KILLING ME SOFTLY (24 page)

He winced as though she'd struck him, rolled from her and swung his feet to the floor, sat hunched over on the side of the bed. The urge to go to him was strong, to press against his back and drape herself around him, hold on tight.

Tell him the truth.

She put a single hand to his back, felt his muscles convulse.

"She's here," he ground out, "like a fucking cosmic joke. Hell, I don't know, maybe it's some perverted payback, retribution for how badly I screwed up, but, damn it, every time you so much as walk into the room, every time I kiss you, touch you … it's her. Her I taste. Her I feel."

Her, he wanted.

Her, Savannah.

Her, Renee.

The backs of her eyes burned and her mouth twisted. As some broken voice deep inside demanded that she walk away now, while she still could, she curved her arms around his waist and pressed her face to his back, absorbing the feel of him, the heat and the strength and the pain.

"It's been almost two years," she said into the deathly quiet. She hadn't thought it possible for words to form when her heart didn't even beat. "Surely there's been someone else since then."

His body tightened on the words, and with her palm splayed against his stomach, she could tell that for a moment he didn't even breathe. Then, slowly, he turned toward her and took her hand, drew it to the slick warmth of his chest.

"Not here," he said holding her open palm against the wiry hairs above his left nipple. She could feel the thrumming beneath the flesh, hard and fierce and erratic. "Here there's been nothing." He'd been living on autopilot. He didn't say it, but she could see the darkness. "Until you walked into my life."

The admission crested through her, scalding like sweet poison.

"I don't know what's real anymore," he went on, and his voice was ravaged. "What's imagined. What's cursed."

Yes, he did. Trying not to shake, Renee lifted a hand and felt the telltale wetness beneath his eyes. "Because when you look at me—"

"My heart sees Savannah."

The words came at her through a vacuum of time and space, and for a moment everything fell away. She was kneeling on his bed. He was naked, his body twisted to hers. His hands were on her face. Hers were on his. And for that one fraction of a moment, time disintegrated and they were lovers again, drunk on each other and the insatiable need that kept bringing them back for more. Always more.

But then the moment shifted and reality poured in, and deep, deep inside, she started to bleed. "You resent me for that."

His eyes met hers. "Nowhere near as much as I resent myself."

"And you feel you're betraying her." The irony twisted deep.

Cain took her hands and pulled them from his face.
"Mais oui,"
he bit out, standing. Gruffly he reached for his sweatpants and jerked them up his legs. "And I just can't do it."

The room tilted. She wanted to reach for him, reached instead for his pillow and hugged it to her chest, watched him pace to the adjoining bathroom and splash water on his face.

"What about Angel?" she asked with near militant defiance, and even as the question left her mouth, she didn't know what she wanted more. Admission—or denial.

Admission meant Angel had told her the truth, that the agony she'd just heard in his voice and seen in his eyes was an act, an illusion designed to manipulate her.

But denial … denial meant Angel had lied, and that the agony was real.

He looked at her through the mirror. "Angel?"

"I met with her in the Quarter." She stood, grateful for familiar, solid territory. "A prostitute. She knew things about you, said you used to be one of her regulars."

"And you believed her?"

She lifted her chin, let the silence speak for her.

His eyes glittered. "The dark place,
cher
," he said turning toward her, and almost sounded amused. "It can get you in trouble."

A tremor ran through her. She refused to call it hope. "You haven't been with Angel since—"

"Jamais."
Never.

"What about while Savannah—"

Through the darkness, his eyes met hers. "There was never anyone else. Savannah knew that."

"You two hadn't been lovers for long."

"The intensity of a relationship cannot be measured by time," he said, then swung toward the closet and narrowed his eyes. She heard it then, the faint scratching coming from behind the door.

"Mon bebette,"
he muttered, striding from the bathroom toward the door. He opened it and went down on one knee. "How did you get in there, girl?" he asked.

She stood there staring, trying to breathe, as she felt the punch clear down to her soul.

Cain rose, bringing the big calico with the unmistakable green eyes up with him. "Does it really feel like," he asked, turning toward her, "you've known me less than a week?"

