Luke (28 page)

The explosion of rifle fire and crack of shattering wood was muffled by the water around her ears as she dog-paddled with one arm and tried to hold the 30.06 above water with the other. She couldn't look to see, wouldn't think about, what the other two were doing. All her energy and concentration was centered on reaching the aluminum dinghy.

It loomed above her sooner than she expected. The rifle made a dull clatter as she heaved it inside. She clung a moment to the back of the motor, gathering her strength and her courage. Then the dull thud of a bullet striking metal sent her swirling
around to the far side. Hand over hand, she made for the front and the line that held the bobbing craft. It was tied in a slipknot, as it had been tied the night when she'd tried this before, so short a time ago, yet so long.

She jerked the knot loose, shoved the shallow fishing boat away from the dock. Then she clung to the rope as it pulled her into the lake with its momentum. She wasn't sure she had the strength to lift herself over the side, or the nerve left to try. Even if she did, she feared she'd be picked off the instant she showed her head above the gunwale, long before she could get the motor started.

She couldn't do it. She wasn't going to make it.

Abruptly the world shook with a thunderous roar. White light blossomed, spreading, pushing back the night and taking all color and sight with it. She felt no pain, no wrenching agony of separation. One moment she was alone, struggling in the water. The next she was encompassed by warm closeness, buoyed up in sheltering arms. She floated, comforted and at peace, locked in the eternal shelter she had needed all her days without knowing it, sought all her life and never found. And peace settled over her, touching her soul, except for one small, desolate corner where regret lived that she had not reached Luke, after all.

Luke, her only hero ever. Her whole life long.

“You can let go of the line. I've got you now.”

That low-voiced growl came from beside her ear. Luke…

She started so violently that she wrenched away from him, went under. She swallowed a large por
tion of the lake and came up coughing, clinging helplessly to a hard and intimately familiar shoulder. Luke grinned into her face, supporting her, while beyond him loomed the shape of an airboat, and beyond it a police boat with spotlights on each end whose powerful beams illuminated the water and raked the shanty with their white glare.

Roan was there, holding his weapon on Frank and Muriel who stood exposed in the spotlight's brilliance with their hands above their heads. Farther out, other boats circled slowly, rocking in the water with their spotlights trained on the house and the men in them standing at the ready with rifles in their hands. It was the Benedict clan, she thought, the backcountry Benedicts who always came with balled fists and fire in their eyes when one of their number sent out a call.

Gladness bubbled up from deep inside her on a choke of laughter. Her voice half strangled, she cried, “You found me!”

“Sure, sweetheart,” Luke drawled with bright eyes and bone-deep Benedict confidence. “Didn't I say I would?”

April had no answer for that just then. It was a little while later, after she had been lifted into the airboat and an ancient beach towel smelling strongly of insect repellent and fish draped around her, that she spoke in simple wonder. “How? How did you ever manage it?”

“Process of elimination,” Luke said, turning his attention to her from where he'd been keeping a close eye on Roan and the others as they disarmed Frank and Muriel.

“Meaning?”

“Frank almost had to be in on it. Regardless of spotter aircraft, it took someone who knew the lake to locate us. Roan checked out his trailer but he wasn't around. He got on to Clay—our limo driver who's the nature photographer, you know? Clay remembered that Frank had joined the hunting club that uses this place. There were several other possibilities, though, so I called in the clan to check them out. We settled on here when we saw the smoke from the stovepipe.”

“I can see that must have taken a while.”

“Actually, we pinpointed this place early this morning, but were afraid to storm it for fear of what might happen to you. The idea was for me to come in nice and quiet after midnight, to check the situation and find a way to get you out. That plan was scrapped the minute the shooting started.”

“I—wasn't sure I could afford to wait.”

He smiled at that. “You did fine. I guess you really didn't need us.”

“Don't say that! I'd gone about as far as I could go.” He meant that she hadn't needed him, she thought, and that wasn't true at all. She put her hand on his chest, willing him to believe her. Her fingers touched a familiar thickness under his T-shirt that wasn't warm flesh. In quick concern, she said, “You were really hurt. I was so afraid—how did you get to town?”

