Hall, Jessica (33 page)

"Marc didn't know about me." Now she was frightened and
confused. "He said he never knew."

"No one on the bayou had any reason to hurt you and Ginny. It
could have only been one person."

She shook her head. "No. I don't believe you."

"There was no one else with that kind of money." Caine's
voice grew harsh. "Marc LeClare paid my father to burn you and your mother
to death. Marc was the one who brought you to that warehouse. He was the one
who wanted to kill you."

"You don't know that."

Terri saw her partner exit the elevators and dropped the stack of
case files in her hands.

"J. D.!" She ran to him and, uncaring of the
disapproving eyes, flung her arms around his neck. "Oh, God, I've been so
worried." She drew back and studied him. "You okay? Where have you
been? I could just kick your ass right now. Wait." She hugged him
again.
"Okay, I'll beat the crap out of you tomorrow. What's happening?"

"I quit the force." He helped pick up her files.
"Caine Gantry grabbed Sable out on the bayou. He's got her somewhere
now."

"Stupid shit for brains." She pressed the heels of her
hands against her eyes for a moment. "He won't hurt her, J. D."

"I'm not going to wait and find out."

"I promise, he won't. Caine's my cousin." She grimaced
as she met his incredulous stare. "I know, I should have brought that up
before, but you had enough on your mind. Caine's been in love with Sable since
they were teenagers."

"You know, I didn't need
another
reason to kill
him." He looked around and nodded toward a conference room. "Come on,
we need to talk."

"Wait." She grabbed a couple of files from her desk.

After Terri filled him in on what little progress Garcia had made
on the case, she opened one file. "This is the sheet on Bud Gantry. I can
verify that Caine was only thirteen when Sable and her mother were nearly
burned to death. He saw his father setting it and ran to get Remy that night.
Even back then Caine was crazy about Sable."

J. D. related what Remy told his father, and she closed the file.
"Okay, so Marc goes to find Ginny the next day and they tell him she's
dead. He couldn't have been too broken up about it."

"Why do you say that?"

"This is the background sheet on LeClare." She tapped a
section on the front page, then an entry on Bud Gantry's rap sheet. "Look
at the dates—his wedding was only three weeks after the fire."

That changed everything, and J. D. went still. "We've got to
get into his bank accounts."

"You're no longer working here," she reminded him.

"Run a financial check. Look at all of the LeClares'
accounts, personal and business. I'm interested in large lump-sum withdrawals
in the last month and twenty-nine years ago."

"You think LeClare tried to kill his own daughter?
Twice?"

Terri drove up to her apartment ten hours later. She was tired and
her eyes burned from studying printouts of bank records all day. She hadn't
been able to find any suspicious withdrawals, and called J. D. to tell him
that, but he had only told her to keep searching. He seemed convinced that
she'd find something.

All Terri wanted to do was spend ten hours flat on her back, but
she'd be lucky if she got five. She kept seeing the look on Cort's face after
she'd punched him in the nose.

Felt good, too,
she thought as she rubbed
the bruised spot on her cheek.
Too bad I didn't break it.

Standing under the shower until the hot water ran out helped relax
her tense muscles, but she'd barely dried off when she heard someone hammering
at her front door. Thinking it was J. D., she threw on a robe and ran, only to
see Cort Gamble hovering outside her front window.

She unlocked all five dead bolts on her door and pulled it open.
"What, are you selling cookies?"

"No." He stared at her oddly for a moment. "May I
come
inside?" He sounded as polite as a visiting priest.

She stepped out of his way and then closed the door behind him.
"J. D.'s back."

"I know." He looked all around her front room.
"This is a small place."

"Not all of us can afford nineteenth-century mansions. I like
it." She brushed past him to go into her tiny kitchenette. "Beside, I
really only sleep here. Sit down—want a drink?"

He didn't answer her or sit; he only stood in the middle of the
room staring at the portrait of Marie Laveau over her sofa and the yellow
blessing candles on the shelf beneath it. "You believe in voodoo?"

"No, but some of my family does, and I don't have the heart
to throw out the crap they give me." She poured herself a glass of
raspberry tea, and after a hesitation, poured a second for him. "So what
brings you to my humble, not very architecturally interesting, voodoo-infested
abode?"

"I needed to see you." He watched her come from the
kitchen and stared at the glass she held out to him. "No, thank you."

This close, she could smell the whiskey on his breath and see the
slight glaze over his eyes. Despite his very sober appearance, she wondered if
the oh-so-proper Marshal Cortland Gamble might be slightly smashed out of his
gourd.

You don't prod a gator with a stick, chère,
her
mother told her.
Even when it don't look hungry.

She set the glass down and kept her voice neutral. "What can
I do for you, Cort?"

He looked over her shoulder. "Is my brother here?"

"No." She laughed as he went back to have a look
in
her bedroom anyway. "Fabio is, though, and he's very tired. Don't wake him
up—I wore him out."

Cort returned to the front room. "Where is J. D.?"

"I don't know." He was beginning to worry her now.
"Maybe you should go home now, Cortland. Sleep it off."

"Have you slept with him?"

She folded her arms. Here stood the only Gamble she'd ever been
interested in, and he thought she was doing it with his brother. There was some
kind of sick, twisted message in that. "Fabio? I wish. J. D.? Ah, no,
sorry. Department policy, paragraph nine, subsection three: Female detectives
will refrain from screwing their partners' brains out at all times."

He didn't like that. "You're always laughing at me."

