Blood Ties in Chef Voleur (3 page)

“So, your wedding would have been the event of the season?” He spoke lightly, but his jaw ticced, as it did occasionally when he couldn’t relax the tension in it.

“Not that our family hasn’t had quite a few weddings in the past few years, but yes. Especially since I was the last holdout
and
the only girl.”

“What about your cousin Rosemary?”

“Rosemary and Dixon had the tiniest, least announced ceremony in the history of the state. And Hannah, Claire’s granddaughter, and her fiancé, Mack, aren’t planning on getting married until after her mom’s liver transplant. So that left me as the only girl with even a chance at a big wedding.” She gave a little sigh. “My mother has expressed her
extreme
disappointment that I denied her all the pomp and circumstance.”

“We could still—” Jack started to say as he took off his pants and boxers.

Cara Lynn broke in. “Don’t even go there,” she commanded, unable to take her eyes off him. “Although, it would shut my family up. I can’t tell you how much ribbing I’ve taken about being the last one to marry.” She shook her head. “My brothers and cousins have been falling like dominoes over the past few years.”

“So, when your cousin Paul said I was a criminal that needed punishment—?”

“He said that?”

“Yep. That’s fine though,” he said, hanging up his dress pants and pulling on pajama bottoms. He looked at her and smiled.

She hated that false smile that said,
I’m smiling and agreeable, because that’s what you want
. It had only appeared after they’d gotten married. In fact, she was pretty sure she could trace it back to the day—or at least within a few days—of their elopement.

“I’m glad they’re worried about you,” he finished.

Was he? He’d been so sweet and sexy and fascinating before they’d eloped. Now he was still sexy and fascinating, but he’d become more reserved and often seemed distant. The change in him made her nervous. It seemed as if sometimes, when he wasn’t aware she was watching him, he appeared to be sad or even angry about something. Could it be he regretted marrying her?

She smiled back, feeling as if her smile was as vacant and false as his, and a shudder slid through her, as if a goose had walked over her grave.

Ignoring the sinking feeling in her chest each time she saw that artificial smile, she took a deep breath and walked out of the bathroom toward him. Jack, his pajama bottoms hanging loose and low on his hips, met her halfway.

“You are beautiful tonight,” he said, running his palms down her bare arms and bending to kiss her shoulder. “Your skin glows like rose petals in moonlight.”

“Wow,” she said nervously, as his hands and lips began to stir her. “That’s quite poetic.”

“I have my moments,” he murmured, tracing his fingertips along her shoulder where he had kissed, then up the side of her neck to her jaw, and farther, until he reached her eyebrow. He kissed her there. “Did you get a chance to look inside the book?” he asked softly.

“What?” The question surprised her. Usually, when he made love to her he was single-minded, focused, as if he were a surgeon performing a very delicate procedure that could be disastrous if he made one tiny mistake.

“Your inheritance from your grandmother. It was one of her journals, like the ones in your office, right?”

“Oh. The journal. It looked exactly like the others. They must be hugely expensive, with all that leather and engraving and lace and the metal page corners. But no. I started to open the cover to look at the first page, but the lights went out before I saw anything.”

He pushed her hair away from her ear and nibbled on the earlobe. As she gasped with surprise and pleasure, he said, “What did the cover say?”

The front cover of each journal was engraved. She had traced the first line with her finger. “They all have her name at the top. When she was a little girl it just said Lilibelle Guillame. The later ones say Lilibelle Guillame Delancey. Beneath her name is the year. And the one that was snatched tonight had 1986 on it, I’m pretty sure.”

“1986? Isn’t that when Con Delancey died? I heard someone ask if it was her last journal. Was it?” he murmured.

Cara Lynn pushed away. “Why are you so interested in—”

He nipped at her earlobe, then lowered his head and kissed her collarbone as his hand slid down, down, to catch the hem of her nightgown and push it up.

He ran his hand along her hip, then gasped. “I’d forgotten you took off your panties,” he whispered as he caressed the delicate, sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs, then touched her intimately. He pressed his lips to the soft skin below her jaw and moaned as he increased the rhythm of his caresses.

