Free Wildest Hearts by Jayne Ann Krentz Page B

enough as it was this afternoon. There's no telling how he would react if he thought our marriage was a sham. He might let it slip to the very people we're trying to convince.”

    Annie turned to study a row of glass-topped trays. Oliver saw the tension in her shoulders as she stood with her back to him. “I think Barry deserves some explanations. He was extremely upset this afternoon.”

    Oliver leaned against one of the benches and shoved his hands into the pockets of his charcoal gray slacks. “Go ahead, Annie. Ask me what that was all about.”

    She shot him a quick, searching look over her shoulder. “All right, what was Barry talking about? What did he mean when he said some people thought you had, uh, done in an executive of one of your acquisitions? What was his name?”

    “Walker Gresham.” Oliver concentrated on the night outside the glass walls. He fell silent, wondering how much of the story to tell her.

    “Well?” Annie prompted after a few seconds of silence.

    Oliver glanced at her, mildly surprised by the hint of asperity in her voice. “About five years ago I took over a medium-sized manufacturing firm that had found an active niche in the Pacific Rim market. I kept one of the former partners, Walker Gresham, on as a high-level manager. He was the one who had carved out the foreign markets for the company and he seemed to know what he was doing.”

    “What happened?”

    “Your brother had just been put in charge of security. He walked into my office one morning and said he had reason to suspect Gresham was shipping something other than machine tools to some of his foreign customers. We set up a discreet investigation.”

    Annie watched him, intrigued. “And?”

    Oliver shrugged. “And we found out Gresham was using my new machine tool exporting business as a cover for his real occupation.”

    “Which was?”

    “He was an arms dealer. The bastard shipped black-market weapons to every two-bit terrorist and revolutionary around the Pacific who could pay for them.”

    Annie's eyes widened in astonishment. “That's awful. What on earth did you do? Report him to the FBI?”

    “We never got the chance,” Oliver said. “Daniel and I didn't know what we were onto at first. We thought it was just another white-collar business scam. We followed a computer trail that took us to a warehouse on a small South Pacific island where Gresham's stuff was being transshipped.”

    “What happened?”

    “We went into the warehouse late one night looking for evidence and stumbled across Gresham and one of his clients instead.” Oliver paused. “There was some trouble.”

    “Trouble?” Annie frowned. “I remember Daniel going out to the South Pacific on a business trip a few years ago. He never told me there was any danger involved. He just said everything had been straightened out.”

    Oliver chose his words carefully. “Everything did get straightened out. But in the process Walker Gresham was killed.”

    “Killed.” Annie gave him a horrified look. “Who killed him?”

    Oliver saw nothing to be gained by telling her that he had fired the shot that had killed Gresham or that Gresham had been about to shoot Daniel at the time. Some things were better left unexplained, especially to someone like Annie.

    Telling even a sanitized version of the story brought back unpleasant memories, however. Oliver suspected that the image of Gresham's blood-stained body lying on the concrete floor of the warehouse would haunt him off and on for the rest of his life. Perhaps it was only right, he thought. A man should not be able to kill, even in self-defense or to save someone else, and then be able to erase the memory of the killing.

    “Your brother and I had gone into the warehouse armed just in case,” Oliver said, choosing his words carefully. “We weren't sure what to expect. All hell broke loose. There was a flurry of shots and when it was over, Gresham was dead. It all happened a long ways