tiny billabong, desperately needing comfort. Home from nursing college for the summer, Mary-Anne had come to him—but with tears streaming down her face for what they both knew would be their last time together.
“Ginny’s pregnant,” she’d cried, her pure, clear voice sweet even in her severe distress. “The whole town knows—and they’re all laughing at me. How could you? Why didn’t you make love to me? Why her? I thought…I thought—” She’d broken off then, her face ravaged and white, her eyes dark and burning.
He’d ached to comfort her…and to get comfort himself. Caught like an animal in a trap from one damn time he couldn’t remember. But he’d been in it then, for better or worse. Much worse. “I don’t love her. I—I don’t even like her,” he’d stuttered, desperately needing someone to talk to…aching to hold her, one last time…
“But you slept with her. You gave her your baby.” She’d flung off his touch, his pleading hands. “Go on then, marry her—have your baby—have a nice life with your skinny, pretty wife—but she’ll never love you the way I love you!”
The words he’d always longed for her to say as woman to man, said a day, a week, a year too late, while Ginny listened in from the shadows. Ginny, who’d thought she could cheat and lie to get him, and he’d love her anyway.
Ginny had made him pay for the love he’d only given to Mary-Anne. She and Max had made him pay every hell-filled day of the five years he’d been forced to stay with her, long after their mythical baby returned to the world of fairy tales and any real baby she might have had could have been any guy’s in town.
And Mary-Anne had disappeared into a fairy-tale ending. She’d hooked up to the stars, and dropped his Mary-Anne carelessly in some other galaxy where he’d never find her again.
As if dragged by magnets, he limped over to her now. “Well, I never thought I’d live to see this sight. Mary-Anne Poole is exercising of her own free will.”
“I didn’t lose those sixty pounds by crying in my coffee.” She turned her face to smile at him, sweet and unselfconscious. “And it’s rather hard to keep up a schedule of two hours of dancing and singing almost every night without some basic fitness skills.”
“I thought you famous pop-star types slept ’til midday.”
She smiled at that, too. “You’re still a farmer’s son, why shouldn’t I be a farmer’s daughter?” In a movement shimmering with tranquil beauty, she lifted her arms to a sky alight with the colors of sunrise. A gentle scent of rose and lavender floated to him, filling him with a sense of peace and rest.
“What are you doing?” he asked gruffly, gulping down a ball in his throat at the sight of her effortless grace, the fluid movements of her body. Oh, man, I’m losing it already…
“Tai chi. I finished my yoga a few minutes ago.” She sighed. “I feel like a sloth. I usually do an aerobic dance workout, run five kilometers and do an hour of weights, but I ‘officially’ have a throat infection, so I’m taking a week or two of R and R.”
He shook his head, laughing. “Mary-Anne Poole running five Ks every day and working weights. Is this the same girl who hid behind the equipment shed during phys ed?”
“No, it’s Verity West and Songbird.” Her tone measured, even. “I work out every day. I have to stay fit to keep my jobs.”
“And the jobs are so important to you?”
She gave him a look hard to interpret. “Verity West is my cover, like being a beach bum pilot was yours until you quit. I have to work hard at getting it right, but the life I lead for my cover is no less important to me than yours is to you.”
“Right. You lost the weight first. You were famous four years before you joined the Nighthawks, and you reveled in it!”
She didn’t blink at his knowledge of her life. “So you asked about me,” she said softly. “You found out about me after that day we passed each other in the hall at headquarters.”
He flushed. Had Anson told her about his attempted theft of her files, the suspensions he’d endured for refusing to drop what Anson called his obsession with her? Had she asked about him, or was the gnawing need for them to be together again only in his mind and heart? “Can you answer the question?”
“Fame was important once.” She swung her body around in another motion of unselfconscious confidence. So unlike the girl who hunched over to hide her breasts, walking with a shuffle, as if apologizing to the earth for being such an unwanted part of it. “I thought I’d feel better about myself, being accepted. But being chased and photographed by the press, or enduring endless speculations about my sex life—no, I don’t revel in it.” She shrugged. “I just wanted to be like everyone else.”
“Why?” To him, she’d always been a miracle, a true human in a world of wannabes. A girl who just loved him for what he was, in a town where everyone adored him in an awed manner as Cowinda’s sports star and valedictorian. In their anxious eyes, he was only as good as his next performance or exam result, his university entrance mark and the beautiful girl on his arm.
“Being normal has its merits, Tal.” She lunged down, her arms reaching out, fingers reaching to emptiness—but it didn’t seem to bother her, the emptiness. But she’d never had the emptiness inside, like him.
“Why are you here?” He had to end this farce, the pretense that they were still friends, soul mates—anything but the lovers he couldn’t stop aching for. “What does Anson want?”
“Are you sure you’re ready to hear it?”
He shrugged. “I know Anson. Always expect the unexpected.”
She scouted the area to be sure they were alone. Then she looked him in the eyes with her usual directness. “Here’s the deal. We have a whirlwind public courtship, then do a fake marriage ceremony in either Sydney or Cowinda within three days. Then we begin a European honeymoon where, under the cover of a happy couple, we investigate the activities of a black market arms dealer and an apparent houseguest wanted for murder.”
The world swung around him like her body in that Tai chi movement. Oh, man. Was this a twelve-year dream coming true or yet another king hit from life? Trying to reorient himself, he lifted his brows and sucked in a breath. “O-kay,” he said for the sake of saying something, vaguely proud of the fact that he hadn’t fallen over. Yet. “Why us?”
She gave him a resigned grin. “The tabloid stories Ginny sold. What else?”
He felt the flush creep up his neck. After he’d left her three years ago, Ginny had made a fortune by selling stories to TV, radio and the print media that her husband had taken the Iceberg’s virginity by a billabong. When the story grew cold, she’d added her belief that Mary-Anne was cold to all other men because she was still, and had always been, wildly, madly, deeply in love with Tal O’Rierdan—even when she was married to Gilbert West.
“But the stories are lies,” he argued.
“And no one knows that but you, me and Ginny,” she said quietly. “You and I won’t argue, and Ginny’s not likely to recant the story. Nick thinks we can use it to our advantage.”
He shook his head. “But it’s breaking all his you-can’t-know-your-fellow-operative rules—and it’s bloody dangerous for both of us. We know too much about each other—homes and families, our backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses. This is crazy. The mission had better be something right outside the box.”
“Um, you could say that.” She looked around the beach again, checked the path. When she spoke, it was low and urgent. “One of the Nighthawks is working with the arms dealer and his houseguest—an international criminal who’s out to destroy us. Operatives are dying or disappearing on the most basic missions. Some found alive were loaded with a chemical cocktail that left them with no memory of who they’ve been with or what they’d been doing. Top-secret information’s reaching the wrong people—stuff