Cry Wolf (19 page)

“Come on,
'tite chatte
,” he said, nodding toward the back gate. He caught her small hand in his and started walking.

Laurel dug her heels in and scowled at him. “Come on where?”

“Crawfishin'.”

She tried in vain to tug her hand away even as her feet took a step in his direction. “I'm not going crawfishing with you. I'm not going anywhere with you!”

“Sure you are, sugar.” He grinned like the devil and drew her another step toward the gate. “You can't stay holed up in this garden forever. You gotta get out and live with the common folk.”

She gave a sniff. “I don't see much of anything common about you.”

“Merci!”

“It wasn't a compliment.”

“Come on, angel,” he cajoled, changing tacks without warning. He sprang toward her, landing as graceful as a cat, and swung her into a slow dance to music only he could hear. “Me, I'm jus' a poor Cajun boy all alone in this world,” he murmured, his voice warm and rough like velvet, his accent thickening like a fine brown roux. He captured her gaze with his and held it, his head bent so that they were nearly nose to nose. “Woncha come crawfishin' with me,
mon coeur
?”

Temptation curled around her and drew her toward him. It seemed insane, this attraction between them. She didn't want a man in her life right now. She had all she could do to manage herself. And Jack would not be managed. He had a wildness about him, an unpredictability. He could tell her he had suddenly decided to fly off to Brazil for the day, and she wouldn't have been a bit surprised. No, he was no man for her.

But his offer was tempting. She could almost feel the mud between her toes, smell the bayou, feel the excitement of lifting a net full of clicking, hissing little red crawfish out of the water. It had been years since she'd gone. Her father had taken her and Savannah—against Vivian's strident objections. And she and Savannah had snuck away on their own a time or two after he had died, but those times were so distant in the past, they no longer seemed real. Now Jack was offering. Good-time Jack with his devil's grin and his air of
joie de vie
.

She looked up at him, and her mouth moved before she could even give it permission. “All right. Let's go.”

Chapter
Ten

They rode in Jack's Jeep down the bayou road, turning off on a narrow, overgrown path a short distance before the site of their accident. Lined with trees, rough and rutted, it had Jack slowing the Jeep to a crawl, and Huey jumped out of the back, eager to begin his exploration of this new territory. Laurel hung on to the door as the Jeep bounced along, her attention on the scenery. She knew the area. Pony Bayou. So named for a prized pony owned by a local Anglo planter back in the late seventeen hundreds. The pony was “borrowed” by a Cajun man who planned to use the stallion for breeding purposes. A feud ensued, with considerable bloodshed, and all for nought as the pony got himself mired in the mud of the bayou and was devoured by alligators.

Despite its gruesome history, Pony Bayou was a pretty spot. The stream itself was narrow and shallow with low, muddy banks and a thick growth of water weeds and flowers. A perfect haven for crawfish, as was evidenced by the presence of two beat-up cars parked along the shoulder of the road. Two families were trying their luck in the shallows, their submerged nets marked by floating strips of colored plastic. Half a dozen children chased each other along the bank, shrieking and laughing. Their mothers were perched on the long trunk of an ancient brown Cadillac, swapping gossip. Their fathers leaned back against the side of the car, drinking beer and smoking nonchalantly. Everyone waved as Laurel and Jack rumbled past in search of a spot of their own. Laurel smiled and waved back, glad she had come, feeling lighter of heart away from the aura of her family.

They parked the Jeep and gathered their equipment as if this were an old routine. Laurel pulled on a pair of rubber knee-boots to wade in, grabbed several cotton mesh dip nets, and clomped after Jack, who had nets tucked under his arm and carried a cooler full of bait. Huey bounded ahead, nose scenting the air for adventure. Jack scolded him as the hound splashed into the bayou, and Huey wheeled and slunk away with his tail tucked between his legs, casting doleful looks over his shoulder at Jack.

Jack scowled at the dog, not appreciating the fact that he felt like an ogre for spoiling Huey's fun. Laurel was giving him a look as well.

“There won' be a crawfish between here and New Iberia with him around,” he muttered.

“Depends on how good a fisherman you are, doesn't it?” She lifted a brow in challenge.

“When you grow up fishin' to keep your belly full, you get pretty damn good at it.”

Laurel said nothing as she watched him bait the nets with gizzard shad and chicken necks. He had grown up poor. Lots of people had—and did—in South Louisiana. But the hint of defensiveness and bitterness in his tone somehow managed to touch her more than she would have expected it to.

There was such a thing as being poor and happy. After her father had died, Laurel had often offered God every toy she possessed, every party dress, for the chance to have parents who cared more about her and Savannah than they did about wealth. She had known a number of families whose parents worked on Beauvoir, who had little and still smiled and hugged their children. The Cajuns were famously
un
materialistic and strongly family-oriented. But she had a feeling this had not been the case with Jack's family.

