KILLING ME SOFTLY (33 page)

What must it be like? he started to wonder, but killed the thought as soon as it started to form.

"For now." Despite the concession, suspicion remained in Edouard's voice. He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and pushed a few buttons, swore softly. "Call, damn it," he said, then shot Cain a loaded glance before turning away.

The breeze sent loose strands of dark hair against Renee's face. She shoved them back and stepped around the paltry three sprays of gladiolas and roses.

And then she was there, standing so close he could smell the subtle scent of roses and vanilla, and it punished. "You don't belong here."

In a gesture that threw him back in time, she angled her chin and squared her shoulders. "He was my friend, too."

"He was Savannah's friend," Cain corrected, "and despite your little fantasy that the past can be rewritten, she doesn't exist anymore."

His words were deliberately harsh, but typical Savannah, she didn't wince or flinch, didn't back down. "You know that's not true," she said with a quiet strength to her voice. But there was sorrow there, too, compassion, and the combination landed like a punch to the gut.

He looked from her to Alec's casket, where Tara stood with a single hand pressed to the mahogany.

"There was no funeral, was there?" she asked quietly, and the memory spilled through him like poison. "Without a body—"

He spun toward her. "Without a body hope tries to survive." He stepped toward her and lowered his voice, couldn't stop himself from touching. His hands found her arms and his fingers curled, not rough like all the edges inside of him, but with a softness he despised. "Without a body you never stop looking, wanting. You never know if the woman who makes love to you in your sleep is dead or alive, if she comes to you as a dream or a nightmare. You never know if she's hurt or scared or if she's beyond feeling anything at all, if she needs you, wants you, if you let her down somehow, if you should have held on tighter, looked harder, done something, anything—"

He broke off and tore his hands from her, sucked in a harsh breath and looked toward a statue of the blessed mother standing in silent prayer over the grave of a child.

"Cain." Just his name, that's all she said, but the sound of it on her voice—
Savannah's voice
—lacerated something deep inside.

Her hands then, soft and gentle, settling against his forearm. "Don't you want to know who did this to us?"

His jaw went tight. He looked down at her and lifted his hand, slid the sunglasses from her face. The crystalline blue stunned him. It was Savannah's color, so pure and unfathomable it almost gutted him.

"Maybe you can just walk away from the past," she said, "but I can't. I won't. Not until I find out who took away my life and destroyed yours, and make them pay." She paused, slid the hair from her face. "But I can't do it alone."

He should go home. Gabe knew that. Val would be waiting. She'd been upset when he told her he had to go out. Worried. She'd asked him to stay. Told him she would cook dinner.

He'd picked up his keys and pressed a kiss to her forehead, walked out the door.

He hadn't turned around to see if she'd been watching through the window.

Restlessness twisted through him. He needed to do something, damn it. But didn't know what. Go somewhere. But had nowhere to go. He'd driven around for hours, sat outside the remains of the warehouse while the sun set, waiting for a bottle of whiskey to kill the slow burn of guilt.

It hadn't happened.

He'd failed him. Alec. His friend. No matter how many ways he tried to twist and spin what had happened, he couldn't get past that one dominating fact. He'd failed Alec.

Scowling at the bookcase full of law books that mocked him, Gabe took another long swallow from the bottle and tried to kill another certainty—the insidious reality that Alec's death had not been an accident.

"Thought I might find you here."

The smoky voice came to him through the darkness of his office and had him slowly turning to see Evangeline standing just inside his door.

He knew he should have closed it.

"Evie."
Her name scraped on the way out. She looked better than she had any right to standing there with a soft smile on her face. As always she wore her long leather jacket, but it was open now, revealing a red blouse, and blue jeans.

He'd never seen her in jeans. "You don't want to be around me right now," he practically growled. Because God, the sight of her fed something dark and needy he'd been trying like hell to deny.

"Leave that to me to decide," she said, crossing to where he stood on the far side of the office, near a small sofa and table where he conducted meetings.

