Cole Dempsey's Back In Town
Suzanne McMinn
It couldn’t be him, but it was.
She was first struck by how tall he’d grown, that she found herself looking up to him.
Cole was a man now, strong shouldered and lean. Her breath caught as heat twisted through her blood. Dread pulsed in her throat.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here, Cole,” she said, her voice strong even while her legs felt weak. “But you can go pack your things. You’re not welcome.”
The tension hung thick in the air, and just looking at him made her feel small and panicked. No matter what had changed, no matter how many years had passed, Cole Dempsey represented a moment in time she’d give anything to erase.
“I’m not going anywhere, Bryn,” he said, breaking the stony silence. “And you can’t make me.”
Cole Dempsey’s Back in Town
Suzanne McMinn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
SUZANNE MCMINN
lives by a lake in North Carolina with her husband and three kids, plus a bunch of dogs, cats and ducks. Visit her Web site at www.SuzanneMcMinn.com to learn more about her books, newsletter and contests. Check out www.paxleague.com for news, info and fun bonus features connected to her “PAX League” series about paranormal superagents!
With much love to my husband,
Gerald, who is always there for me.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Chapter 1
The house looked the same.
Minus the dead body, of course.
Cole Dempsey stared up the oak-canopied drive to the classic columns fronting the antebellum Bellefleur Plantation. The Greek revival-style monstrosity had filled his waking fantasies and sleeping nightmares for fifteen long and bitter years. Someone owed. He was here to collect.
Look out, Azalea Bend, Louisiana. Cole Dempsey had returned. And this time, he had something to back up his claims.
He left his black Cobra at the head of the drive, preferring to walk to the door, overnight case in hand. He needed the time and space to take it in, to comprehend that the house was no haunted vision; it was real. The mansion rose before him as timeless as the Mississippi that flowed behind it, holding its secrets, its lies, its fears, its ghosts. And sweet, false Bryn Louvel.
Now that he was here, the emotions that came with the magnolia-laden air, the river-swept breeze, the memory-churned past hit harder than he’d expected. Amidst the buzzes, hums and whispers of the late-spring evening came the sounds of the past—the mental audio reel of another May night. The scream that no one in the whole of St. Salome Parish would forget, the thundering footsteps, the shouts in the thick night, the wailing of a mother…and the terrible accusation that had ended in a ringing shot.
The lights of the columned portico drew him.
He had been promised the corner bedroom on the second floor, overlooking the river. The Oleander Room, as he had been told it was now called, boasted a rosewood half-tester double bed and a private verandah. All the rooms included decanters of refreshment beverages, a guided mansion tour and a wake-up call with hot coffee, juice and sweet potato muffins as well as a full plantation breakfast.
As if he gave a damn about any of that.
Cole took the massive steps of the columned portico in athletic strides. Lifting the ornate brass knocker, he pounded it forcefully against the heavy door in the center of the portico. Up close, he noticed the peeling paint on the sides of the building. The surrounding gardens, what he could see of them in the spill of the porch light, were overgrown. The eighteenth-century-era mansion had survived colonial and civil wars and the perils of time, but it appeared that murder had brought it to its knees.
Open to the public for tours weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. announced the small lettered plaque in the center of the door. How that would have galled Bryn’s father.
The sound of footsteps near the door elicited an answering jerk in his pulse. He needed Bryn. He couldn’t get to the truth without her help.
But instead of Bryn, the woman who greeted him was young, maybe twenty, with a pixie-fresh face, curly strawberry-blond hair and bright eyes that held no shadows.
“Welcome to Bellefleur!” The young woman made a gesture inviting Cole into the majestic chandelier-lit foyer. Her voice was bubbly, her movements energetic.
A sweeping, free-standing staircase carved from walnut rose at the back of the large entry area, flanked by floor-to-ceiling oil paintings of a long-ago master and mistress of Bellefleur. Wide-arched openings led to huge rooms. Cole knew one was the parlor, the other a library, all furnished in period style.
“I’m Melodie Ladd. You must be Mr. Granville.” Shutting the door, the young woman moved past him to station herself behind a rococo table in the center of the foyer.
A guest book lay open and she held out a fountain pen. Cole set down his case.
“Actually, it’s Dempsey, Cole Dempsey,” he said, and watched her face. There was no reaction. “I’m with the Granville, Piers and Rousseau. There must have been a misunderstanding when my secretary made the reservation.” He smiled his charming smile.
There was, of course, no misunderstanding. Never forewarn the enemy. He had learned that and more in law school.
“Oh! Well, Mr. Dempsey, then.” The young woman waited as he signed the book, then launched into a perky speech. “We’re so glad you’ve chosen the Bellefleur Bed and Breakfast for your stay in Plantation Country. We specialize in escape from the three T’s—telephones, television and traffic. If you have a need to use a telephone, there is one available in the plantation office. Also, we’ll be happy to assist in arrangements to take advantage of any of the area attractions—”
Cole cut her off. “I’m here to work.”
“I see.” She carried on, “There is a coffeemaker, microwave and small refrigerator in each room. Check-out is 11:00 a.m. on your day of departure—let’s see, I have you down for two weeks, is that right?” She consulted a ledger.
“I may need to stay longer, if the room is available.”
She looked surprised, but quickly nodded. “That would be wonderful! I’ll let Miss Louvel know. We’ve only recently opened, so we aren’t booked up. In fact, you’re our only guest tonight.”
That was what Cole’s research had led him to believe. Turning the plantation into a bed and breakfast was a last-ditch effort to prevent seizure. Property taxes were a bitch, especially when you got behind. Even as Cole’s star had risen, the Louvels’ had fallen on hard times.
But there would be no sympathy in Cole’s dead, ruined heart for anyone in Azalea Bend, much less a Louvel. After all, they had shown none to him or his family.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Melodie offered, gesturing toward the grand staircase that wound up three stories from the foyer. “If you’d like, you may take advantage of the refreshments waiting there or take a stroll down to the river. Tomorrow, if you like, I can escort you on a guided tour of the mansion.”
“I’d like Miss Louvel to take me on the tour.”
A look of sudden caution crossed Melodie’s face.
“She’s the owner of the house, isn’t she?” he explained. “I’d simply prefer she be the one to tell me about its history. I can wait till she’s available.”
“Yes, she owns the house, Mr. Dempsey.” Melodie gave him another long look, and for a second he thought—
Dempsey.
Did the name mean anything to her? Even at her age, she would have heard the stories.
“I’m sure Miss Louvel will be happy to show you around the mansion tomorrow,” Melodie said finally. “Shall we go up then?” She led the way upstairs.
The room was everything it was advertised to be. Spacious, clean, stripped of any reminder that the brutally murdered Aimee Louvel had once slept there.
“Please, make yourself at home at Bellefleur,” Melodie said, exiting the room. There was a pitcher of ice water along with a decanter of merlot, and a spread of crackers, sliced cheeses and fruit on the low table in the sitting area. He turned over a crystal glass and poured the merlot.
He took the wine with him when he went back down the stairs and through the lonely, low-lit parlor, to the dark dining room, then beyond, to the wide back porch that spanned the rear of the mansion. He leaned against the columned edge and gazed out toward the shadowed thickness that he knew was trees and river.
A slow sip of merlot later, he closed his eyes, let the unstoppable past roll over him. He wondered, not for the first time, what Bryn was like all these years later. She would be thirty-one years old and…beautiful. Surely she was beautiful. She and her twin Aimee had been fairy princesses in a tower. Rich, sheltered and spoiled. Two perfect golden-haired fairies with their purple hyacinth eyes. He remembered the last time he’d known hope, he’d stood in this spot, holding sweet-sixteen Bryn’s hand—
When he opened his eyes and turned back toward the house, she was there.
