Sins of the Storm (11 page)

Forcing himself to let go, he untangled himself from the plastic shower curtain and lunged from the tub, refused to let his stiff right leg buckle. From the medicine cabinet he retrieved the small scissors, then turned back and went down on his knees. The silk bindings fell away leaving deep red gouges in her wrists. “He’s a dead man.”

She twisted toward him, damn near slayed him with the ferocity in her eyes.

“You were right,” he said, reaching for her hand to help her from the tub. She stepped over the side and into his arms, looked up with a trust that almost sent him right back to his knees. “About everything,” he said. “That man thinks he’s above the law. It’s just a game to him. He thinks he can play people like they’re pawns—”

Something broken flashed through her eyes.

“Cami?”

But then the shine of courage was back, the same tenaciousness he’d seen too damn many times in Iraq. And it was all he could do to keep from driving his fist into the wall. He’d set the trap, laid out the bait. But he’d never imagined it would be Camille who faced the fire while Jack lay incapacitated in his own bathtub.

“There’s more…”

The soft words punched, had him looking down into her upturned face. “You said he didn’t hurt—”

“Not me,” she said, and now it was she who touched, she who lifted a hand to his face. “Beauregard.”

Spanish moss slapped them. Jack zigzagged around a series of tree stumps, hurdled over two fallen pines. He ran fast and hard, with only a slight limp, not pausing to assess or navigate, as if he knew every twist and turn, every tree, every obstacle by heart.

“Beauregard!”

The edge to his voice tightened the vise around Camille’s heart.

“Réponds mon chien!”
Answer me!
“Où vous êtes?”
Where are you?

Camille raced behind him, tried to keep pace. But she didn’t ask him to slow, didn’t
want
him to slow. No matter how long she lived, she’d never forget the drain of color from Jack’s face when she’d repeated Lambert’s taunts and insinuations.

For a moment he’d stood there, holding her, and she’d known he was torn, still worried about her, not wanting to leave her but needing to find Beauregard.
Let’s go,
she’d told him, and that was all the encouragement he needed. He didn’t waste time grabbing a towel, just ripped from her and ran into his bedroom, pulled on a pair of underwear and gym shorts, shoved his feet into his old athletic shoes, then ran for the back door.

From the hall closet, he grabbed his service revolver.

In the kitchen, Camille retrieved her mobile phone. She tossed it to him as they passed the rose bed, ran along behind him as he called Russ and Detective D’Ambrosia, barked out orders and demanded a locale on Marcel Lambert.

I’m not awaiting trial.

The words chased Camille through the woods. Typical summer in Louisiana, clouds had rolled in, thickened. The sky was heavy now. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

“Bo-Bo!” Jack called. “Answer Papa!”

Papa.
She tripped on the word, staggered against a tangle of vines.
Papa.
Jack had lost his father and his wife, his dream of flying fighter planes. But Beauregard…

Pretty quiet, isn’t it?

“Come on, boy!” This time it was Camille who called for him, Camille whose voice broke. “Beauregard!”

Jack twisted toward her, revealing the most scorched earth eyes she’d ever seen.

“Go!” she told him. “I’m fine.”

But he slowed, held out his hand. “There’s a creek ahead—”

“I know.” She remembered. She knew this land, not as well as he did, but she’d grown up here, too. She’d traipsed the woods…usually a few steps behind Jack and her brother.

But he was holding out a hand to her now, and she went to him, took his hand and ignored the stitch in her side.

“Did he say anything else?” Jack asked. “Did he give any indication—”

“No,” she told him. “I heard Beau barking a few minutes before you fell. He was agitated. I thought it was a squirrel.” But it hadn’t been. It had been Marcel Lambert.

Or had it?

The nasty thought niggled at her. Marcel Lambert would be ridiculously bold to come after her in broad daylight. He could have hired someone, that was true. But those eyes…

“Beauregard!”

They heard it simultaneously, more of a whimper than a bark.
“Mon Dieu,”
Jack breathed, and ran faster, harder. She let him go, let him charge into the muddy waters of the creek toward the other side, where something yellow lay slumped against the base of an oak.

Her heart surged. She followed, waded into the thigh-high water and found Jack on the other side, reaching for his dog.

“Is he—” A pair of bottomless chocolate eyes gazed up at her and blinked, sent her to her knees. “Beau…”

The big muscular dog lifted his face toward her hand, nuzzled her palm, then whimpered again.

“He tied him up.” Jack bit out the words. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small utility knife, flicked it open and used the blade to sever the rope looped around Beauregard’s collar. “There now,” he said, and his voice was soft, soothing. “Papa’s here.”

Camille rocked back and watched, tried to breathe. Somewhere along the line rain had started to fall—she hadn’t even noticed. “Thank God,” she whispered.

