Til Death Undo Us. Morgan Q O'Reilly

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      The meeting went downhill from there. Shaughnessy showed me a photo of a man who looked identical to my Ryan. Held side-by-side with the wedding photo one of the goons had found in my home office, I might have been fooled, if I could forget holding Ryan through the wasting from his disease. I countered Shaughnessy’s belief that we’d faked Ryan’s illness by showing photos of the month-by-month erosion of the lovely man I’d married. That might have convinced him, though he didn’t admit it.

      Shaughnessy threatened to hurt my family if I called the authorities, who wouldn’t help me anyway since Ryan’s promise to him involved defense secrets amounting to treason. I’d only find myself in jail or tied up in lawsuits that would make me wish I’d died alongside my husband. I was also put on notice he’d be watching me. Very, very closely. Just in case we’d cooked up this scheme complete with a faked death. And another note for the record, he added, keeping my handgun in the bottom desk drawer wouldn’t be of much help if someone broke in during the night. A threat, or a dare?

      He left, and I made an attempt to slap a sandwich together. Which I couldn’t do, and wouldn’t have been able to eat if I had. I moved the gun to my bedside table and stashed it at the bottom of a box of tissues.

      I returned to work where I sat, trying to ease the petrifying panic from my head. Think. Okay, I had it–safety measures. The man had jimmied the locks on my house, in my safe, quiet neighborhood, in the middle of the day. Obviously I needed better protection. I looked up the number for the security company Jacob used and placed the call. Fifteen minutes later, I had an appointment to meet the owner, a man named Russ Steigart, at the house at five.

      Thinking I might be set until I figured out something else, I turned the problem over to my subconscious and focused on work, tuning out the phones and the slow, steady stream of foot traffic. I was good at that. Denial. If I didn’t want to see it, I put my nose to the grindstone and, poof, my problem went away. I owed Jacob a good day’s work. Lord knew he’d been the perfect boss, the epitome of patience throughout Ryan’s illness and the aftermath.

      To show my appreciation for all he’d done for me, I did my best to put on a happy face each day. Barring that, I did my work with as much efficiency as possible, keeping my mien as neutral as possible. If not cheerful, at least I avoided doing an Eeyore impression. Minimal drama, maximum production. I’d been slowly making progress the last eighteen months and now made it through most of my days without wanting to crawl into Ryan’s grave and join him.

      Postman, office supply delivery, a package from Fed Ex, a tall dark man in a suit, all these events passed with little notice from me until I heard the man say my name.

      “Mrs. Malone?” Brandy questioned the man standing at her desk. Through the smoke-tinted glass panel and assorted hanging plants screening my desk from reception, I couldn’t tell much. “Who may I say is asking?”

      “Niall Malone.”

      “In regards to?”

      “It’s personal.”

      I cringed. Based on the suit, my first thought tagged him as one of Shaughnessy’s goons. However, he didn’t have a Boston accent, or East Coast for that matter. He could have passed for local.

      Second thought had to do with his last name. Could he be a long lost relative who’d just heard of Ryan’s death? Pretty slow on the uptake if so. I leaned sideways to peek around a leaf and noted he looked tan with dark hair and light eyes, possibly blue. Broad shoulders and chest. Quite possibly well-toned abs. Ryan had resembled my family, with varying shades of red hair. This stranger was darker. Other than coloring, he looked a bit like Aidan after a long summer of wielding a hammer–in a word, buff. But there the similarities ended. The shape of his jaw, the line of his nose were all more refined than the Shaughnessys I knew. He didn’t look at all like Ryan. And he wore a suit. Dark charcoal, crisp white shirt, dark tie. Few people in our valley, fifty miles east of San Francisco, wore suits and ties, especially in summer.

      Government? Gangster? Police? My shivers of terror returned.

      “You don’t have to talk to him,” Jacob murmured in my ear, suddenly bending over a file he placed on my desk. I hadn’t even heard him approach.

      A relatively small man, Jacob was in his late fifties with liberally gray-salted brown hair, but looked much older due to the heavy wrinkles on his tanned face. Too much time sun worshipping, he’d confessed. And he still indulged. He and his wife liked baking beside their pool, and both were as brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Once Ryan had been diagnosed, they’d become my support away from home, part of the reason I felt I owed him loyalty and a full day’s effort. He often said I was too hard on myself. To tell the truth, we both knew it was to keep my mind off my all-encompassing grief.

      I suppose I could have told Jacob about my noon time caller, but I didn’t want to trigger deeper feelings of responsibility in him or endanger him. A tiny part of me insisted once Shaughnessy had proof of my Ryan’s death, he’d go elsewhere and threaten someone else. I listened to that part instead of the side that wanted to pack my bags and run home to Daddy.

      The phone on my desk rang and the man waiting for me looked my direction. No point in picking up. Brandy had pointed me out as clearly as if she’d turned and around and used her finger.

      “I don’t like the look of him.” Jacob frowned, deepening the many wrinkles around his eyes. “Looks like a mobster to me.”

      I glanced at the stranger again, moving a little to see around the spider plant. The suit looked a little more up-town than regular government issue. Still, he had the bearing of man who’d probably served in the military and possibly carried a weapon.

      “He’s not going away. Either I talk to him here or he ambushes me outside the office,” I murmured to Jacob.

      Smoothing my black linen skirt over my hips, I stood and made my way to the front. At home I’d swapped out my usual high heels for flatter sandals. I’d figured they were easier to run in, just in case. Considering only a few thin strips of leather held them to my feet, my logic was seriously flawed. As a result, I felt shorter than usual. In my heels I usually just about matched Jacob for height. In flats, I stood half a head shorter.

      The man at the desk towered over both of us, but he paid little attention to Jacob, who followed me. Instead, the stranger’s blue-eyed gaze swept me from head to toe and back again. I felt as if I’d been scanned as surely as if I’d been slapped down on the printer-scanner on my desk. I also felt as hot as if I’d spent ten minutes baking in the one-hundred-and-ten-plus outside temperature. One hundred ten in the shade, but low humidity. I’d come to prefer it to the moist heat of the mid-west.

      If the tall, dark stranger appreciated my appearance in any way, he didn’t show it. His eyes stopped briefly on the black hand-crocheted top I’d made, a camisole and cardigan in the style of Irish lace. Not that I cared one way or the other, but I was used to people either noticing my creations, or taking in my lack of height and making judgments on my age.

      When it came to age, they usually underestimate by five years or so. Ryan had earned some scathing looks over the years from people assuming I was half his age. As a nineteen-year-old bride, someone from the hotel we’d stayed at had called the cops thinking he’d kidnapped an over-developed–but still underage–girl. Fortunately, we’d chosen a hotel in our town and the cops had known me from playing softball with my brothers. At twenty-six, I’d earned a few grief lines around my eyes, making me look more my age.

      “I’m Cassidy Malone.”

      “Niall СКАЧАТЬ