It couldn’t be him, but it was.
He leaned against the white pillar of the porch, wineglass in hand, and watched her with that steely will of his that she remembered all too well. He straightened, as casually as if this were his home and not hers. The shadows melted away and the ghost of the past was replaced by the reality of the present as he walked into the light.
She was struck first by how tall he’d grown; she found herself looking up to him. Cole Dempsey was a man now, dark-haired, strong-shouldered and lean. Unable to stop herself, she thought of the nights they’d shared together, exploring each other’s bodies. Experiencing the joy and passion of first love. Her breath caught as heat twisted through her blood. Dread pulsed in her throat.
Bryn Louvel hated herself for it, but she took a step back and struggled to control the havoc his reappearance had wrought in her emotions.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here, Cole, what kind of trick you think you’re pulling,” she said, her voice strong even while her legs felt weak. “But you can go pack your things. You’re not welcome at Bellefleur.”
The tension hung thick in the air for a long beat before he spoke, and just looking at him made her feel suffocated and small and panicked. No matter what had changed, no matter how many years had passed, Cole Dempsey represented a moment in time she’d give anything to erase. Her first love had been destroyed as surely as her sister.
She couldn’t look at Cole without thinking of his father and everything that had happened the awful night that had changed everything.
“I’m not going anywhere, Bryn,” he said, breaking the stony silence. “And you can’t make me.” He took another step toward her, as if he meant to close in on her by slow degrees. He set his glass down on a nearby wrought-iron table.
“That sounds very mature, Cole. I can see you’ve grown up.”
“You certainly have,” he responded. His eyes took her in, boldly swept her from head to toe. “Bryn Louvel, all grown up.”
Though her traitorous body tingled from his thorough appraisal, she spoke stiffly. “That’s right. I’ve grown up. This is my home and I’d like you to leave.”
Still he came towards her. “Ah, this may be your home, Bryn, but it’s also your business. I’ve paid for the right to stay here. How things change. Once my father was paid to work at Bellefleur. Now I’m the one paying you. Ironic, don’t you think?”
She refused to answer his taunt. “Don’t mention your father in this house,” she said instead.
Cole stood in front of her now, his proximity overwhelming. “What about your father, Bryn?” he demanded softly, too close. “What if I mention him?”
“He’s dead. They’re all dead. Your father, mine, Aimee. It’s all over, Cole. So leave.” Her voice rose. “Get out of my house.”
“But it’s not over, not yet,” he countered calmly, as if they were discussing the news instead of the fifteen-year-old crime that had destroyed both their families. “Do you know that Aimee’s death is the oldest unsolved murder in St. Salome Parish?”
“It’s not an unsolved murder.”
“Oh yes, it is.” He came at her now with furious speed, and when she backed up again, she stumbled against a potted bougainvillea. He grabbed her shoulders, bare in her sleeveless blouse, and steadied her. “But I’m here to solve it. And you’re going to help me.”
She braced her hands against his chest and pushed him away. “Let go of me, Cole.” And he did, but the chilling heat of his touch on her skin remained, as did the haunting threat of his words. He scared her, and that thought was shocking. She had never been frightened of him before.
Fifteen years ago, she’d loved him. It was the first and only time in her life she’d ever given her heart away so completely. Even now, she knew there was a part of her that she held back from any man she’d become close to since.
Whether any future relationship could overcome what had happened fifteen years ago, she didn’t know yet. And Cole had been part of that horror. He belonged to another lifetime, and he had no place in her here and now. He was not that tender boy she had once loved any more than she was that naive sixteen-year-old girl. At thirty-two, his face had taken on a mature seasoning that was both handsome and cold. And his eyes, oh God, they were the worst. She would have known them anywhere, and yet it was as if she’d never looked into them before. Gold flecks like solar flares dotted in the brilliant green of them, compelling and yet bitter now, the gentleness all gone.
Cole Dempsey the man was hard as stone.
“If you’re here to dig up the past, the last thing I’ll ever do is help you,” she promised. “So if that’s what you’re here for, you’re wasting your time. There are several perfectly fine new motels closer to town—”
He shook his head. “You’re running a business here, Bryn. What kind of business turns away customers? Especially a business that’s in dire need of cash flow.”
She carefully schooled her features to reveal nothing of the clean shot he’d achieved. Yes, Bellefleur was in trouble. When the sugar mill had gone under, they’d nearly lost everything. Her father’s drinking and gambling had consumed the last years of his life. Maurice Louvel had drowned himself in alcohol and debts until he couldn’t see his way to the surface anymore, then he’d shot himself by the edge of the reflecting pond.
“Your father ruined us,” she bit out. “He got the revenge he’d sworn, didn’t he? He killed Aimee and destroyed my father—”
“And your father did nothing?”
His gaze bored into her.
“Your father deserved everything that happened to him,” Bryn hissed back. “For what he did to Aimee. How dare you ask me to care what happened to him after that? Do you think it was easy for my family?”
Her nightmares about that night were both surreal and vivid. Over and over, she had to hear her sister’s scream, her mother’s cries in the darkness, her father’s frantic running, lights flashing over the grounds, and the angry shouts, a popping gunshot and the silence. The silence was the most horrible part.
In the silence, she always saw Aimee, face up at the edge of the reflecting pool, bloody, battered, her life gone. And Wade Dempsey beside her at the pond’s bank, one bullet clean through his heart, gazing lifelessly up at the death-dark sky. A bullet Maurice Louvel had fired.
Ten years later, Bryn’s father had placed himself in that same spot, only this time he’d shot himself. He’d won his freedom in a courtroom, but he could never forgive himself for inspiring the revenge that had made Wade Dempsey kill Aimee. To the end, her father had blamed himself for his daughter’s murder.
Cole’s voice was as bitter as the look in his eyes. “Oh, I hope it was hard, Bryn. I hope it was very hard. Your father was judge, jury and executioner that night.”
“He was out of his mind that night. Who wouldn’t be after finding their daughter dead in their own backyard?”
“Oh, I know all about it. Temporary insanity. He got off, didn’t he? No court in St. Salome Parish would convict a war hero and the town’s biggest employer, would they? Even if it was all lies. That’s right.” He kept his agonizing gaze on her. “Lies. Do you know I’ve read every document I could get my hands on connected to your sister’s murder, Bryn? Have you?”
“No,” she said finally. She couldn’t bear it. She didn’t want to know more about that night than she already did. The bitter strife between her parents, the near-violent altercation when her father had fired Wade Dempsey, and the horror of everything that followed. It was enough. Too much.
Bryn would never forget the betrayed fire in Cole’s eyes when she’d sat across a courtroom from him months later when the verdict was read and Maurice Louvel was acquitted for taking a father’s justice. But she had lost Cole even before that last day of the trial, and there was no going back. She’d had to start over, just as he and his mother had had to do when they had left Azalea Bend. Her father hadn’t been able to start over, though.
Her father had lost more than a daughter that night. He’d lost his will to work and even to live. His business had been destroyed, his family broken. Battered beyond repair, just like Aimee.
Nothing had ever been the same.
“Your father lied,” Cole said. “Your mother lied. And you lied, Bryn. And we both know it.”
Guilt was a horrible thing, but Bryn had learned to live with it. The only lie she’d told wouldn’t change the fact that Wade Dempsey had murdered Aimee. Her father’s pride, her mother’s dignity—it was little enough to leave them after they’d lost Aimee.