At that instant, all rational thought left her head. Instead of trying to recapture even one of those thoughts, she slid her fingers into his hair, bending forward to reach for his mouth with hers.

He turned his head so that her kiss landed on his cheek, because he was bending toward her ear again. He nipped at it, a bit harder this time. At the same time, he whispered, “Beautiful.”

Intense, nearly painful thrills spiraled through her. Her head fell back, exposing her neck and the underside of her chin to more caresses, but he stopped, pulling away. His long fingers hooked the straps of her nightgown and slid them over her shoulders. The loose, slippery silk fell to the floor, leaving her naked. She shivered, feeling her breasts tighten in anticipation of his touch.

He slid his palms down her arms to her elbows and farther, down to her fingers. Slipping past them, he cupped her firm bottom.

On the way back up her legs, thighs and hips, he skimmed his fingers along a path of exploration that turned every fraction of an inch of her body into an erogenous zone. Finally, when she was sure her wobbly knees wouldn’t hold her up for another second, he cupped her breasts, barely large enough to fill his palms, and caressed the soft skin with his thumbs, moving closer and closer to the areolae.

With each caress, her breaths became quicker until the moment when the pads of his thumbs slid across the taut tips of her nipples. She gasped and moaned, and he bent his head to place his mouth on one hard point. He grazed it with his teeth. She arched her back and pushed her fingers into his hair, holding his head there, until he moved to the other breast to graze it and send flames arcing through her again.

“Jack, please,” she begged, tightening her fists in his silky dark hair.

He raised his head and his dark, fathomless gaze met hers. “What?” he asked gruffly.

She knew this game. They played it often. She wanted him deeply, primally. He’d brought her to this point and he knew it. Now he wanted her to tell him what she wanted.

Only what she always said and what she really wanted were two entirely different things.

“Please, Jack, don’t make me say it,” she whispered.

He held her gaze, that little place in his jaw tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing. “Say it, Cara,” he rasped. “Say it.”

Tears burned in the back of her throat and she swallowed, hoping to keep the need to cry there and not allow it to crawl all the way into her eyes where they would fall and he would win. Her new husband, whom she did not know at all, but whose touch she craved like she craved air, would win again.

“Jack...”

His eyes left hers and moved down to her mouth. She saw his gaze slide over her face and down to her lips. She almost went over the edge just in anticipation of him kissing her. Because he rarely did.

She looked at his straight, hard mouth. Then she reached for it with hers. He stayed still and let her kiss him, but he barely reciprocated. Then, after a very few seconds, he pulled away and picked her up and tossed her onto the bed. He pushed his pajama bottoms down and off, then lay beside her and began to caress her intimately.

She gasped at the feel of his hand, his fingers, as he bent his head again to taste and tease her nipples. He lifted his head and looked at her. “Say it,” he demanded.

Cara Lynn’s throat spasmed and the tears escaped. They rushed to her eyes and gathered there, dampening her lids and seeping out to trickle across her skin and wet the pillowcase. She squeezed her lids shut, trying to wring out the last tear, then she opened them again and looked into Jack’s shadowed ones.

“I want you inside me,” she said. “I want you now.”

He rose above her, the lean muscles of his arms and chest bulging with effort, and entered her with a shuddering breath. And then, what Cara Lynn really wanted, he finally gave her. Once he was inside her and filling her with his hot hard sex, he kissed her, just as deeply and intimately as she had not dared to ask him to. It would crush her if he ever refused.

As the quest for release built until she thought she would burst, and as he thrust harder and harder until she was sure she couldn’t stand it, his kiss also deepened, until she felt close to passing out from the sheer flood of pleasure and love and lust that overwhelmed her.

Then she did burst into ecstasy and Jack burst with her. For a brief moment out of time they were two supernovas crashing in the depths of space, becoming one, a pure blue flame of energy and love, and nothing else mattered.

