eyes and then walked slowly over to the kitchen table. Unclenching his fist, he tried to smooth out the creases that he’d created in the letter. He’d only known her for a few weeks, but she hadn’t let a month go by since then without writing to him. Sometimes he would come back from an assignment and find four or five envelopes waiting for him, and once in a while he’d scrawled a postcard back, just to let her know he was still in the land of the living.
Jack Tanner. Paddy Doyle. The Haskins kid—the one they’d nicknamed Hemingway, because he’d always been writing in his journal. And now Sister Bertille, who in her own way had been as much a soldier as any of them: going wherever she was sent and fighting for the cause she believed in as implacably as they had. He glanced down at the letter once more, his gaze bleak.
“When mercenaries die, Sister, their souls become wild geese. That’s how the legend goes, anyway,” he whispered softly. “And those of us who are left behind go out and get drunk, and sometimes we persuade ourselves that we hear our friends high up in the night sky, flying through the darkness toward home. I owe you that much, Sister. I owe you a drink or two to your memory, and I’ll wish you safe journey to wherever it is that you believe we go when we die. But what you’re asking of me is impossible. This is the only way of life I know.”
Drunk sounded good, Quinn thought. To hell with the phone call he’d been planning on making earlier; there would always be another job. He’d go out to the nearest bar, stay just sober enough to walk out under his own power at last call, and then he’d come back here and finish off the bottle of Bushmills he kept at the back of the cupboard. Sometime during the evening he’d try to call Terry Sullivan and let him know about Sister Bertille, and if Terry hadn’t grown too respectable to be seen with an ex-comrade, he might even join him in the wake of a woman they’d both known and respected.
A protector, for God’s sake. She’d always told him he was a better man than he knew, he thought in irritation, staring at the still-crumpled letter. It seemed that right up to the end she’d been too damned stubborn to discard her naive belief in him.
He turned away and was halfway to the door when his phone rang. Grabbing it up impatiently, the caller’s first words froze him in his tracks.
“Mr. McGuire? Quinn McGuire? I was given your number by someone who knows you.” The soft voice quavered. Then it steadied. “I—I need a bodyguard. I want to hire you to protect me.”
Chapter One
The bar was smoky, the music was loud and apparently Quinn McGuire wasn’t going to show. He was over an hour late already. Avoiding surreptitiously interested glances from the surrounding tables, Jane took a miniscule sip of the orange juice that she’d been nursing since she arrived. The ice-cubes in it had long since melted, but even the watered-down citrus tang did nothing to relieve the tight parched feeling in her throat. What was she doing here anyway? How had it happened that her life had spun so far out of control that she’d been reduced to waiting desperately in this raucous Irish pub for a man she’d never met?
In marked contrast to this unlikely meeting-place, earlier today the reception area of Sullivan Security and Investigations had given the impression of a professional and successfully run organization. She should have realized right from the start that the firm was well out of her price range, she told herself now with a brief flicker of embarrassment. The Irish trio on the small stage at the far end of the room launched into a new song, and all around her enthusiastic voices took up the refrain. Her temples throbbed dully, and she set her drink down on the sticky tabletop. The female operative she’d finally spoken with had been diplomatic enough not to mention an actual dollar amount, but her keen glance obviously hadn’t missed the fact that Jane’s outfit was working-girl attire, and that her jewelry—a pair of gold-toned studs in her ears and a leather-strapped wristwatch—was department store at best.
The woman had advised her to go back to the authorities to alert them to her most recent problems and had outlined a few basic safety precautions that she should take, a shadow of sympathy on her features. Even as Jane was leaving the reception area on her way out, the woman had come after her, a little breathless. She’d thrust a piece of paper into her hand and told her that the name and phone number written on it belonged to a personal friend of Mr. Terrence Sullivan himself, and that Mr. Sullivan had suggested she call Quinn McGuire to sound him out about the possibility of hiring him for a short while.
At the time Jane had felt as if she’d been thrown a lifeline. Even after that disconcerting phone call with Mr. McGuire, she’d still held onto the possibility that somehow he might be able to extricate her from the nightmare her life had become over the past few weeks. The man had been brusquely antagonistic, and the mention of Terrence Sullivan’s name hadn’t seemed to effect any positive change in his attitude. But when she’d finally apologized for taking up his time and had been about to hang up, he’d grudgingly given her the name of a pub, told her to be there at seven and said he’d meet her.
If she’d had any other options at all she would have thanked him politely and told him she’d changed her mind, she thought bleakly. But that was just it—she’d come to the end of the line and this Quinn McGuire had been her last hope. Now she was forced to face the fact that even the dubious possibility of his assistance had faded.
Gathering up her purse from the chair beside her, she started to rise. She should feel angry at the man, she told herself, but somehow during the last couple of weeks even the capacity for anger had been drained out of her, overridden by the numb and ever-present fear that seemed to be the only emotion she had room for anymore.
“Waiting for me, beautiful?”
Startled, she looked up and met a pair of bright blue eyes. With a slight grin the dark-haired man staring down at her set a glass of beer on the table.
“Mr. McGuire?” she ventured, automatically distancing herself from his familiarity. He had the same lilt to his speech that she’d heard over the phone, she thought, but without the antagonistic edge that he’d displayed earlier. For some reason a flash of confused disappointment overlaid the nervousness that was her usual reaction to men who stepped across the invisible but inviolate boundaries she tried to keep around her. He was tall and well-built, with a hint of muscle filling out the shoulders of the light wool sweater he was wearing, but she’d expected something more. Like what? she asked herself. Did you think he was going to be some kind of superman?
“I’m not McGuire, whoever the hell he is,” he said easily. “But any man crazy enough to stand up a lady like you deserves to lose his chance. What are you drinking, sweetheart?”
“Screw off, boyo. Now.”
It hardly seemed possible that such a big man could come up so unobtrusively, but suddenly he was there. As Jane’s accoster turned and saw who’d just spoken, he swallowed visibly. She didn’t blame him.
Silvery-gray eyes stared out of an implacably expressionless face that looked as if it had been carved from teak. In stark contrast, his close-cropped hair seemed to have been bleached to pewter by the same tropical sun that had tanned him so darkly. He was wearing olive-drab chinos, and an olive-drab T-shirt strained over his massive torso. He looked about as solid and unyielding as an oak tree. Even though he hadn’t raised his voice, the tables around them fell silent.
“You’d be McGuire, I’m thinking.” The dark-haired man smiled weakly in a valiant attempt to retain some of his previous jaunty charm.
“You don’t have to know my name. You don’t have to do anything but walk away.” The softly spoken words were uninflected and matter-of-fact, but at them the other man swallowed again.
“Sure.