Curiosity itched inside her, but she didn't ask. Personal questions didn't seem wise.

They each took a net out into the water, spacing them a good distance apart. Jack worked quickly and methodically, the ritual as second-nature to him as tying his shoes. Laurel kept stumbling over tangles of alligator weed that was entwined with delicate yellow bladderwort and water primrose. The spot she had chosen to drop her net was choked with lavender water hyacinth that fought her for control of the net.

“Uh-huh,” Jack muttered dryly, suddenly beside her, reaching around her, enveloping her in his warm male scent. “I can see you grew up eating store-bought crawfish.”

Laurel shot him an offended look. “I did not. I'll have you know, I've done this lots of times. Just not in the last fifteen years, that's all.”

Jack set the net and helped her wade back to shore, balancing her when the roots and reeds caught at her boots. When they were back on solid ground, he gave her a dubious look.

“I saw where you grew up, sugar. I can't picture any daughter of that house wading for mudbugs.”

“That just shows what a reverse snob you are,” Laurel said as she stepped out of the hot boots and let her bare feet sink into the soft ground of the bank. “Daddy used to take Savannah and me.”

She leaned back against the side of the Jeep and stared across the bayou, thinking of happier times. On the far bank lush ferns and purple wild iris grew in the shade of hardwood trees dripping moss and willows waving their pendulous ribbons of green. In brighter spots black-eyed Susans and white-topped daisy fleabane dotted the bank like dollops of sunshine. Somewhere along the stream a pileated woodpecker began drumming against a tree trunk in search of an insect snack and the racket startled a pair of prothonotary warblers from their roost in a nearby hackberry sapling. The little birds fluttered past, flashes of slate blue and bright yellow.

“What happened to him?” Jack asked softly.

Emotion solidified in Laurel's throat like a chunk of amber. “He died,” she whispered, the beautiful growth along the far bank blurring as unexpected tears glazed across her eyes. “He was killed . . . an accident . . . in the cane fields . . .”

One swift, terrible moment, and all their lives had been changed irrevocably.

Jack watched the sadness cloud her face like a veil. Automatically, he reached for her, curled his arm around her shoulder, pulled her gently against his side. “Hey, sugar,” he murmured, his lips brushing her temple. “Don' cry. I didn' mean to make you cry. I brought you out here to make you happy.”

Laurel stifled the urge to lean against him, straightening away instead, scrubbing at the embarrassment that reddened her cheeks. “I'm okay.” She sniffed and shook her head, smiling against the desire to cry. “That just kind of snuck up on me. I'm okay.” She nodded succinctly, as if she had managed to convince herself at least, if not Jack.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Tough little cookie, bucking up when she wanted to crumble. She was a fighter, all right. He had learned that not only by experience, but through his reading. According to the papers he had culled out of his collection of a year's worth, she had been as tenacious as a pit bull going after the alleged perpetrators in the Scott County case. She had driven her staff mercilessly, but worked none harder than she worked herself in the relentless—and, as it had turned out, futile—pursuit of justice. He couldn't help wondering where that hunger for truth and fairness had come from. Reporters had described it as an obsession. Obsessions grew out of seeds sown deep inside. He knew all about obsessions.

“How old were you?” he asked.

Laurel pulled up a black-eyed Susan and began plucking off the petals methodically. “Ten.”

He wanted to offer some words of sympathy, tell her he knew how tough it was. But the fact of the matter was, he had hated his father and hadn't mourned his passing for even a fraction of a second.

“What about you?” Laurel asked, giving in to her curiosity on the grounds of good manners. He had asked her first. It would have been rude not to ask in return. “Do your parents live around here?”

“They're dead,” Jack said flatly. “Did he want you to be a lawyer, your daddy?”

Laurel looked down at the mutilated flower in her hand, thinking of it as a representation of her life. The petals were like the years her father had been alive, all of them stripped away, leaving her with nothing but ugliness. “He wanted me to be happy.”

“And the law made you happy?”

She shook her head a little, almost imperceptibly. “I went into law to see justice done. Why did you go into it?”

To show my old man
. “To get rich.”

“And did you?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Me, I had it all.”
And then I killed it, crushed it, threw it all away
.

Jack shifted his weight restlessly from one squishy wet sneaker to the other. She was turning the tables on him, neatly, easily, subtly. He shot her a glance askance. “You're good, counselor.”

Laurel blinked at him in innocence. “I don't know what you mean.”

“I mean,
I'm
the one asking the questions, so how come I'm all of a sudden giving answers?”

Her mouth turned down in a frown. “I thought this was a conversation, not an interrogation. Why can't I ask questions?”

“Because you won' like my answers, sugar,” he said darkly.