Afterward, Jack lay there as long as he could, holding Cara Lynn. Her head fit perfectly in the hollow of his shoulder and her quiet breaths warmed the soft skin beneath his jaw line. Her slender, supple body molded perfectly to his. He hated that.

He shifted restlessly and she made a soft sound in her throat. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep,” he said, as he always did, then he slid his arm out from under her and rolled up off the bed.

He pulled on his pajama bottoms and went into the living room and through the French doors out onto the balcony. The night was cool and a breeze blew in off the Mississippi River. The sky was pale with the lights from the cruise ships and the fishing boats. Jack closed his eyes and took a long breath, reminding himself why he was standing here, in this place, with the taste and scent of Cara Lynn Delancey—Cara Lynn Bush—still in his mouth and nose.

All for show.
“All for show,” he said aloud, wishing he could shout it. Wishing he could tattoo it on the inside of his eyelids. And wishing, just for an instant, that he was not Jacques Broussard, grandson of the man who died in prison, falsely accused of the murder of Con Delancey, but merely a stranger.

Then, as happened when he let his guard down, he thought about what might have been, had he met Cara Lynn accidentally, if they’d had a chance to meet and learn to know each other in a world apart from reality—

The sound of the French doors opening stopped that thought cold.

“Hey.” Cara Lynn’s soft voice wrapped around his sore heart like a velvet bag that protects a fragile crystal. “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” he responded. “Just wanted some air. I got hot.”

She stepped out onto the balcony beside him. “It’s cool out here, isn’t it? Look at the river. It’s so beautiful at night.”

“Really? You like all the garish lights on the cruise ships and the bridges? They’re just light pollution.”

She slapped at his arm playfully. “No, they’re not. It’s like Christmas every night!” she cried. “They blink and twinkle just like Christmas Eve when you’re supposed to be in bed. I love it. And after it rains, the whole horizon turns into a wonderland, shining like thousands of sparklers.”

He looked at her, his mouth curving upward in a reluctant smile. “How did you get to be twenty-six years old without ever growing up?” he asked. “You’re like a child. Does nothing bad ever touch you? Do you never feel sad or angry or grief-stricken?”

To his chagrin, her smile faded and the sparks in her eyes went out. “Of course bad things happen, Jack. Of course I can be sad and angry and grief-stricken. I thought my heart would break when my best friend Kate’s little boy was kidnapped recently.” She stared out beyond him, into an unhappy distance.

After a long time, she looked back at him and her smile returned. “But he was fine, and then I met you and my world was happy again.” She threw her arms up. “And it’s a beautiful night. Want to sleep out here? I can make a pallet on the balcony floor out of quilts.”

Jack shook his head. “I need to work on some plans. You need to go to sleep. Don’t forget everything you have to do tomorrow.”

Cara Lynn nodded and kissed him on the nose.

He recoiled. He didn’t mean to. But it was a knee-jerk reaction to the closeness he felt whenever they kissed. The longing that simmered deep inside him was becoming harder and harder to control. He craved her kiss and yet he didn’t like kissing her, because he was convinced that it was the kissing and touching that were the most intimate acts, not the sex.

This balancing act he was performing was about to drive him crazy. He didn’t want her to get even the most fleeting thought that he might not love her. But at the same time, he was becoming desperate to protect himself from falling for her. He had to keep all his plates spinning in the air, because through her was the only way he was ever going to find the proof he needed to clear his grandfather’s name.

So he returned her casual kiss—pressing his lips to her cheek near her temple.

She stepped back, her eyes bright. “Actually, yes,” she said, obviously working to make her tone casual and talkative. “I do have a lot to do tomorrow, and I’m tired tonight, for some reason.” She smiled at him as she backed through the French doors. “G’night, handsome.”

“Good night, beautiful,” he muttered, but she’d already gone inside and closed the doors.

Chapter Three

Jack stayed on the balcony for another fifteen minutes or so, staring at the bridge lights. He squinted to see if that would help him to see them as Christmas lights, but it was a waste of time. Lights were lights, not fairy tale sparkles or holiday decorations.

