Hot Pursuit (9 page)

She flipped down the visor and checked her
reflection. She had dark smudges of mascara under her eyes, her
hair needed combing, and there were grass and dirt stains on her
dress where Matt had dragged her down to the ground. She picked up
a napkin from the stack Matt had brought her and poured some
bottled water on it. Then she tried to scrub out some of the stains
while she waited for him to return.

She’d probably have to buy Julie another
dress. Knowing her cousin, this wasn’t a Gap dress either. It’d
probably cost her a week’s worth of tips.

She watched as Matt shook hands with the
patrolmen he was talking to. The driver’s door swung open, and he
sank down beside her. “You okay?” His gray eyes were sharp as he
studied her.

She shrugged, too embarrassed to admit she
was still shaking. As if he couldn’t see. “I’ll be fine. Did you
find Julie? Is anyone hurt?”

“Steve took her home already. And yeah, there
were some minor injuries. No one got shot, though.”

“Bastard,” Evie spat. “Stupid bastard.”

“Jimmy’s always been a bully. Tonight, he
took it too far.”

“I heard he pulled a knife on Ginny Temple. I
should have been more careful.”

Matt gripped her chin and forced her to look
at him. “It’s not your fault. Jimmy’s an asshole. And now he’s an
asshole with a broken arm and a few criminal charges. If it’s
anybody’s fault, it’s his.”

“He seemed pretty pissed at you.”

Matt ran a hand over his face. He’d tried to
rinse the dirt away, but there were still streaks of it across his
skin. Not that it made him look any less appealing,
unfortunately.

“Yeah. He wanted to join the military but he
couldn’t pass the physical. It drives him crazy that I’m in and
he’s not. Last time I was here, he picked a fight with me out at
Dean’s Bar. It’s like he’s got something to prove.”

“Did you break his arm that time too?”

His eyes glittered. “I’m sorry you had to see
that.”

Evie wrapped her arms around her body. Where
had that come from? He’d pretty much just saved her from God only
knows what.

“It’s okay. I’m not typically squeamish. It’s
just a combination of a lot of things in my life right now. And I
know you broke his arm because you had to, not because you wanted
to.”

He laughed low in his throat, a sound that
curled through her and made her shiver again. “Believe me, I wanted
to.”

Matt started the car and reversed out of the
parking lot, and Evie turned away from his hard profile to look out
the window. It was dark and she couldn’t see anything, but she had
a sudden need to breathe without him taking up all the air. Of all
the places she thought she might be tonight, alone in a car with
Matt Girard hadn’t been one of them.

“What’s a Ranger?” she asked after they’d
turned onto the main road. She had no idea what all that military
jargon was, but Jimmy had seemed impressed with it.

Matt glanced at her. “A Ranger is a special
operations soldier. They parachute behind enemy lines, take the
difficult targets, smooth the way for the rest of the Army to
follow.”

“Jimmy said your daddy bought you in.”

Matt laughed. “If only it was that easy.
Believe me, I’ve got the scars to prove I did it on my own.”

Evie watched his profile. She hated to think
of him with scars. He was beautiful.

And she was ridiculous. She shook her head as
if that simple movement would clear him out of it. He’d never
really left her thoughts. He’d just been hidden behind a curtain.
Now that he was here, the curtain had been peeled back, and she was
grappling with his presence in her life all over again.

“Why’d you choose to do something so hard,
Matt? You could have done anything.” It made no sense to her. If
she’d had the advantages he had, she would have made good use of
them, not thrown them away getting captured by enemy soldiers.

He glanced over at her again, his eyes
gleaming in the darkness. “You think it’s crazy?”

“It seems a little odd for someone like
you.”

He flipped on the turn signal. “Because I’m a
Girard, you mean.”

She sighed. “If I could have anything I want,
I doubt I’d risk my neck jumping out of airplanes.”

“Maybe you think I ought to sit on my daddy’s
porch sipping iced tea all day. Or do nine to five at Girard Oil,
pretending I like being a businessman. No, thanks. When I go to
work, I know what I do matters.”