And for that, to save what was left of her family, Bryn had lied. To Cole, it had been betrayal. To Bryn, it had been her only choice for her family’s survival.
“Go away, Cole. If you can’t let go of the past, that’s your problem.”
“Oh no, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s your problem, too—because you and your family weren’t the only ones who lied. This whole town is full of liars, and I might not have been able to prove that fifteen years ago, but things are different now.”
Bryn’s blood ran cold. Oh, this wasn’t the first time she’d heard Cole’s conspiracy theory about the prosecution. Even at seventeen, he’d been determined that his father had been innocent. But he wasn’t seventeen anymore.
What havoc could Cole’s misplaced, bitter loyalty create now? He blamed an entire town for his father’s downfall. And she knew he also blamed her. She’d hurt him, she knew that. But he’d also hurt her more than he could possibly realize. She’d never imagined she could be as close to anyone as she was to Aimee—until she’d fallen in love with Cole. Then she’d lost them both in one night.
And he could still hurt her. She had a business to build, and everything depended on its success.
“Aimee’s murder is the last thing I plan to discuss with you, Cole.” She gave her words the ring of finality, but she might as well have flung them at a stone wall for all the effect they appeared to have on Cole.
“It’s late, and I realize seeing me again is…upsetting,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
God, he was arrogant. “I’m not upset, Cole. I’m not bound by the past as you clearly are.” She took another step back, bumping into the column behind her.
“Did you know I’m an attorney now?” he went on in his quiet-steel voice as if she’d said nothing. The lethal ice of his eyes prickled uneasiness up the nape of her neck. “That’s right. I worked my way through college, made something of myself that no one in Azalea Bend thought possible. Especially you, isn’t that right, Bryn?”
He stood a breath away, and with the column pressed against her back, she had no room to get away. She was trapped, in every way possible.
“You’re looking at the newest partner in Granville, Piers and Rousseau. That’s the biggest law firm in Baton Rouge, if you don’t know,” he continued, lifting his hand and running the tips of his fingers down the side of her face. Her pulse jumped in response. “I’m a man now, Bryn. Not a boy. I won’t be tucking my tail between my legs and running away this time. And I won’t be a victim to the Louvels any longer. I’m going to finish this, once and for all.”
The marsh grasses down by the river shuddered in the long beat. Bryn felt her heart sink inside her. He might be wearing a plain polo shirt, both buttons undone, and laid-back jeans, but his looks were deceptively simple. His bearing alone revealed the truth of who he had become even if she hadn’t seen the sleek new sports car in the drive. Cole Dempsey was a success, but the question of what drove him was what really unnerved her.
He was a man on a mission. But was it justice…or revenge?
Chapter 2
She wished she hadn’t sent Melodie home.
The main house of Bellefleur was over nine thousand square feet, but with no one else in the mansion tonight but Cole Dempsey, it felt about the size of an airplane lavatory.
Bryn hugged her knees up to her chest, sitting in the middle of the mahogany four-poster in the main second floor bedroom. She had her own private sitting area and a small personal office. It had been her parents’ suite, which Bryn had made over for herself. In the years following Aimee’s death, her mother had spent more time in than out of hospitals being treated for depression. Patsy Louvel had finally come back to Bellefleur—but only to one of the cottages on the grounds, self-imprisoned with her beloved camellias, her keening grief and later, a full-time nurse.
Sometimes Bryn thought she hated Bellefleur as much she loved it, but all she knew for sure was that after more than two hundred years she couldn’t be the Louvel who let it go. She had plans, lots of them. Other families along Louisiana’s famed River Road, Highway 18, that traversed the state following the path of the mighty Mississippi, had found ways to keep their plantations. They offered overnight accommodations, tours, Old South history and craft events.
Slowly, she would be able to finance restoration work on the house and grounds to bring them back to their former glory. Her father’s pride and outdated sense of Louvel nobility would never have allowed it, but now that he was gone, Bryn had taken over. After high school, she’d learned the historic tourism business from the ground up, working for several of the most successful historic plantations as everything from receptionist to tour guide and finally manager. It hadn’t left her with much time for relationships, but she hadn’t cared. Saving Bellefleur had been her goal.
She was starting small, with only herself, Melodie, who worked part-time while finishing college, and the few additional employees she could afford, but the possibilities were endless.
She was even in the process of convincing a Creole chef who had once cooked for her parents to create a restaurant at Bellefleur—if she could get the financial backing. First she had to prove to the bank that she could make a success of the bed and breakfast she’d already opened.
Now Cole Dempsey threatened everything.
He’d returned to unearth a scandal just when she was trying to turn Bellefleur into a tourist destination. She didn’t need talk of murder darkening her chances. Especially if Cole was determined that it was an unsolved murder. That meant the real murderer was still out there, possibly even near Bellefleur. Which couldn’t be true, but what would the mere rumor do to her business?
The soothing palette of ivory, oatmeal and gray in the grand bedroom suite that had once been her parents wasn’t soothing tonight. Bryn rose, paced to the verandah doors, pushing back the creamy silk drapes outlined with grosgrain ribbon. She stared out at the thick, unknowable night. He’d booked two weeks already and had asked Melodie if he could stay longer. And what was worse, seeing him had upset her. Damn him for knowing it so easily, too.
She was still in shock from seeing him, in fact. His chiseled, hard face was almost unrecognizable as that young, gentle teen who’d wooed her in the summer gardens long ago. He’d slip up from the sugarcane fields to find her, his bare muscular arms glistening in the humid heat. He would wink at her, watch her with his remarkable eyes, cast her smiles, and slowly, with his whispered words and stolen kisses, he drew her into his magic world of hopes and dreams. He’d always wanted to make something of himself. He’d been ambitious and arrogant even then.
And she, who had known nothing but privilege, was awed by him. In those days, she’d had everything but feared her own shadow. He’d had nothing but exuded the confidence that he could do anything. Together, they’d steal away on secret dates, sometimes with Aimee’s help, and other times without it—like the night he’d tempted her down the latticed ivywork outside her window and made love to her for the first time under the star-splashed sky.
He’d made her believe that, like him, she could do anything, too. But the truth had been that neither of them could control the events that had torn them apart.
Damn him for coming back.
The phone in her office rang. Bryn hurried across the aged heart-pine floor, her bare feet padding silently. While none of the visitor accommodations included telephones for the sake of their guests’ serenity during their stay, Bryn kept phones installed in her personal office here as well as her business office downstairs. They were the only two land lines in the main house.
“Just checking to see how your meeting went with the bank today,” came Drake Cavanaugh’s voice in response to her hello.
Bryn hesitated, despite the fact he was her oldest friend and had stood by her ever since Aimee’s death. Their relationship had grown by gentle degrees from friendship to fondness, and only recently had Drake expressed a desire to take their longstanding relationship to the next level. His marriage proposal had taken her completely by surprise, though looking back, she realized she’d ignored the signs of his changing feelings.
And now that Cole was back, she knew why.
She’d walled up her emotions fifteen years ago. She’d loved Cole with her whole heart, and the day he’d broken it it had nearly killed her. She’d been protecting herself ever since. Even with Drake.
“It went fine,” she said finally. “But I need to have a good year, that’s all. Then we’ll take a look at the books and they’ll decide if I’m ready for a loan.”
“I’d co-sign and you could get a loan now.”
“I know.” Bryn cradled the phone against her shoulder as she slipped into the comfortable wingback chair behind her desk. “But you know I won’t do that.” Especially now that Drake had revealed his deeper feelings for her. She couldn’t let herself become indebted to him that way, not if she wasn’t sure she would marry him.
