Slow Heat in Heaven (21 page)

To the day she died, she had never complained about their arrangement. Each time he made the trip from the mansion to the house on the bayou, whatever time of day or night he arrived unexpectedly, she dropped whatever she was doing and gave him what he needed, whether it be a meal, a fight, sympathy, laughter, conversation, sex.

Her curiosity about Macy never waned, but she wasn't jealous of her. Jealousy wouldn't have improved her situation. It would have been a wasted emotion, and Monique poured all her emotion and energy into loving Cotton.

Jesus, he had loved that woman.

She'd been dead for almost four years, but the pain of her death was as keen as it had been when her smiling lips whispered his name for the last time and her fingers relaxed their grip on his hand.

Now, the guilty memory of her last smile squeezed tightly the fragile walls of his damaged heart.

"Cash?" He stopped and turned. Schyler was poised in the doorway of the office. "Are you on your way home?"

He squinted against the setting sun. "It's quitting time, isn't it?"

"Yes, but if you can spare a minute, I'd like to talk to you."

She thought he was going to ignore her because he turned his back and sauntered toward his pickup truck. He left it parked at the landing nearly every day and drove one of the company trailer rigs to wherever they were cutting.

"Have you been cooped up inside that office all day?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Yes."

He leaned over the side of the truck and opened a cooler. He took an iced-down six-pack of beer out of it. "Come on. I'll treat you to a beer."

"Where?"

He looked at her long and hard. "Does it matter?"

Schyler wouldn't back down from a challenge, no matter how subtly it was issued. "Just a sec." She went back inside and turned off all but one light, then locked the office for the night before joining him beside the pickup. He had already downed one can of beer. He crushed the can in his fist and tossed it into the pickup's bed. It landed with a hollow, metallic clatter. He worked a can out of the plastic webbing for her and took another for himself before replacing the six-pack in the cooler.

"Where are we going?"

"Over the river and through the woods."

'To grandmother's house?" Laughing, Schyler fell into step beside him.

"I never had a grandmother."

Both her smile and her footsteps faltered. "Neither did I." He stopped in his tracks and gazed at her. "At least none I knew about," she said in an undertone. He began walking again. After a moment, she asked, "Why do you do that?"

"What?"

"Throw all your deprivations in my face."

"To make you mad."

"You admit it?"

"Why not? It's true. I don't need a priest to confess my sins to."

"You're a Catholic?"

"My mother was."

"And you?"

"I can do without it. My mother's religion didn't do her any good, did it? I prized a rosary out of a dead soldier's hand in Nam. What good did prayers do him?"

"How can you be so callous?"

"Practice."

They walked on, but Schyler wasn't ready to quit. "What about your mother's people?"

"What about them?"

"Where were they from?"

'Terrebonne Parish, but I never met any of them that I remember."

"Why?"

"They kicked her out."

Again Schyler stopped and faced him in the darkening twilight. "They kicked her out?"

"Oui.
Because of me. When my old man deserted us, her folks didn't want to have anything to do with us either."

Not a trace of sadness was registered on his uncompromisingly masculine features, but she knew that he must hurt. Somewhere deep down inside himself, Cash Boudreaux must feel the pain of rejection.

They continued down the overgrown path that meandered through the woods. "Maybe that's why my real mother gave me up for adoption," she said. "Maybe her family threatened to disown her if she kept her illegitimate baby. Your mother must have loved you very much and wanted to keep you in spite of her family."

"She did. But wanting to keep me sure as hell made life tough on her." He held aside a low dogwood branch for her. "There."

He pointed toward the shallow and narrow tributary at the bottom of a slight decline. Trailing willow branches bent toward the water to tickle the knobby knees of cypress trees that poked out above the surface.

"It's beautiful here," Schyler whispered. "And peaceful. The nearest town could be miles away."

"Have a seat."

She sat down on the boulder he indicated, close to the water's edge. Fragrant, yeasty vapor was belched out of the can of beer when she pulled the tab off. Foam spewed. She sipped it off the back of her hand. She drank from the can, then licked her lips. Cash was leaning against the trunk of a cypress, studying her. She looked up at Him and asked, "How do you find these places?"

He gazed around. "I was as wild as an Indian when I was growing up. My favorite place to be was in the woods. I've tramped all over these bayous." He slid down the tree trunk until he was sitting on his haunches. He picked up a stick and dug the tip into the soft mud at the water's edge.

Bubbles popped up. When they burst, tiny holes were left. "Crawfish," he said.

Schyler stared at him. This man intrigued her. He was an enigma, a study of contradictions. He was a diligent worker, but money wasn't his motivation. He didn't seem to mind living with scarcely any amenities. He neither scorned nor coveted material possessions but seemed genuinely indifferent to them.

"Did you ever think of doing something else, Cash?"

He slurped his beer. "About what?"

"With your life. I mean, didn't you ever have any ambition to go somewhere else?"

"Like where?"

"I don't know," she said in exasperation. "Somewhere. Didn't you explore other career opportunities?"

He shook his head. "I always wanted to work in the forest."

"I know. You're excellent at your job. So you could have gotten work anywhere there is timber. Didn't you ever think of leaving Heaven?"

He stared at the still surface of the water for a long time before answering. "I thought about it."

"Then why didn't you go?"

He finished his beer. "It just didn't work out."

Dissatisfied with his answer, Schyler pressed. "What didn't work out? A promised job?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"I couldn't leave." Impatiently, he rose to his feet.

"Of course you could leave. What was holding you here?"

He made several restless movements, then propped his hands on his hips and stared at his booted feet. He drew a deep breath and let it out. "My mother. I couldn't leave because of her."

