Loe raamatut: «O'Halloran's Lady»

“So just who is going to be my bodyguard?”

O’Halloran’s gaze locked with hers. Her heart slammed against her chest as he held the door and stepped inside the elevator. As one big hand cupped her jaw, she acknowledged that somehow she had managed to completely misread the situation.

His head dipped. She had a fractured moment to log the masculine scents of soap and skin, the heat blasting off his body. His mouth brushed hers once, twice, then settled more firmly.

Heat and sensation shot through her as he angled her jaw to deepen the kiss. A split second later, O’Halloran released her and stepped back out into the hall.

He hit the close button. “Honey, who do you think is guarding you? I am.”

About the Author

FIONA BRAND lives in the sunny Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Now that both her sons are grown, she continues to love writing books and gardening. After a life-changing time in which she met Christ, she has undertaken study for a bachelor of theology and has become a member of The Order of St Luke, Christ’s healing ministry.

O’Halloran’s
Lady
Fiona Brand

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To The Lord, who really did renew my strength while

I was writing this book.

“Guard me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the

shadow of your wings.”

—Psalm 17

Acknowledgments:

Huge thanks to Stacy Boyd, my editor,

for her patience, expertise, encouragement and grace.

Thank you!

Prologue

Disbelief and cold fury gripped Branden Tell as he sat in the echoing solitude of a cavernous warehouse. Motes of dust lit by beams of late afternoon sun drifted through the air as he read Jenna Whitmore’s latest romantic suspense novel.

The words on the page seemed to swim and shimmer before his eyes. But no matter how hard or how long he looked, the truth he thought had been lost in the smoke and fire and confusion of the past kept stubbornly reforming.

Six ugly letters spelling out m-u-r-d-e-r. Black ink on a pulp page: pointing the finger at him.

He broke out in a sweat; his heart was pounding as if he had just run a race. He wondered how much Whitmore actually knew. Given that she had not gone to the police but instead had included the details of his past crime in a novel, he had to assume she probably didn’t know much. He was willing to bet she had stumbled on her conclusions by pure, dumb luck.

He blinked rapidly and tried to think. Would anyone else notice the connections Jenna Whitmore had unwittingly made and link them to her cousin’s death in a house fire six years ago?

The answer swam up out of the acid burn in his stomach. Marc O’Halloran, the hotshot police detective who had been hunting him with a dogged, relentless focus for the past six years. He would.

Two months ago, almost to the day, O’Halloran had walked into a security firm Branden supplied with alarms while he had been there delivering a consignment. The second he had recognised O’Halloran, he had turned on his heel and left, but he had felt O’Halloran’s gaze drilling into his back as he walked.

The close shave had almost given him a heart attack. There was no way O’Halloran could have recognised him, because he had been wearing overalls and a ball cap pulled low over his forehead. He would have looked like a hundred other tradesmen or casual labourers. He had found out later that O’Halloran had been following up on a lead on the fire that had killed his wife and child, checking on who had installed the alarm in his house.

Six years and O’Halloran was still hunting him.

The fear that gripped Branden for long, dizzying moments almost spiralled out of control. He had to think.

No. He had to do something.

Snapping the book closed, he found himself staring at the photograph of Jenna Whitmore on the back cover.

She was nothing like her cousin, “The Goddess.” Natalie had been blond, leggy, tanned and gorgeous. Jenna was her polar opposite; dark-haired and pale-skinned with a firm chin and the kind of high, moulded cheekbones that invested her dark eyes with an incisive quality he had always found unsettling.

In that instant, a crude solution formed. After years of wondering when he would appear in one of Jenna’s books as a hero, or maybe as some interesting secondary character who could become a hero, he had finally made an appearance, as the villain.

He had mostly read all ten books now, even though he hated reading, because he needed to know if Jenna had written about their shared past. He had found out, just before everything had come to pieces, that Natalie had confided to Jenna that she had a secret friend. For years he had been certain that any evidence that he was linked with Natalie had burned along with everything else in the house, but now he had to assume that Whitmore, who had been close to Natalie, could be sitting on some hard evidence. Since Natalie had been crazy about social networking, it would probably be in the form of emails on Jenna’s computer.

