Authors: Tami Hoag
Her hand brushed across the bottle of tranquilizers tucked in among her underwear, left over from her stay at Ashland Heights. Dr. Pritchard had told her to take them when she needed help sleeping, but she wouldn't. No matter how badly she wanted to, she wouldn't take any. They were a crutch, another weakness, and she was so damn tired of being weak.
She changed quickly and went out onto the balcony, hoping to rejuvenate herself with fresh night air, but the air was heavy and warm, without a breath of a breeze. Folding her arms against herself to keep from shaking, she padded down to the French doors of Savannah's room and peeked in. The bed was unmade, the rich gold-and-ruby spread a tangled drift across the mattress, lace-edged satin pillows mounded along the ornate French headboard and tossed carelessly onto the floor. The rest of the room had Savannah's stamp of housekeeping draped everywhere in the form of discarded lingerie and articles of clothing that had been dragged out of the closet and abandoned in favor of something brighter, skimpier, sexier, trashier.
Fear cracked through the other emotions that were thick in Laurel's throat as a medley of lines played through her head.
“Murders?” . . . “Four now in the last eighteen months . . . Young women of questionable reputa-tion” . . . “She gonna come to grief,
dat one.”
. . .
She chewed hard on her thumbnail as she wrestled with the urge to call the police. She was being silly, jumping to conclusions. There was nothing unusual in Savannah's staying out past two—or all night, for that matter. She could have been anywhere, with anyone.
With a killer?
“Stop it,” she ordered, her voice a harsh whisper as she reined in the irrational urge to panic. Dammit, she wasn't an irrational person. She was logical and sensible and practical. Wasn't that what had saved her when she was growing up in the poisonous atmosphere of Beauvoir?
That and Savannah.
Her gaze fell again on the bed, and she jerked herself away and headed for the stairs that led down to the courtyard, her stride brisk and purposeful.
She was feeling unsettled, skittish. The evening at Frenchie's had rattled her, from her encounter with Baldwin to Savannah's fight to Jack's tirade to the role she had agreed to play for the Delahoussayes. Truth to tell, that probably had her the most on edge. Tomorrow she would have to go down to the courthouse and see about solving the problem of Jimmy Lee Baldwin. She would have to go to work as if she had never stopped, as if she hadn't left her last job in disgrace. She would go into the halls of justice and face the secretaries, the clerk of court, the judge, other attorneys, Stephen Danjermond.
She had been mulling over that prospect as she walked home from Frenchie's. With Jack nowhere to be found, and the last rays of day still seeping through the gloom of evening, she had set off for Belle Rivière on foot, hoping to walk off some of the anxiety and self-doubt. But after only two blocks, a bottle green Jaguar pulled alongside the curb, its passenger window sliding down with a hiss.
“Might I offer you a ride, Laurel?” Stephen Danjermond leaned across the soft gray leather seats of the car and stared up at her, his green eyes glowing like jewels in the waning light. He smiled, that handsome, perfectly symmetrical smile, tinting it with apology. “As much as I enjoy bragging about our diminished crime rate in Partout Parish, I hate to see a lady take chances.”
“I could be taking a chance with you, for all I know,” Laurel said evenly, keeping her fists tucked in the deep pockets of her baggy shorts.
Danjermond regarded her with a touch of disappointment, a touch of amusement. “I think you know me better than that, Laurel.”
She looked at him blankly, trying to cover her confusion. They had only just met, but somehow she knew if she pointed that out to him, he would only be more amused. She felt as if he were a step ahead of her in time, that she was coming into a play already in progress and missing her cue. If he could rattle her this much with a simple conversation, he had to be hell on wheels in a cross-examination. A man destined for great things, Stephen Danjermond.
She pulled open the door of the Jag and sank down into the butter-soft seat. “I don't know you at all, Mr. Danjermond,” she murmured, her tone as cryptic as his expression.
“I intend to remedy that situation.”
He let the car ease along the deserted street, silent for a moment, the Jag as quiet as a soundproof booth. He had shed his tailored suit for a knit shirt the color of jade and a pair of tan chinos, but he still looked immaculate, perfectly pressed.
“Dinner with your parents was an interesting occasion,” he said.
