KILLING ME SOFTLY (17 page)

Sweet God, for over two hours he'd been looking for her, scouring the streets of the Quarter, the alleys and vacant buildings. He'd found her rental car at a small hotel, but her room had been empty. An overstuffed garbage bag at the back of the parking lot had shut him down inside. Each Dumpster had thrown him further into the past.

Then Tara had called, said Renee was with her…

She was hurt. That was his first realization. There was blood on her neck, a bruise on her cheek.

She was safe. That was his second thought. She'd made it to Tara's. She was conscious, able to sit. Her clothes were intact. She wasn't crying or shivering or incoherent.

She was scared. That was his third thought, and it damn near slayed him. From the moment they'd met, she'd taken everything he'd dished out with aplomb and a courage that infuriated even as it seduced. Except at the casino. There she'd been rattled, nervous. Because the game had turned, and they both knew it.

But now there was no game, no strategy or carefully calculated move. The glitter to her eyes, the clash of terror and hope, ran far deeper than mere nerves.

Four seconds, maybe six, that's all it took for the thoughts to register, and then the moment released him and he lunged toward her, dropped to his knees. "Sweet Mary."

"I'll leave you two for a minute," Tara said, and left them alone.

With a gentleness that stunned him, Cain lifted his hands to Renee's neck and found her flesh cold. Too cold. "Who did this to you?"

She looked away, down toward the ridiculously clean white ceramic tile. "You didn't come back." Her voice sounded robotic, stripped of emotion, and the change rocked him even further. Until that moment he hadn't realized how much he'd come to crave her fire.

"I … waited," she went on as he squeezed antibiotic cream onto a bandage and pressed it to her throat, "but you didn't come back. I was walking—"

His hands stilled. "You were what?"

She looked up, met his eyes. "Walking back to my hotel."

Alone. At night. In the Quarter. Just like— "Christ." The edges of his vision blurred and he saw her, sprawled and broken in his partner's arms, bruised, battered, bleeding. "You're just like her," he bit out, and the realization gutted him. "She never listened, always thought she knew best, that she could handle anything, that she wouldn't get hurt."

Gutsy and vibrant, he'd always thought, like a big beautiful magnolia, defying wind and rain to revel in the aftermath. Afraid of nothing or no one, even when she should have been.

In the end, that's what had gotten her killed.

On a hot rush of adrenaline, he narrowed his eyes and brought the room back into focus, saw Renee, her eyes huge and devastated, her hair tangled and falling against skin paler than before, staring at him as though he'd suddenly started speaking in the language of the damned.

"God damn it." There was no other way to explain it. "Do you really want to find out what happened to Savannah?" he asked in the deceptively quiet voice he used when fighting for control. "Or end up just like her?"

Renee winced. "That's what he said."

"Who?" The need to know, to punish, gripped him. "Tell me who, damn it."

Nothing had prepared him for what she did next, what she said. The gleam that fed some place deep inside him returned to her eyes, the steel to her voice. "That's what I came here to find out."

He went very still. Because in that one fractured instant he knew. He saw the truth, the accusation, in every hard line of her body, the fierce angle of her chin, the cold glitter of her gaze, and it burned. "You came looking for me."

"To tell you to call off the scare tactics."

The ragged words slapped, not because she'd said them, but because he'd given her every reason imaginable to say them. He'd tried to run her out of town. He'd threatened and bullied and cajoled. And when words hadn't worked, he'd tried to scare her off through seduction.

"You think I'm responsible for what happened to you." It was more a statement than a question, and the words scraped on the way out.

She didn't flinch, didn't wince, didn't try to deny. "Can you blame me?"

No. He couldn't. That was the problem. He was a man who went to great lengths to get what he wanted. Limits were not in his nature. He loved the chase, the anticipation. He savored the taste of success, the high it always brought. Whether he'd been pursuing a suspect for weeks or crouched in the foggy swamp for hours waiting for just the right light didn't matter. The means were just a road along the way.

The end, the victory, was all that mattered.