“You know I’ll keep offering,” he said. Bryn was quiet, and after a beat, Drake asked, “Is something wrong?”
There was no point in keeping it a secret. Melodie was a chatterbox. The whole town would know by tomorrow. As soon as Melodie mentioned the name of their new guest, people would recognize it. Melodie was young, but even she had heard the story, if not the name of Wade Dempsey’s son. Dempsey itself was a common enough surname, but plenty of older residents in Azalea Bend would remember and put it together.
“Cole Dempsey’s back in town.”
“You’re kidding.”
Now Drake was quiet.
“I wish I were. He’s staying here. He booked a room.”
Drake let out a curse beneath his breath.
“He’s a lawyer now. In Baton Rouge. Have you heard of Granville, Piers and Rousseau?
“He’s in with them?” Bryn could hear the shock in Drake’s voice.
“Yes. Or, he said he was.”
“Do you want me to come over? I’m in the city tonight, but—”
“I’m fine.” As a member of the state congress, Drake spent a lot of time in Baton Rouge, had a lot of connections. He kept his parents’ old Georgian in Azalea Bend for his frequent visits to St. Salome Parish. “Maybe you could check out his story. Find out if he’s really with the Granville, Piers and Rousseau firm.”
She didn’t really doubt Cole on that fact, but it seemed wise to check. She couldn’t think of anything else to do and she was grasping at straws. She promised Drake she would call if Cole caused trouble, but she knew she wouldn’t. Drake and Cole had never been friends, and she doubted the passage of time had lessened that tension. As the prosecutor for St. Salome Parish, Drake’s father had handled—or deliberately mishandled, according to Cole—the case against Maurice Louvel, leading to his acquittal for the shooting of Wade Dempsey. Once, years ago, she had confided in Drake about her secret affair with Cole. And the fact that now Drake had let her know about his true feelings for her could only make things worse. She was about to go back to bed when the phone chirped again.
“Bryn, it’s Melodie. I stopped by the Kwik Pak on the way home and ran into Mr. Brouchard. I mentioned Cole Dempsey and he told me who he was. Why didn’t you tell me Cole Dempsey was Wade Dempsey’s son? I’m so sorry! I feel awful about just leaving you there.”
“It’s all right. It’s no big deal.” Maybe if Bryn kept telling people that Cole Dempsey being back in town was no big deal, no one would pay any attention to him. Spin control.
“Do you want me to come back?” Melodie asked. “I could get my things, spend the night.”
“No. I’m fine. Thanks, anyway. You have class in the morning. You don’t need to be way out here.” Melodie attended college part-time in Baton Rouge.
“He’s— Well, he’s not like I expected,” Melodie said.
“What did you expect?” He was everything Bryn had expected and worse.
“I don’t know. He’s so— Gorgeous. Charming. Rich. My God, did you see that Cobra in the drive? I just didn’t expect—I guess I had in mind this hired hand’s son, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a bad boy.”
“People change,” Bryn said briefly. “Thanks for calling, Melodie, but I’m all right.”
She hung up. The linen-upholstered walls with their hand-stenciled white medallions seemed to close in on her. She tried to sleep, but only tossed and turned. The room felt suffocating, and her mind wouldn’t stop turning. She got up, pulled off her pajamas and put on shorts and a pink hibiscus-colored T-shirt. Silently, she slipped into the hall, padded barefoot down the main stairs—
And slammed straight into a hard shadow at the bottom of the steps. Strong arms grabbed her, held her tight. He smelled like musk and man, and a hopeless need built inside of her.
“Dammit, Bryn, you’ll kill yourself barreling down stairs in the dark like that,” Cole said.
“And you would care.”
She shook him off, trying to ignore the effect his hands had on her body. Her pulse jumped off the scale and she felt as if her heart was in her throat. It was bad enough that he was back—the last thing she could handle was him touching her.
“What are you doing wandering around the house in the night?” she demanded, as if she weren’t doing the same thing.
“I went for a walk down by the river.”
Was he restless, too? Why? She wanted—and didn’t want—to know what he was thinking.
“What are you doing wandering around in the night?” he asked in turn.
She said nothing. In the spectral dark she could see the bright shine of his eyes and something deep inside her quivered when he reached back up and touched her cheek.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Bryn,” he said in a quiet voice. “That’s not why I came to you.”
For some strange reason, the tenderness of his words made her want to cry.
“Then why did you come?” she whispered tautly.
In the teeming silence, she saw something in his eyes shift, heat, and there it was, the inexplicable seductive frisson tugging her toward him just as it had on those long-ago days in the summer shadows of Bellefleur. And she understood why she was suddenly struggling to contain tears. But before he could speak, the screech of a tire from outside pulled her away, then the sound of shattering glass broke the night.
Chapter 3
Something crashed on the floor of the front hall mere feet away, and there was another screeching sound. Bryn’s stomach dipped crazily. She froze for just an instant, her brain computing facts. That sound was a car, and that crash was something thrown through the window. She pushed past the hard shadow of Cole. Her bare feet raced across the wood floor and she flung open the door even as she registered the stab of something sharp and ice-hot.
“Wait, Bryn!” Cole came up behind her, grabbed her as she would have torn outside onto the portico. The half moon that had lit the grounds earlier in the evening hid behind clouds, and beyond the splash of the porch lantern, she could see nothing but impermeable dark.
“Let go of me,” she demanded, fighting Cole’s too-intimate arms plastering her to his too-hard body.
“They’re gone.” He relaxed his hold.
Bryn hit the switch in the entry hall. The overhead chandelier spilled blinding light down on the room. Her breath jammed her throat.
Glass lay everywhere. A rust-red brick sat innocently amongst the shards. It took a beat for her to register the fact that something was tied to it.
She took a step toward it and cried out in pain.
“Bryn!” Cole reached out to her again. As his arms went around her, he felt her trembling.
He knew the last thing she wanted was his help. “I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re hurt.”
“There’s a note.” She started to hobble her way across the glass-littered pine floor, but Cole—wearing shoes—crunched straight for the brick and reached it before her. He knelt and picked it up. A small sheet of white paper was tied to it with a strand of twine.
He ripped it off and opened it. The block-lettered words burned up at him.
The son of a murderer isn’t welcome in St. Salome Parish.
The old bitter fury washed through him, thick and greasy and nauseating.
“What does it say?”
He stood, turned. Bryn’s face was pale, anxious. She was good and freaked-out by what had just happened, and he tamped down his own rage against the past and this town and the injustice he’d waited fifteen years to make right. He handed her the note.
She read it and lifted huge, haunted eyes to him. The small piece of paper shook in her slender fingers. “We have to call the police,” she said hoarsely.
“Right. That’ll help.” He couldn’t stop the sarcasm that laced his words. The police in St. Salome Parish hadn’t given a rat’s ass about the Dempseys fifteen years ago and he wouldn’t be surprised if that hadn’t changed. The Dempseys’ nomadic lifestyle, moving from sugarcane plantation to sugarcane plantation every time Wade Dempsey had got drunk and in trouble, had seemed to end here. No more alcoholic binging, no more fighting and no more of the philandering that Mary Dempsey had borne with a stoic determination to keep her family together.
They’d had three good years in Azalea Bend. Three years of putting down roots, thinking they’d found home. It was their family’s new start. With Wade on the wagon, his genuine passion for the sugarcane fields had landed him the position of plantation manager by that third year. God, Cole had been proud. And maybe, just maybe, he’d hoped even he, once merely the son of a hired hand, would be good enough for the daughter of Maurice Louvel….