His fingers tightened on the novel. In all of the books, the hero had never changed. Whitmore had called him Cutler, Smith, James, Sullivan and a whole host of other names, but the name changes didn’t disguise the fact that she was really writing about O’Halloran. The same hard-ass, hero type who had made a habit of ruining Branden’s life through the years.

His jaw clenched. O’Halloran had even dated then married The Goddess, the girl he should have had.

The distant sound of sirens jerked his head up. For a split second, he thought that it was too late, that the cops were coming for him. He stared a little wildly at the familiar, ordered gloom of the warehouse, and his desk with its neat piles of forms, installation orders and packing notes.

Clamping down on the burst of fear, he strained to listen.

The sirens were receding.

He remembered the fire that, by now, would be a raging inferno. The chemical warehouse would burn for days, soaking up police hours with roadblocks and evacuation procedures. He was safe, for now.

But that didn’t change the fact that it was past time he left the country. After the scare two months ago, he had systematically put plans in place: a new identity complete with passport and bank accounts. He had even bought a condo on Australia’s Gold Coast. He just needed a little more time to liquidate assets.

He stared at Jenna’s face, which, after years of being pretty but slightly plump, had metamorphosed into something approaching beauty. Turning the book over, he studied the cover, his jaw locking. Just to tick him off, the guy they’d put on the cover even looked a little like O’Halloran.

Old rage, fuelled by his intense annoyance that cutting and running was going to cost him big-time, gave birth to a stunning idea. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

If he was going to lose his business and his expensive, commercial property, which he hadn’t been able to offload, damned if he would leave Whitmore and O’Halloran feeling like winners. Instead of venting his temper by flinging the book at a wall of boxes filled with the latest generation of security systems and automated gates, he placed it carefully on his desk, checked his wristwatch and sat down at his computer.

He had almost forgotten that tomorrow was the anniversary of Natalie’s death.

Once again it was time to prove that he was a lot more intelligent and creative than anyone had ever given him credit for, past or present.

Including Jenna Whitmore and Marc O’Halloran.

Chapter 1

Pleasurable anticipation hummed through Jenna as she slit open a box stamped with the familiar logo of her publisher. Setting the knife she’d used to cut the packaging tape down on her desk, she extracted a glossy, trade-sized paperback: her latest novel. Glancing at the back cover copy, she flipped the book over to check out the cover … and for long seconds her mind went utterly blank.

Swamping shadows flowed over broad, sleek shoulders and a lean, muscled torso. Moonlight glimmered across sculpted cheekbones, a blade-straight nose and a rock-solid jaw. By some trick of the light, for a heart-pounding moment, the dark, molten gaze of the man depicted on the cover, shaded by inky lashes, appeared to stare directly into hers.

Her breath hitched in her throat as her sunny office faded and she was spun back nine years, to the stifling heat of a darkened, moonlight-dappled apartment, Marc O’Halloran and a fatal attraction she thought she had controlled.

Memories flooded back, some bittersweet, others hot and edged and earthy. The clean scent of his skin as he had shrugged out of his shirt, the sensual shock of his kiss. Heart-stopping moments later, the weight of his body pressing down on hers …

Groping blindly for her chair, Jenna sat down. Her heart was hammering and her legs felt as limp as noodles, which was crazy. After nine years, the few weeks during which she had dated O’Halloran—and the one out-of-control night after they had broken up when she had made love with him—shouldn’t have still registered. Especially since she had spent more time avoiding him than she had ever spent mooning over him.

More to the point, she had gotten over him. It had taken time, the process had been a lot more difficult than she had expected, but she had moved on with her life.

Taking a steadying breath, she forced herself to dispassionately study the masculine image that decorated the front cover of the novel.

It wasn’t O’Halloran. Plain common sense dictated that fact. Like her, O’Halloran lived in Auckland, and the book had been published and printed in New York. The cover model would have been someone picked from an agency list in Manhattan.