With his dog in his lap, Jack looked up, and everything else fell away. His eyes, so isolated and…charged, met hers. And for a moment he looked at her while the rain came down and the sky rumbled, while lightning streaked. And then he was curving a hand around her rib cage and pulling her closer, bracketing his other hand behind her head.

No words were spoken. No words were necessary. Maybe his mouth found hers first. Or maybe it was she who pushed up and into him. Or maybe they both reached, and they both found. She didn’t know, didn’t care, only knew that she needed his mouth on hers. She closed her eyes and let the sensation wash through her, knew she could drown in the feel of his lips, the lingering taste of peppermint and desire, of brutality.

“Mon chou…”
He kissed her deeper. She opened to him, thrilled to the warmth of his tongue against hers, the hunger of someone gasping for their last breath. Lifting her hands, she brought one to his face, the other to his chest, still bare, hot now, slick from rain and sweat. There she slid around to his back and held him tighter, didn’t ever want to let go.

This, she realized, was how he’d kissed her that night so long ago, when she’d invited him to Whispering Oaks to say goodbye in private. She’d brought the candles and smuggled the wine from her mother’s cabinet, she’d dressed in the tight jeans and skimpy black shirt. But she’d never imagined, not once, that Jack would reach for her, that their mouths would meet and everything else would fall away, that he’d pull her close and hold her, crush her mouth with his own as if one taste would never, ever be enough.

But he had, and he did now, he kissed her like the boy he’d been, the hero she’d once worshipped, the man he insisted no longer existed. The feel of his hand along the side of her face, the whiskers scraping her cheek and her jaw, blanked her mind. And when Beauregard squirmed from between them and she found herself in Jack’s lap, when she felt the ridge pressing up between her legs, something inside her shattered.

S
he could have been hurt. She could have been—

Jack pulled Camille closer and stabbed his fingers into her hair, knew that he could never get close enough. Marcel Lambert had been there. He’d gotten to Jack, leaving Camille alone. With that man. Susan would have—

It didn’t matter what Susan would have done, because Susan was not Camille, Camille who’d seen her father gunned down, who’d been pursued like an animal. Who’d stared at Jack when he’d found her, who’d lifted her arms to him and let him hold her…

Something primal swam through him as he felt her rock against him, as his own body bucked in response. Their mouths clashed; their hands roamed. Carefully he pulled her back with him, until her body sprawled over his, much like in the bathtub.

She’d faced down Lambert. She’d done as he’d asked, had found the map and surrendered it to him—the map she’d returned to Louisiana to find, the map she was convinced would lead to something of significance. She’d given it to Lambert, just handed it over.

Because of Jack…

“’Tite chat…”
He curled his thighs around hers and held her, squeezed his eyes shut, but could still see her in the small bathtub, straddling him, gazing down with eyes huge and dark and…damaged, the way she’d looked at him all those years before.

The way she looked at him in his dreams.

What’s a ’tite chat?
The question had been innocent, not all that concerned. Because Susan hadn’t known. She hadn’t understood. She’d had no way to know her husband had been searching for another woman in the depths of his sleep, that as he’d reached for his wife, he’d wanted another.

“Jacques…” His name was thick on Camille’s voice, allowing a trace of the old Cami to slip through, of the heritage she’d scrubbed away when she became Cameron Monroe. “I never stopped—”

“Sh-h-h,” he murmured against her open mouth, then closed the distance between them and kissed her again. Kissed her deeper. Harder.

This, he knew. This was how he’d kissed her then, that long-ago night he’d never been able to scour from his mind, no matter how hard he’d tried. She was Gabe’s little sister. She was damaged, spinning out of control. He’d promised to protect her, to be there for her….

She’s messed up,
frère.
She’s hurtin’ real bad.

I’m not gonna let anyone hurt her,
Jack had promised his friend.
If anyone so much as looks at her the wrong way—

But in the end it was Jack who’d looked at her the wrong way, Jack who’d crossed lines he’d considered inviolable. Gabe had been away at college. He’d trusted Jack, had trusted him to take care of his sister. Jack had promised….

“Don’t let go,” she whispered against his mouth. “Please don’t let go.”

He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to now and despite the frayed edges inside him, the knowledge of how dangerous her need to rock the boat was, he hadn’t wanted to before. He’d opened his eyes and pulled her closer, had felt his body ready. Then she’d whispered his name.

“Jacques…”

It had all twisted, jumbled. He’d pulled back and looked down at her—

“Jack! Camille!”

Now it all shattered. Camille froze, hung that way a damning moment as Beauregard surged to his feet with a vicious little bark.

“Answer me!”