But here, now, on his knees in Tara's kitchen, the high eluded him.

"Are you out of your mind?" The fury came over him in a wave and had him reaching for her, taking her shoulders in his hands and fighting the urge to pull her out of the chair. "If you think I did this to you, then what the hell are you doing here?" Something dark and unfathomable flashed through her eyes—alarm? fear?—and it ripped at him. But it didn't stop him. "Don't you get it? Don't you understand? If I'm the man you think I am, then you should be sitting in a police station right now, telling a detective everything you know."

There was a clock in the kitchen, a whimsical black cat with big animated eyes that Alec had bought Tara years ago. Its tail wagged with each second.

Cain counted twelve long, slow ticks before Renee answered. During that time she never looked away, never moved, just looked at him as if he was both antichrist and savior.

"The police can't give me what I want," she said.

It was a large kitchen, bright, spacious. But in that heartbeat the walls pushed in. "And I can?"

She stunned him by lifting a hand to his face. "You did." Her fingers were soft against his cheeks, cool and affirming. Dangerous. "The second I saw your eyes," she whispered, and her voice thickened, "I knew you weren't responsible."

The quiet admission should have brought relief. Instead it rocked. Cain released her abruptly and stood, backed away from her, her touch. Her confession. He didn't want it, not any of it, but especially not the way she kept looking at him, as though she could consume him with her eyes. Christ, he didn't want anyone looking at him like that, not ever, ever again. Only one person had ever looked at him like that—

No. He killed the thought, the comparison, immediately. He was so not going there.

"Why does that bother you, Cain?" Renee stood and moved toward him. "Why are you more comfortable with people thinking you're the bad guy?"

He turned away from her, moved to the window and stared out into the night. It was all he knew, damn it.

"Cain—" she said, and he saw her reflection, felt her moving closer.

"Don't psychoanalyze me."

"What about care?" Her hand touched his arm. "Can I do that?'"

He spun toward her. "You have no idea—"

"Then give me one," she whispered, and before he realized her intent, she put a hand to the back of his head and urged him toward her, brushed her lips across his. The kiss was soft and quick, so gentle it damn near sent him back to his knees.

With a sad smile, she feathered her thumb along his cheekbone. "Why do you want me to hate you?"

For one of the few times in his life he acted without thinking, without strategy or tactic. He acted on pure blind instinct and dark driving need. A hard sound ripped from his throat as he pulled her into his arms and crushed her against his body, took her mouth with his own.

There was nothing soft or gentle about this kiss, nothing quick. He held her face in his hands and slanted his mouth over hers, needing to taste her, claim her, with an urgency that stunned him. For two hours black thoughts had punished him, taunting him with horrible, cruel images. He'd shoved them aside, remained objective, but all that objectivity fled now, crumbled, leaving just the woman in his arms, alive and beautiful and dangerous as hell.

"Cain," she whispered, and as her mouth opened he went in for more, went deeper, wanted to touch and take every part of her, every inch. She pressed into him, held on to him with the same intensity that fired through him. She had a hand at the small of his back, the other shoved into his hair, holding, pulling. Demanding.

Lost in her, the moment, he backed her across the kitchen and into a wall. "No more chances," he murmured, reaching for her leg and hiking it up around his waist. "No more—"

The pain lanced through him like the bright punishing light of a laser.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

R
enee ripped her mouth from Cain's and stared up at him. "What happened? Are you okay?"

Wincing, he put a hand to her face and traced his thumb along her swollen lip. "I will be just as soon as—"

"Don't!" She struggled out of his arms and reached for his shirt, tugged it out of his jeans and yanked it up.
"Mon Dieu."

"It's nothing—"

But she was already there, leaning over the nasty purple bruise courtesy of Alec's boot. Her hands were soft, devastating. "Who did this to you?"

The simple question stung more than the bruise. She was the one who'd been attacked. She was the one who'd had a knife to her throat, who was hurt, who'd scraped together the courage to come to Tara's house and confront the man most believed to be a monster, but who she, for some godforsaken reason, did not fear.