But it had been no bright new beginning. Rather, it had been an all-too-lurid end. And when Aimee had died, it had also been all too clear that their acceptance into St. Salome Parish had been the worst kind of mirage.
They were outsiders.
Even Bryn had turned her back on them.
“I’m calling the police,” Bryn insisted. “Someone threw a brick through my window. This note is a threat. Maybe they can get fingerprints or analyze it or something.”
She sounded so desperate and scared.
“Fine, call the police. But the two of us have already handled the note.” Which probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, but neither of them had been thinking.
“Oh, God.” She dropped the note and took a step back. A smear of blood stained the pine floor where she’d stepped.
Reaching out to her without thinking, he picked her up into his arms. The fit of her sexily curvaceous body, the scent of her orange jessamine soap, the feel of her blunt-cut shoulder-length gold hair brushing his cheek, mingled with the magnolia air sweeping in from the broken window, dreamy and nightmarish all at once. How had he teased himself into believing that he could feel nothing for Bryn Louvel? She evoked a beat inside him as distinctive as a Zydeco rhythm.
And as hard to forget.
“I can walk—” she started.
He knew where the kitchen was located, and even as they left the fulgent glare of the chandelier-lit entry hall, he paced toward it, giving her no time for further protest. Bryn’s body felt light, though she’d noticeably filled out since she’d been sweet sixteen.
And filled out in all the right places.
She was tall, slender but toned and far too fascinating with her big, wary eyes and full, kissable lips. She pulled at his heart even as his head told him she was dangerous.
Holding her like this made him remember all too well that there had been tender moments between them. But that had been before their world had spun apart, leaving nothing but bitterness and regret.
Pushing through the swinging door that led into the humongous Bellefleur kitchen, he saw that a light had been left on over the sink. In its ghostly spill, he set Bryn down by the round fruitwood table. She grabbed hold of one of the cane-back carved chairs, putting her weight on the uninjured foot. He pulled back another chair.
“Sit.” He headed for the sink.
“Do I need to remind you this is my house?” The chair scraped against the floor as she settled into it. “Who the hell do you think you are? If you hadn’t stopped me, I might have gotten a look at that car—”
Cole grabbed a towel by the sink and turned on the water. He looked back at her.
“No, you wouldn’t have gotten a look at that car. They didn’t have their lights on and they were driving off way too fast. And if they hadn’t been and you had seen them, who knows what they would have done next. Someone who throws a brick through your window isn’t stopping by for a social call. You could have been hurt, Bryn. You were hurt.”
And he shouldn’t care that she was hurt. She’d trampled his heart fifteen years ago. Yet dark and unnervingly deep, he knew he did care and he fought inside himself to keep it under control. He was here for a reason, and opening his heart to Bryn again wasn’t part of it.
He wrung out the wet towel and headed back across the room.
“It’s just glass,” she said, leaning over to inspect the foot she’d elevated on the next chair. “I’m more worried about the window. And who did it. I’ve got a phone in the office—”
“Let me take a look. You might need stitches. The brick’s not going anywhere. You can call in a minute.”
She looked up at him, her face half-hidden in the brooding shadows of the room. Her soft lips were pressed in an unpliable line—whether from pain or stubbornness, he wasn’t sure. He flicked the switch on the wall, illuminating the table with the lantern-style chandelier. The room was a rustic, aristocratic melody, from the intricately cast arms of the lighting fixture with its delicate leaf-and-beading details to the collection of colorful plates and jugs crowding the overmantel of the old fireplace. Despite the museum-quality antiques filling the room, it had the lived-in feel of generations of Louvels.
He pulled out another chair and drew it close enough to pick up her foot in his hands, rest it on his lap. The night was warm, but her skin felt cold. He could feel the tension in her body. The pieces of glass in her foot were small, thankfully, but when he pulled the sharp bits out, the blood flow increased. He placed the shards on the scarred, antiqued tabletop and wrapped her foot in the towel.
“Do you have some bandages around here somewhere?” He settled her foot back on the other chair.
“There’s a first-aid box in the cabinet by the sink,” she told him.
He found a white plastic box with a red cross stamped on the top. He pulled out the gauze. She unwrapped the towel. The bleeding had slowed. She took the gauze and tape from him, clearly preferring to tend to herself.
His gaze followed the line of her slender foot to the delectably curved calf, and higher. She wore lightweight cotton shorts and a slim-fitting boat-neck T-shirt that hugged the supple rounding of her breasts.
He felt again a very sexual and all-too-familiar tug of awareness, and knew he was going to have to accept it. He’d been attracted to Bryn since he was seventeen years old. He couldn’t expect that to change just because he was older. His heart might be dead and ruined but his body was in full working order.
But he didn’t have to act on that attraction…and couldn’t, because too much else had changed.
His gaze continued to rise till he found himself meeting her water-hyacinth eyes, as deep a purple as the wild blossoms covering every bayou and swamp in Louisiana. And just as capable of robbing everything they touched of oxygen. For just a second, he thought he saw the same raw hunger that had so unexpectedly seized him.
His chest hurt, and although he wasn’t even touching her, he was more aware of her than ever.
She put the gauze on the table. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said in a brittle voice. Whatever she was thinking, feeling, it was under control now. If she’d felt that same crackle of awareness, she wasn’t going to let it rule her. “I know you were just trying to help. I don’t think I’m going to need stitches,” she added.
He nodded. “You’re going to be fine.”
“I was fine before you got here. I’m not fine now.” Her eyes accused him as much as her words. “Now you see why you can’t stay here, Cole.”
“I’m not leaving.”
Bryn heard the determination in Cole’s voice, and her chest tightened.
They fell into an uncomfortable silence. Around them, the big house creaked and settled.
“What do you really want from me, Cole?”
“I told you I didn’t come here to hurt you, Bryn,” Cole said. “And it’s true.” His eyes were deep, fathomless pools. “We need to talk about Aimee. I know it’s hard. I know you don’t want to even think about it, but we have to talk.”
He was right. There was no getting around it. Cole Dempsey had come back into her life and turned it upside down in a matter of hours. And he wasn’t going to leave without at least saying his piece. And after that— He still might not leave. But sticking her head in the sand wasn’t doing her any good.
“All right,” she said finally. “But I want to call the police first.”
Cole didn’t say anything as he followed her out of the kitchen. He took her arm as she struggled to walk on her bandaged foot. The pain was a dull ache compared to the dread licking at her stomach.
They reached the small anteroom off the entry hall she’d turned into a small but comfortable office. She’d colorwashed blue walls and added an eclectic mix of personal mementoes, artifacts and local crafts, yet there was nothing comfortable about it tonight. The silence lay turgid between them as she punched in the number for the police.
“An officer will be here as soon as possible,” she told him as she put the receiver back in its cradle a few minutes later.
He sat across the desk from her in a threadworn velvet wingback chair, and yet he was still far too close. He invaded her space by his mere presence at Bellefleur. An aura of immutable authority exuded from him. No matter what he wore, he would cut a powerful figure with his dark hair, perilous eyes and the solid breadth of his muscular body.
“You want to talk,” she said. “So, talk. You have till the police arrive.” Since he’d gotten here, he’d been acting as if he was in charge. She wanted to let him know that he wasn’t.
She caught the slight narrowing of his eyes, but he let her words pass unchallenged.
“Would you like a drink?” she offered, coolly hospitably. There was a bottle of brandy in the antique cabinet behind the desk. She needed a drink even if he didn’t.
The chair swiveled, and she took the bottle down, along with a couple of crystal glasses. She poured them each a glass, returned the bottle to the cabinet and raised the amber liquid to her lips. The brandy burned sweet and warm down her cold throat.
