Bayou Hero (18 page)

“And I’m sure your mother fed you as often and as much as possible.”

Alia rinsed the first dish he’d washed, then dried and put it away. “Mom says every Vietnamese mother needs a village to feed. I was hers.” She gave the towel a warning wave in his direction. “I know what you’re doing. Jimmy teased me about how much I ate every single day we were married. You’re just a little more tactful than him. He was always saying, ‘Damn, girl, you eat a lot.’ I do. I always have. Mom says I begged for extra bottles of formula when I was six months old. Jimmy says one day my metabolism is going to fail and my ass is going to explode to two ax handles’ wide.”

Landry handed the last dish to her. “I like your ass just fine.”

After putting the plate away, she swatted him with the towel. “I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, but thank you.”

Still teasing, he said, “Now you say something nice about me.”

“Oh, you
are
fishing for compliments.” She hung up the towel, smoothed it neatly, then looked up. “I like you—” After a moment, she changed the inflection and simply, quietly repeated it. “I like you.”

* * *

It was nearly ten when Landry rose from the couch and stretched. “I should go.”

Yes, you should
, Alia thought, but she didn’t want him to. Which was exactly why he should. She had already spent way more time with him than she could justify, doing things far better suited to boyfriend/girlfriend than special agent/subject. The only claim she could make with a clear conscience was that things hadn’t gotten physical. Yet.

She slid to her feet, turned off the music and walked barefoot with him to the door and outside. Nocturnal insects sang in a chorus of buzzes. A soft breeze carried fragrances from a neighbor’s garden, and somewhere distant a train whistle sounded.

They stopped at the edge of the steps, the boards warm and worn smooth against her feet by generations of feet traveling across them. He was near enough for her to feel the energy radiating from him, to touch if she swayed just the tiniest bit to her left. She could lay her head on his shoulder, feel his warmth and strength and breathe in the scent of him. She could then lift her head from his shoulder and find herself exactly where she wanted to be.

Wrapped in intimacy with him.

He gazed at her a long time in the dim glow of the porch light, and she knew—not wishful thinking but
knew
as sure as she stood there that he was thinking the same thing. He wanted intimacy, and he wanted it with her.

Confirming her thought, he leaned closer, a slow encroaching that gave her plenty of time to step back. She didn’t. His mouth was only an inch away, almost near enough to kiss, to taste, but before she closed the distance between them, he spoke.

“I like you, too,” he murmured in a raspy voice. “So what do we do about it?”

Her breath caught. A frivolous part of her that so rarely showed itself did a silent
Yes!
while another part sighed with relief. If she were a different person, a more overtly emotional person, she might even call it a swoon.

“Do we wait until the case is over and done with and then see...?” He arched one brow.

Tilting her head to the side, she replied, “That’s one option.”

“It could be weeks.”

“Months,” she agreed. “Or...”

“Or?”

The thought played in her head, tempting her with the possibilities, stunning her with the idea of making such a commitment to a man who might be nothing more than a short-term fling. Though in her gut, she knew there was nothing short-term about what she felt. What she was pretty sure he felt.

He was waiting for her to suggest option two, still standing impossibly close, his dark gaze locked with hers. A slow smile formed, softening the lines of his face. “Guess I’ll have to wait to find out.”

She smiled, too.

“I’ll be going to the funeral home again tomorrow. I’ll give the guy Scott’s credit card information and ask him to outdo the old man’s send-off.” Hands in his pockets, he gazed into the night. “The good thing about them finding her body when they did...with the year-and-a-day rule, she can’t be buried in the same crypt as him. Her life with him might have seemed like an eternity in hell, but at least she won’t have to really spend eternity with him.”

“Thank God for small favors.” Alia wasn’t wild about the aboveground crypts or sharing her final resting place with a bunch of other people, but the idea that, one year and a day after she was interred, the workers could pop open the vault and slide someone else in, frankly, made her skin crawl in a major way.

“Come by the bar tomorrow evening if you get a chance.” His hand fumbled for hers, and he gave it a squeeze, then let go.