By some freak chance, whoever had designed the cover had just somehow managed to choose a model who looked like O’Halloran.

At a second glance, the differences were clear. The model’s nose was thinner, longer, and his mouth was fuller. As broodingly handsome as he was, overall he was just a little too perfect. He lacked the masculine toughness to his features that was a defining characteristic of O’Halloran, the remote quality to his gaze that spelled out that O’Halloran was neither gym-pumped nor cosmetically enhanced. He was that breed apart: a cop.

Frowning, she replaced the book back in the open carton, closed the flaps and stowed the box under the desk, out of sight.

Feeling distinctly unsettled, she strolled out to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, using the calming routine of selecting a fragrant fruit variety and a pretty mug to put herself back into work mode. The distant sound of a siren almost made her spill hot tea over her fingers and shoved another memory back at her.

The last time she had seen O’Halloran had been from a distance, four years ago, when she had narrowly avoided running into him in town. Dressed in a suit and wearing a shoulder holster, he had been on police business. The grim remoteness of his expression and the presence of the weapon had underlined the reason she couldn’t afford him in her life. Maybe her reaction had been a little over-the-top, but after losing both her father and her fiancé to military front lines, the last thing she had needed was to fall for a police detective. Like soldiers, cops bled. More to the point, in the line of duty, they died.

She had seen what being married to a soldier had done to her mother; the separations and the constant fear, the shock when the bad news finally came followed by intense, bone-deep grief.

Less than a year later, her mother had died of cancer. Jenna had read the specialists’ reports and listened to the medical experts but that hadn’t shifted her inner certainty that what her mother had really died of had been a broken heart.

The final kicker had been when, even knowing the risk, straight out of high school she had gotten engaged to a soldier. Dane had also been her best friend, which was probably why he had slipped beneath her defences. But that hadn’t changed the fact that he had died in a hot, sun-blasted foreign country on some covert mission.

A week after it had happened she had finally been informed. In the midst of her grief, somehow the fact that Dane had been lying cold and dead in a hospital morgue for seven days, while she had spent that time shopping and planning for a wedding, had added to her disorientation. She had loved Dane. She should have known something was wrong. Instead, she had been choosing invitations and having fittings for a dress she would never wear. Her own lack of connection to a man she had been prepared to marry had been subtly shocking. It had underlined a distance, a separation, from Dane that she had witnessed in her parents’ marriage, and in that moment she had understood something basic about herself. She couldn’t live that life.

She needed to be loved. And not only loved, but also to be the cherished focus of the man she chose.

Fingers shaking slightly, a ridiculous overreaction, she placed the mug on a coaster and seated herself in front of her computer.

Maybe her need for a deep, committed love was unrealistic and overly romantic, but she knew her nature. As much as she had wanted to share her life with Dane, she knew now that it would never have worked. She couldn’t compete with the adrenaline and danger of combat and undercover missions.

She couldn’t afford to fall for anyone who was going to place themselves on the front lines, either militarily or as a civilian.

She refreshed the screen and found herself staring at a manuscript page from the book she was currently editing. A love scene.

Jamming the lid of the laptop down, she strode out of her office and grabbed a jacket. She needed air, lots of it. Stepping out onto her porch, she closed the front door of her house and locked it behind her.

But slamming the lid on the Pandora’s Box of her past was more difficult. As she walked, more memories flickered in a series of freeze frames. The undertow of fascination she had felt the first time she had seen O’Halloran. The bone-melting excitement of their first kiss, as his big hand had curled around her nape and his mouth had settled on hers.

Her stomach clenched. Emotions and sensations she had thought long dead flared to life. She felt like a sleeper waking up, her pulse too fast, her skin ultra-sensitive; she could smell more, hear more, feel more. It had been years since she had felt so alive and, with a jolt, she realised that it had been years since she had felt anything much at all.