Cole didn’t touch the glass she pushed across the desk toward him.
“My mother became seriously ill a year ago,” he said in the still thick of the quiet office. “I buried her in Baton Rouge last month.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She truly hurt for him—but why was he telling her this? It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but she was hardly an old friend catching up on his life story since last they’d met. She’d never blamed Cole’s mother for what Wade Dempsey had done. If anything, Mary Dempsey was another of Wade’s victims. Still, she wasn’t sure what Mary’s death had to do with Cole’s return.
How long would it take for the police to arrive? The conversation had barely begun and already she wished it was over. She focused on the small bronzed bust of Alexandre Louvel, one of the first Louisianans to risk his resources turning Creole cane into sugar and thereby founding the Louvel fortune, standing sentry on a chipped and peeling painted column by the door. He’d found a way to profit on the lands he’d inherited, and Bryn often felt his vacant, heavy gaze as she sat behind this desk and tried to turn around Bellefleur’s future once again.
“I never thought I’d come back to Azalea Bend,” he said. “I worked my way through college, and on through law school. I never looked back, not once.”
He appeared to be in no hurry to get wherever he was going with this conversation, and that bothered her more than anything else. He was confident, composed, while she felt her own control slipping.
Time to cut to the chase and get this done. She turned her gaze from the bronze of Alexandre Louvel and squared it on Cole.
“I thought we were going to talk about Aimee.” Her hand shook as she lifted the crystal glass and took another sip. “Your father swore revenge, and he took it. Everyone at Bellefleur heard his threats. He went to town and got drunk—a dozen people saw him in the bar, talking crazy. The Louvels were going to pay. And he came back and killed Aimee…because she was the only Louvel he could find.” God, and how she blamed herself for that.
She’d been down by the river with Cole that night, both of them desperate and aching. Her sister had offered her comfort, even her help. Aimee had insisted that she could fix everything. But all Bryn had been able to think about was losing Cole. Wade would have to leave Azalea Bend to search for new work, and his family would go with him. She might never see Cole again, despite his promises to write and call. And if her parents found out she was trying to keep in touch with Wade Dempsey’s son…
She’d gone to Cole instead. And Aimee had waited for her. Bryn had come back to the house in time to hear her sister’s screams. She’d never known for sure where her parents had gone that night, but they’d been fighting and Patsy had driven off in the car. Her father had chased after her. Everything about that night had been awful.
They’d come home around the same time as Bryn. And then things had just gotten more awful.
“Those threats, they were empty words,” Cole replied. “He’d been unjustly fired and he went crazy. He got drunk. That doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Are you going to tell me why you’re here, Cole?” She couldn’t take much more. Remembering that night…it always killed her a little more each time. “We had this conversation fifteen years ago, and I can’t see one good reason to have it again.”
Cole leaned forward, his forearms resting on the solid polished mahogany of the desk that had once belonged to her great-grandfather. His voice lowered, as if meant only for her even when the two of them were alone in the house anyway.
“My mother went to her death wanting to believe my father was innocent—but fearing somewhere inside herself that he was guilty.” His eyes bored hard into hers. Emotion lurked in those lithoid depths, but it was unreadable. “She was haunted by that question, Bryn.”
She didn’t know what to say. Her family had been haunted by that night, too. What was Cole getting at?
She knew he was getting at something.
“Before she died, she told me something she’d kept secret all my life. She was pregnant with another man’s child when she married Wade Dempsey. He married her and gave me a name, and that’s why she stayed with him all those years, even with his philandering. Wade was sterile, couldn’t have any children of his own, but he treated me like his flesh and blood and she loved him for that. But she wanted me to know that I wasn’t the flesh and blood of a killer. She was ashamed, Bryn, and she didn’t want me to be ashamed, too.”
“She must have been proud of your accomplishments,” she said carefully, shocked by his revelations. Sympathy she didn’t dare reveal tore at her heart. “You’ve made something of yourself. Why should you care what anyone thinks about anything in Azalea Bend now? It’s history, Cole. Let it go.”
When he continued, it was as if he hadn’t heard her. His voice remained oddly flat and expressionless. “I realized I’d let her down, and I’d let down the man who loved me enough to give me his name. The least I could do is try to clear his—not for my sake, but for my mother’s. I began to research Aimee’s case. Reading documents, police reports. The court transcripts of your father’s trial. I read everything I could get my hands on, and one question stood out in my mind.”
Bryn’s uneasiness increased. His sheer matter of factness continued to prickle alarm up her spine.
She waited.
“My father’s face was scratched as if he’d been in a life-or-death struggle that night,” Cole went on. “The forensic report was strangely silent on this fact. Scrapings from Aimee’s nails should have linked those scratches to my father. But no such evidence was ever presented in court.”
“Forensic science was not the same then as it is today,” Bryn countered. “This was fifteen years ago, in a small town. We don’t have murders in St. Salome Parish on a regular basis. This wasn’t a conspiracy, Cole. It was a small town grappling with a big-city crime. If scrapings weren’t taken from beneath Aimee’s nails—”
“But scrapings were taken.”
“You just said—”
“I said the evidence wasn’t presented in court. I didn’t say the evidence didn’t exist.”
Chapter 4
Bryn swallowed thickly. “What do you mean?” Her voice was a gracile cloak masking unnamable trepidation.
Cole looked at her, his gaze suddenly as frightening as a hot summer storm. “I mean the scrapings were taken. And the evidence was suppressed. The information was removed from the forensic report.”
Bryn’s stomach muscles clenched. “How can you know this?”
“Because I contacted the coroner who autopsied Aimee’s body. I asked him why no scrapings had been taken.”
All the blood seemed to run out of Bryn’s head. She felt light, sick. She had to hear what Cole had to say, though. There was no stopping now.
“Randol Ormond is nearly eighty years old,” Cole told her. “But he’s got all his wits about him. He left Azalea Bend several years ago and now lives in a senior-care center in Tampa. He wasn’t hard to track down. I flew there, spoke with him face to face. And he told me the truth. He removed the evidence from Aimee’s report—though he wouldn’t tell me why or on whose authority. But I can guess.”
“Maybe he’s lying.” Even she knew her words sounded desperate.
“He doesn’t have long to live, Bryn. He’s got cancer. He has no reason to lie. The truth does nothing but stain his reputation. He’s been carrying a load of guilt for fifteen years, and he was only too ready to let it go.”
“Maybe he said what you wanted to hear. People change their stories sometimes. People lie for all kinds of reasons.”
“I know that only too well.” Cole’s quiet voice was jeapordous now. “You know as well as I do that your father had more than one reason to shoot mine. And that only one of those reasons would get him out of a jail sentence—and that was pinning Aimee’s murder on Wade Dempsey. A jury let Maurice Louvel off for taking a father’s justice. But a husband’s justice…That would have been a little more difficult to win, even for a Louvel.”
Bryn had to force her next words from numb lips. “Did you expect me to tell the world that my mother had an affair with your father? Even you didn’t believe it was true.” But oh, he had wanted her to say it anyway. And she’d refused. And he’d never forgiven her.
A stiff beat passed. “It never mattered what I believed about that, Bryn. It only mattered what your father believed. And you and I both know what he thought that night. We know he didn’t fire my father because of negligence on the job. He fired him because he suspected he’d slept with his wife. And when he found my father with Aimee, he shot him dead. After that, there was no backing down. If Wade Dempsey wasn’t a murderer, then Maurice Louvel was, wasn’t he, Bryn? The town came to Maurice Louvel’s rescue. Any evidence that pointed to someone else being Aimee’s killer was shoved away because the jury might not have been so sympathetic to the man on trial for murder. Not just the fact that your father had more than one motive to shoot mine. Now there’s more. Now there’s the forensic report that was suppressed—and who do you think suppressed it, Bryn?”