She was still nodding agreement when he reached his car. She watched until he drove away, then moved a few steps back to sit. Getting comfortable, she drew her feet into the seat, wrapped her arms around her legs, then sighed softly, thinking about that second option again.

When she realized that the bump pressing against her hip was her cell phone, she pulled it out, stared at it a moment, then dialed. Though it was her mom’s cell she’d dialed, her dad answered. After thirty-five years together, neither needed nor wanted much privacy from the other.

Alia caught him up on the public aspects of the case before her mom came on the line. “Tell me what’s new,
chica.
”

“That’s
cô bé
to you.”

“Don’t get sassy, girl. Have you had a date since we last talked?”

Alia ran through her encounters with Landry, but none of them technically qualified as a date. Except...”A man cooked dinner for me this evening.”

In her mom’s book, that was beyond dating and darn close to being engaged. “
Really?
What did he fix?”

She recited the menu, then teasingly added, “That was after he took me out for Vietnamese for lunch.”

“Ooh.” Lien sounded somewhere between envious and thrilled. “So what are you doing for this man that makes him want to feed you so well?”

For a moment, Alia wished she could give a naughty reply that would make her mother laugh. Instead, she went for blunt truth. “I’m helping find out who murdered his parents.”

The silence on the line made clear that her mom’s light mood had vanished like a helium balloon in typhoon winds. “He’s Admiral Jackson’s son.”

“Yes.”

“He’s a part of your investigation.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not supposed to get personally involved with him.”

“No, I’m not.” Alia watched lights streak across the distant sky and wished they were shooting stars or lightning. She could make a wish or sleep well in her warm, dry cocoon of a bedroom while nature raged outside. But based on their location and movement, she was pretty sure the lights belonged to a medical helicopter, picking up or dropping off a critical patient.

“Landry is a good guy, Mom,” she said quietly. “He...he gets me. He likes me. And I like him.”

For a moment she was transported back to Hawaii and the day she and Kanani had become official.
Do you like me?
he’d asked solemnly, and she’d shrugged.
I like your toys. And your bike. Plus, I can run faster and jump higher than you, so that’s good.

But I can skateboard better, and I can surf. So d’ya want to be my girlfriend?

Seeing that they’d been pretty equally matched, she’d agreed. Thankfully, her tastes had matured since then. She liked Landry’s eyes...smile...body. His sense of humor and his intelligence. The way he could say so much with only a look, and the way he’d survived a childhood so ugly that it made her hurt for him. She figured she could outrun, outjump and outskateboard him, and she didn’t give a good damn if he could surf.

“Have you been intimate with him?”

The question startled a laugh from her. “Aw, Mom, you sound so proper when you put it that way. No, we haven’t had sex.”

“Intimacy isn’t just about sex, LiLi.”

Alia thought about the story he’d told her that afternoon—trusted her with—and her throat grew thick. “I know.”

“What are you going to do? Ignore your feelings and do your job? Avoid him as much as you can?”

“I was thinking...” Mouth pursed, she drew a deep breath, then expelled it. “I might request to be removed from the case.”

That earned another silence from her mother. Alia wasn’t a quitter. When she accepted a responsibility, she saw it through. Impossible projects, difficult classes, ugly turns in relationships...she’d learned from her father, whose farming family had been on a first-name basis with hardship, and from her mother, whose family had faced life-threatening adversity in their homeland and made a new home in a new country. Every effort deserved her best.

“He’s that important to you,” Lien said.

“I—I...yes.”

“Will this adversely affect your career?”

“I don’t know.” It was an important case; Jeremiah Jackson aside, the sheer number of victims made it important. Any solve made an agent look good. This one would carry extra weight.

“But you’re willing to put your feelings for this man ahead of your career.” Her tone was cautious. Was she disappointed in Alia? Did she think her only child was letting down people who counted on her—her coworkers, her victims, her parents, herself? All for a chance at an affair that might not amount to anything.

Or could turn out to be everything.

Alia’s answer was practically a whisper. “Yes?” That little question at the end had nothing to do with her certainty, just her very personal, very vulnerable admission, and her mom knew it.

