Midnight in Ruby Bayou (18 page)

“Don't touch anything just yet,” he warned her. “I forgot something.”

As soon as his back was turned, she dove into the mound of shrimp and started peeling, dipping, and eating. After the first bite, she began making noises that were half hum, half purr. The shrimp was pure ecstasy—succulent, sweet, perfectly cooked.

“I told you to wait,” Walker said when he returned.

Without looking up, she made noises that roughly translated into “Do I look stupid?”

Smiling, he shook out the clean apron he had borrowed from the kitchen. “Stand up and hook up, sugar. We don't have time to go back to the inn for a change of clothes.”

“Mmph.” She swallowed, licked her fingers, then tried and failed to wipe them clean on a paper napkin. Hastily she stood, turned her back to him, and held her arms away from her body. “Go for it.”

After an instant of hesitation, he took the neck strings and tied them in place. He tried not to notice the warmth of her skin and the exotic mixture of gardenias and cocktail sauce that tantalized his senses. When he reached around her for the waist ties, he discovered they were hip ties on her. Even after he wrapped them around twice, he still had enough left over for a big double bow.

While he worked, he told himself that he didn't enjoy discovering just how good she felt in his arms. He even tried to believe it. He tried really hard. Then he sat down in his own chair, shifted and shifted again, and decided that sometimes, just sometimes, testosterone could be a literal pain in the ass. Sitting down to eat with a woody and a ruby necklace stuffed into your shorts was one of those times.

And if she kept licking her fingers and making sex-kitten noises, he was going to do something stupid. Like grab her and start doing some serious licking of his own.

Instead, he forked up several fried oysters, bit into them, and then went still as the memories of childhood washed over him, drowning him. The sounds of the swamp, deep to shrill, and the echoing silence that followed a noisy misstep. Raking oysters in the salt marsh, the rich smells of mud and brine and shellfish, the cruel slice of shell through careless flesh. Sun like a million burning daggers. Bayous steeped in heat and silence and time. Swamps alive with the pale flash of herons. Dark water shimmering with the slow, rippling wake of an alligator. The elation of finding his net squirming with fish or his pots bristling with crabs. Hunger. Cool glide of water over sunburned skin. Warm mud squeezing between bare toes. Sunrise like a silent explosion. Surprise at discovering that few of his schoolmates knew what possum or alligator tasted like.

And his dead brother echoed through every memory, every scent, everything. Ragged pants and reckless grin. The first one to take a dare and the last one to give up a losing game. Black hair, golden eyes, handsome as sin and twice as hard to live without. Smart about women before he had to shave.

Fool enough to believe his older brother walked on water.

Come on. We can do it. Hell, Walker, you can do anything. You got us out of Colombia alive. What are a few Afghani tribesmen next to that? Think of the adventure!

It had worked just the way Lot said it would. For a while. Then Lot trusted his brother to get him out of one too many jams.

And Lot died.

Faith watched Walker power through oysters as though they were an enemy to be vanquished. If she wanted any, she had better move fast. “You're not holding up your end of the bargain here.”

Walker's mouth turned down in a sour twist. “That's the problem with me, sugar.”

She made an unladylike sound. “I doubt that.”

“Don't.”

The darkness in his eyes told her that he wasn't teasing any more than he was talking about dividing up the lunch. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she smiled brightly and began forking some of his food onto her plate. “Then I'll just have to take my fish and oysters up front, won't I?”

He looked at her for a long, tight moment, seeing both her concern and her offer of companionable laughter. Reluctantly the corner of his mouth turned up. “There you go.”

As she cut into a delicate, fragrant grouper filet, she wondered what scars lay beneath Walker's easy drawl and slow smile. Then she told herself that it was none of her business. It certainly wasn't her business to take him in her arms and simply hold him until the bleak pain faded from his eyes.

Yet she wanted to do just that.

Deliberately Walker looked only at the food he was eating. Not at the brutal mistakes of the past that added up to his brother's early, rocky grave. Not at the mistakes he had to avoid in the future. And certainly not at the woman whose simple, sensual pleasure in the Low Country lunch made his whole body tighten with a hunger that no amount of food would satisfy.

He was way out of line. He had no business thinking about how much fun it would be to peel her like a shrimp, lick her, taste her, suck on her, swallow her whole and get swallowed in turn, the two of them slick with sweat and rolling over and over like a roadside gator wrestler who had bitten off more than he could chew. Hell, a gator would be nothing next to a woman like Faith Donovan. Sensing the elemental sex beneath her coolly expensive exterior aroused him to the point of pain.

With a silent curse, he went to work on his fish and fries. Both were equally hot, tender-crisp, and fresh. The tartar sauce and the spicy cocktail sauce were homemade and good enough to lick right off your thumb, which was what he did when he made a miscalculation. The coleslaw was pure blue-collar—heavy on the mayonnaise and light on the greens.

Walker concentrated on the fish. As he ate, he couldn't help noticing that despite a slow start, Faith was getting the hang of peeling shrimp. An uneven mound of translucent pink shell fragments was growing on one side of her plastic basket. Some of the time she dipped the shrimp into the fresh, spicy cocktail sauce. Most of the time she just ate the tender beauties in her own messy but increasingly rapid fashion, using her tongue on any scrap that was in danger of getting away from her.

Watching it was making him nuts.

“That's your finger you're working on, not a shrimp,” he muttered.

“That's why I'm licking and not chewing.”

He grabbed a wad of paper napkins from the scarred metal holder in the center of the equally scarred table. “Try these.”

“Why? No one else in here is.”

“I am.”

“Are not,” she retorted with the ease of a younger sister. “You're licking your fingers, not wiping them daintily.”

“I'm a man.”