She felt more ill by the second. She knew where he was headed. Drake’s father, the prosecutor responsible for the case against her father. “That’s a loaded charge, Cole. And all you have is a grudge and the word of an old, dying man to back you up.”
“I have more than Randol Ormond’s word.” Suddenly the emotion in his eyes was too clear. And it wasn’t bitterness or anger. It was pain, pure and scorching. “He still had the original report in his private files, Bryn. He got his daughter to track it down and give it to me.”
She could barely breathe. “What does it say?”
“It says that the DNA beneath Aimee’s nails didn’t match my father’s.”
Her head reeled, and she grappled for perspective. What if Wade really hadn’t murdered Aimee? What if everything she’d believed all these years was wrong?
But everything else she knew about that night warred with Cole’s new evidence.
“Mistakes happen,” she whispered. There had to be another explanation—
“And so do lies.” His face twisted. “It’s too late for my mother’s peace of mind. I can’t do anything for her now. She died while I was in Tampa talking to Randol Ormond. But I can still clear my father’s name. Randol Ormond can’t be the only one in Azalea Bend who knew the truth about what happened. Someone else fought with Aimee that night, and that someone else fought with my father. I believe my father interrupted the killer, perhaps even tried to save Aimee. I’m here to find out who that was, Bryn. I won’t leave till I find out. And I need your help.”
Bryn’s heart tore. What Cole was suggesting was almost too horrible to contemplate. If there had been evidence to clear Wade Dempsey, evidence that had been suppressed to justify her father’s fatal act that night…
Blood roared in her ears. She didn’t want to believe any of this. It couldn’t be true. “I can’t help you.”
“Oh yes, Bryn, you can.”
She jerked back from the desk. Her chair hit the cabinet and she stood, bracing her weight as much as possible on her uninjured foot.
“My mother has been hurt enough. I’m not going to tell the world that she had an affair with your father to clear a dead man’s name. My mother doesn’t deserve any more pain. Whatever my father did or didn’t think that night doesn’t prove anything—”
Cole stopped her as she came around the desk. He rose to his feet, took hold of her by both arms. “That’s not what I’m asking of you, Bryn.”
“Then what are you asking?” she demanded wildly.
“Nobody asked the right questions fifteen years ago. I’m here to ask them now. And I want answers.”
“So what do you need me for?” She shook off his hold. “I can’t stop you from asking questions in Azalea Bend. You want to play private detective, go for it. You don’t need me. You’ve even got this supposed forensic report. If there were scrapings taken, have them retested.”
Something flinched in his eyes at her obvious doubt. “The scrapings taken from Aimee’s fingernails are long gone.” He watched her steadily, letting go of her arms but not moving out of her way. “They disappeared when the original report was suppressed. Someone took them, Bryn. Probably the same someone who suppressed that report. But there was someone else in Azalea Bend who had scratches on their face that night, someone else who had a reason to kill Aimee—and I’m going to find out who it was. But I don’t have a prayer without you, Bryn. You’re a Louvel. That still means something in this town.”
“I can’t help you.” Her entire being wrenched. She’d spent years trying to put those horrible events behind her. To put Cole behind her. And now that she’d finally started building a new life, Cole was here, asking her to dredge it all up again. “I can’t relive the past.” And she couldn’t believe what he was saying. No one else could have killed Aimee that night. No one else had a reason.
But he wasn’t about to let her off the hook. “The original scrapings may be gone, but Aimee’s body hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s in St. Valerie’s Cemetery. It’s not too late to take new scrapings—”
Oh, God. “No!” Horror washed over her. He was sure she held the key to gaining the answers he wanted, and now she knew just what he’d do to force her to help him.
She could see the small muscle twitching in his jaw.
“I’m sorry, Bryn,” he said hoarsely. “I hate this as much as you do.” He lifted his hand, brushed his knuckle across her cheek. “I don’t want to see Aimee’s body exhumed. That’s not what I’m asking. There’s more than one way to find the truth. But people in this town aren’t going to answer my questions readily. They’d answer yours, though—if you help me. We can look for the truth together.”
Together. The words seemed to hum in the air between them.
She could so easily fall into those dark-rimmed, soulful eyes, eyes that looked no longer dead but very much alive and hurting, just as she was hurting. In spite of everything he’d just said, his agonized eyes drew her in, made her remember how much she’d loved him….
Bellefleur receded around them, leaving only Cole’s eyes, Cole’s touch, and the memory of one steamy night by the river’s edge…
Her legs wobbled beneath her.
“Bryn…” Her name came out throaty, husky, and he was so close.
Fifteen years vanished. She wanted him, just as she had in those halcyon summer gardens long ago. His lambent magic pulled her in, overwhelmed her, threatened to sweep away her reason. She should hate him right now for shattering her delicate peace, but instead she ached—had ached for him all this time….
A pounding from the front hall jerked through her clouded senses.
Bryn struggled for air, for rationality. She wasn’t sixteen. And he wasn’t that young boy. He was a man, indurate and cold, and he’d just threatened to have her sister’s body ripped from hallowed ground.
She pushed past him, hobbling as fast as possible to the front door and away from Cole, snatching a pair of sandals from a hall closet on the way.
Officer Martin Bouvier was a couple of years younger than Bryn, but she’d gone to high school with him. He came from a long line of cops, and he did his job methodically, without emotion. He recognized Cole right away.
He took their statements, sealed up the brick and the note in plastic bags, and didn’t offer much in the way of encouragement.
“Unless something else happens and we get more to go on, there’s probably not much we can do.” Martin watched Bryn from the torpid shadows of the portico. He nodded at Cole, standing behind Bryn in the doorway. “How long’s he staying?”
Cole stepped forward. He was invading her space again.
“Indefinitely,” Cole said.
She gave him a glare, then looked back at Martin. “He registered for two weeks.”
“You might want to consider cutting short your stay.” Martin’s voice was even, non-threatening, but she saw Cole’s eyes burn in response, the solar flares lighting within the caliginous green.
“I’m here on business,” Cole clipped out. “And I won’t be leaving till it’s finished.”
“Let me know if there’s any more trouble,” Martin said, directing his words to Bryn before heading down the steps.
The sound of the cruiser’s ignition filled the thick night, then faded away as the taillights disappeared up the long drive. Bryn turned back to face Cole.
She could still see the flash of bitter pain in his eyes from Martin’s advice. But she couldn’t afford to feel sorry for Cole. He’d chosen to come back to Azalea Bend.
He hadn’t given her any choice at all.
Bryn stalked past him, leaving him to shut the door. She stepped around the mess of broken glass. She was way too tired to clean it up tonight. All she wanted to do was go back to her bedroom and forget this day had ever happened.
Ha. As if that was going to happen. But she could try. At least till morning, when she’d have to face him all over again.
She used some plastic and tape to seal up the broken window, ignoring Cole. Finished, she headed for the stairs, put her hand on the balustrade.
“Bryn.”
She froze for a brief beat. Tension bristled behind her. She could almost feel his eyes on her back, pulling her, making her turn.
His grim visage made her wish she’d kept right on going up the stairs. Damn him for making her feel like the bad guy in this situation. She couldn’t stop him from looking for this truth of his, whether he was right about the past or not.
And how could he be right? Why would anyone else have killed Aimee? Nothing about his claims made sense. Wade Dempsey had been the one with the grudge against the Louvels. The one making threats. The one who’d charged back to Bellefleur drunk, looking for revenge. The one who’d been found with Aimee.
