Outsider Read Online Free PDF Page B

could be drawn up, and they wanted an address to send them to. He gave them Maureen’s. Obviously Sarina had been willing to lie about the marriage being consummated and he didn’t give a damn. He’d sign their stupid papers. Maureen had called him the day he’d married Sarina to tell him she wanted to get married at once. He’d made some excuse and then he’d taken out his fury on Sarina. His conscience still troubled him.
    He’d had a rushed assignment overseas before he and Maureen could get married. When he came back, she told him that she forged his name on the papers and the annulment had been granted, so they could get married right away. She had a friend who was a minister and he was willing to marry them. She had the license and everything. All he had to do was say the right words. Odd, that ceremony, he recalled. Maureen even kept the license. He hadn’t seen it since. He assumed that she’d used it to get her own divorce. He’d signed some sort of papers, on tacky legal stationery. He didn’t remember much of it. He’d been drinking back then, too.
    He and Maureen had a feverish wedding night after their quickie wedding. She’d kept him at a distance all the time they were dating. The abstinence had been one reason he’d fallen on Sarina like a starving wolf, he recalled with shame. But Maureen had been an obsession. Once she was truly his, he’d had to leave her behind in Washington, D.C., for several months because he’d been given a new assignment overseas. Sarina’s father had pulled strings to get him out of town. Right after that, he’d left military intelligence and gone to work with a group of mercenaries. The money had been fantastic, and he’d loved the adrenaline rushes. But that was over now.
    He felt regret about Sarina. It must have taken a great deal of courage for her to risk intimacy with a man again, he thought. He hated the memory of what he’d done to that gentle young woman whose only crime had been to love him. None of what happened had really been her fault, even if he’d blamed her for it. The fault had been his own, for having too much to drink at the party they’d both attended, and letting them be discovered by her father and his associates in a compromising situation. He’d blamed her for that, but he shouldn’t have.
    She was still as attractive as ever, he mused. She was more mature, more independent, more spirited than the woman he’d once known who was owned by her rich father. He was surprised that she was working for a living. Her father had been worth twenty million dollars, and she was his only heir. He’d heard that Carrington had died six years earlier. He hadn’t grieved, but he’d thought about Sarina finally being out from under his thumb, and with money of her own. He frowned, remembering how she dressed, how her daughter dressed. If there was money now, it didn’t show in their clothing, or in the lowly position, probably poorly paid, that she held now.
    The microwave buzzed and he pulled the instant dinner out of it. He had a small store of dinnerware and silverware that he’d brought from his apartment in D.C. He still lived like a Spartan. Old habits died hard. He didn’t have possessions. A man who was constantly on the move couldn’t afford to lug a houseful of stuff around with him.
    Hunter had been, like himself, in the CIA, and then in freelance covert ops before he settled into security work. It had surprised him to find Hunter married and with a child. His wife was a knockout—a gorgeous blond geologist named Jennifer who was a cousin to the wife of old man Ritter’s son, Cabe. The way Hunter and Jennifer felt about one another was obvious to a blind man. They’d been married for years, but the passion hadn’t burned out, not by a long shot. Perhaps, he considered, some marriages did work out.
    He thought about his own two