Her pulse throbbed. “A job doesn’t have to be
dangerous to matter.”

He flashed her a grin. “Maybe I’ve just got a
thrill-seeking personality.”

Evie found that she couldn’t look away from
him. Even with dirt streaking his face, he looked like he belonged
in the pages of a celebrity magazine. When he used words like
thrill-seeking
, something inside her turned to putty.

She swallowed. “It’s because of your mother,
isn’t it?”

His hands tightened on the wheel. “What makes
you say that? She’s been gone a long time, Evie. And I don’t think
she would approve of what I do any more than you do.”

“I didn’t say I don’t approve.” It wasn’t
that she didn’t think it was an important job. She just thought it
was odd that Matt had chosen it when he could have been anything he
wanted to be. “But when she died… well, I remember what you said to
me in the tree that day.”

Her throat was tight and her eyes stung. Matt
glanced over at her, his jaw as hard as a block of granite. “I was
twelve, Evie. Twelve-year-olds don’t know what they want out of
life.”

“You said you’d have given anything to save
her. You said you wanted to save people when you grew up—I thought
you were going to be a doctor.” She laughed, but it didn’t contain
much humor. “God, even when you got appointed to West Point, I
thought you were going to be a military lawyer or something.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I
would have given anything to save her.” His voice was quiet in the
darkness. “We needed her. Christina needed her. The old man…” He
swallowed. “He’s not bad, Evie. He’s just self-absorbed. It’s
always been about
his
feelings,
his
grief,
his
needs. He never really had time for us, and I’d have given anything
to bring her back again.”

“I don’t understand how doing what you do now
makes up for any of that.”

He made a sound in his throat like a growl.
“If I’d known you were going to try to analyze me, I’d have stayed
home tonight.”

“Maybe you should have.”

He glanced over at her. “It doesn’t make up
for a damn thing. But I do something important and, yeah, people
live because I’ve done my job. Running an oil company would seem
pretty meaningless in comparison. And I wasn’t about to be a
doctor. No patience for the kind of time that takes.”

“You’d rather jump out of airplanes and get
shot at.”

“Something like that.” His tone was clipped.
“So now that we’ve had fun with me, what about you? I notice you
aren’t precisely cooking for a living at the moment. And Christina
told me you’d gone to culinary school, so that can’t be the
problem.”

Evie rubbed two fingers along her temple.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard all about it yet. I had a
restaurant in Florida, but I also had a partner who stole from me.
I lost it all.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sighed. “Yeah, well, lesson learned and
all that. Now I wash hair in Mama’s salon and send out résumés
every week. Something will happen eventually.”

“I’ve noticed life has a way of piling on the
shit sometimes.”

“I’d like to think I’ve had all the shit I’m
going to get for a while, but with my luck, God only knows.”

He laughed. “
Chère
, I so hear
you.”

Evie turned toward him. The lights from the
dash illuminated his features, caressed the bridge of that
aristocratic nose, those full lips and firm jaw. He was gorgeous,
but that had never been the sole source of her attraction. It
didn’t hurt, of course, but there was more to it than that.

He’d always made her laugh, and he’d been her
friend, and he’d let her see the parts of him that weren’t strong.
She’d never forget hugging him while he cried in the hollow of that
tree. She hadn’t quite reached the stage of having a crush on him
then, but she figured that was the moment when she’d fallen in
love, before she even knew what it meant.

“Folks in town seem to think you’re in some
kind of trouble. Were you really captured?”

He stared straight ahead. “Yeah, we were
captured. People died. It wasn’t pretty, but war never is.”

“I’m sorry.” She wanted to ask what had
happened, how he’d gotten away, if he was okay now—but she couldn’t
seem to find her voice. How did you ask someone how he’d escaped
death? How it had felt to wonder if you were going to die?

“It is what it is. But thanks.”

The car rolled to a stop at a four-way
intersection. He didn’t even glance at her as he took a left
instead of a right.

“You turned the wrong way.”

Mama’s house was to the right, and Evie
couldn’t wait to get back there, stand in the shower for about an
hour, and then crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head and
try to forget everything about this night.