How dare Cole expect her to help him now? She wanted to charge right back down the stairs, shake him, strike him, do something, anything.
Then he did something. He closed the space between them in two heartbeats.
“We weren’t finished with our conversation,” he said quietly. The bright candescence of the chandelier played unforgivingly on his features. God, he was good-looking. Always had been. But now his face was etched with experience, and yet within those austere lines she could still see the boy she’d loved.
His tormented bayou eyes had her aching with a raw need. They’d both given in to that need once and had found something in each other that had seemed too strong to break. But the horror their families had faced had broken it. She’d stood by her family and he’d stood by his. Their youthful trust and love had been shattered irreparably. They’d tried to talk, but they’d both been too hurt and too immature to overcome what stood between them, and eventually it had turned into a bitter chasm. And she wasn’t feeling any more capable of overcoming it now. So why did she suddenly wish things could be different?
“Maybe you weren’t.” She forced her weak knees to move. “But I am.”
She left him at the foot of the stairs, but her room was no escape. The pull of him reached her even there. She clicked the lock on the inside of her doorknob and sank onto the night-gloam of her bed.
Sleep was a million miles away, but somehow she found her way into its dark, anguished arms. And the nightmares of Aimee’s murder pounded through the wispy night of ghosts and fears.
It was sometime after midnight when a shadow lunged through her bedroom window.
Chapter 5
Bryn was screaming.
Cole stumbled out from the rosewood half-tester bed. Sheets tangled around his legs and he almost fell. Bracing himself, he kicked the sheets away and tore from the room. All he could think of was the scream he’d heard the night of Aimee’s death. His heart nearly stopped beating and the blood froze in his veins.
The Oleander Room was on the same floor as the room he’d watched Bryn enter a few hours earlier. He raced down the pitch-dark corridor, willing Bryn to be all right, praying in double time. God, if he never asked for anything again, let Bryn be all right.
By touch, he found the door. The knob turned, but the door didn’t budge. It was locked.
No sound came from inside Bryn’s room now.
Cole pounded on the door. “Bryn! Dammit, Bryn, are you all right? Let me in!”
When she didn’t answer, he reared back, prepared to break the damn door down if he had to. The shadow-black of the corridor yawned open as he threw himself against the door.
But his body didn’t hit a door. It struck something soft and sweet-smelling. Bryn.
Together, they fell against the hard pine floor. It took a stunned beat for him to realize what had happened, that she’d opened the door just as he slammed forward.
“Bryn, are you okay?” He pulled himself off her. Pale moonlight tracing through her windows sketched her shocked face. Her midnight eyes stared up at him.
“There was someone in my room,” she whispered starkly.
The double French doors to the private balcony were shut, the drapes pushed back. Cole reached the doors, flung them wide. The moist air of the Louisiana night enfolded him, soupy and warm. He saw nothing but moon and trees, and heard only the murmur of the river and the rush of leaves in the light breeze. He swung back to Bryn.
She was on the floor, sitting with her knees pulled up, her back braced against the foot of her bed, moon-gleamed blond hair framing her frightened face. Cole knelt beside her.
“I don’t see anyone,” he told her, crossing the room to crouch down in front of her. “Are you all right? Tell me what you saw.”
“I thought I saw someone coming into the room,” she whispered again, and he could see tears on her cheeks. He thumbed one away, the satin of her skin cold against his touch. “Oh, God, it must have been a dream.”
“We should call the police—”
“No,” she cried brokenly. “I’ve had this dream before. I dream I’m in Aimee’s room and someone else is there, too—and I can’t save her. I can’t stop the shadow from taking her.”
In the pale moon, he saw more tears. They fell wet and warm against his hands. He felt like crying, too. He didn’t want to feel this connection to Bryn, but it was undeniable.
They shared the pain of that night, whether they wanted to or not. She’d lost her sister. He’d lost his father. And they’d lost each other. Cole closed his eyes against the sudden onslaught of despair inside him.
Opening his eyes again, he sat down beside her, shifting to put his arm around her. He couldn’t let go of her.
“I heard you scream,” he said.
She drew in a shaky breath. “I’m all right. I’m sorry I woke you. I just haven’t had a nightmare like that…in a while.”
It was because of him that she was having nightmares now. He’d brought the terrible past back to her. And he’d told himself a hundred times before he got here that he wouldn’t care, but damn it all to hell, he cared anyway.
For the first time, he noticed what she was wearing. Or rather what she wasn’t wearing. She’d left on the slim T-shirt she’d worn earlier, but had taken off the shorts. A wisp of panty peeked from between her pale thighs in the gloaming night.
He jerked his gaze away, back to her face. She stared back at him with her huge, hurting eyes. She was trembling and without thinking, he rubbed her back, trying to calm her down. He could feel her heart pounding.
“I still miss Aimee,” she said then.
Her words broke his dead heart. “I know.” He still missed his father. His mother’s loss was new and raw. “The pain never completely goes away, does it?”
She shook her head. “We always did everything together. When we were eight, we took swimming lessons. Aimee took a bad dive and hit the board, cut open her forehead. And after that, she wouldn’t go back. She wasn’t a good swimmer, anyway, and she’d always hated the water.”
Bryn and Aimee hadn’t been identical, either in looks or personality. They had the same coloring, but Aimee was always smaller, shyer, somehow more fragile. It had been Bryn, with her bright energy, strong body and will and flirty-innocent eyes, who had captivated his attention—and held it.
“She cried and cried because she thought she was letting me down when I wouldn’t go on with the lessons without her,” Bryn continued. “She knew I loved swimming. But that’s the way things were with us. We did everything together, or not at all. Until that last summer.”
Cole didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say, how to comfort her. He hadn’t known fifteen years ago, either. And she hadn’t known how to comfort him. A fresh wash of hurt struck him. They’d failed each other, terribly. It hadn’t all been Bryn’s fault.
“I loved dreams when I was a little girl,” she whispered softly. “I always had good dreams. We loved to feed the brown pelicans down by the river, and I used to have this same dream over and over where I would take Aimee’s hand and we’d fly away with them. We’d go anywhere in the world we wanted to go, then we’d come home.”
“The two fairy princesses of Bellefleur flying away on wings of pelicans,” Cole whispered, still stroking her back, her hair. “I can just see it.”
A long beat passed. Her eyes seemed to search his, and he had no idea what she was looking for. She looked achingly beautiful in the gossamer-gleam of her room. She could have been sixteen, she looked so young and vulnerable suddenly.
Then she drew in a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“I’m not your enemy, Bryn.”
Her gaze held on to him. “Then what are you?”
As he gazed back at her, he saw realization creeping into her eyes. The tension shifted into something else, something nearly electric. And now that the fear was past, the blood thrumming through him was communicating an altogether different need. And she felt it, too. He saw her desire in the glitter of her tear-drenched eyes.
His gaze flicked to her mouth. Her soft lips parted as if in readiness. It had been so long since he’d touched her this way. So long since he’d kissed her.
And yet he remembered exactly how she fitted in his arms. He knew her taste, her slight sigh and the way she tipped her head to the right just as his lips closed on hers.
Her mouth was warm and she made him think of summertime and sugarcane. He remembered her kiss, her innocence, and all these years later she was only that much more intoxicating for not being quite so innocent anymore. He deepened the kiss with all the pent-up passion he’d blocked for so long. Her hands crept up to tentatively touch his chest, and she was kissing him back. He felt the fever in her response, and heard the choked sob in her throat—and he knew she was feeling everything he was feeling. Pain and need and rightness—
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