However, they did draw the eye, kind of like a river full of stars. For a while he stared at them, letting his thoughts wander back over the party. He’d tried to catalog each person’s name as he met them, equating them to what his granddad had said about them, as best he could remember. And while he did that, he worked on remembering who he might have seen that didn’t seem to belong.

Cara Lynn’s father, Robert, was a wheelchair-bound man who had difficulty speaking. His grandfather had told him about the older of Con Delancey’s two sons, both of whom had been young men with new families when Granddad had known them twenty-eight years ago. He’d called Robert angry and bitter, incapable of holding his whiskey or his temper.

It hurt Jack to think that Cara Lynn had been brought up in such an angry, hostile home. But from her accounting, her experience had been very different than her older brothers’.

Harte and I didn’t have the same father as Lucas, Ethan and Travis,
she’d told him
. By the time we were old enough to remember, he’d had the stroke. The only anger I remember was toward himself—his body. Trouble talking and walking.

He thought about his own parents and how he had grown up. As an only child, the problems he’d had with his folks stemmed from their over-protectiveness of him. Their biggest fear for him was that he spent too much time at the federal penitentiary visiting his granddad. But they had never refused to let him go.

Michael, Con’s youngest son, seemed like a paragon of normalcy compared to Robert. Jack knew from Cara Lynn about Michael’s time spent in prison, as well as his issues with his oldest son Dawson, but he seemed a likeable man, and his children seemed extraordinary.

In fact, it was a little disgusting just how likeable, intelligent and successful all the Delancey grandchildren were.

Jack wondered how they would react when they found out that Armand Broussard, who’d spent over twenty-five years in prison for their grandfather’s murder, was innocent. Jack wasn’t sure who had actually killed Con Delancey, but he knew his granddad hadn’t done it.

He glanced absently in the direction of the foyer, where his briefcase sat on the floor next to the foyer table. Inside it were letters from his grandfather, and in one of those letters his granddad had written his account of the murder and named Con Delancey’s killer, or at least his opinion of who had killed him.

Jack couldn’t even imagine how the news of the killer’s actual identity would affect the Delancey grandchildren. Probably not a lot, he decided. After all, the oldest of them had been only ten when it happened.

Cara Lynn hadn’t even been born. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect her at all. At least Jack hoped it wouldn’t.
Whoa
. No, he didn’t. He gave his head a mental shake.

Of course he wanted it to affect Cara Lynn. Just as much as the rest of them. He hoped it would gnaw holes in their stomachs that their family had allowed the wrong man to be convicted of murder, just like it gnawed holes in his that his grandfather had been locked up for a quarter of a century for a crime he hadn’t committed.

He went inside, grabbed his briefcase from the foyer and set it on the kitchen table, brushing aside a small strip of paper sitting near Cara Lynn’s evening bag. He picked it up, thinking to throw it in the trash. It was old, yellowed and brittle, a tiny rounded edge of the flap of an envelope, an old-fashioned
lick-’em, stick-’em
one.

Where had it come from? He stared at it for a few seconds, rubbing one edge between his fingers. It turned to dust. Obviously old. Looking at his dusty fingers, he felt a strong sense that there was something important about it. It had been lying near Cara Lynn’s purse. Could that mean it had something to do with the lockbox or its contents?

He stopped and repeated the thought aloud. “The lockbox,” he whispered, considering the implications. If it really was an envelope, then that meant there was a letter, didn’t it? A letter from whom? Maybe from Cara Lynn’s grandmother to her youngest granddaughter, written some time between 1986, when Con Delancey had died, and thirteen years ago when Lilibelle had died. Any paper could have turned yellow and brittle after being stored in a hot place, say an attic, for that long.

But how had Cara Lynn gotten the envelope—or at least that part of it? He looked at her purse, wondering if she’d left the envelope in there. With a furtive glance toward the back of the apartment, he released the clasp on the small rectangular bag and peered inside. No envelope.