Her eyes darkened. “It’s D’Ambrosia.”

He looked at her sprawled on top of him, her hair tangled, her mouth swollen, her chin raw from his whiskers. Her clothes—

Another few minutes and they would have been off.

“Jack!”

Swearing softly, he eased her from his body and stood, rearranged his baggy shorts as he strode toward the creek. Beauregard darted in front of him.

D’Ambrosia broke from the cypress and ran toward the water. Russ sprinted behind him.

Camille came up behind Jack and slipped her muddied hand into his, waited quietly while her cousin’s fiancé waded through the creek.

“He never left his house.”

The words came at Camille through a tunnel of time and space. She tried to shake them off, but beneath the canopy of an old oak, there was no escaping what the detective was saying.

“I’ve got someone on him 24/7. Lambert was there last night and he’s been there all day.”

“Then he hired someone,” Jack said. Gone was the man who’d pulled her against his body, who’d slanted his mouth against hers as if he meant to consume her. As if he
needed
to consume her.

Jacques Savoie was all business now. All sheriff.

But his mouth…his mouth was still swollen, and a small scratch streaked like a tattoo against the side of his neck. “The coward is letting someone else—”

“No.” Camille looked from her cousin’s fiancé to Jack. “It was
him.
” Those eyes…dark and disturbing, desperate…she’d know them anywhere, had seen them too many times in the shadows of her dreams.

D’Ambrosia shook his head. “Sweetheart, I’m afraid that’s just not possible.”

Everything tilted, blurred. She blinked against the rain and looked at them, D’Ambrosia in his cargo pants and T-shirt, Jack wearing only gray athletic shorts, the two of them huddled around her the way Jack and Gabe had been that long-ago morning.

That man! He killed my daddy.

Petite ange.
That had been Uncle Edouard. He’d always called her his little angel. He’d gone down on one knee and lifted a hand to her face.
There was no man.

Yes, there was. I saw him!
He’d chased her.

But the rain, more than five hard, driving inches in one night, had washed away any trace of footsteps. Even hers.

Darlin’…
Gabe had been soaked, covered in mud. He’d joined his uncle on his knees, had taken her hand and squeezed.
I’m afraid that’s impossible….

Then she’d been a child. She’d been young, scared. Easily manipulated. She looked at them now, at Jack and the detective, at Russ standing a few feet away, his shoulder holster visible as he talked quietly into his mobile phone.

I’m not awaiting trial….

The words nagged at her, nudged against all those fractured pieces that refused to fit together.

“We have to go,” she said, standing. And Beauregard whimpered. “We have to get there before he does.”

Jack’s eyes, normally such a steady, emotionless brown, flickered. He stood and reached for her, pulled back at the last minute. But she saw it in his expression, the awareness…the memory of those broken moments alongside the creek, before D’Ambrosia’s voice had cut through the wind.

“Camille—”

“Don’t you see? Don’t you get it?” She was tired of being treated like a child. “Lambert said the stained glass was destroyed. He said it’s gone. But if that’s true, why would anyone go to all this trouble to steal the map?” She’d been followed from the moment she arrived in town. “And who else?” she asked. “Who besides Lambert even knows about it?”

The answer burned: She knew. Jack knew. Saura and D’Ambrosia did. But no one else, not her mother, not even her uncles…

“She has a point,” D’Ambrosia said.

But Jack’s expression tightened. “Games—”

“Maybe, but that’s not a chance we can take.”

Russ flipped his phone shut, turned and joined them. “There’s no trace of anyone,” he said. “Whoever broke in made a clean getaway.”

With a slow smile, Camille stepped into the center of the three men, looked first at D’Ambrosia, then at Jack—and felt the fissure clear to her bone. “But the map is worthless if you don’t know where to start looking….”

She had pictures. She’d stood there on the side of the highway with her back to him, had snapped pictures of her father’s map with a camera so small Jack had never even suspected. He wanted to be angry with her for that. He wanted to be angry at the secrets she’d kept—secrets that still haunted her eyes.

But he watched her walk across on the sugary-white beach of Isle Dernier, with her face lifted toward the brutally blue late-morning sky and the southerly breeze whipping her hair, and knew she’d been punished enough.

She’d lost her father. She’d lost her childhood. She’d turned her back on it all—the memories and the horror, the remnants of all those broken dreams, the ugliness and the betrayals, the sins of that long-ago storm—and forged a new life. She could have lived quietly. But she’d stepped back into a world of violence and done everything in her power to right as many wrongs as she could.

I write their stories…for those who suffered…I make sure they’re remembered. I make sure no one forgets….

And now she was back in Louisiana, knee-deep in the worst nightmare of her life. She’d left a girl, a wild, reckless child; but she’d come home a woman. And this time she demanded to be heard. She had a voice now, and an audience.