"What can I say, you're a funny guy."

"No, I'm not." He reached out and touched her shaggy
hair. "Why Fabio?" he asked as he fingered the short strands.
"Why not me?"

Jesus, he really is smashed.
Reasoning with him
would be totally useless, so she might as well concentrate on hauling his butt
back to the Gamble plantation. "He's richer than you. And nicer.
Don't." As he tried to kiss her, she whipped her head to the side.

"I want to."

"I'm getting high enough from the fumes, thanks." She
took his arm, trying to steer him toward the sofa. "How about you sit
down, let me get dressed, and I'll drive you home."

"I'm not that drunk, Therese."

"You don't want me to make you blow up a funny little
balloon, do you?" She gave up on planting him and headed for her bedroom.
"Hold on, I'll be right out."

Terri didn't realize he'd followed her in until he
closed
the bedroom door and locked it. She was not going to yell at him. He was
intoxicated; he didn't know what he was doing.

"I've been dressing myself since I was three, Cort. I don't
need help."

"I know what you need." He loomed over her, and brought
her hand to the front of his trousers. The ridge tenting them was pretty
impressive. He pulled off his shirt. "I'll give it to you."

The temptation was equally daunting—he felt long and thick against
her fingers, and lo and behold, the man had the chest of a god. The rest of him
had to be as good or better. Terri hadn't had sex since... she couldn't
remember—it had been that long.

But this wasn't just any guy. This was Cort, and that was
broken-heart territory from the borders in.

Carefully she pulled her hand away. "I don't have any paper
bags for you to put over your head for when you sneak out of here in the
morning."

"I don't sneak and I don't need a bag."

"Go back outside and get a better look at the neighborhood,
you'll change your mind real fast."

He turned on the lamp, then came over and tugged at the belt of
her robe. She stopped him, and he looked into her eyes. "I need you,
Terri."

Maybe he hadn't had sex in a long time. That might explain his
choice. "Why now? Why not in 2001, or last Christmas, or next
Tuesday?"

"I've tried not to think about you," he told her.
"For years, ever since they made you his partner. I can't do it
anymore." He untied the belt and parted her robe, then stared down at her.

She knew her breasts were small and she was too thin, and she had
to struggle with a terrible urge to
jerk her robe shut.
"As you can see, I'm built for speed, not display."

"You're..." He dragged in an unsteady breath as he
cupped her and circled her nipple with his thumb.

She braced herself. "Anorexic? Unappealing?
Androgynous?"

"Art. A work of art." He closed his arms around her
waist and his mouth over her breast.

The last of her good intentions went straight to Jail, no passing
Go, no collecting two hundred dollars. What the hell—she'd have one good
reality-based fantasy to masturbate to for the rest of her life.

"This is just sex, right?" When he only moved from one
breast to the other, she clenched her hands on his waist. "Uh, safe
sex?"

He stood up and stuffed his hand in his jeans pocket, and then
slapped several square packets into her palm. "Safe enough?"

She pretended to check them.
He came prepared, bless his stony
little heart.
"Latex are good." Though they looked kind of
small—or maybe that was like objects reflected in car side mirrors. Next to
him, a prizewinning bull would look pretty puny right now.

She placed all but one of them within reach of her bed, then
shrugged out of her robe and sat down on the side of the mattress. "Come
here."

He walked over to her, but she put her hands on his hips when he
would have joined her. "Stay right there." She set the condom aside
to work on his jeans, and didn't look at him until he pulled his long legs out
of them and kicked them aside. Then she lifted her lashes and stared.

He was, well,
large
didn't quite encompass it.
Gargantuan
might work. Or
lethal weapon.

Something panicky fluttered in the bottom of her
stomach
as she touched him. Smooth, satiny skin over what felt like iron. T think we
might need to sew two together."

He cradled the back of her head, rubbing his fingers against her scalp.
"Put it on me."

So her hands shook as she took out the condom, and she fumbled a
little. If she'd been thinking clearly, she would have done something sexy like
pop the condom in her mouth and roll it down over him with her tongue and lips.
Instead she felt like she was playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey—and losing.

His big hand came down and helped her, and together they rolled
the thin latex sheath down the wide, thick length of him.

She uttered a shaky laugh. "Houston, I think we're good to
go." She crawled backward onto the bed, and he came down after her,
blocking out the light with his shoulders, meeting the slight curves of her
frame with the heavier, corded perfection of his own.

For some reason she didn't know where to start touching him, so she
pretended to fuss with the pillow under her head. He was arranging her legs,
placing her feet flat against the bed and bending her knees up on either side
of him. She didn't know anything about him as a lover, and worse, she was
probably the ugliest woman he'd ever been in bed with. That was a title she
could have lived without.

But if lever hear him say that, I get to kill him.

"Relax." He stroked his palm down the inside of her
thigh. "You're all nerves. Tell me what you like."

She didn't need his pity, either. "Could we move on to
entree, please?"

Cort gave her a slow, sexy smile. "Yeah." He curled his
hands around her tense thighs and dropped down between them.

"I didn't mean... uh..." Her back arched as she felt the
languid pressure of his tongue laving against her, parting her and tasting her.
"Me..."

He made himself comfortable, stretching out his body as he feasted
on her with his mouth and his tongue. He licked all over her first, like a boy
with an ice-cream cone he didn't want to melt, and then he went exploring. By
then Terri was panting and twisting under him, trying to move so that he would
touch her where she needed it.