Esmerelda
. Her heart swelled at the sight of the big cat cradled in Cain's arms. She'd wondered. She'd wondered what had become of the cat she'd found as a kitten abandoned along the side of I-10. She'd tortured herself with thoughts of Esmy left alone in her house, starving to death. Or worse, turned out on the street or surrendered to the fate of an animal shelter.

Never once had she imagined Cain—

The sight of them—Cain, tall and battle scarred, bare chested and barefoot; her cat, fat and happy and perfectly cared for—did cruel, cruel things to her heart. It thrummed low and deep, and in that one instant everything crystallized, the lies and the truth, the deceit and the hope.

"Her body was never found," she whispered, and even as she saw him stiffen, even as the voice of the survivor warned her to stop, now, while she still could, the risk taker she'd once been refused to cower. "What if she's still alive? Injured, maybe.
Broken
." Just saying the words hurt. But she had to know. "Waiting to come back to you."

"That's not going to happen," he practically growled, and the cat began to squirm.

She stepped toward him. "How do you know that?" she asked, hating the desperation in her voice, and only when she saw the condemnation move back into his eyes, did she realize how the question must have sounded.

"Unless I killed her." The quiet words blasted like a shout. "Is that what this is about,
cher?
Another game, another trap, bait me with memories and see if I slip?"

"No!" The word shot out of her. She crossed the room and reached for him, froze when he stepped back.

"You said it yourself," he ground out. "It's been almost two years. Eighteen months, three weeks and two days to be exact. Without one word." He paused, pierced her with his gaze. "If Vannah was alive, she would have found some way to contact me. Even if she was hurt. She would never have stayed away, not as long as she had a single breath left in her body."

Silently, Renee brought a fist to her mouth, felt everything inside of her go cold.

"And if by some miracle she survived," he went on in that brutally quiet voice of his, "but never let me know, if she stayed away when one phone call would have cleared my name … then she is dead to me anyway."

Denial shouted through her, but words wouldn't form. Because deep inside, she knew he was right. She was dead to him, dead to herself, had been from the moment she'd come to in a small clinic in Mississippi, bandaged and broken, scared and confused, and chosen to call her grandmother, and not Cain.

"I was wrong to come here," she whispered through the tightness in her throat. Not trusting herself to look at him one second longer, she did the only thing she could.

She turned and walked away.

Across the hall, a door closed. Saura Robichaud pushed aside her laptop and slipped from bed, went to investigate. She opened her door and looked both ways, saw nothing but the big calico cat slinking from her brother's room.

Relief washed hard and fast. She hurried downstairs to Cain's study and looked for any signs that the reporter had been poking around while she thought the house slept.

Satisfied all was secure, Saura made her way back upstairs, but paused outside the guest room. At first there was nothing, just silence, but then she heard the sound of running water from the adjacent bathroom. Only then did she return to her bedroom—and the Internet database awaiting on her laptop.

A long-forgotten hum buzzed through her. She climbed into her big canopy bed and crossed her legs, pulled the computer into her lap and let her fingers fly across the keys. It all came back to her, the routines that had once been so familiar. Once she'd thrived on the high, fed on the adrenaline. Adrian had always teased her, said she was like a woman possessed.

Adrian.

Her heart clenched on the memory, and deep inside, she cried. Not on the outside, though. Those tears were gone. Dried up like a sunbaked riverbed.

Sometimes it all seemed like a dream. After a lifetime of being invisible, Adrian had seen her. And not just seen her, he'd
loved
her. Wholly and unabashedly. It had startled her at first, then frightened. No one had ever loved her like that. Other than Cain, she wasn't sure anyone else had ever loved her, period.

She'd tested Adrian, pushed him away as hard as she could, and when he refused to go away, she'd resorted to throwing dragons in his path. But like water working against rock, he'd worn her down, and gradually she'd begun to trust. Him. Her heart. The future. He'd known her as no one else ever had—her hopes, her dreams, her secrets, even the one she'd never confided in Cain.

