bellowed like a stricken animal and came after Pitt again with a look of black malevolence heightened by pain and pure savagery. He threw a vicious punch at Pitt’s head.
Pitt ducked and jammed the base of the lamp downward. It connected somewhere below Dorsett’s knee on the shin, but the momentum of the flying leg knocked the lamp from Pitt’s hand. There was a clunk on the carpet. Now Dorsett was coming back at him almost as if he were completely uninjured. The veins were throbbing on the sides of his neck, the eye blazed and there were dribbles of saliva at the ends of his cracked, gasping mouth. He actually seemed to be laughing. He had to be mad. He mumbled something incoherent and leaped toward Pitt.
Dorsett never reached his victim. His right leg collapsed, and he crashed to the floor on his back. Pitt’s swing of the lamp base had broken his shinbone. This time Pitt reacted like a cat. With a lightning move, he sprang onto the desk, tensed and jumped.
Together, Pitt’s feet hurtled downward, ramming soles and heels into Dorsett’s exposed neck. The malignant face, single eye gleaming black, yellowed teeth bared, seemed to stretch in shock. A huge hand groped the empty air. Arms and legs lashed out blindly. An agonized animal sound burst from his throat, a horrible gurgling sound that came through his crushed windpipe. Then Dorsett’s body collapsed as all life faded away and the sadistic light in his eye blinked out.
Pitt somehow managed to remain standing, panting through clenched teeth. He stared at Boudicca, who strangely had made no move to help her father. She looked down at the dead body on the carpet with the uncaring but fascinated expression of a witness at a fatal traffic accident.
“You killed him,” she said finally in a normal tone of voice.
“Few men deserved to die more,” Pitt said, catching his breath while massaging a growing knot on his head.
Boudicca turned her attention away from her dead father as though he didn’t exist. “I should thank you, Mr. Pitt, for handing me Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited on a silver platter.”
“I’m touched by your sorrow.”
She smiled boredly. “You did me a favor.”
“To the adoring daughter go the spoils. What about Maeve and Deirdre? They’re each entitled to a third of the business.”
“Deirdre will receive her share,” Boudicca said matter-of-factly. “Maeve, if she is still alive, will get nothing. Daddy had already cut her out of the business.”
“And the twins?”
She shrugged. “Little boys have accidents every day.”
“I guess it isn’t in you to be a loving aunt.”
Pitt went taut from the bleak prospects. In a few minutes the eruption would occur. He wondered whether he had the strength left to fight another Dorsett. He remembered his surprise when Boudicca had lifted and crushed his body against the wall on her yacht at Kunghit Island. His biceps still ached from the memory of her grip. According to Sandecker, the acoustic wave would strike the island in minutes, followed by the eruption of the volcanoes. If he had to die, he might as well go out fighting. Somehow being beaten to pulp by a woman didn’t seem as frightening as being cremated by molten lava. What of Maeve and her boys? He could not bring himself to believe harm had come to them, not with Giordino present. They had to be warned of the coming cataclysm if there was still any chance they could escape the island alive.
Deep inside him he knew he was no match for Boudicca, but he had to act while he had the slight advantage of surprise. The thought was still in his mind when he sprinted forward, head down, across the room, crashing shoulder first into Boudicca’s stomach. Boudicca was caught off guard, but it made little difference, almost no difference at all. She took the full force of the blow, grunted from the sudden shock, and although she reeled back a few steps, she remained standing. Before Pitt could recover his own balance, she clutched him with both arms under his chest, swung around in a half circle and threw him against a bookcase, his back shattering the glass doors. Incredibly, he managed somehow to remain erect on wobbly legs instead of crashing to the floor.
Pitt gasped in agony. His whole body felt like every’ bone was broken. He fought off the pain and charged again, catching Boudicca with a bruising uppercut with his fist that drew blood. It was a blow that should have knocked any woman unconscious for a week, but Boudicca simply wiped away the blood streaming from her mouth with the back of one hand and smiled horribly. She doubled her fists and moved toward Pitt, crouched in a boxer’s stance. Hardly correct posture for a lady, Pitt thought.
