Midnight in Ruby Bayou (32 page)

Faith made a startled sound. Jeff didn't even flinch. He was used to Tiga's soft-footed ways.

“Rubies, Tiga,” he said mildly, yawning again. “The Blessing Chest holds rubies.”

“You've never seen them in moonlight. Sometimes they sing. Sometimes they laugh. Mostly they just weep for all that happened before souls bled and turned into red stone.”

The calm reason in Tiga's voice was so at odds with her words that the hair on the nape of Faith's neck moved.

Tiga walked forward and put a cold, brine-scented hand on Faith's cheek. “I would have loved you, but they took you away. Pretty little baby girl. Are you safe from him now? I put something very special in the chest for you, for me. A soul to set us free.” She looked at Jeff. “You must do the same. Thirteen souls. If enough rubies weep, your generation won't.”

“Tiga,” he said wearily, “it's time for you to be in bed.”

“Haven't I told you about time? It comes and goes like moonlight. You can never tell, never tell, wishing well, souls wishing, sighing, crying, never dying.” She smiled at him. “Breakfast at eight. Pancakes, Papa's favorite. Sugar pie and Fourth of July. Pecans for Thanksgiving. Thanks be I'm not a ruby, I think. He drinks. I'm not just rubies, am I?”

With a sigh Jeff took Tiga's arm and led her off toward the family wing of the house. Boomer followed, nosing the older woman's slack fingers as though to remind her that she was indeed flesh and blood. Gradually the sound of her voice faded into silence.

Faith rubbed her hands up and down her arms to smooth away the primitive ripple of unease that came in the presence of madness. Suddenly she understood why tribes made shamans or spirit doctors of the insane. There was an eerie feeling of larger truth woven like a glittering black thread through Tiga's irrationality.

After a moment Faith shook herself and went back upstairs. She needed Walker's wry sanity and laughter.

The bathroom was silent. The door to his bedroom was closed. She stood just outside it and called softly, “Walker?”

There was no answer.

After a few moments she quietly turned away. She opened the door to her own bedroom and saw the single snifter of brandy sitting on her bedside table. The message was clear: she would be sleeping alone. Ignoring the stab of disappointment and something very close to sadness, she kicked off her sandals, grabbed the snifter, and went back to the sitting area.

There was no reason to feel hurt and rejected. It wasn't like she had propositioned him or anything.

Yet she felt rejected just the same.

Are you going to let me kiss you? Or are you going to keep me out in the dark, watching everything beautiful that I can't touch?

Apparently Walker had decided he would rather be alone in the dark.

Faith turned off all the lights and went out onto the gallery, in the dark, and thought about everything beautiful that she couldn't touch.

Some women weren't good at sex. She was beginning to accept that she was one of them. She had always been able to take it or leave it. Tony had known. That was why he had sex on the side. That was why they argued. That was what drove him to hit her.

That was why she hadn't married him.

Obviously Walker didn't want her. Not really. Not the way she wanted him. Once he had cooled down from that surprising kiss in the garden, he had managed to avoid her quite easily.

I'm supposed to be too smart to seduce my boss's baby sister.

Yeah? What if she seduces you—just sneaks into your bed and starts licking you all over?

Brave words. But she wasn't feeling very brave right now. She was feeling weary and worn and sad.

“Ruby Bayou blues,” she whispered. “Maybe I could put it to music and have a hit. Single, of course. Always single.”

Moonlight glinted back at her from the marsh on one side of the point and the seamless ocean on the other. Moonlight full of shadows and misty secrets. She wondered if Tiga knew the secrets of the night, and if the night knew hers.

The rich yet astringent fragrance of brandy curled up to Faith's nostrils and stung her eyes. She took a sip and told herself the slow tears that felt first hot and then cold on her cheeks came from the bite of the brandy and pity for Jeff. Jeff, who was caught between the love of a child for his parent and the reality of an adult who was hurt by a parent who was acting like a child.

