She didn’t say anything, just looked at him. Charity had an open face and Nick could always tell what she was thinking. All her emotions were up front and visible. Except now, when he couldn’t read her at all.

Charity said nothing. And it suddenly occurred to him that she hadn’t said yes yet.

Sweat gathered along his spine, under his arms. Fuck. It had never even occurred to him that she might say no. If she refused, what the hell was he going to do?

The only other option would be to take her into protective custody. Essentially jail her. And he’d do it, by God. Cuff her if he had to. Drag her into custody kicking and screaming and keep her there until this whole sorry mess was settled.

“So?” he growled.

Nick could feel his muscles tensing. The low, insistent noise of imminent danger in the back of his head dialed up a couple of notches. If she said no, he was taking her in, right now. To hell with Worontzoff. They could get Worontzoff on their own. Nick would go crazy worrying about her, compromise the mission, so the only way he could function was to restrain her and drive her immediately into Birmingham.

They’d put her in a safe house, under guard 24/7. Safe houses were miserably dingy at best, and most were downright seedy. He’d been in more than one with cockroaches. And anyone under guard in a safe house subsisted off stale pizza and beer. Standing guard in a safe house was the most boring security work imaginable and the only way men could stand it was to let themselves go. Inside a day, any safe house in the world looked and smelled like Animal House and the men on guard lost about twenty points off their IQ. Lighting farts was a big diversion on guard duty.

She’d hate it—used to pretty surroundings and perfumed rooms and cut flowers in vases and fresh fruit and vegetables. She’d hate being in a safe house, with no privacy, none of her things around her, guarded over by loutish, uncaring men.

“So,” he said again. He tried to keep his voice soft. Nicholas Ames, asking a woman he’d fallen in love with to marry him. Not Nick Ireland, willing to abduct her if she said no. “What’s your answer?”

Charity suddenly smiled, eyes shining. “Yes,” she said softly. “Oh yes!”

Sixteen

It went smoothly. And fast.

Nobody else wanted to get married on this dark, icy winter day, so after filling out forms and producing IDs, the clerk ushered them immediately into a large room with a podium at the other end.

The room was filled with remnants of weddings past. Big vases of wilted flowers flanked the podium and formed a little honor brigade on either side of the aisle. White satin bows hung from the windows and the smell of scented candles still lingered in little pockets of fragrance. The empty chairs were like ghosts in the room.

A smiling woman and a gray-haired man stood at the podium, watching benevolently as Nick and Charity walked up the aisle, hand in hand.

Half an hour later, they walked out, man and wife.

Or rather, Nicholas Ames walked out a married man. Nick Ireland was still…what? Single? Legally, yeah, he was single. He didn’t feel single any more, though, not with a beaming Charity on his arm, responding happily to her new name, Mrs. Ames.

Like pulling the petals off a daisy. Married. Not married. Married. Not married…

It was a farce, of course. The whole marriage thing. He was a nonexistent man taking vows to be faithful until death. Ridiculous. He didn’t even believe in marriage. Nothing in his lifetime had ever led him to think that marriage was anything but a legal way to scratch an itch. Stupid, expensive way, too, when there were so many other ways to get laid.

Most of the men in Delta Force were divorced. Several times over, too, which just proved that the smartest men in the world could be led around by their dicks. For a while, at least.

And in the Unit—few of them even managed girlfriends, let alone wives. A long-term commitment was twenty minutes. Roll on, roll off, good-bye. It wasn’t a lifestyle conducive to relationships. That wasn’t anything that bothered him, until now. Marriage was for civilians.

And yet—and yet.

There’d been a moment there, when the gray-haired man read aloud some bible thing about cleaving unto each other, then made them repeat vows to look after each other in sickness and in health, then quietly pronounced them man and wife. When Charity lifted her radiant face for his kiss. When a goddamned shaft of sunlight unexpectedly broke through the slate gray sky to fucking shine at their feet like some fucking sign from heaven.

Then, right then, the whole thing felt…real. For an instant, he could believe he really was Nicholas Ames, businessman, marrying a wonderful woman, till death do us part. They’d live in that beautiful house which they’d fill up with kids. Take a week’s vacation in Aruba each winter. Plant roses and establish a wine cellar and buy a goddamned dog.

It was like a fork in the road and he could see far down where that road would take him. He’d become a family man, pillar of the community. Mow the lawn on Saturdays, coach Little League. Father, husband, neighbor…

Nah.

Nick wasn’t born for that life. What the fuck did he know about families? Dick is what he knew. His mother had abandoned him at an orphanage; she probably didn’t even know who his father was. He had tainted, renegade blood in him. And his upbringing, well…Charity could never know what his childhood had been like. What he’d done, what he’d seen. She’d recoil in disgust. Any woman would. And what he was would come out, sooner or later. No one can stay undercover for a lifetime. So a real marriage wasn’t in the cards, ever.

But still, for just a minute there…

Afterward, he took her to a jewelry store. The jewelry store, the only one in Parker’s Ridge. This was one thing that was on him. He wouldn’t make Uncle Sam pay for this. But what the fuck, he had a million dollars now, didn’t he? He could afford a pair of rings.

The store didn’t have a big selection and he was just about to settle for a plain regular wedding band size extra large and a band and a diamond for Charity, when he saw them.

A pair of claddagh rings, set in a velvet box under glass. A large, broad band of gold with four claddaghs etched on the ring for him, and the symbol itself as a gold ring for Charity.

The claddagh, the Celtic symbol of true love.

It was the only thing he had of his mother.

On the twenty-first of December, 1976, the night watchman of the orphanage heard a bell ring. It rang only a few times a year and it was the sensor of the only baby hatch in America at that time. Now there were 150 of them, most of them funded by Jake.

The hatch was a warmed baby bed, and it was why Nick had survived that night, the coldest night of the winter of 1975. He had been placed in a cheap plastic basin, wrapped in a blanket stolen from the downtown homeless shelter. The doctors wrote down that, in their estimation, he was three or four days old and that he’d been breast-fed sporadically. The only object in the basin was a small, cheap trinket, sold by the millions in Ireland. A claddagh medallion.

Nick had that medallion in his pocket.

“Honey,” he said, “come here.”

Charity put down the ring she’d been looking at and walked over to him.

Nick picked up the smaller ring, meant for a woman’s hand. He placed it in the palm of her hand. “Do you know what this is?”

Charity picked it up, turning it around. Two stylized hands clasping a heart topped by a crown. “No, but it’s very pretty. An unusual design, though.” She looked up with a frown. “What is it?”

“A claddagh. It’s an ancient Celtic symbol. Look, see the hands holding the heart?”

Charity nodded. “And what’s that on top?”