“They're not my parents,” Laurel blurted automatically, a hot flush stinging her cheeks as he looked at her with one dark brow raised in question. “What I mean to say is, Ross Leighton isn't my father. My father passed away when I was small.”
“Yes, I know. Killed, wasn't he?”
“An accident in the cane fields.”
“You were close to him.” He stated it as a fact, not a question. Laurel said nothing, wondering how he knew, wondering what Vivian might have told him. Wondering if he was privy to Vivian's plans for the two of them.
He shot her another steady look. “Your aversion to Ross,” he explained. “I suspect you never accepted his taking your father's place. A child loses a beloved parent, resentment toward the usurper is natural. Though I should think you would have gotten over it by now. Perhaps there's something more to it?”
The answer was none of his business, but Laurel refrained from saying so. Her skills were rusty, but the instincts were still there. Danjermond's were honed to perfection. He didn't have conversations, he had verbal chess matches. He was never off duty. Every exchange was an opportunity to exercise his mind, sharpen his battle skills. She knew; she had been there. She had been that sharp, that focused. She knew an answer to this question would put her in check.
“I'm sorry about the scene my sister caused,” she said casually. “Savannah does love to be dramatic.”
“Why are you sorry?” He stopped the Jag for the red light at Jackson and pinned her with a look. “You aren't the one who caused the commotion. You have no control over your sister's actions, do you, Laurel?”
No. But she wanted to have. She wanted control. She wanted the components of her world to fit neatly into place. No messes, no unpleasant surprises.
Danjermond's gaze held fast on her. “Are you your sister's keeper?”
She shook off the thoughts and kicked herself mentally for not seeing the potential hazards of this subject she had diverted them onto. “Of course not. Savannah does as she pleases. I know she won't apologize for disrupting Vivian's gathering, so I will. I was merely taking up the gauntlet for etiquette.”
“Ah,” he smiled, looking out over the hood of the car, “the gauntlet. You might have been a knight of the Round Table in a past life, Laurel. Galahad the Good, adhering to your strict code of honor.”
He seemed amused, and it irritated her. Did he think he was too urbane, too sophisticated for the quaint, provincial ways of Bayou Breaux—he the privileged son of old New Orleans money?
“Hospitality is the Southern way. I'm sure you were raised to have better manners than to, say, interrogate a guest,” she said sweetly, shifting to the offensive.
He looked surprised and pleased at her parry. “Was I interrogating you? I thought we were getting acquainted.”
“Getting acquainted is generally a reciprocal process. You haven't told me anything about yourself.”
“I'm sorry.” He sent her a dazzling smile that had doubtless knocked more than one simple belle off her feet. Laurel reminded herself she was no simple belle, had never been. “I'm afraid I find you such an interesting and enchanting creature, I lost my head.”
The sincerity in his voice was too smooth, too polished to be real. Laurel had the unnerving feeling that nothing on this earth could rattle Stephen Danjermond. There was that sense of calm around him, in his eyes, in the core of him. She wondered if anything could ever penetrate it.
“False flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. Danjermond,” she said, glancing away from him to her reflection in the mirror on the visor. “I hardly look enchanting tonight.”
“Fishing for a compliment, Laurel?”
“Stating a fact. I have no use for compliments.”
He turned in at the drive to the carriage house that served as Belle Rivière's garage and let the Jag idle in park. “Practicality and idealism,” he said, turning toward her, sliding his arm casually along the back of the seat. “An intriguing mix. Fascinating.”
Laurel's fingers curled over the door handle as he studied her with those steady, peridot eyes. “I'm so glad I could amuse you,” she said, her tone as dry as a good martini.
Danjermond shook his head. “Not amuse, Laurel. Challenge. You're a challenge.”
“You make me feel like a Rubik's Cube.”
He laughed at that, but his enjoyment of her spunk was cut short as his pager went off. “Ah, well, duty calls,” he said with a sigh of regret, punching a button on the small black box that lay on the seat between them. “Might I beg the use of a telephone?”
He made his call in the privacy of Caroline's study and left immediately after, leaving Laurel feeling a mix of relief and residual tension. She had dreaded the prospect of introducing him to Aunt Caroline and Mama Pearl and having to sit through coffee and conversation. She had escaped that fate, but the tension lingered.