He watched her approach, forced himself not to move.

"Gabe—"

"It was all a setup," he ground out. "There never was a goddamned shipment."

"You don't know that," she said.

But he did. "Someone used you to lure Alec into the open—"

A dark curtain of hair fell against her face. "But that doesn't make any sense. Alec wasn't a cop anymore. How could telling the D.A.'s office—"

"Then why was he there?" Gabe wasn't sure what he was getting at, knew that he made no sense. But something wasn't adding up. "There's no other reason for him to have been there, damn it."

She lifted a hand to his arm, stilled him with her touch. "You have to stop torturing yourself like this."

"It was a trap." Through the stillness of the office, he stared down at her hand splayed across his forearm. "No one was meant to leave there alive." Slowly, he lifted his eyes to hers. "And whoever set that trap, Alec's blood is on their hands."

The light in her eyes went dark. "I—I'm so sorry."

He should have turned away. He knew that. He should have broken the contact and walked out of the office, like he'd done when she'd first put her hands to his body.

But this time he didn't. He moved so fast neither of them had a chance to react. He lifted a hand and stabbed it into her soft, soft hair, pulled her to him and crushed her mouth to his. The kiss was hard and dark and desperate, and it made him feel more alive than he had in days.

Longer than that.

He waited for her to struggle. She didn't. She lifted a hand and touched his face with devastating gentleness, pushed up on her toes and opened to him in ways that damn near drove him to his knees.

Walking her backward, he guided her toward the sofa and urged her down onto the cushions, went down with her and felt her legs fall open in greeting.

She was so damn soft and so damn sweet, offering herself to him like—

Offering herself to him.

And he was damn near about to take.

Room spinning, he pulled back and stared down at her lying there on the sofa, hair spilling around her face and eyes heavy lidded, lips parted and swollen, shirt yanked from her jeans, and realized he really was a son of a bitch.

Not trusting himself to look at her one second longer, he turned and walked away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
he barking penetrated his shower. On a growl of his own, Edouard turned off the water and grabbed a towel, strode toward the front of the house where Hanoi, the scrawny fleabag of a hound who'd moved in on him years before, paced anxiously at the screen door.

"Something out there you want?"

Soulful eyes darker than melted chocolate met his.

"Go ahead then," he said, pushing open the door.

Hanoi bounded into the early morning, where he would no doubt reunite with the other mutts who thought a filled food bowl every morning made a place home.

Hanoi kept barking, an agitated sound quickly joined by a chorus of half-breeds.

Scowling, Edouard dried off and dropped the towel, strolled to the fridge. He wanted a beer. Maybe a whiskey. But it wasn't yet 8:00 a.m., and he needed to be at the station in thirty. Never mind that he hadn't gotten home until sometime after one, then had spent another hour trying to find a link between the Lambert brothers and Renee's appearance and Alec's death.

Settling for orange juice, he grabbed a handful of chocolate-chip cookies—only four remained on the plate—and headed into the main room, sprawled out in his big easy chair. The dogs were still barking—

Edouard flipped on the TV, but he barely heard a word the news reporter was saying.

My plane leaves in the morning.

The uneasiness oozed deeper, forcing Edouard to confront a truth he preferred to deny. To make sure he never became that mangy dog that Lena had no choice but to bring in from the rain—
to flat out survive in a world in which he no longer fit
—Edouard had done the only thing he could. He turned off all those emotions his daddy had insisted made a man weak. His once-proud, booming father had never recovered from the death of his wife from an infection that set in after giving birth to her fifth son.

They'd buried him just a short time later.

His oldest brother Jacques had fallen, too, marrying young and immediately fathering two children, only to drop dead of a sudden heart attack. His young wife, fragile even before she'd lost her husband and became the single mother of a one-month-old and a one-year-old, had joined him seven weeks later, courtesy of a prescription for sleeping pills and a bottle of schnapps.

