photos. The hand with which he reached—his right—had been scarred by fire and was missing part of its little finger. The disfigurement was one of a number of legacies from the incendiary car crash in which Nicholas “Saint Nick” Marchand allegedly had been killed.
Although obviously not what it had once been, the injured hand seemed profoundly familiar to him. Not so, the facial features that had been painstakingly reconstructed from shattered bone and ruined skin after his accident. Try as he might, they were still very difficult to accept as his own.
This was not to say that the image that now confronted him when he glanced in a mirror was repulsive. It wasn’t. Imperfect, yes, but by no means terrible to gaze upon. Indeed, he’d overheard his new visage described as “compelling looking” more than once. His ability to attract women—on those rare occasions during the past few years when he’d chosen to test it—seemed as potent as ever. Perhaps even more so.
And yet…
It wasn’t his face. And there were moments when he seriously doubted that he would ever feel as though it was. He’d lost count of the occasions when he’d accidentally caught sight of his reflection and wondered—with an almost visceral rush of alarm—at whom he was looking. Even when recognition finally kicked in, the sense of alienation lingered like a toxic residue.
Taking a steadying breath, John began shuffling methodically through the Greggs’ snapshots. The autumnal scenery they’d photographed left him unmoved. He knew the glorious reds and golds were transitory. The leaves that blazed so vibrantly on film had long since withered into lifeless brown and fallen to the ground…forgotten.
He hesitated for a few seconds when he came to a picture of what he assumed must be the happy couple. They were standing in front of what appeared to be a small bookstore, holding hands.
Marcy-Anne was short, silver-haired and projected an aura of belle-of-the-ball coquettishness. Maxwell was a balding old bull of a man who beamed down at the daintily-made woman beside him with the ardor of a husband who’d said “I do” half a minute—rather than half a century—ago.
Fifty years, John mused, suddenly conscious of the rhythmic thudding of his pulse. The simply furnished room in which he was sitting was very, very quiet. Only the faint hum from the top-of-the-line electronic equipment that connected him to the outside world disturbed the silence. What must it be like to share that much?
He shoved aside the question before his brain had a chance to complete it and shifted the photo to the bottom of the stack. He briefly considered consigning the rest of the pictures to the trash, but decided he should finish what he’d started.
Next, a photo of more foliage.
A close-up of Marcy-Anne, solo, flirting with the camera.
Maxwell, alone, posing in a pumpkin patch.
More foliage.
And then…
John Gulliver’s heart lurched, slamming against the inside of his rib cage with sledgehammer force. His breath clotted at the top of his throat. The circuits of his nervous system surged toward overload. He started to shake.
“God,” he somehow managed to whisper. The crash that had cost him his face had impacted his vocal chords, too. His voice was lower and less smooth than it had been. “Dear…God.
For nearly five and a half years, he’d wondered. Riven by guilt and grief, he’d lived with agonizing uncertainties and awful speculations. To have the questions that had tormented him for so long answered like this, purely by chance—
He stiffened, chilled to the marrow of his bones by a terrible truth: Had this photograph been sent to him a few months ago, he would have thrown it away without looking at it.
His vision blurred. He blinked several times, then focused again on the soul-shattering picture his final shuffle of the stack had revealed.
It was another snapshot of Marcy-Anne and Maxwell. This one showed them flanking a willowy blonde whose smile, although undeniably appealing, didn’t quite reach her wide-set blue eyes. She was in her late twenties. Young enough to be the Greggs’ granddaughter.
Only John Gulliver knew she wasn’t. The Greggs’ granddaughter, that is. He knew this because he knew the woman in the photograph had no living relatives. Her lack of family ties was clearly spelled out in government intelligence files. She’d also confided her solitary status to him on a moonlit walk nearly six years ago.
Or, rather, she’d confided it to Nicholas Marchand, the man she’d believed him to be.
That man—a convicted criminal, an alleged killer—had been someone every instinct she had must have shrieked at her to avoid. Yet she’d come to him like a moth to a flame. She’d come, offering her untouched body and innocent heart without reservation.
And he’d taken them. Him. Not Nicholas Marchand. Because Nicholas Marchand had been a role, not a real man. He’d taken her body and heart, knowing that it was utterly wrong-unethical, immoral, downright dangerous—to do so.
He hadn’t been able to stop himself.
He’d seduced her with lies. Big lies. Little lies. Lies deliberately thought out. Lies improvised on the spur of the moment. He’d held on to her in the same duplicitous manner. And in the bitterest of ironies, he’d found that the only way he could begin to atone for the deceptions he’d practiced was to become an active participant in what some might call the ultimate fraud.