“The pontoon boat is equipped with a radio distress signal, and I had Roan primed to monitor it. He zipped out to pick me up.”

“Because it would have taken too long to cut the
pontoon boat free of its camouflage and drive it in yourself. And I suppose the hole in you was just a scratch.” The censure in her voice came from caring, but she wasn't sure he knew that.

“More or less,” he said with the lift of a shoulder, “but it needed patching before I could get into gear.”

“And now you've doused it in the lake. You'll be lucky if it doesn't get infected.”

He rested his fingertips on her thigh where a long red weal stood out against her light tan. “Since you've got more cuts and scratches than the law allows, I could say the same about you.”

“Yes, well,” she said, looking past his shoulder, “I had to get away from Muriel. She wasn't—isn't really…”

“Sane?” he suggested, his voice grim.

“I suppose. What will happen to her, do you think?”

“Nothing good. Roan and Kane will see to that. As for Frank, that's another story.”

“I don't think his heart was in this, not really. He's a marksman and a hunter. He should have killed me a couple of times but didn't.”

“You can put in a good word for him,” Luke said evenly, “if that's what you want.”

She looked down at her hands where she clutched the edge of the towel. “I don't know. I feel sorry for him, in spite of everything. He's lived a long time with what he did to Mary Ellen. He'll never escape it any more than she could.”

“No,” Luke answered as he looked away.

April discovered that she would rather Luke
didn't spend too much time brooding over Mary Ellen. It was not a nice feeling to realize that she could be jealous of a girl long dead. She said abruptly, “Muriel wanted my book, wanted to publish it as hers. I burned it.”

“The story about the Benedict family?” he asked with a quick frown. Then his features cleared. “You still have it on your computer hard drive at Mulberry Point. You can always print it again.”

She shook her head. “I don't think I want to.”

“But you worked so hard on it.”

It felt good to know that he realized the labor that went into it. “I know, but it doesn't feel right any more. Besides, I have another idea. What do you think about a series of books with Southern gentlemen heroes, wonderful backcountry men who all live in wonderful old houses that sit on a lake with a swamp behind it, men who can do anything, and will—for the right reason.”

“April,” he began.

“I think this may be something for a movie. I can see it now. As the credits roll, some female soloist will be singing the song about this guy always being her hero. Wouldn't that be great?”

“Just great,” he said deliberately.

“You don't like it?” she asked, her gaze innocent.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“Where you do your research. And who you do it with.”

She pursed her lips. “That last sentence wasn't very grammatical.”

“Neither is what I'm likely to say if you put too much about us in these books.”

“Would I do that?” She gave him a long glance from under her lashes.

“In a heartbeat. You're not to be trusted.”

She slid her fingertips higher up his chest, then circled his neck and clasped them behind it. “I don't know why not,” she said in low sincerity. “I trust you.”

He drew back a little to search her face, his own gaze dark. “Do you really?”

“Yes, I do,” she answered. Then she took a deep breath before adding, “But I love you more. It may seem a little strange, but I've loved you a lot longer.”

“April, you…” He stopped, then began again.

“You wouldn't say that just because you…”

She lifted a brow. “What? Feel like rewarding you because you found me so—heroically?”

“Something like that.”

His gaze was vulnerable; she saw that clearly. She also saw something else, that he needed to be told in words just how she felt. With a slow smile, she said, “I might. Because you are my hero, you know. You always have been, and always will be.”

“I'm just a man with all kinds of faults and failures. You don't want to go making the mistake of thinking I'm some kind of fantasy man.”

“Oh, I don't think I'll do that,” she said with a slow shake of her head. “Fantasy is fine, lovely in fact, but I'm no more likely to mistake you for that kind of hero than the women who read my books mistake the fantasy adventures I write for real life.
I want you, the man who fries fish for me and brings water so I can take a bath. The one who makes me laugh and tries so hard to keep quiet so I can write that he drives me nuts. I want the man who lets himself be eaten alive by mosquitoes so I can have the best bed, and who—”

“I get the picture,” he said gruffly.

