Texas Proud and Circle of Gold (Long, Tall Texans #52) - Diana Palmer Page 0,4

a sniper kit when he needed to. It was just that he didn’t have the same need for notoriety that had once ruled his life.

Nobody needed him. Funny, the main reason he’d enjoyed the debutante was that she’d pretended to be helpless and clingy. He’d enjoyed that. Since his grandmother’s death, there had been nobody who cared about him except Paul, and nobody who needed him at all. Briefly, he’d helped his cousin protect a young woman from Jacobsville, Merrie Grayling, before she married the Wyoming rancher. But that had been sort of an accessory thing. He’d liked her very much, yet as a sort of adoptive baby sister, nothing romantic. It had been nice, helping Paulie with that little chore, especially since he knew the contract killer who’d been assigned to get Merrie. He had known how to get the hit called off—actually, by getting Merrie, an artist of great talent, to do a portrait of Tony. The contract killer had ended badly, but that happened sometimes. Most sane people didn’t go against Tony, who’d told the guy to call off the hit.

But all that had been three years ago. Life moved on. Now here was Mikey, in hiding from a newcomer in Jersey, trying to protect his friend Tony.

He thought again about the young woman who’d fallen in front of the limo. He felt bad that he’d misjudged her. She was pretty. What had she called herself—Bernadette? He smiled. He’d been to France, to the grotto where Saint Bernadette had dug into a mudhole, found a clear spring and seen the apparition she referred to as the Immaculate Conception, and he’d seen Bernadette in her coffin. She looked no older than when she’d died, a century and more ago, a beautiful young woman. He wondered if her namesake even knew who Saint Bernadette was. He wondered why she’d been given that name.

So many questions. Well, he was going to be staying in the same rooming house, so he’d probably get the chance to talk to her, to ask her about her family. She was nice. She didn’t like pity, although she had a devastating medical condition, and she had a temper. He smiled, remembering that thick plait of blond hair down her back. He loved long hair. It must be hard to keep, for someone with her limitations.

His little Greek grandmother had been arthritic. He recalled her gnarled hands and the times when she hadn’t been able to get out of bed. Mikey had carried her from room to room when she had special company, or outside when she wanted to sit in the sun. He couldn’t remember what sort of arthritis she’d had, but it was in the family bible, along with plenty of other family information. He kept the bible in a safe-deposit box back in Jersey, along with precious photographs of people long dead. There had been one of the debutante. But he’d burned that one.

The car was eating up the miles to San Antonio, where Mikey had left his luggage in a hotel under an assumed name. He’d send Santi in to pick it up and pay the bill, just in case, while he waited outside in the parking lot. You couldn’t be too careful. He needed to send a text to Paulie, as well, but that could wait until he was back in Jacobsville. He should ask Paulie about hackers and what they could find out, and how. He still wasn’t up on modern methods of surveillance.

He leaned back against the seat with a long sigh. Bernadette. He smiled to himself.

* * *

Bernadette took a hot bath, and it did help ease some of the discomfort. Mrs. Brown had been kind enough to add a handhold on the side of the tub so that Bernadette would find it easier to get in and out of the tub. She took showers, however, not baths. It was so much quicker to stand up. Besides, the bathroom was used by all the boarders on the ground floor, although there had been just Bernadette for several weeks, and poor Mrs. Brown had enough to do without having to scrub the tub all the time. She did have a daily woman who came in to help with the heavy chores. But Bernadette was fastidious and it bothered her, the idea of baths when at least one of the former boarders had been male and liked lots of musk-smelling bath oil. For women, especially, baths in a less than