Faced with the task of helping raise his brother's children, Edouard had vowed to never do anything that might leave him weak in any way. After his sister lost her husband and left two more children, Gabe and little Camille, fatherless, Edouard's need for control morphed into a monster.

Becoming sheriff had been the logical progression.

Caring for Lena Mae was not part of the plan. He'd had no choice but to secure a tight grip on their relationship and set the parameters, make sure it never slid too far toward commitment.

And for a while, she'd gone along with it.

Until the baby.

Even now, almost twenty years later, the memory of learning he was going to be a father had the power to shake him.

The memory of finding Lena Mae slumped on the bathroom floor in her own blood had the power to destroy.

Grabbing the remote, Edouard changed the channel. Again. And again. But nothing appealed. Nothing held his interest.

Nothing killed the thoughts.

Hanoi was howling now. So loud Edouard almost didn't hear the phone ring. Almost.

On a growl of his own he rolled to his feet and found his cell phone on the kitchen table. "Robichaud."

"Eddy."
The voice was soft and sweet and … wrong.

"Lena?" Something inside him started to shake.

"Someone's in my house," she whispered. "My bedroom."

He was running before she'd finished speaking.

Places carried memories every bit as real and powerful as those recorded in a diary. A house absorbed what transpired in its walls. Trees stood silent witness to the beauty that blossomed at their trunks—and the depravity that bled at their roots. Rivers flowed, the current concealing evidence that sank to the murky bottom.

Time moved on, but the essence of all that had once transpired remained. Love lingered. So did hate.

Pulling a cluster of vines aside and stepping into the circle of massive oaks, Renee knew without Cain saying a word that they'd reached the place where her brother had drawn his final breath. She felt the chill, an icy slap to her body, and stopped.

Sensations blasted her, vivid slashes cutting like lightning through the thick canopy. The unease was as primal as it was immediate, a nauseating awareness, uninvited and unwanted. Completely unvindicated.

Her brother had died here, miles away from those who loved him and any hope of medical attention. Looking at the carpet of decaying leaves and sticks covering the ground, she felt her throat tighten in renewed horror.

The urge to turn to Cain was strong, to feel his arms close around her like the day in the cemetery when he'd found her at her brother's grave, when he'd held her and rocked her, and made promises without saying a word. She wanted that now, needed it with an intensity that shook her.

But he just stood there in the cool damp hollow, and so did she.

They'd barely spoken since he'd picked her up at the hotel, where he'd paid someone to deliver her things. Barely looked at each other. Yet the awareness remained, humming strong and violently like a dangerous song neither wanted to sing. She could feel him, just as she always felt him, standing beside her without touching, condemning through absolute silence.

Once, the barricade had worked. Eighteen months before, she'd not let herself see beyond the hard exterior to the man inside, the man driven by deep passion and a relentless need to protect. They'd come together too fast. She'd convinced herself it was just sex, because just sex she understood. Just sex she could handle. It hadn't been just sex.

And now the barricade no longer worked. She saw the struggle for control in every rigid line of his body, saw the residue of hurt and betrayal in the dark glitter of his eyes. They could never go back. Maybe they couldn't go forward. But they weren't strangers, and she refused to pretend otherwise.

"What was he doing out here?" she asked.

Cain stepped forward and reached up, grabbed a scrap, of yellow police tape still speared by a small branch. "The forensics team believes he came out here on his own, that he was followed."

In the city someone might have noticed a stranger who didn't belong, noises that didn't make sense. But here in the swamp, where even during the day little light leaked through the vegetation, there'd been no one. He could have run, Renee knew. He had run. But knowing that only made it worse. "He never had a chance."

"The hunted usually doesn't."

The chill came hard and fast. It was a familiar sensation, the same she'd experienced at an old Civil War battlefield. Adrian had felt it, too. "I don't like this place," she whispered. "It's cold." Like death.

Something dark and volatile shifted through Cain's gaze. He yanked off his camouflage jacket and stepped toward her, draped it around her shoulders.