Well, maybe not everything. Not the part
where she’d danced with Matt, even if it had called up all those
latent feelings and memories she’d tried to suppress.

“Reynier’s Retreat is closer than going to
the other side of town. You can clean up a bit before I take you
home.”

Her heart kicked up. The thought of entering
that fabulous antebellum mansion tonight was enough to drown her in
shame. “I can’t see your family looking like this!”

She’d been inside dozens of times, but an
eight-year-old with dirty knees was completely different from a
twenty-six-year-old who looked like she’d been rolling in the dirt.
Reynier’s Retreat was over one hundred and fifty years old, and
it’d been in Matt’s family all that time. It also looked as if it
had come straight out of
Southern Living
magazine. If she
ever went inside the grand mansion as an adult, she damn sure
didn’t want to look like something off the set of a zombie
movie.

“Relax. We won’t go near the house. I’m in
the guest cottage.”

Evie shook her head. “I appreciate it, Matt,
but there’s no reason I can’t go home. Mama’s playing bingo at the
lodge tonight and Sarah—”

Sarah
. Hell. What would her sister
think if she walked in looking like this? There’d be questions.

Matt turned toward her. “Your little
sister?”

Evie swallowed. “She’s home tonight.” Then
she let out a sigh. Sarah might be grumpy and hostile, but she
wasn’t stupid. “Maybe it is best if I clean up before going
home.”

Matt nodded. “That’s what I thought. It won’t
take long, I promise. I’ll have you home again before anyone misses
you.”

A few minutes later, Matt pressed a button
over the rearview mirror as they turned into the lane to Reynier’s
Retreat. Two iron scrollwork gates ground open slowly.

The drive to the house was at least half a
mile. Oak trees lined the lane, the car’s headlights illuminating
the Spanish moss that dripped like ragged beards from heavy
branches. The main house stood on a low knoll at the end of the
drive, gleaming white in the darkness. Light spilled from the
windows across the bottom half of the home. Several cars were
parked in the circular drive, and several more sat in a
cordoned-off area that served as a parking lot. A white-coated
attendant sprinted up the stairs as the front door opened. A
formally dressed couple emerged onto a sweeping veranda studded
with eight fat columns.

Evie looked at the big house with a pang of
envy. She’d never attended a fancy party here before, though she
did have an invitation to Christina’s wedding in a few days. She’d
said yes, but she’d been torn about coming. She’d been worried
about the wistful memories this place would call up. And about
seeing Matt.

“You came to the lake when you could’ve been
here?”

“Boring as hell. I gave it an hour before I
left. Chris understands. Besides, it’s just an excuse for the
senator to glad-hand some of his wealthy constituents.” He drove
past the house and turned in the opposite direction.

“Your sister seems happy. I haven’t met her
fiancé yet. I’m not sure many of us have.”

Christina Girard had been in Rochambeau for a
couple of weeks now, but her fiancé only flew in a few days ago.
The couple lived in Washington, D.C., but according to Mama—and the
gossip mill—Christina had always had her heart set on marrying at
Reynier’s Retreat.

“Yeah, Ben’s an attorney on the Hill.” Matt
paused as if considering what else to tell her. “If the senator has
anything to say about it, he’ll be a congressman in a couple of
years.”

She thought he sounded annoyed.

“Does that bother you?”

“What? Ben in Congress?” He shot her a look.
“No, not really. But I’m not sure it’s what Chris wants. The old
man wants another politician in the family and he probably won’t
take no for an answer.”

She knew what he didn’t say. That his father
had wanted
him
to be the one to follow in his footsteps.

“Why did your father never run for Congress
himself?”

Matt laughed. “One word,
chère
.
Strippers.”

“Oh, geez, I almost forgot.” Matt’s father
had married a succession of ladies who entertained in nightclubs,
to put it politely, after his first wife died. It was almost a
cliché in some ways, but politicians and strippers were somewhat of
a Louisiana tradition. Though it had played just fine up at the
Statehouse at one time, it probably wouldn’t translate well to
Washington.

“The old man has a weakness. He’s married
four of them since our mother died.”