So, if she actually had a letter that was inside the box, had she looked at it here at the table? And if she hadn’t put it back in her purse, where had she put it?

She had refused to answer his questions about the journal, wanting to know why he was so curious. Of course, he’d been making love to her at the time, and judging by her response to his nips and caresses, she’d been caught up in the pleasure of the moment.

A brief aftershock of lust echoed through him at the memory of how she’d moved beneath him. He immediately shut down those thoughts and made himself think about where she’d have put that envelope. He opened her evening bag and looked inside, feeling a little guilty. He wondered how guilty he’d have felt if he really loved her.

Stepping out of the kitchen and down the hall, he went into the small second bedroom and closed the door. Cara Lynn had made the room into an office. There was a desk and chair, and a drafting table on which a watercolor sketch of a bright wall hanging lay askew. It depicted a nearly abstract cat drawn in black using only three strokes. The hanging would be exquisite as part of her collection at the gallery. He hoped she’d managed to finish putting together the fiber-art version.

He tore his gaze away from the sketch and looked at the bookcases. There, on the third shelf were the gold-etched white leather journals. He took the first one out and opened the cover. On the first page was the handwritten date of June 5, 1951. Lilibelle would have been twelve. There were red sticky flags on some of the pages with tiny scribbled notes in Cara Lynn’s neat handwriting. Notes for the genealogy book she was working on for the Delancey and Guillame families.

He quickly scanned the room, but didn’t see an envelope. However, it did look as though someone had been in there. The spines of her grandmother’s journals were uneven, and there were spaces where books had been removed. Jack picked up the sketch of the black cat and looked beneath it. There was a piece of paper with some notes on it in Cara Lynn’s hand. And beneath the paper a journal that should have been on the shelf behind him. He picked it up and put it back. Then he checked around the small room, but he didn’t see the envelope.

Back in the kitchen he put the piece of an envelope flap into a plastic baggie. Unlocking his briefcase, he dug under a small stack of architectural drawings and paper-clipped reports down to several rubber-banded stacks of envelopes.

Rifling through them, he found the ones postmarked the earliest. “Okay, Granddad,” he whispered. “I met most of the Delanceys tonight. Let’s see if my impression of them matches yours.”

As he began to read his grandfather’s letter for the twentieth time, or the fiftieth, he thought about what he’d told Cara Lynn, about needing to stay up to work on some plans, his implication being that they were architectural drawings.

He smothered a wry laugh. He was working on plans all right—plans to clear his grandfather’s name. He’d married Cara Lynn Delancey to gain access to the documents that could help him prove his granddad’s innocence. If he broke her heart, well, maybe that would satisfy his need for revenge.

* * *

H
OURS
LATER
, J
ACK
rubbed his eyes and yawned. A glance at the kitchen clock told him that his burning eyes and foggy head were telling him the truth. He
had
been up all night. It was after 5:00 a.m.

Cara Lynn would be getting up in about an hour. He should have gone to bed hours ago, but he’d wanted to read over his grandfather’s notes while his first impressions of the Delanceys were still fresh in his mind.

He had looked forward to hating every single one of them. But to his surprise, he didn’t. They seemed like ordinary people. Okay, maybe not ordinary. He sorted through the letters again until he came to the one where Granddad had listed Con Delancey’s grandchildren.

Mr. Delancey’s two sons, Michael and Robert, seem rather ordinary, although I can see that they have the genes to be great, like their father. But perhaps Con’s philandering and their mother’s resentment kept them from achieving everything they could have. In any case, their children—Con’s grandchildren—are but babies and it’s already obvious they are extraordinary.

Robert, Jr. is the oldest, at nine. Already, it seems to me, he is showing a remarkable resemblance to his grandfather, both in looks and personality. Maybe it’s because he’s the oldest, but I see in him the most potential of all of them. Mark my word, he’ll follow Con into politics, and likely, will be better at it.

Jack took a pencil and jotted a note in the margin, next to the comment.
Died in plane crash at age twenty-three. So much for potential.

