agreed. “Always.” With a jab of his thumb the connection was broken and the receiver put down thoughtfully. The conversation was typical Mitch Ryan. No breach of security. No unnecessary questions asked. No unwanted advice given. Tough talk. Teasing names. Levity that fooled no one, then an oblique comment that gave him away if it had.
Mitch was worried, and not about the storm. Tony Callison had gone to ground months ago. He could be surfacing now, in Charleston. The weather would offer perfect cover. And by now he would be desperate, as only a hunted man completely alone could be.
Contradiction sliced though Jeb’s thoughts. Not completely alone. He had Nicole. A gut feeling said Simon had been right on target all along. The errant brother would come to his sister. Perhaps, contrary to Bishop’s absence of reports, he already had.
Tony Callison might be desperate, and he was dangerous, but he was cunning in the bargain. The man could move in and out of a scene as quietly as a ghost. He’d proven it time and again. Better men than Hank Bishop had been lulled into a false security, thinking the target of his surveillance was too quiet and peaceful to be at risk and in no danger.
When too quiet really meant danger was already present.
“Danger.” The word, a constant in Jeb’s life, the measure of it, was harsh on his tongue. If the telephone had been in his hand, he would have crushed it. Was Nicole in danger?
In all the hours he’d spent arguing with Simon—resisting this assignment until the absolute end; throughout the exhaustive brainstorming and planning with Mitch and Matthew; in the final stages of pouring over Nicole’s dossier—he hadn’t wanted to consider that she might become a threat to her brother and, thus, to herself.
Jeb Tanner admitted he’d tried her in his mind long ago and convicted her of one of two crimes. Complicity, or innocent naiveté. He’d nearly convinced himself there were no other choices, and if it came down to it, the lesser crime would protect her. But then he hadn’t seen her again. Hadn’t discovered the woman the child had become.
Nicole Callison might be guilty as sin, but that sin wouldn’t be naiveté.
If Tony came to her with the taint of death clinging to him; if he asked for help, an avenue of escape, a smuggler’s ticket out of the country; if she refused him, would he harm her?
Once Tony had loved her too much to let anyone or anything touch her. But that was before.
Before his sociopathic mind lost its last touch with humanity. Before the collegiate bad boy evolved into a conscienceless killer of men and women and, finally, children. Before the killing became a sadistic ritual, the bounty less important than the pleasure.
Before he became a stalking mad dog, who walked as a man.
If she got in his way, it wouldn’t matter who she was, or what she’d been to him. “He would kill her,” Jeb muttered, the horror of it, the waste, turning him sick.
Tony would kill her like all the rest.
The image that scorched Jeb’s mind sent a shudder down his back. He’d studied the forensic reports and seen the snapshots of what Tony did to his growing list of victims. Each a signature killing, and each worse than the last, until a gruesome pattern of a serial killer began emerging.
“But no more.” Jeb’s voice was the guttural voice of a stranger, as cold as his eyes. It was the threat of a serial killer with the honed skills of murder for hire that had brought Simon McKinzie and The Black Watch into the pursuit. The same threat had tipped the scales, destroying Jeb’s resistance to Simon’s plan to trade on his past—renewing one acquaintance to catch another.
With the gruesome facts laid before him, Jeb saw, not the man who had been his rival and his best friend in college, but a monster, potentially more destructive than any the world had ever known. If he were not stopped.
But he would be. And Jeb Tanner would do it.
“Before Nicole’s name is on any damn bloody list.” If he wasn’t already too late.
Dread like cold lead in his belly, Jeb took the stairs in a deliberate pace that ate up the distance more surely than frantic rushing. In the bedroom that occupied the top floor, he slid into jeans, a light shirt and moccasins. A holster was strapped to his ankle and a compact, but powerful, pistol was snapped in it before he gathered up the keys to the roadster. Then he was running down the stairs again, taking them two at a time.
The door slammed behind him on the echo of a single word.
“Please.”
* * *
The air was humid and fragrant. Shrubs crowded the walled garden walk and the courtyard, their heavy blooms and waxen leaves shimmering like old velvet. In the murky half-light the narrow corridor that bordered Nicole Callison’s Charleston home was a magical place of drifting mists and deepening shade, of muted bird song and quiet footsteps.
As she walked through the mist, Nicole reveled in these last minutes before a summer squall. When the wind lay still, city streets outside her gate were wrapped in a waiting hush, and this little part of her world was softer, sweeter. When there truly was peace before the storm.
Soon the wind would rise again, bringing with it the rain, the thunder and the lightning. But when it was done, the city would go on as before, and her garden would be rife with the promise of new life.
Nicole believed with all her being that in Charleston and Kiawah, she’d found the best of both worlds. One offered serenity embodied in a rain-swept garden. The other, the wild exhilaration and the furor of the sea. She loved them both.
She was content with her life. As she wandered this tiny space that was hers alone, she knew she was more content than she had ever hoped. But the way had been long and hard, leading, at last, to a place far away from who she was and where she’d begun. Only then had she put the past behind her.
Three days ago a part of that past had stepped back into her life, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to feel anything.
Catching a drooping blossom in her palm, she watched as moisture gathering on a creamy petal trembled like tears. The tears she’d shed over Jeb.
Jeb. She’d loved him. With every beat of her fifteen-year-old heart she’d loved him. As she’d trailed behind her brother and his best friend, she’d known his smiles were only kindness, and his kindnesses only pity. But the knowledge didn’t keep her from worshiping him.
In the days, weeks and months when classes were a grim, cliquish ordeal, when well-meaning professors singled her out and older students who perceived her as a freak shut her out, there was always Tony. But most of all there was Jeb.
When she was near him, she was even clumsier than usual. All bony knees and jutting elbows. Hair a shaggy disaster. Teeth a mass of silver wires and bands, and her tongue eternally tied to the roof of her mouth. But he never seemed to notice.
“He was just...Jeb,” Nicole murmured. He’d been kind and gentle when little else of her life was kind and gentle. Then she loved him even more. For one school year, though he never knew, he was the center of her universe. Then the end of the term came. He and Tony graduated, she became a sophomore. One more rung on the ladder of escape. She’d thought her heart would break without him, and maybe it did, but she’d survived and even flourished in a new life. And she