As a professional writer, her life was necessarily ordered and quiet. She worked long hours to meet her deadlines, and most evenings she went online to chat with fans or reply to emails. A couple of times a year she travelled to conferences and did promotional tours, coinciding with the release of her books. Apart from socialising for business, cloistered was the term that came to mind.

At the age of twenty-nine, thanks to her solitary career, and the pressure of work created by the success of her books, she had a gap the size of a yawning abyss in her social and sexual life.

Thanks to an inconvenient perfectionist streak that had seemed to become more pronounced with every year, she had trouble meeting anyone with whom she could visualise having an intimate, meaningful relationship.

As in sex.

Another hot flashback to the night in O’Halloran’s apartment made her stomach clench and her breasts tighten. She definitely wasn’t a nun, but for nine years she had lived like one. She hadn’t set out to be so isolated and alone—lacking almost any semblance of human warmth in her life, lacking the mate she wanted—it was just the way things had worked out.

Or was it?

The feeling of constriction in her chest increased as she examined the extremity of her reaction to the cover of her new book.

She had gotten over the loss of both of her parents; and she had gotten over Dane. The fact that they had never slept together, because he had surprised her by proposing literally minutes before he had shipped out, had meant they had never had the chance at a full, intimate relationship. As much as she’d loved him, in her mind, he would forever remain a part of her childhood and teen years, not a part of her adult life.

For the past few years, as much as she had wanted to find someone she could fall for, marry and have babies with, she hadn’t come even remotely close.

As outwardly attractive as her dates had been, there had always been something wrong. They had been either too short, or too tall, or their personalities just hadn’t appealed. She had been picky to the point that most of her friends had long since given up introducing her to eligible bachelors.

Now she had to consider that the reason she had never been able to move on to the healthy, normal relationship she craved was because at some deep, instinctual level, O’Halloran still mattered. That in the weeks they had dated—and maybe because he was the first and only man she had ever made love with—in a primitive, purely masculine way, he had somehow managed to imprint himself on her so deeply that she had never been able to open up to another relationship.

She stopped dead, barely noticing the trees that dappled the sidewalk with chilly shade, or the young mother with a stroller who walked past her. It was even possible that in some sneaky, undermining way, she had fallen for O’Halloran because of his dangerous occupation; that the reason she wasn’t attracted to a “normal” nine-to-five guy was because her years on military bases had hardwired her to be attracted to edgy alpha types.

She forced herself back into motion again, automatically turning down the street that led to a small park. The sick feeling in her stomach increased as she strolled, along with the desire to bang her head against the nearest wall she could find in the hope that that salutary action might jolt some sense into her.

She felt like she was staring down a long tunnel inscribed with the words obvious reason for multiple relationship failures.

Now was not a good time to realise that as hard as she’d tried to bury her past and the attraction to O’Halloran, like the heroine in her book, she hadn’t succeeded.

And now it had come back to bite her.

Two hours before midnight, and the clock was ticking….

On edge and gripped by a tense air of expectation, haunted by a past that had teeth, Marc O’Halloran, clad in a pair of grey interlock track pants that hung low on his hips, closed the door on his private gym. A towel from the shower he’d just taken slung over one muscled shoulder, he padded through the darkened luxury of his Auckland waterfront apartment, not bothering to turn on lights.

Stepping out on his terrace, he allowed the damp chill to settle around him like a shroud as he stared broodingly out at the spectacular view of the Waitemata Harbour. To one side, the graceful arch of the Harbour Bridge was almost obscured by a wraithlike veil of mist, and the headland that was Devonport, with its naval base and steep streets crammed with houses, glittered quietly.

Below, street-lighting from the busy viaduct glowed through the wrought-iron railing that edged his terrace. The pulse of neon lighting from the busy restaurants and bars flickered garishly in time with the beat of a jazz band, adding a strident, unsettling rhythm to the night.

As Marc stepped back into his lounge, the glass of the bi-fold doors threw his reflection back at him. The scars that marred his right shoulder and his forearms were an unwelcome reminder of the house fire that had taken the lives of his wife and small son six years ago. Luckily, the broken neck, courtesy of the falling beam that had also damaged his shoulder, hadn’t required surgery or scars, just months in a neck brace.