“How will I know until I hear them?”

“Trust me.”

Laurel took advantage of the silence to study him for a moment as he stared out at the brown water, that intense, brooding look on his face. The feeling that he was two very different men struck her once again. One minute he was the wild-eyed devil who wanted nothing more than to get into trouble and have a good time; the next he was this closed, dark man who kept the door shut on the part of himself he didn't want anyone to see. She found herself wanting to know what was on the other side of that door. A dangerous curiosity, she thought, pulling herself back from asking more questions.

Down the bank Huey suddenly bounded out of a stand of cattails and coffee weed, baying excitedly. The children who had been chasing around their parents' cars farther downstream came running, squealing with excitement to see what the hound had discovered, shrieking delightedly when they found the dog's quarry was a painted turtle with a spotted salamander riding on its back.

The turtle lumbered along, ignoring the sniffing hound, its lethargic gait seeming out of sync with its gaudy coloring. Its ebony-green shell shone like a bowling ball and was crisscrossed with a network of reddish-yellow lines. A broad red stripe stroked down the center of it from head to tail. The salamander flicked its long tongue out at the dog, sending Huey into another gale of howls that in turn set the children off again.

Poor Huey couldn't seem to figure out why the turtle didn't spring away from him so he could give chase. He batted a paw at it and yipped in surprise as the salamander shot off its hard-shelled taxi and skittered into the tall weeds. The hound wheeled and ran, bowling over a toddler in his haste to escape.

Being the closest adult, Laurel automatically went to the little girl's aid. She hefted up twenty pounds of squalling baby fat and perched the child on her hip as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Don't cry, sweetie, you're okay,” she cooed, stroking a mop of black curls that were as soft as a cloud.

The little girl let out a last long wail, just to let the world know she had been sorely mistreated, then subsided into hiccups, her attention suddenly riveted on her rescuer. Laurel smiled at the swift change of mood, at the innocence in the chubby face and the wonder in the round, liquid dark eyes. A muddy little hand reached up and touched her face experimentally.

“Jeanne-Marie, are you okay,
bébé
?” The child's mother rushed up, her brows knit with worry, arms reaching out.

“I think she was just startled,” Laurel said, handing the baby over.

After a quick inspection satisfied her parental concern, the young woman turned back to Laurel with a sheepish look. “Oh, look! Jeanne-Marie, she got you all dirty! I'm so sorry!”

“It's nothing. Don't worry about it,” Laurel said absently, reaching out to tickle Jeanne-Marie's plump chin. “What a pretty little girl.”

The mother smiled, pride and shyness warring for control of her expression. She was herself very pretty in a curvy, Cajun way. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you for picking her up.”

“Well, I'm sure the dog's owner would apologize to you,” Laurel said dryly, shooting Jack a glance over her shoulder. “If he would ever admit the dog is his.”

The woman was understandably baffled, but nodded and smiled and backed away toward the rest of her group, telling Jeanne-Marie to wave as they went.

Laurel waved back, then turned toward Jack, a smart remark on the tip of her tongue. But he had a strange, stricken look on his face, as if he had seen something he hadn't been at all prepared for.

“What's the matter with you?” she said instead. “Do you have a phobia of children or something?”

Jack shook himself free of the emotion that had gripped him as he had watched Laurel with little Jeanne-Marie.
Dieu
, he felt as though he'd taken an unexpected boot to the solar plexus. She had looked so natural, so loving. The thought had crossed his mind instantly, automatically, that she would make a wonderful mother—as Evie would have if she had ever gotten the chance. If their child had ever been born. Thoughts he didn't usually allow himself during daylight hours. Those were for the night, when he could dwell on them and beat himself with them and cut his soul to ribbons with their razor-sharp edges.

“A—no,” he stammered, blinking hard, scrambling for a mental toehold. He shrugged and flashed her a smile that was pale in comparison to his usual. “Me, I just don' know much about babies, that's all.”

Laurel gave him a look. “I'll bet you know all about making them, though, don't you?”

“Ah,
c'est vrai
. I'm a regular expert on that subject.” His grin took hold, cutting his dimples deep into his cheeks. He looped his arms around her, catching her by surprise, and shuffled closer and closer, until they were belly to belly. “You want for me to give you a demonstration, sugar?” he drawled, his voice stroking over her like long, sensitive fingers.

Laurel swallowed hard as raw, sexual heat swept through her.

“You certainly have a high opinion of your own abilities,” she said, grabbing frantically for sass to ward off the other, more dangerous feelings.

He lowered his head a fraction, his dark eyes shining as he homed in on her mouth. “It ain't bragging if you can back it up.”

Laurel's pulse jumped. “I'll back
you
up,” she threatened with a look of mock consternation. She planted both hands against his chest and shoved.