John touched the tip of one finger to the image of the woman standing between Marcy-Anne and Maxwell Gregg. The passage of time appeared to have wrought very few physical changes in her, he observed with a pang. She seemed slightly more curvaceous than he remembered, although the clothing she had on made it difficult to accurately assess her shape. Her flaxen hair, which had once tumbled halfway down her supple back, now barely brushed her slim shoulders. The girlish freshness that had softened her features even in the throes of sexual ecstasy was gone, heightening her fine-boned beauty in a way, yet also rendering it more austere—less accessible—than it had been.
All in all, however, she looked very much as she had the last time they’d been together.
Unlike him.
“Suzanne,” he finally said, uttering the name he hadn’t pronounced aloud since the day he’d acquiesced to his former supervisor’s contention that it was best if the woman for whom he had broken every rule, betrayed every code of righteous conduct, was allowed to go on believing that he’d been Nicholas Marchand and that Nicholas Marchand was dead, buried and most likely burning in hell. “Sweet…Suzanne Whitney.”
Suzanne Whitney had said she loved the man nicknamed “Saint Nick.” Had she mourned his passing? Did she mourn him still?
John stared down at the photograph he gripped in his scarred right hand. Who had she become? he wondered, his throat tight and aching. He was aware that the government had given her a new identity in much the same way it had given him a new face. Had she accepted this precipitous change of circumstances with more grace than he’d accepted his radically altered appearance? Had she sought help in adjusting, or had she held the world at arm’s length as he had chosen to do?
He inhaled on a shudder.
Whoever she now was…
Whatever kind of life she’d made for herself…
How would she react to a stranger named John Gulliver? How would she respond to a man she’d never really met, yet who knew her intimately?
It was madness to contemplate the possibility of seeking her out, of course. He recognized that. No good could come of exhuming the past and trying to explain it away.
Still…
Discovering Suzanne Whitney’s new name and current whereabouts would be child’s play for him, he reflected. A few seconds at his computer keyboard would grant him full access to the New England itinerary Gulliver’s Travels had arranged for the Greggs. And if that didn’t give him the information he needed, he could interrogate Lucy Falco. She would be so thrilled by his unprecedented show of interest that she would never think to ask why he was inquiring about a fiftiethanniversary trip taken by a septuagenarian couple he didn’t know.
He simply wanted to make certain that Suzanne was all right, he told himself. To know that she’d survived her involvement with Nicholas Marchand reasonably intact, if not wholly unscathed. He had no intention of approaching her. None!
Yes…he might watch over her from a distance. And yes, he might try to find some anonymous way of expiating the sins he’d committed against her. But he would never, ever attempt to reawaken her emotions or to renew their physical union.
Unless…
No!
Never.
Ever.
How long John Gulliver sat studying the face of the woman who’d given herself to the man he’d once pretended to be, he was never able to calculate. Nor could he ever be sure at what minute of what hour he decided on a course of action. The length of time it took him to compose—and recompose, and compose yet again—a three-sentence computer message to Lucy Falco was similarly impossible to gauge.
However, when he finally dispatched the E-mail request for information into cyberspace and happened to glance toward one of the windows in the room in which he was sitting, he realized that the sun was beginning to come up.
Federal Prisoner No. 00394756—aka Anthony Stone—didn’t give a damn about day or night, light or dark. For him, the traditional tick-tock of seconds, minutes and hours had little meaning.
To many of those incarcerated in the maximum-security facility that had been his home for nearly five years, the passage of time was an adversary. A twisted few regarded it as an ally. For him, it was simply something to be endured—ignored, when possible—until that inevitable moment when he chose to exert his power.
How much power could a convicted felon facing life-plusten-years in a concrete cell have at his disposal? Federal Prisoner No. 00394756 laughed softly. That would be telling, he thought. Suffice to say, it was more than enough to set him free whenever and however he chose.
An almost-voluptuous sense of anticipation stirred within him.
“Soon,” he murmured. “Very, very soon.”
The time of deliverance was coming. His time. His deliverance. He was willing to wait for it. To savor the implications of its inexorable approach. And while he did that…
Let the so-called “authorities”—the fools who thought they’d brought him down, because he was allowing them to keep him behind bars—slip deeper into their bureaucratic complacency.
Let those who owed him grow more acutely aware of their debts, more fearful of how he would demand repayment.
Let his enemy, Nicholas “Saint Nick” Marchand—the man he’d hated above all others—go on rotting in an unwept-over grave, feeding worms and maggots.
And let the woman he’d claimed for himself five and a half years ago continue as she was. Chastely faithful to his memory. Vigilantly protective of what they’d created together. Not within his grasp, exactly, but definitely under his thumb.
Federal Prisoner 00394756 closed his eyes.
“I’m coming, Suzanne,” he whispered hoarsely, his mind filling with the image of a fair-haired, sky-eyed woman. His body pulsed with the memory of the May night they’d finally joined as one. “For you…and for my son.”