Not enough people had grown up the way she had, with parents who loved each other and their children. Having known that kind of love, it was hard to think of the emptiness that must lie at the heart of Jeff's childhood memories. Davis and Tiga had been even more badly savaged by their father. Had that father been raised cruelly, too? And his father? Did it go all the way back to Eden, one cruelty begetting another, world without end, amen?

Then there was Walker, with his dead brother and his childhood out of a social worker's file.

Yet Walker wasn't cruel. Except for her family, she had never known a strong man who was so gentle. He had handled Tiga with the tenderness of a son rather than a casual guest.

Faith had been drawn to Walker even before that. Now she was very much afraid she could fall in love with him. Given her track record with men, that would be quite stupid. He wasn't like Tony, the kind of man a woman would easily forget.

Yet Walker had made it clear that he could forget her.

Night air swirled around the balcony and breathed over her like a sigh, drying some of her tears. She took a deep, ragged breath. The night smelled of salt and mystery and something elemental, musky, spicy, warm.

Walker.

“You'll get cold standing out here in your bare feet,” he said quietly.

His voice came from a point only inches behind her.

She nodded, but didn't turn around, didn't speak. She didn't want to have to explain her foolish mood.

“Everything locked up?” he asked.

She nodded again.

“Enjoying the moonlight?”

She nodded.

“Cat got your tongue?”

Her breath caught on something that wasn't a sigh or a laugh, but in between. Something painful.

Walker hesitated, yet couldn't ignore the ragged breath he had heard. He put his hands on Faith's shoulders and slowly turned her around. Faint silver trails gleamed on her cheeks.

“What's wrong, sugar?” he asked.

The tenderness in his voice made her eyes sting all over again, blurring the outline of the man who stood in front of her, naked but for a pair of smuggler's shorts and a million dollars worth of rubies.

“Don't be nice to me,” she managed, smiling just a bit. “I'll just cry more.”

“Want to talk?”

Her smiled turned upside down. “About madness and the sins of the fathers? No, thanks. I spent dinner with them.”

Without a word, Walker closed his arms around her and rocked her gently from side to side. He tried very hard to ignore the warmth of her against his bare chest, but it was all he could do not to groan with a combination of tenderness and desire.

“I should have put you on that plane,” he said huskily.

“I'm a big girl. And contrary to myth, big girls
do
cry. Some things are worth crying about. The Montegeaus are one of them.”

“No argument there.” His hand moved soothingly over her hair and down her back in slow sweeps that asked nothing, gave everything. “If it helps, I'll bet it isn't always as bad as tonight for Jeff.”

“What makes you say that?”

“If Davis had been like this when Jeff was young, Jeff wouldn't care anymore. Kids are survivors. They have to be.”

“You were.” Her arms stole around Walker and she leaned into his warmth. The smell of him was like the night, warm, rich with possibilities and secrets. “I like you, Owen Walker. You're a gentle man.”

He brushed his lips over her hair. “Don't you believe it. I'm mean to the bone.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Now, don't go all agreeable on me. I won't know what to do with you.”

She smiled against his chest. His thatch of soft, dark hair felt intriguing against her mouth in a way that Tony never had. She didn't know what the difference was. She only knew that it was as real as Walker and her response to him.

Standing on tiptoe, she pressed her lips against his neck just below his beard. The leap of his pulse beneath her lips was a revelation.

A harsh cry came out of the night.

“What was that?” she asked, stiffening.

“Shitepoke,” he said absently. He was still trying to control his response to her almost sisterly caress. At least, that's what he was telling himself. Sisterly.

Yeah. Right. And he was a fairy godmother.

“What's a shitepoke?” Faith asked.

“What my ma's granny used to call a blue heron. Something disturbed the bird on its roost. Those city boys aren't much good in bayou country.”

“You're making almost as much sense as Tiga.”

Walker smiled against Faith's forehead as he thought of the FBI out there right now, blundering around with the mud and the bugs and the gators. But he didn't want to talk about that with her. Not when the moon was up and her breath was warm against his bare skin. He didn't want to think, because if he started thinking, he would stop doing what felt too good to stop.