It lingered, still, as she wandered the cobbled paths of the garden in her bare feet. What a nightmare that Vivian saw them as a match.
Even if she had been in top form, Laurel wouldn't have wanted anything to do with him personally. He made her uneasy with those cool green eyes and that smooth drawl that never altered pitch or tempo. He was too composed when she felt as if she were scrambling on the side of a steep hill, scratching for a handhold. He was too intensely male, she supposed.
An image of Jack came to her, unbidden, dark, brooding, intense. Intensely male in a more basic, primal way than Stephen Danjermond . . . and desire stirred when she thought of him.
It made no sense. She had never been attracted to bad boys, no matter how seductive the gleam in their eyes, no matter how wicked their grins. She was a person who lived by the rules, stuck to them no matter what. There hadn't been a rule made Jack Boudreaux wouldn't go over, under, or around. She had always been one of the world's doers, tackling problems head-on. Jack's credo was to avoid as much responsibility as he could, to lay back and have a good time.
Laissez le bon temps rouler
.
It made no sense that she should feel anything toward him except contempt, but she did. The attraction was there, pulling at her every time he looked at her. Strong, magnetic, beyond her control. And that made her uneasy all over again. He was trouble on the hoof. A man with secrets in his eyes and a dark side he took great pains to camouflage. A man whose baser instincts ran just beneath the surface. Dangerous. She'd thought so more than once.
“Dreamin' about me, sugar?”
Laurel started, clutching at her heart as she whirled around. Jack stood just inside the back gate, leaning indolently against the brick gatepost. Shadows fell across his face, but she could feel him watching her reaction, and willed herself to relax and stand calm.
“You don't give a fig how much it sells,” she said, dryly. “You write horror because you love to scare people. I'll bet you were the kind of little boy who hid in the closet and jumped out at his mother every time she walked past.”
“Oh, I hid often enough.” His voice came so softly, Laurel thought she was imagining it. Low and smoky and laced with old bitterness. “My old man locked me in a closet for a couple of days once. I never tried to scare anybody, though.
Mais non
. My sister, Maman, and me—we were pretty much scared all the time as it was.”
His words, so casually delivered, hit Laurel with the force of a hammer. In just those few sentences he had painted a vivid and terrible picture of his childhood. With just those few words he had stirred within her compassion for a small, frightened boy.
He stepped out of the shadows, into the silvery light, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders sagging. He looked beat, drained. She had no idea what he had been doing in the time since he had stormed away from Frenchie's, but it had sapped his energy and etched lines of fatigue across his face.
“Oh, Jack . . .”
“Don't,” he said sharply, shaking off her sympathy. “I'm not a little boy anymore.”
“I'm sorry,” she whispered.
“Why? You were Blackie Boudreaux in another life?” He shook his head again, took a step closer. “
Non, 'tite ange
. You weren't there.”
No. She had been busy surviving her own nightmare, but she wouldn't say that, wouldn't share it . . . had never shared it with anyone.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What are you doing out at this hour?”
“Prowling.” He smiled slowly, his gaze roaming deliberately down from the top of her head to her tiny bare toes. “On the lookout for ladies in their nightclothes.”
Laurel had forgotten her state of undress. Now that Jack had so graciously pointed it out to her, she was acutely conscious of the fact that beneath a thin T-shirt that fell shorter than a miniskirt, she wore nothing but a pair of lavender panties. His grin deepened and he bobbed his eyebrows, an expression that clearly said “Gotcha.”
She crossed her arms and scowled at him. “People can get shot creeping around backyards in the dead of night.”
Jack let his gaze melt down over her again, lingering on the plump curves of her
breasts. “Mmmm . . . you don' look armed, sugar, but you could be dangerous—to my sanity,” he growled.
Laurel tried to scoot away from him and found he had backed her around into a position that trapped her between an armless statue of a Greek goddess and the bench where he had caught her reading his book.
“I wasn't aware your sanity was in question,” she said sarcastically. “The general consensus seems to be that you're crazy.”
He chuckled and inched a little closer to her. “You got a lotta sass,
'tite chatte
. Come here and give me a taste.”