Mallory Rush - [Outlawsand Heroes 02] (23 page)

"Waiting. For you." When he didn't move, she beckoned him to the bed. Again, he looked from her to the pad. Something that resembled guilt, not the delight and purely male heat she had expected, shadowed his face. "Something tells me that wherever you've been has a lot to do with the fact you're not ripping off your clothes and jumping my bones."

His conflicted gaze meeting hers, Noble silently handed her the thick sheaf of pages filled with his script.

He wasn't taking notes on Shakespeare. An uneasy feeling twisted her stomach as she flipped through enough legalese jottings to make a Supreme Court judge's head spin. Her own pounded an echo of
oh no, oh no, no, no, no.

"You were at the state law library, weren't you?"

"I was. It's where I go once you've gone to work. It's where I leave an hour before you arrive home. It is where I've been tutoring myself with a vengeance so I might take the state bar. Another year, perhaps less, and I'll be ready."

"But to take the bar you have to have proof that you graduated from law school."

He looked at her then, directly and without apology. "I have graduated from law school, Lori. Top of the class, Cambridge, 1887. Furthermore, I have proven myself as a force to be reckoned with in a courtroom. As I shall prove myself again once I finish with my studies and pass the bar."

"I'm sure you could do it with your eyes closed, Noble. But that doesn't change the fact that you don't have a diploma—"

"I do. Not the original, but the photocopy I received last week will suffice."

"That photocopy has your name on it."

"As well it should. I earned my law degree, Lori. And now I have the proof that I did. All I need to do is convince the necessary authorities it is indeed mine, which I will, and then I'll take the bar. Since one's reputation isn't earned overnight, you'll likely have to work awhile longer, but once I'm established, you need never work again."

"But I like my job," she said frantically. "Never mind that, forget my job for now—"

"I
never
forget it. Have you any idea how it galls me to see you off to work when more than anything I want to go to my own? Have you any inkling of how I long to kiss you and our children, leave with the knowledge that my family is well provided for and safe? Safe in a grand house on my land—
our land
—that will never see blood shed upon it again. This is my dream, Lori, a dream so real it's in every breath I take."

Her own breath was a pant of panic. The one fear she had convinced herself she wouldn't have to face was coming at her head-on and Lori floundered as wave upon wave assaulted her.

Fighting for calm, she knew this was one battle she had to win. "It—it's a wonderful dream, but the price is too high. You want too much, Noble. The only way we can have even a piece of your dream is if you're willing to compromise."

"And just what do you propose?" He sneered. "That I continue to tend the house, minus my studies, while you continue to support us both, my own paltry means of support limited to the occasional poker game?"

She knew, had known all along, that Noble couldn't live like that and neither could she. He'd start to resent her while she tried to make everything all right, and she'd end up resenting him when she couldn't. In the end what was so good between them now would turn sour.

"You haven't wanted to talk about it, so I never told you why I picked Barry Jones from all the obituaries I could find. Out of state—he was from Nebraska."

"Of course. After all, it wouldn't do for me to pretend to be someone I'm not when others here could recognize me for the impostor I would be."

There was a cutting edge to his voice that made her wince. But she couldn't back down.

"Listen to me, just hear me out, okay? The picture they ran of him slightly resembled you. He was in his mid-thirties, no wife or kids. He was also a lawyer, Noble.
A lawyer.
The obituary listed his credentials, where he'd graduated. It shouldn't be much harder to get a copy of his transcripts and diploma than it was to get the birth certificate. People lose things like that all the time, right?"

At Noble's stony silence, she rushed on.

"You couldn't practice in his city—even the same state would be risky. But you could take another bar and work in almost any state you wanted to. We'd have to move, at least out of Juneau, since people who know me might ask questions, but I don't care. All I care about is making a life together. A good life, Noble. I'm begging you,
please,
swallow your pride and bend your principles on this. If you could just do that, we could get married, have a family—"

"Shall I take this as a profession of love?"

The light of hope in his eyes made her hope too. Now he would listen, see reason. She wrapped her arms around him. "Yes.
Yes.
I do love you, Noble," she assured him, passionately. "It's something I can't fight anymore. We're right together, so damn right. You won, counselor. You won for us both. We can have it all.
Let us have it."

He kissed her deeply. Then pulled back and shook his head. "How I have longed to hear those words from you. But, Lori, we can't have it all if we're living a lie. And that's what it would be. The truth has a way of emerging sooner or later, and it would. Perhaps out of the mouths of babes; children tend to speak without guarding their words. Would you have me hide my heritage from any offspring we might be blessed to have? Would you have me give them and you a name that is not mine to give while I deny my own?"

He placed his left hand over hers. "Come and grow old with me. The best, Lori, is yet to be."

God knew it had to get better than this. She was in misery, what she'd been sure would be one of the best days of her life, a shambles.

Lori searched for the strength to pick up the pieces and emerge with a fellow survivor: Noble Zhivago, barrister-at-law, who had won yet another case.