Nothing too major, he thought grimly. He had lived.

Walking through to the laundry, he tossed the towel in a basket, grabbed a fresh T-shirt out of the dryer and pulled it on. Minutes later, after collecting a glass of ice water from the kitchen, he entered his study. The view of the port, and the shimmer of city lights, winked out as he switched on a lamp and unlocked his briefcase.

Bypassing the correspondence file from the security business in which he was a partner, he searched out the bookstore bag that contained the novel he had bought during his lunch break.

Hot off the presses, the latest Jenna Whitmore.

With an effort of will, he shook off the miasma of guilt that went with the impending anniversary of his wife’s and child’s deaths, and the hot burn of frustration that the only crime he had never been able to solve had been the murder of his own family. Dropping the paper bag on the gleaming surface of his desk, he studied the cover with its tense, dark backdrop.

The book was a suspense, but also a romance, not something he normally read, but he had once dated Jenna so, out of curiosity, he had bought her first book.

To his surprise he had been hooked from the first page. Despite her link to his past—one of the links that he had systematically eradicated from his life—Jenna’s books had become a guilty pleasure and a deep, dark secret. If the detectives he had used to work with at Auckland Central or his business partner in the security business he now part-owned, Ben McCabe, ever found out that he read romances, he would never live it down.

Automatically, he turned the book over and examined the publicity photo on the back cover. Despite the tension that coursed through him, he found himself gradually relaxing. Jenna, who also happened to be his dead wife’s cousin, frequently changed her hair. The constant process of reinvention never failed to fascinate Marc.

This time she had opted for caramel streaks to complement her natural dark colour and a long, layered cut. As modern as the cut was, the overall effect was oddly elegant.

When they had dated, even though it had only been for a short time, he had liked Jenna’s hair exactly how it had been, long and soft and completely natural. Although he was willing to be converted by the lighter streaks and the sexy cut, which highlighted the delicate curve of her cheekbones and made her dark eyes look long and unexpectedly smoky.

Settling into a black leather armchair set to one side of the desk, he propped his bare feet on an ottoman and flipped open the book.

The vice-like grip of guilt and frustration, the knowledge that approximately an hour from now, the man who had murdered his family would contact him, slowly eased as he forced himself to turn pages.

Reluctantly engrossed by words that flowed with a neat, no-nonsense economy, Marc ceased to notice the silence of his Auckland apartment and the inner tension that sawed at his nerves.

As the minutes flowed past, he sank deeper into the story, noting that it was her best yet. The hero, Cutler, a detective, had a lot of grit and texture, and the procedural details were right on the button.

The plot reached a crescendo as Cutler and the heroine, Sara, after a series of tantalising near misses, finally, electrifyingly, made it to Cutler’s apartment.

Unexpected tension burned through Marc as he was drawn through the passionate interlude. By the time he had reached the end of the love scene, he had ceased to visualise the damp chill of a rainy afternoon, and instead his mind had shifted to another season, another room, filled with heated shadows and moonlight….

The sound of distant sirens brought his head up, an automatic reaction that, after two years out of the force, he hadn’t been able to kick.

His jaw tightened. Thinking about Jenna was crazy. Since his wife, Natalie, and their baby had died in a house fire, Marc had had no interest in another committed relationship. He had enough guilt to process.

Added to that, he hadn’t seen Jenna in years and, apart from one unplanned episode after they had broken up and following a near accident with a car, they had never made it anywhere near a bedroom.

A vivid memory of Jenna scrambling off the couch they’d ended up sprawled across nine years ago, moonlight flowing over the pale curves of her body, jolted him out of the story altogether. A new tension coursing through him, he put the book down.

Broodingly, he recalled flickering images of her fastening the low back of her dress. The tense expression on her face as she’d searched for shoes and her handbag.

She had refused a lift and waved her cell at him, indicating she had already called a cab.