Her tawny eyebrows arched. “Last time I checked, there was no sex difference in tongues and fingers. One and ten each, male or female.”

Walker had the losing end of this conversational tug-of-war and he knew it. Part of him wanted to laugh. Part of him wanted to swear. Most of him wanted to grab her and show her just what a man could do with his one tongue and ten fingers.

With great care, he wiped his hands on the napkins she had refused.

She went back to the slowly shrinking pile of shrimp.

“Are you fixin' to share those shrimp with me?” he asked, taking the last bite of fish.

“Sure. The way one pig shares with another.”

This time he did laugh. Then he reached out and scooped up a big handful of shrimp. It had been years since he had earned money peeling Low Country shrimp, but the skill came back quickly. Soon he was drawing even with Faith in the shrimp eating. Then he was pulling ahead.

She started to peel and eat faster, then faster.

Smiling like a pirate, so did he.

Soon the conversations at the closer tables faded to silence as folks watched the silk-shirted lady in the oversized counter apron and the rough-looking man in the black sport coat race each other through two pounds of shrimp.

“Five on the classy blonde,” one young man said.

“Done,” said the older man who was eating with him. “Git out your wallet.”

“Why? It ain't done yet.”

The other man lit a cigarette, took a hard drag, and smiled as he exhaled a long plume of smoke. “I peeled shrimp as a boy. From the look of him, so did he.”

“She's got a head start.”

“She's gonna need it.”

More money appeared on the other tables. The younger customers bet on the blonde. The grizzled pragmatists went with Walker.

Shrimp shells flew every which way.

“You have to eat them, not just peel them,” Walker said, stuffing another shrimp into his mouth.

“Says who?”

“God.”

“Prove it,” Faith retorted.

“Prove he didn't.”

“She.”

Walker gave a crack of laughter and nearly choked on a shrimp. “Sugar girl, if you can prove that, you win it all.”

But even while he laughed, chewed, or choked, his fingers worked so quickly the separate motions blurred into one quick unzipping of flesh from shell. Despite his speed, the shrimp emerged whole and clean, no missing pieces and no prickly legs clinging to sweet meat. He peeled and ate two shrimp to her one, then three.

It didn't help Faith's cause when a shrimp squirted out of her fingers, plopped into Walker's tea, and bobbed there like a pink cloud over a muddy swamp. She snickered, tried not to, gave up, and began laughing so hard she could barely hold on to the next slippery shrimp, much less pull it whole from its shell.

He grabbed the last handful of shrimp and dumped them onto his side of the table.

“No fair,” she said between laughs.

“All's fair in love, war, and shrimp shucking,” he drawled. “Besides, you haven't peeled the one that's doing backflips in your fingers, much less the one that's facedown in my sweet tea. You get to those and I'll see about sharing whatever's left of mine.”

Ignoring him, she swiped some of his shrimp and went back to work, peeling and eating and peeling and eating, with side trips into the cocktail sauce. A line of concentration appeared between her eyebrows. She couldn't get the hang of shelling the slippery beasties in one quick swoop the way he did.

When her cheek itched, she rubbed it against the back of her knuckles rather than break her rhythm in tearing off shells and eating shrimp. Sauce from her knuckles smeared under her cheekbone like cheap blusher. She didn't even notice it.

Walker's rich laughter destroyed her concentration. She looked up and realized that he was finished. Even a little sister had to admit that his pile of shells looked bigger than hers.

Naturally, that meant nothing about conceding victory.

“I've got the most,” she said smugly.

“Wrong, sugar.”

“Okay. We'll count 'em. The one with the most
pieces
wins.”

The café echoed with laughter, Walker's included. Everyone with eyes knew that Faith had shredded her shrimp shells rather than unzipping them in one neat piece as he had.

“Put your money away, boys,” Walker said to the men at the next table. “Looks like the lady and I both win.”

Feeling triumphant, she stood up, whipped off her apron, and bowed. There were cheers and catcalls and applause. When she turned back toward Walker, he was standing about two inches away. The look in his eyes was amusement and something much more intense. She knew right away that it wasn't outraged male ego. Unlike Tony, Walker could laugh at himself and truly enjoy the joke.

She grinned back at him. Then her breath wedged when his hand lifted to her cheek. His thumb skimmed and pressed caressingly just below one cheekbone. He brought the thumb to his mouth and licked, removing the cocktail sauce.

“That's right tasty rouge you're wearing,” he drawled.

“Yeah?” Despite the sudden racing of her heart, she dipped her fingertip in the sauce and splatted some on his cheek just above his beard. “Doesn't look as good on you.” She leaned close, licked the sauce off with comic thoroughness, and said, “Yum. Spicy. Got any shrimp to go with it?”

“You're fixin' to get in trouble, sugar.”

“I'm terrified,” she said blithely. She dipped a napkin in her water and finished cleaning his cheek. “There you go, sugar boy. All bettah.” Her tone was a close imitation of his drawl.

She was still grinning when she sauntered out the door, her jacket slung jauntily over one shoulder.

“Hold on,” Walker said. “I—”

Faith screamed.

It was the kind of scream that could be a weapon, ripping flesh and making bone ache.

T
he man in the black leather jacket grabbed Faith's hair in one hand and waved a knife in front of her eyes with the other. “Gimme the fucking purse.”

When the door swung open, he glanced at the man with the cane and dismissed him as a threat.

“The purse, bitch!”

The instant the mugger looked back at Faith, Walker hooked his cane around the attacker's knife hand and yanked the blade aside. At almost the same moment, Faith's stiletto heel sliced down his shin. She ducked out of his grasp, set to give him her knee on the return trip, but the cane beat her to it, stabbing into the mugger's crotch.