He stepped in, ducked under a savage right-hand slash and hit her again with the last of his remaining strength, He felt his fist drive home against flesh and bone, and then he was pounded by a tremendous blow that caught him in the chest. Pitt thought his heart had been mashed to pulp. He couldn’t believe any woman could hit so hard. He had hammered her with a punch that had more than enough momentum to break her jaw, yet she still smiled through a bleeding mouth and repaid him with a driving backhand that drove him into the stone fireplace, forcing all the breath out of his lungs. He fell and lay there grotesquely for several moments, engulfed in pain, As though in a fog, he pushed himself to his knees, then came to his feet and stood swaying, gathering himself for one final move.
Boudicca stepped in and brutally caught Pitt in the rib cage with her elbow. He could hear the sharp snap of one, maybe two ribs cracking, and felt the stabbing pain in his chest as he crumpled to his hands and knees. He stared dumbly at the design in the carpet and wanted to hold onto the floor forever. Perhaps he was dead and this was all there was to it, a floral design in a carpet.
Despairingly, he realized he could go no further. He groped for the fireplace poker, but his vision was too blurred and his movements too uncoordinated for him to find and grasp it in his hands. Vaguely, he saw Boudicca lean down, take him by one leg and hurl him crazily across the floor, where he collided with the open door. Then she walked over and picked him up by the collar with one hand and smashed him a hard blow in the head just above the eye. Pitt lay there, teetering on the edge of unconsciousness, swimming in pain, sensing but not really feeling the blood flowing from a gash above his left eye.
Like a cat toying with a mouse, Boudicca would soon tire of the game and kill him. Dazedly, almost miraculously, drawing on a strength he didn’t know he possessed, Pitt somehow struggled slowly to his feet for what he was certain would be the last time.
Boudicca stood there beside the body of her father, smirking with anticipation. Complete mastery was etched in her face. “Time for you to join my father,” she said. Her tone was deep, icy and compelling.
“There’s a nauseating thought for you.” Pitt’s voice came thick and slurred.
Then Pitt saw the malice slowly fade in Boudicca’s face and felt a hand gently ease him aside as Giordino entered the Dorsett family study.
He stared at Boudicca contemptuously and said, “This fancy maggot is mine.”
At that moment Maeve appeared in the doorway, clutching a pair of blond-haired little boys by the hands, one on either side of her. She looked from Pitt’s bleeding face to Boudicca to her father’s body on the floor. “What happened to Daddy?”
“He caught a sore throat,” muttered Pitt.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Giordino calmly. “A couple of servants proved overly protective. They locked themselves in a room with the boys. It took me a while to kick in the door.” He didn’t explain what he did with the servants. He handed Pitt the nine-millimeter automatic taken from John Merchant. “If she wins, shoot her.”
“With pleasure,” Pitt said, his eyes devoid of sympathy.
Gone was any display of confidence in Boudicca’s eyes. Gone too was any anticipation of merely hurting her opponent. This time she was fighting for her life, and she was going to use every dirty street-fighting trick she’d been taught by her father. This was to be no civilized boxing or karate match. She moved wolflike to position herself to deliver a killing blow, mindful of the gun in Pitt’s hand.
“So you came back from the dead too,” she hissed.
“You never left my dreams,” Giordino said, puckering his lips and sending her a kiss.
“A pity you survived only to die in my house—”
A mistake. Boudicca wasted the half-second with unnecessary talk. Giordino was on her like a cattle stampede, legs bent, feet extending as they came in contact with Boudicca’s chest. The impact doubled her over with a gasp of agony, but incredibly, she somehow retained her stance and clamped her hands around Giordino’s wrists. She hurled herself backward over the desk, pulling him with her until she was lying, back against the floor, with Giordino face-down on the desktop above her, seemingly defenseless with his arms stretched out and locked in