Marc hadn’t pushed it. The fact that they had slept together after they had broken up had underpinned the awkward minutes until the cab she’d ordered had slid into his drive.

The blinding fact that it had been Jenna’s first time had added to the tension, although Jenna had brushed it off. He could still remember her quiet assertion that if it hadn’t been for the adrenaline-charged moments when Marc had stepped in and saved her from being hit by an obviously drunk driver, what had just taken place on his couch would never have happened.

Marc had had to accept her self-contained approach. He’d been aware that she hadn’t liked the fact that he was a police detective or that he commanded an armed first response team, the Special Tactics Squad.

When he’d started dating Jenna’s cousin, Natalie had held a similar view. She hadn’t liked the long work hours, the seaminess or the danger, and she hadn’t liked being closed out of that part of his life.

After the first year of marriage, Natalie had wanted him to quit the force and go back to law, in which he had a degree. His parents, both lawyers, had their own successful law firm, and she hadn’t been able to understand why he didn’t want to be a part of it.

The argument had been the start of a wedge in their relationship he hadn’t been able to mend. When it came down to it he preferred the practical, hands-on approach to justice that police work offered him, rather than the intricacies of negotiating the legal system.

The whoosh of incoming mail on his computer brought his head up. Tension slammed into Marc as he noted the time: eleven o’clock, exactly. He had been so engrossed by the book, and the window into the past it had opened, that he had forgotten the time.

Jaw taut, he strolled to his desk and read the email.

The message was simple. The same message he had received every year for the past five years on the anniversary of the house fire. A fire he had been certain had been started deliberately, an act of revenge by the notorious criminal family he had been investigating at the time.

Catch me if you can.

Cold anger edged with frustration burned through Marc. Although, there was a certain relief in the fact that the waiting was over. Punching the print button, he waited for the hard copy of the taunting message to feed out.

He had never been able to trace the message to an actual person, or prove the message was connected to the crime. Each time he had traced the email to the server, the name and physical address hadn’t panned out. The trail had been predictable, a string of stolen identities, mostly deceased persons, through which cash payments via fake bank accounts had been made. Nonexistent people and random addresses, all added up to a wild-goose chase.

Despite his contention that the house fire that had killed his family and put him in hospital had been a copycat crime committed by someone other than the serial arsonist the police had been hunting at the time, no one had bought into his theory. Since the arsonist had died during a shootout just after he had tried to set a police station on fire, there was no one to question. The supposed perpetrator was dead, the fires had stopped, end of story.

Grimly, Marc filed the message with the others in a heavy manila folder that contained every police or fire department report and newspaper article relating to the fire and the death of his wife and small son.

Maybe he was being obsessive about his hunt for a shadowy criminal. Maybe he had been wrong all along, and the investigative team who had sifted through what was left of his house were right. The psychological reports that had finished his police career were adamant on that point.

Even so, Marc couldn’t let go. The two people he had cared about most had died of smoke inhalation when he should have been at home, protecting them. Instead, he had used his free time—the quality time he should have been spending with his family—working surveillance on a powerful criminal family who had slipped the net on his last operation.

Courtesy of the injuries he had sustained getting Natalie and tiny Jared out of the house, he had ended up flat on his back in hospital for weeks. Further months on sick leave while he had waited for his neck and shoulder to heal, followed by reconstructive surgery for his shoulder, had added to his frustration. By the time he had been fit for duty again, the case had been closed.

He was no longer a detective, but he had not dropped the case. Thanks to bequests from his grandparents and a talent for investment, Marc was independently wealthy. Enough so that he had been able to buy in to the security business he presently co-owned and could afford to fund an ongoing private investigation into the case.

When he had finally woken up from sedation in hospital to find that both Natalie and Jared had died, grief and cold fury hit him like a blow. Despite the gloomy prognosis on his fractured neck, he had made a vow.

It was too late to save his family, but he would use his talent for solving crime, which had resulted in their deaths, to bring the man he was certain had murdered them to justice.