It was that secret which drove her now. That secret which seduced her back to the world she'd abandoned … that of
Femme de la nuit
.

Her brother was a smart man. Cautious. Intuitive. But he was also fractured in ways only someone else who was broken could realize. And he'd been alone for so very long. That kind of solitude could warp a person, lead them to imagine things, see what they wanted—such as truth where there was none.

Renee Fox was a beautiful woman, but there was something about her, an air, an aura, that had assaulted Saura the moment she laid her eyes on her. Cain felt it, too. Saura knew that, could see it in his eyes when he looked at the woman. But she also knew he thought it was purely sexual, a base primal attraction.

But Saura was a woman, and she felt it, too. And while she'd tried many things in her life, she'd never been sexually attracted to another woman. So she knew whatever odd, disturbing energy swirled around Renee Fox came from somewhere else.

Saura wouldn't rest until she found out where.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
he columns rose up from the early-morning mist, solitary remnants of one man's great love for his wife. Where a plantation had once stood, weeds and gnarled shrubbery now fought back the encroaching swamp.
Grand-père
Robichaud had claimed the wind still carried Samuel's agonized pleas for his wife to come back to him.

Revenez à moi, ma petite. Notre amour ne va jamais mourir
. Come back to me, little one. Our love will never die.

Going down on one knee, Cain lifted his 35 mm and zoomed in on the truncated staircase, shrouded in wild ivy. Clouds had rolled in after midnight, and now they fought with the struggling rays of the morning sun, granting him the haze he favored.

Cain snapped the picture, felt the immediate kiss of satisfaction. As a young boy he'd been intrigued with nature—doodle bugs and lizards and crawdads, love bugs, but most especially, butterflies. Their fragility had fascinated him, their beauty had seduced. When he was seven he'd coaxed a showy black-and-yellow monarch onto his hand, then secured it in a mason jar for safekeeping.

The next morning he'd been devastated to find it dead.

That's why he switched to the camera. On film, he could capture and preserve, tucking away the images for his enjoyment without the risk of his trophies dying on him.

Or so he thought.

Frowning, he pulled out the picture of Renee he'd developed a couple of hours earlier, taken without her knowledge the day he'd found her by the cottage. Her tailored suit struck a stark contrast against the overgrown clearing, but it was her eyes that grabbed his attention, her eyes that haunted. They were as shrouded as his heart. Secrets, he remembered thinking. They festered in her soul.

It was the same way she'd looked last night, stoic, wounded, that had made it impossible for him to sleep. She'd stood there in those damn gold pajamas, the ones he'd burned to tear off her body, dark hair tangled and mouth swollen. Like a fallen goddess, he remembered thinking, drenched in moonlight and atonement and … pain. Someone had hurt her—Cain wanted to know who. And why.

And then, he wanted to punish.

The protective instincts staggered him. Fighting it, denying what the dangerous urges meant, he stomped across the clearing toward the ruins. But in his mind he saw her there, weaving with the mist among the columns.

Clenching his jaw, he blinked, and the image transformed, and it was no longer Renee taunting him, but Savannah. He could see her, just as she'd been the day a few weeks before she vanished, when he'd brought her here. He'd wanted to see her here, had known instinctively that somehow, she belonged.

He'd never been a man for self-torture, but he pulled out his wallet anyway, flipped it open and shoved his finger into a slot he'd not touched in eighteen months, and pulled out the picture.

His gut tightened. There she was, just as beautiful as he remembered, with her blond hair and daring blue eyes, dressed in a white poet's shirt, faded jeans and leather sandals, embracing one of the columns like a long-lost pagan lover. Her smile—

The sound of a twig snapping had him spinning, half expecting to see her emerging from the woods. At the sight of his sister, he didn't know whether to curse perdition, or laugh out loud.

With her hair pulled into a ponytail, she sauntered toward him as though out for a morning stroll, which Cain knew was ridiculous. Saura was neither a morning person, nor did she stroll. She walked with the catlike grace she'd perfected around the time she turned thirteen. The black top and tight-fighting jeans added to the image.