He read the next line.
Lucas, his younger brother, is at age six, already intense, even angry, much like his father. If he continues like this, he’ll be a criminal before he’s twenty-one. Maybe he can turn himself around.

Jack remembered Lucas and his wife Angela, who was carrying their first child. Jack wrote in the margin.
Still intense. Channeled into police work.

Jack continued down the list of Delancey children and his grandfather’s impressions of them. A fierce jealousy rose up inside him, as it had every other time he read it. He hated that his grandfather had spent even a few moments thinking about Con Delancey’s grandkids and what he saw them becoming as they grew.

But more than that, he hated that his grandfather had been right about them. While he had not been a prophet, he’d certainly been insightful enough to see that Con Delancey’s grandkids were extraordinary.

Armand Broussard had thought his own grandson was extraordinary, too. Jack blinked against the sudden stinging in his eyes. He missed his granddad. Had it already been half a year since he’d died? Jack had never seen him in anything except his orange prison jumpsuit, until he looked at him in the casket before the funeral service. That sight, his beloved Papi in a dark suit with that awful makeup and lipstick designed to make the corpse look
natural,
made Jack cry for the first time in his life.

“I’m sorry about that, Papi,” he whispered, repeating the same words he’d uttered over his grandfather’s body that day at the funeral home. “I couldn’t help that. But I swear I will clear your name.”

He put the letter back in its ragged envelope, slid the rubber band around the stack and inserted it under the architectural plans and drawings. Then he took out a small spiral bound notebook and paged through it for the notes he’d jotted as he’d read through the letters the first time. After glancing at his handwritten notes, he leaned back in the kitchen chair and stretched.

He didn’t have to refer to any notes to recall what his grandfather had said to him at their last meeting.
Ah, Jacques
.
You are so smart and so wise for your years. But you’re drowning your talents in jealousy and hatred. It’s no way to live,
mon petit
. It will eat up all the goodness and love inside you and leave you empty and alone. You must forgive them, son. The murder of Con Delancey was only one act by one pathetic individual. The Broussard name is a proud one, but it is not worth the ruination of your life. You can be the better man
.

“I’m sorry, Papi,” Jack muttered. “I can never be as good a man as you were.”

Standing, Jack locked his briefcase and slipped into the bedroom and lay down beside Cara Lynn, whose back was turned. For a few seconds, he lay and watched her sleep. She was so beautiful, with her eyes closed and her lips slightly parted.

As he’d thought earlier at the reception, she really was one of the most genuine people he’d ever met. Her eyes were always clear and blue, her expression was always open and trusting. He sometimes felt guilty for deceiving her. But it had been the perfect ruse. After all, she was a Delancey, and the Delanceys had ruined his grandfather’s life.

As the thoughts flitted drowsily through his mind, his gaze traced the flowing line of her shoulder and torso where the moonlight danced off her skin. He admired the curve of her hips and imagined the shadow centered between them and felt himself harden with desire. He closed his eyes deliberately and turned over, putting his back to hers.

As he did, the bedclothes rustled. After a second, she slid her arm under his and rested her hand on his flat belly. The muscles there contracted when her warm fingers splayed against his skin and the arousal he’d almost managed to quell rose up again.

Desperately, afraid she might decide to slide her hand lower and coax him into early morning sex, he wrapped her hand in his.

“What time is it?” she asked drowsily.

“Five thirty or so,” he said.

“Have you been up all night?”

He nodded. “Told you, I had some plans to go over, but I don’t have to go in early today, so I’ll have plenty of time to take a nap after you leave.”

“Well, in that case...” she murmured in a low voice. At the same time she leaned forward and kissed his bare shoulder.

He grimaced, but he turned onto his back and held up his arm so she could slide into his embrace and rest her head in the little hollow between his neck and shoulder. “I’m way too tired,” he said.

She chuckled and the sound of bells filled his ears. “That’s disappointing. Maybe next time you’ll think twice about staying up all night,” she whispered, then nipped at his ear lobe.