"Okay, Noble. We'll do it your way. Finish your studies, convince who you have to convince that you are who you are, in order to take the bar, and we'll deal with the scientists and the media. Together." She tossed the pad aside and got up, pacing the floor. "Am I crazy or just in love?" she debated, her eyes to heaven. "I'm so in love with you that I'm crazy with it. It's gonna be awful, Noble. Really, really awful. But before it gets bad, let's enjoy it while we can."

She held out her arms. Noble took an eager step forward, then stopped. In the small distance he searched her eyes and whatever he found there caused him to swallow hard. So hard Lori could see the contraction of his throat.

"What's the problem, Noble? Something's wrong."

"Indeed, Lori, something is wrong. Very wrong. A lie stands between us. It is my lie and one I've loathed. But I kept it so that I wouldn't lose you. If your love is everything you say it is—and I pray God it's so—then you will love me still, despite the ugliness of the truth."

"Whatever it is, it can't be half as bad as you make it sound." His anguished gaze told her it was. A terrible sensation came over Lori, made her scalp tingle, the hair on her nape stand on end. "Hey, it's not like you killed someone or something," she said, forcing a nervous laugh.

With a low curse, Noble lifted the mattress and withdrew a folded piece of paper.

"Before I show you a dark bit of my past, I'll have you know it also holds a promise for the future. The mine I took you to—you see, it possibly contains more than memories. If so, we can reclaim the land which rightfully belongs to me and build where my house once stood. Whether or not the means to that dream is still there, I'll take the bar. The love of law runs too deep in my veins not to."

"Okay, okay," she said anxiously. "We've got the bar thing settled, okay? But what's this business about some dark past?"

Noble fingered the paper and hesitated, causing her apprehension to mount. When he replied, his words were measured and careful. Too careful.

"Please, Lori, keep in mind that wealthy people enjoy a good degree of protection which is denied those with lesser means. We could claim our dream and some immunity from the curious as well if we were shielded by the power which comes with money. To be exact, a fortune in gold.
My
gold. I seized it from those who took it first. Whether or not it's still in the mine where I hid it is the only question remaining."

"The
only
question remaining?" she repeated as a buzzing noise filled her ears. She wanted to cover them, run from the room and pretend she hadn't heard any of this. Instead, she heard the questions tumble out, wanting to stop them and not wanting to hear his answers. "Where did you get that gold, Noble? What did you do to get it?"

He gave her the folded paper. Hands trembling, she slowly opened the aged page, and a nightmare leaped from the past and into the present.

She stared at it, the roughly drawn picture that was unmistakably Noble, the words that her mind refused to register:

WANTED LUKE LASSITER

FOR ARMED ROBBERY AND MURDER

$5000 REWARD

DEAD OR ALIVE

Lori wanted to throw it down, throw her head back and laugh, accuse him of a really sick joke, and tell him that she loved him anyway, that both of them knew he was Noble Zhivago, barrister, not some Luke character who robbed banks and killed people.

"It's strange, but I get the feeling you're two different people in one."

"But of course I am. I assumed Attu told you."

"I only knew you needed help and you're lucky—"

"Lucky Luke." A chuckle. "So, Attu failed to mention my real name?
Allow me to introduce myself..."

Their first meeting replayed itself without mercy, flashed before her the way people's lives supposedly did just before they died. Lori heard the sound of sloshing water, felt the consoling sweep of his embrace while he tasted her tears, and she claimed a personal victory so transcending she could smell its sweetness even now.

She stared in disbelief at the truth that made everything they had shared a lie.

Numb, she felt so numb. It was the way she'd felt when she had touched Mick's cold, still hand in the coffin, unable to believe she was really there and he was gone.

It had seemed so horribly unreal. Shock had a way of getting people by until they could handle the trauma. A part of her knew she was in shock now, but this was one trauma she couldn't imagine ever being able to get over. She was trapped in a nightmare and she was desperate to wake up from it.

"I love you, Lori."

It was a man's voice filled with passion and conviction. But it wasn't Mick's voice saying that he loved her. Neither was it Noble's. It was the voice of a stranger she heard, one belonging to a robber and a murderer. The same breed of low-life who'd crawled out from under some slimy rock to demand money with a gun before turning it on her good, decent husband. Drowning in his own blood, killed with a bullet in his heart, another in his face.

"I love... you. Lori... sweetheart... sorry, so... sorry."

Mick had begged her to forgive him for dying. And now she begged him to forgive her for living. For coming back to life again, thrilling to the touch of a man who had pulled a trigger of his own.

"I love you, Lori."

There were the words again, suffused with truth and longing and every gut-deep emotion a human could feel. But she didn't want them. She didn't want them any more than she could stand to feel his hands gripping her arms.

"Don't touch me," she snapped, jerking away from his fierce grip. She thrust the wanted poster at him, as if it were contaminated. Unable to bear even looking at him, she gave him her back.

"Lori, please—"

"Don't touch me." She shrank from his beseeching whisper, slapped off the palm he gently laid on her shoulder. "Don't ever touch me again. You're tainted."

Chapter 18

Don't ever touch me again. You're tainted.

The words rolled over and over, uncountable times, lashing him more cruelly than his grandfather's cane, seared into him with a pain more severe than a scalding iron.

He had braced himself for the worst, but this was immeasurably worse than he'd allowed himself to imagine.