“Did you drink all that brandy?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Feel like sharing?”

She looked into his eyes. Like the night, they were dark, mysterious, waiting. “Do you?”

“I shouldn't,” he said bluntly.

She waited.

He let out a rough sound. “Damn, sugar. I wanted you the first time I saw you nineteen months ago. Now I want you more. I want you the way I want to breathe. That taste of you in the garden just about dropped me to my knees.”

Her heartbeat doubled as heat shimmered out from the pit of her stomach. She reached for him. “Let's see what a second taste will do.”

Afraid that Walker would change his mind, wanting to be hot enough, fast enough to please him, Faith pulled down his head and gave him a deep, hungry kiss that promised immediate sexual oblivion.

His masculine, multilayered taste almost distracted her from her single-minded pursuit of pleasing him. His mouth was hungry and vital, salty and secret, heady and male. Avidly she explored the velvet roughness of his tongue, the satin sleekness beneath, and the edgy warmth of his teeth. Her hands kneaded down his naked back to his hips, then slid over the front of his shorts. He was hard, hot, ready. She took a deep breath and hoped she would be enough woman for him.

For Walker it was like being caught in a whirlwind. Any thoughts of savoring and seducing after all the nights of hungering for her were blown away in the whirlwind of her tongue and hands demanding his response. Only the certainty that they were under FBI surveillance kept him from yanking off her clothes and burying himself in her right where they stood.

Without lifting his mouth from hers, he dragged her back into the room. Then he pulled her down onto the floor, stripped off her jeans and underwear with a few quick motions, and started to take her.

Her actions had screamed to him that she wanted sex and she wanted it
now
. Her body sent a different message. There was heat, yes, and the promise of slick passion. But it was only a promise.

With a shuddering groan, he brought himself under control. If he took her now, she wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much as he would. He might even hurt her. He had never been so full and hard for a woman as he was for her right now.

“What's wrong?” Faith asked, lifting her hips against him.

When he spoke his voice was rough with the effort of controlling the driving need to take what she was even now offering him. “You're not ready.”

Chill washed over her skin, a preview of the ice that would settle in her belly when he told her just how lacking she was. Yet she had felt different with him, flares of heat and possibility that were as exciting as they were unexpected.

“What are you saying?” she said. “I'm as ready as I've ever been.”

Walker remembered what she had said in the garden about how men and women were so different and that she enjoyed anyway. “Humor me,” he said thickly.

“But—”

He stopped her argument with a kiss that was as gentle as it was hungry, filling her warmth with his flesh in the only way he would let himself right now.

Faith wasn't prepared for Walker's kiss. It devoured her tenderly, completely. Her breath unraveled in a long sigh that became a low sound of pleasure. It felt so good to have his body against her and his tongue rubbing deeply, rhythmically over hers. Close, warm, intimate. Like sex without the self-consciousness and anxiety and discomfort.

When Walker finally lifted his head, Faith realized that she was lying back on the rug, awash in surprise and pleasure, rather than running her hands all over his body and making the sexy demands that men expected.

When she tried to move her hands, she discovered that she couldn't. Her arms were pinned above her head, her wrists locked within the grasp of his left hand. His right hand was opening her blouse and bra.

“I can't touch you this way,” she said. Her voice was light, rushed, breathless.

“Yeah.” His breath wedged. Her nipples were neither pink nor coral. They were both, like the rarest of rubies, the color called
padparadscha
by those few people privileged to ever see it.

“But—”

“You touch me right now and I'd go off like a skyrocket.”

She frowned. “Isn't that the whole idea?”

“It's half the idea. We're working on the other half.”

“What—” Coherent thought splintered.

His tongue was licking over her breasts like a kid with two ice cream cones. Tasting, swirling, sucking, nibbling, devouring her with the same total sensual concentration he had showed with his kiss. Then he took one nipple deeply inside his mouth, rubbing over her sensitive skin with a slow, firm rhythm that foreshadowed the feast to come.