And now she was the one angrily demanding to know who'd kicked him in the ribs.

"It was him, wasn't it?" She looked up at him through narrow, hurting eyes. "The man from the racetrack, the one who tried to kill you."

Cain looked away.

Renee lifted a hand to his face, and again stunned him with the gentleness in her touch, her gaze. It was a side she kept carefully hidden.

God help him, he wanted to know why.

He'd been right all along, he realized. She'd been hurt. Not just tonight, but before she'd ever stepped into the residue of Savannah's life. The remnants of devastation lingered in her eyes. Someone or something had come close to destroying her, forcing her to mask the pain with the hard edges she showed the world.

It was ridiculous, but in that moment the need to know who, or what, grew inside him like a beast. It didn't matter that he could have no future with this woman, that he wanted no future with anyone. It only mattered that she was a woman, and she'd been hurt. He had not been able to save Savannah, to avenge her, but fate had just handed him the second chance he'd never expected to receive.

"Tell me," she said. "What happened?"

That was a damn good question. He'd been convinced Alec had grown disillusioned with the politics and strings of the force and had decided to take justice into his own hands. But then he'd looked into Alec's eyes … and seen a stranger about to pistol whip him.

"He got away." The reality galled Cain. He'd come to on the floor of the warehouse almost thirty minutes later, alone.

"You know him, don't you?"

The question came at him like another booted foot. "Not anymore."

A sound from the butler's pantry had them turning to see Tara still in her robe, her hair tangled around her face. The color had drained from her cheeks. "It was Alec, wasn't it?"

Cain swore softly. "Tara." Renee's hand fell away and he crossed the kitchen, reached for the woman he loved like a sister. The urge to protect was strong, to concoct a neat-and-tidy story that cleared Alec of any involvement. But she was a smart woman and she'd been already been deceived too much. "I tried to get through to him. I tried to pull him back."

Tara Monroe had taken the debutante scene by storm. With a bright smile, an infectious laugh and delicate, porcelain-doll features, she'd left a string of broken hearts wherever she went.

But it was
her
heart that was broken now. Her expression, normally warm and vibrant, was wiped clean.

Robotically, she lifted his shirt. "He hurt you." Her fingers were soft and gentle like Renee's, but her touch did not bring the same warmth, only the chill of sorrow. "He did this to you."

Cain took her hands and pulled them from his body. "He's not himself right now, Tara." But he'd smelled no alcohol on Alec's breath, observed no evidence of substance abuse in his eyes or diction. "But I promise you I'm going to get to the bottom of this."

If Cain didn't, one of them was going to end up very dead.

"I don't think he really wanted to hurt me," he added. If Alec had, Cain would have left the warehouse in a body bag.

Tara glanced at the counter, where limp rose petals lay scattered beneath a crystal vase. "I wish I understood."

"You and me both."

"How did he loo—" There was an edge of desperation to her voice, but she aborted the question and reached for the red petals, brushed them into her palm and closed them in her fist. "It's late." Jerkily she looked beyond him to Renee. "I've readied a room for you upstairs. The River Road suite. It's the third door on the right."

Renee's smile was warm and unaffected, and it damn near knocked the breath from Cain's lungs.

"You're very kind, but you didn't have to do that." She glanced at her purse lying on the kitchen table. "I've got a room—"

Cain didn't let her finish. "
Non
. You're not going back there tonight."

The first pinkish rays of morning streaked up from the horizon, visible through the naked branches of an old oak outside Renee's room. She stood at the window, much as she had the majority of the time she should have been sleeping, and tried not to think about how little separated her from Cain.

A wide hall, a locked door and one life-altering lie.

They could all be breached. It wouldn't take much. A few strides across the hall, a good solid kick to the door, another touch, another kiss. She'd been so sure, damn it. So sure she could return to New Orleans and pick up the threads of the investigation without falling back into the remains of her life. That she hadn't even wanted to pick up those threads. In becoming Renee Fox, she'd wanted to believe she'd become a new woman, someone whose existence was not inexorably tangled with Cain's.