Lien let out a heavy breath. “I’ve been waiting a long time for you to meet someone who is important enough to take precedence over your job. Someone who wasn’t Jimmy DiBiase. It’s about time. How does Landry feel about children?”

“You’re still going to have to adopt your grandbabies.” Relief washed over Alia, easing muscles she hadn’t realized were tight. Telling her mom, who would tell her father, was the hard part. Talking to her boss tomorrow would be a breeze in comparison.

Of course her boss could refuse. She could remind Alia that everyone was putting something on hold for this case. She could insist that Alia’s love life could wait. She could even, as she was good at doing, issue an ultimatum: stay with the case, keep her distance from Landry and be the consummate professional she was trained to be, or else.

But those were worries Alia wasn’t dealing with until they happened.

“Tell me something about him,” her mom requested.

“Ask me something.” When it came to new boyfriends, Alia and Lien were more like best girlfriends than daughter and mother, discussing eye color or dimples or hotness factor rather than anything important.

So her mother’s question surprised her. “Does he have a good heart?”

Alia smiled slowly. “He loves his sister and adores his nieces. He treated his elderly cousin with great affection and respect. He helps old friends with nightmares of their own, and he’s got more friends, and better ones, than I do.”

“Sounds good, LiLi. How does he treat you?”

Letting her feet plop to the floor, Alia slouched down on her spine until she could prop her heels on the railing. “Sometimes he makes me laugh, and sometimes I make him laugh. He took me to meet the old lady who runs his favorite Vietnamese restaurant.”

Mom’s voice perked up. “Does he speak Vietnamese?”

“Not even enough to order. He points at the pictures like I used to do.”

“Yes, but you were seven.” Then Lien relented. “At least he knows good food. That other one acted like we were trying to poison him.”

That other one
wasn’t the worst of the ways Lien had referred to Jimmy. Some of them had been very colorful, thanks to Alia’s Grandpa Kingsley and her
Ông ơi
Hieu.

“We like the same music, and we like to talk, but we don’t have to.” That was a good thing, one she and Jimmy had never achieved. If they weren’t talking, they’d been having sex or arguing.

She wondered wistfully when she would have sex with Landry.

“He must have issues, with his mother, father and cousin all murdered in such a short time.”

This wasn’t the time to admit that he despised his father and was a virtual stranger to his mother—though for very good reasons. Her mom wouldn’t understand his parents’ behavior any more than she did.

She didn’t look forward to sharing those reasons with Jimmy and Jack Murphy in the morning. Just the thought made her stomach tumble.

“You know, you don’t want to take your career lightly,” her mother said. “But when a man like this comes along—a man of substance—you can’t put him aside and hope he waits until it’s convenient for you. Now the sweet-talking weasel—of course you’d never risk anything for him. He’s just a right-now kind of guy. But if you really think Landry is the forever kind, you owe it to yourself to find out.”

The forever kind of guy. She’d teased with her mom that her dad was the last one of that kind ever made. It scared her that Landry might be one—might be
her
forever guy. Special Agent Alia Kingsley, never fazed by murderers, rapists or thugs of any kind, was quaking deep inside at the possibility.

“Try to help Daddy see it that way, will you? I don’t want him to think that I’m going with my hormones instead of my brain.”

Her mom snorted. “Your father’s gone with his hormones instead of his brains plenty of times. In the end, though, all he wants is for you to be happy.”

“And to eventually be the director of NCIS.”

“Ah, he’s just living through your accomplishments. We both are.”

Alia laughed. “There’s a frightening thought.”

“Be happy and give us grandbabies. That’s all we really want from you. And—” Lien turned totally serious. “I’ll deny I said it, but truth is, the grandbabies are optional. You happy and healthy—that’s all that matters.” She paused. “Do you feel better?”

Silently Alia scanned through her emotions. “I do.”

“Good. That’s how it should be when you talk to your mama. Love you, sweetie.”

“Love you and Dad.” Alia disconnected the call and stared into the sky. Had Camilla Jackson ever called her son
sweetie
? Had she told him she loved him? Had she really felt that love?