Her Galahad Read Online Free Page A

much time do they do for that? Surely with a daddy, brother and husband as barristers, one of them checked out the facts for you before you walked down the aisle for the second time in just over a month?"
    "Ididn't know you were alive!" Her cry throbbed with passionate denial. " Duncan gave me a death certificate! Dad even held a memorial service for you!"
    He had to believe that. Her terrified screams at the sight of him, her words of half an hour before confirmed it, if he hadn't already known what her family were capable of.
    "I thought you were dead!" she'd said, in that stunned voice. As if she hadn't known where he'd been all those years. As if she hadn't betrayed him for wealth, success and a handsome face.
    Maybe she hadn't?
    He didn't want to think about it. He didn't want to know. "And where did they say my body was conveniently hiding?" he asked in a conversational tone. "Just for interest's sake."
    Another choking gasp. "They—they said a car accident—your body incinerated … nothing left to bury…" She swung the van off to the side of the road and buried her face in trembling hands. "I can't drive and talk about this."
    "Swap," he said succinctly. He stalked around the front to the driver's door as she slid over to the passenger's side. He swung back onto the road, checking every few seconds for cars. "Go on," he grated. "So they told you I burned to death, and you believed it. How convenient for you, and for Beller. I die just in time for the society wedding he had ready. I read all about it in the paper. My wife the bigamist's glittering socialite bash."
    She gazed out the window as slow darkness rolled over the eastern sky. Her ebony braid, falling to her waist, glowed like sable in the brilliant half light of the setting sun; her golden skin shimmered, playing the colors of an outback sunset across her slanted cheekbone. The pagan princess glowed even in shadow, thrumming with the pulsing beat of her inner life and heat. "David, I didn't know they lied to me. I had no idea anyone could fake a death certificate for a living person until today!"
    A delicate touch of spring flowers wafted to him in the car's heated air. It always seemed an anomaly to him that exotic, spicy Tessa loved such a gentle perfume; yet it suited her once. His innocent Tess…
    Was she still so innocent after all these years?
    He switched on the headlights. "The death certificate's not a fake. It's a legal document. As far as the world's concerned, David Oliveri died two and a half years go."
    "But…" Flicking a glance at her, he saw the helpless confusion in her eyes. "But don't you mean six years ago? They gave me a death certificate three days after you—disappeared."
    He shook his head. "That one's fake. Has to be. But the one I've got is legal, all right." He eased off the accelerator to negotiate around a clump of rocks on the dark country road. "So call me Jirrah from now on. Icould do six to twelve months inside on a felony charge just for using my name."
    He felt her frowning gaze on him in the gathering gloom. "That's the second time in five minutes you've mentioned prison sentences," she said slowly. "Is that why you never showed, six years ago? Is that why you're on the run now? Did you break the law somehow? Are the police after you?"
    He laughed at the naiveté of her questions. "Um, I'm dead, Tessa. Last I heard, you can't do time for that." He turned into a side road, heading northeast. "But doing three and a half years in lockup for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon—" He heard her high-pitched gasp, and grinned in savage bitterness. "Yeah, I suppose that tends to make a man see the legal system from a more negative side of the fence than an average, decent, law-abiding bigamist like yourself."
    "I'm a bigamist? I—oh shoot, so I am!" She made a tiny choking sound: the enchanting gurgle of suppressed laughter he'd once known so well, and loved to hear. "What a farce!" Half laughing, hysterical tears