Talons of the Falcon Read Free Page A

story, but Eden wasn’t going to let herself become personally involved. Pushing back her chair, she stood up. “I’m sorry. But you can count me out of the party.” Working with torture victims in the past had all but burned her out. Turning to a less demanding job had been a matter of preserving her own sanity.
    Connie looked from the agitated young woman to Amherst Gordon. At times like this she almost hated him. His face didn’t show it, but he was holding the ace of hearts and had no qualms about using it.
    “Would it make a difference,” he asked Eden slowly, “if I told you that the man in question is Lt. Col. Mark Bradley?”
    A sharp pain seemed to knife through Eden’s heart, and she sank back into the chair. The horrible things this man had described couldn’t have happened to Mark, not the Mark Bradley she remembered. But Amherst Gordon’s green eyes told her that it was all true.
    “Dear God, no!”
    Constance reached over and put an arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.
    “I’m not going to ask you to make a decision without more information,” Gordon was saying as he got up and walked stiffly across the room to transfer the parrot to a T-shaped perch. “Maybe I’ve made a mistake, and you really aren’t the right one for the case.”
    From a shelf near the window he picked up a manila folder. “Why don’t you look over Colonel Bradley’s file and then take some time to think the assignment over?”
    Constance stood up also. Without further comment, they left Eden alone in the sunlit room that now unaccountably seemed a bit chilly.
    Eden looked down at the cream-colored folder in the center of the table. Finally, with fingers that were far from steady, she flipped it open. The first thing she encountered was a large glossy photo of the man in question. In the picture he was smiling at her with that very masculine, slightly rakish grin that had captured her attention when they first met. Her gaze swept over the raven hair slanted across his forehead, the aquiline nose, the jaw that would have dominated his face had the other features not been so strong. The lines at the corners of his dark eyes had deepened slightly, but they only added a touch of maturity that hadn’t been so apparent five years ago. Mark’s dashing good looks had attracted her first. But she’d learned there was a toughness hidden by that devil-may-care exterior.
    She could see his broad shoulders below the twill fabric of his uniform, but the photo had been cropped so that only the first two buttons of his shirt were visible. Against her will, her imagination began to fill in the rest of the picture—the brawny strength of his arms, the crisp dark hair that spread across his chest and arrowed down his long torso to his trim abdomen, the narrow hips, the well-muscled thighs. The way his naked body had felt pressed to hers. The rough texture of his chest against her breasts. That last incredible night he had made love to her, she had been sure he was going to ask her to marry him. The morning after, he had walked out of her life.
    They’d been good friends for almost a year and lovers for nine months. But it wasn’t just the physical relationship. They’d both seemed to find something vital they needed in each other. Mark had taught her how to capture the unique joy of each moment together—like fine champagne bursting from an uncorked bottle. At the same time, he seemed to be reaching out to her in a deeper way, as if he were finding roots he’d never had time to put down before. She’d thought the two of them had had something very special together. Apparently she’d been wrong.
    She resented the way Amherst Gordon had carelessly ripped apart the scar tissue that had formed over her old wounds. Yet now, with Mark’s folder in front of her, Eden couldn’t help twisting the knife. As though under some sort of compulsion, she began to read on.
    The file was a summary of Mark’s service record,