God help anyone who got in her way.

Not trusting himself to watch her one second longer, Jack lowered his backpack and turned toward a fleet of shrimp boats making its way toward the barrier island. Once barely more than a forgotten sandbar, Isle Dernier was on its way back.

Lifting a hand to block the sun, Jack scanned the sparsely vegetated sand dunes and slash pines—all that remained standing on the south end of the island. New trees had been planted, but it would be another lifetime before they stood as tall as those Katrina had taken.

“Savoie,” he answered when his phone rang sometime later.

“Anything yet?” Saura wanted to know.

“Not yet.” The ferry had dropped them off thirty minutes before. Camille had insisted they come to the beach, rather than the Trade Winds resort where they’d booked rooms for the night. Ferry service was spotty. It was unlikely they would make the last boat back. “Anything on that end?”

“Lambert’s eating breakfast.” One of Camille’s cousins, Cain, a former cop, was watching him. “No one has shown up for the next ferry, either.” That’s where Saura was, at the dock where the ferry would leave for Isle Dernier again in twenty minutes, at noon.

It was the only point of access to the small island forty miles off the coast.

And after noon, there was only one more trip south. Three o’clock sharp was the last time of return.

“And John?” Saura asked.

Jack pivoted toward a wind-bent oak, silhouetted by the sun high overhead. “In position.”

It was the only way Jack had been willing to let Camille travel to Isle Dernier. Even still, with every precaution in place, unease bled through him. He had everything under control, but it only took one variable—

One freaking roadside bomb. One freaking improvised explosive device, put together in a tent or a cave somewhere…

Over. Everything. In the blink of an eye.

But the map was Camille’s, and it was her father who’d been killed that long-ago night. She was the one who’d come back. She was the one who had demons to destroy….

Sliding his sunglasses to the top of his head, Jack skimmed a hand along his service revolver. “I’ll call you in thirty.”

The sight of Camille walking along the water’s edge…

The cop in him took over, the soldier, the man who knew they were here for a reason, and that reason was not strolls down windswept beaches—or memory lane.

But it wasn’t memories that tugged him toward her, wasn’t memories that wound through his chest—and tightened. Pausing, she shielded her eyes and looked toward the shrimp boats. By late afternoon the gulf would consume the strip of sand on which she stood, again concealing its secrets. But now…

“Come on,” he said, nearing her. “We need to go.”

She turned toward him, swiping at the hair blowing against her face. “Did you and Susan ever come here?”

It was a simple question. But it cut into Jack like shrapnel. Somehow he didn’t stagger back. Against the spray of the Gulf and the sand, he held himself very still, didn’t trust himself to move. “No.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Please.” Her voice barely registered above the droning, the one that wore on and on, that grew louder, would never quiet.

He looked down at her, realized how damn easily he could drown.

“About Susan,” she went on when the wind kept lashing and he said nothing. “Why you pretend she didn’t exist.”

The acid burn consumed more. “Is that what you think I’m doing?” His voice was low, deliberately quiet. It was the voice of the soldier, the cop. Not of the son—and never of the husband. “Pretending Susan didn’t exist?”

“She was your wife,” Camille pushed. “You loved her. Losing her—”

He turned to the shrimp boats. “I found her,” he said into the wind. “Did you know that?”

Camille stepped closer. “Saura told me.”

“I found her there in the rain.” The words were as stripped of emotion as the memory.

“I know.”

“She’d been drinking.” He’d smelled the alcohol on her clothes, found the empty wine bottle beside the bathtub. “Did Saura tell you that?”

When Camille said nothing, he looked at her, found her staring at the surf.

Her silence gave him his answer. “Did Saura tell you why?”

She glanced up, said nothing.

“She wasn’t strong like you,” he said, but hadn’t realized the truth until too late. They’d met at a club. Dark haired and dark eyed, she’d reminded him nothing of—

In the beginning, that had been part of the appeal. “She tried,” he said. “At first. But after 9/11—”

“Things got real,” she finished for him.

Susan hadn’t liked real. “We were in Nevada.” Instantly he’d known the cozy life they’d been leading was about to go up in flames. An attack on United States soil was a declaration of war. “I’d come home and find her with a glass of wine—” Sometimes she’d been dressed. Lots of times she hadn’t been. But he hadn’t thought much of it, not even the drinking. Susan had always bucked traditional roles. She’d loved to be daring, shocking, to keep him guessing….

“A lot of people drink wine in the evenings,” Camille said.

Jack watched a gull soar in a circle, then dip toward the water. “When I got activated, I asked her to wait here…in Louisiana.” He’d liked the thought of that. He’d bought the land, had been working on the house.