“Yes, but do you like it?”

“I love it,” he answered as he pulled her close.

“Just as I love you,
love
you, and have all these long, damned years when I thought I'd never hold you or have you or hear you say my name or see you smile at me, just for me. All I want is to love you and keep you safe and do all the things that will make you happy to be with me….”

She caught his strong face in her hands and kissed him. She did it in part to stop the flow of words that had such echoes of pain and loneliness behind them, but also because she couldn't stand not to have that close contact, the nearest thing to blending that she could manage in such a public place.

It was some moments later that she noticed something soft rubbing her ankle, something that had nothing to do with the man who held her unless he'd developed a third hand. At the same time, she heard a plaintive sound, a soft mewling that hadn't, surely, come from her own throat. Releasing herself reluctantly, she glanced down at her feet.

“Midnight!” she cried in quiet wonder. “Oh, Luke, you brought him with you. I can't believe it.”

“I didn't bring him. The damned cat brought himself.”

“I'm sure,” she said with a dry look as she
reached to smooth her hand over her pet's head and down his back.

Midnight accepted her caress as his due, preening under it for a moment, rubbing his chin along her hand. Then he ducked away and leaped to her lap. He didn't pause, but clambered up to Luke's shoulder where he coiled around his neck and licked a drop of water that was clinging to his ear.

April made a sound between laughter and amazement. “Well, of all the—you've stolen my cat!”

“No way.” Luke winced away from the cat's rough tongue at his ear lobe, but made no effort to dislodge Midnight.

“I guess you know this means you have to take both of us?”

Luke paused, gave her a steady look. “Really?”

She nodded while brightness shone in her eyes.

“Okay,” he said, “I guess I can handle that. You probably won't eat much more than a cat.”

“I meant the cat comes with me, not the other way around!” she said, bumping his forehead with her own by way of punishment.

His smile was slow and easy and a glory to see. “I know,” he said in rich promise. “And I think it just may work out if you'll lick my other ear.”

“If I'll
what?
”

“You heard me,” he said, and lifted a brow.

She tilted her head and lowered her lashes.

“Careful, or you might start more than you can finish.”

“Oh,” Luke said, grinning as he pulled both cat and woman close, “I doubt there's much danger of that.”

I
n keeping with a tradition begun in the first book of the Turn-Coupe series,
Kane,
included below is a recipe for the red beans and rice dish mentioned in
Luke.
This old Cajun favorite was often served on Monday, or wash day, since it could be quickly thrown together and left to simmer without close attention.

The version given is the one I use, though there are as many recipes for red beans and rice as there are cooks in Louisiana. What usually happens is that the contents are adjusted according to the likes and dislikes of the family or to the ingredients in the cook's kitchen. If you'd like to cook Louisiana style, just take this recipe as a starting point and add your own touch!

Red Beans & Rice

Wash beans and place in a heavy, 4 qt sauce pot. Add ham and cover with water. Add garlic, bell pepper, onion, celery, hot pepper, and Italian seasoning. Simmer 3 to 4 hours, until beans are tender and bean soup is thick. Adjust salt to taste. Add an extra pinch of Italian seasoning, and serve immediately over cooked rice.

Many cooks in Louisiana use the electric Hitachi rice pot to cook their long grain rice for this and other rice dishes. I've used one for years, but recently began to steam my rice, Chinese style, in an electric steamer. Regardless of how you go about it, the idea is to produce tender rice with every grain separate. The cooking method used by old-fashioned cooks like Granny May is:

Cajun Rice

In a heavy sauce pot with a tightly-fitting lid, bring water to a rolling boil. Add rice, salt and butter. Stir quickly with a fork, and place lid on pot. Simmer on low heat for 30 minutes
without removing the lid.
Fluff with a fork. Let sit, covered, until ready to serve.

I hope you enjoy this taste of my home state, and
Luke.

Warmest regards,

Jennifer Blake
http://www.jenniferblake.com