That was a more thorough answer than Schyler had hoped for, but it still didn't shed much light. She ran her fingertip around the top of the aluminum beer can. "And after she died? Why didn't you leave then?"

He didn't answer her. She looked up expectantly. He was staring down at her. "I had promised her that I wouldn't." They stared at each other for so long that Schyler began to feel uncomfortable. Intuitively she knew that his reply implied something important, something that involved her, but she doubted she would ever know what it was. Cash Boudreaux was a mystery that would remain unsolved.

That reminded her of why she had detained him. "Cash, didn't you tell me that two of the rigs had flat tires when you got to the landing yesterday morning?"

"Oui
,
but they've been taken care of. I changed the flats myself. The tires are being repaired at Otis's garage."

"I'm not worried about the tires," she murmured absently. "Doesn't that strike you as unusual and unlikely?"

"What?"

"That two rigs would have flat tires on the same morning."

"Coincidence." Her worried frown indicated that she wasn't so sure. "You don't think so?"

The deep breath she drew lifted her breasts and delineated them against her blouse. She wasn't aware of that, nor that the involuntary motion had drawn his eyes. Since the day she had asked him to resume his position with the company, she had been careful to wear modest clothing, not because she felt bound to obey his high-handed directives, but because she didn't want to warrant his criticism.

"I suppose it's just a crazy coincidence. I probably wouldn't have thought any more about it
except. . ."

"Go on. What?"

Feeling rather foolish, she looked directly at him. "This morning when I got here, the office door was standing ajar. You didn't arrive before me, did you?"

He shook his head. His brows were pulled into a
V
across his forehead. "Wind?"

"What wind?" she asked with a soft laugh. "I would give my eye teeth to feel a good stiff breeze. Besides, the door was locked. I make certain of that every night before I leave. Did you come in behind me last night to use the telephone?"

He smiled lopsidedly and shook his head no. "What are you getting at? That the track tires could have been tampered with?"

"No, I guess not. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?" She rubbed the back of her neck. The nagging suspicions she had nursed ail day sounded ludicrous when spoken aloud. She wished she had heeded her earlier instinct and kept them to herself.

"Was anything in the office missing?"

"No."

"Disturbed?"

"No."

"No signs of vandalism?"

She denied that, too, with a shake of her head. "It just made me feel creepy."

"I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. But maybe you'd better start going home earlier. Don't stay here so late by yourself."

"Ken said the same thing. He's been driving over to follow me home every night."

"Howell?" Cash's brows drew even closer together. "Was he here the night before last?"

"Yes," she replied, mystified by the question. "Why?"

"Did he go anywhere near the garage?"

She shot him a sour look. "Don't be absurd."

"It's not so absurd. Howell has got two good reasons to be severely pissed off."

"What?"

"You taking over the management of Crandall Logging. And the gossip circulating about us."

"Us?" She knew what was coming. The only reason she had asked was that she was curious to see how much he knew. She braced herself for whatever he might say.

"Us. You and me. Folks say that business isn't all we're doing together. They've put us in the same bed. And they say we're having a damn good time there."

Her preparations fell short. She didn't sustain the blow of his words at all. In fact they caused her breath to catch. She said nothing; she couldn't, no more than she could escape his compelling stare, which, like a chameleon, changed color to match the background. One second it was gray, the next mossy green, the next agate.

"Now if you were Howell, wouldn't you be feeling like shit?"

"Ken's got no reason to hold a grudge. I haven't infringed on his work at the downtown office. As for the other, even though it's silly gossip, it's none of his business. He's married to my sister."

"Right," Cash drawled, taking a long drink from his beer. "But he can't stand the thought of me sampling what he threw away. Finished?"

Schyler had once again been rendered mute. Finally she asked hoarsely, "What?"

"Finished?" He nodded down at the can of beer she was mindlessly strangling with both hands.

"Oh, not quite."

"Well, what have we here?"

Schyler was shakily raising the can of beer to her mouth, when Cash bent from the waist and scooped something up from the muddy ground near her feet. She went rigid with terror when she saw the writhing body of the snake dangling by its tail from his hand. Its dark-banded body was a good two feet long. Its head was black. Inside its open mouth Schyler could see the pinkish-white membrane from which it drew its nickname.

Cash casually swung the snake backward, then let his hand fly as though he were fishing with a casting rod. The cottonmouth tumbled end over end in the air before making a splash in the center of the viscous bayou.

Schyler's eyes backtracked from the dark green splash it made to Cash. "That was a water moccasin," she wheezed.

"Um-huh. Ready to head back?"

"And you just picked it up."

Then he noticed her apparent dismay and said wryly, "I was raised on the banks of the bayou, Schyler. I'm not afraid of snakes. Any snake." He reached down and drew her up. He ran his warm, rough palms over her upper arms. "I guess you are, though. You've got goose bumps." As his hand continued to rub the raised flesh, he whispered, "Not too many snakes make it as far as the mansion, do they?"

Keeping one hand around her elbow, he guided her back toward the landing. Her knees were trembling. The altercation with the cottonmouth had been unsettling. So had his cavalier treatment of it. So was his soft touch and his hot stare and every sexy word that came out of his mouth.

When they reached his pickup, she slumped against the side of it. "Before I forget," she said, "there's something else I wanted to talk to you about."

"I'm listening."

"Today I made an appointment to meet with Joe Endicott, Jr. at his paper mill."

"Over in East Texas?"

"Yes. We've dealt with them before."

"I remember. They gave us several good contracts."

"That's been a few years ago. Do you know why they stopped doing business with us?"