Sins of the Storm (13 page)

“Yes.”

“To Florida.”

“Yes.”

Finally he moved, not his body, just a dark light flashing through his eyes. “He hurt you.”

It all came rushing back, everything she’d tried to ignore, to destroy. And for that one broken moment, she didn’t care about being vulnerable, about carving out her own life. Didn’t care about proving anything to anyone. She just wanted—

She just wanted what she’d wanted fourteen years ago, when she’d sat in the darkness of that Florida hotel room with a foul-smelling bandanna tied around her eyes, another around her mouth.

She wanted what she’d always wanted.

She wanted Jack.

“He never touched me,” she said quietly. Not with his hands, or his body. Words had been enough. Photos.

Jack’s nostrils flared. “
Maudit,
he—”

“Wanted me gone,” she supplied. “Wanted me out of the picture.”

His breath came hard now, deep. As if he’d been running. Sprinting. Tearing through the scrub and the Spanish moss…“Because you saw him kill your father.”

The chill came from somewhere inside, spread with needle-fine precision. She braced against it, lifted her hands and pulled the robe tighter. “Because I was growing up. Because he feared one day people would start listening to me, paying attention. That one day I might try to get even.”

The lines of Jack’s face tightened.

“I didn’t know it was him at first. Someone broke into my hotel room. I was blindfolded, taken away. I—”

Jack’s eyes flashed.

Bottled up for so long, the words wouldn’t stop. “I didn’t know where he took me…didn’t know how much time had passed.”

He breathed. She knew that, saw his shoulders rise, his chest expand. But the stillness deepened, and she saw the soldier he’d become, the discipline he’d fine-tuned. As a boy there’d been intensity, but it had been tempered with the laissez-faire of the deep South.

But here, now…the laissez-faire was gone. And finally Camille realized. Finally Camille knew why Jack had been trying to push her away.

He wouldn’t let himself move, didn’t want to let himself feel.

But he did. It resonated in his eyes, the line of his mouth, the shadow that extended beyond his jaw. “He drugged you.”

Three words, stripped of all emotion, a statement, not a question. “Yes.”

“Fils du—”

“I don’t know for how long but at some point he told me it was time to go away. Time to stay away.” That had been fourteen years ago, before cell phones and text messaging, PDAs, the Internet. She’d tried to get word to her family, knew if she could just let her Uncle Edouard know…

“I was shown pictures.” Could still see them in her mind, the black-and-white photos, the grainy news footage. “Of my mother…on a stretcher.” In a hospital. Hurt. “Of Gabe at her bedside.” Of her uncle and of Saura. But never of Jack.

“The accident,” he muttered.

“Was a warning,” she said, “a way of showing me what would happen if I didn’t do as I was told. If I tried to contact my family, tried to resurrect the past, to prove Marcel Lambert—”

“Killed your father.”

Emotion stabbed through her, knotted in her throat. “So yes, Jack. Call it running if you want to. Call it hiding.”

In the brown of his eyes, something softened. “Camille—”

“But I did what I thought I had to do,” she said. “I went away and stayed away, I became someone else—”

The stillness crumbled and he was moving toward her, reaching for her.

“But I never forgot,” she said, “and I never stopped planning. That’s why I became Cameron Monroe,” she said as his hands closed around her arms. “That’s why I immersed myself in tragedy…because I knew one day I would return, and I needed a voice when I did. I needed an audience. It was the only way I could make sure Marcel Lambert paid—”

Nothing prepared her for the low roar that broke from Jack’s throat, the way he pulled her into his arms and stabbed a hand into her hair, pressed the other against her back. “Sweet Mary,” he muttered. “I should have been there. I should have—”

The urge to sink against him washed through her, but she struggled back, needed to see his eyes. Needed him to see hers. “No, Jack…no. There was nothing you could have done.”

All those shadows, the ones in his eyes and the ones on his heart, swirled deeper, darker. “That’s not true. If we hadn’t slept together you wouldn’t have gone off like that. You wouldn’t have been alone—”

She shook her head, felt the damp ends of her hair slip against her neck.
“No.”

“I would never have let him near you. I would—”

“No.” The word was hard, emphatic. “Another time, another place. You couldn’t have changed the writing on the wall,” she said. “The wheels were already spinning…had been for years. It was just a matter of time until Lambert made his move.”

Jack wouldn’t let her go, still held her anchored against him. Maybe she should have twisted. Maybe it would have worked, maybe she could have broken the contact.

Maybe not.

But in that moment she didn’t want to break anything. She wanted to…fix.

She’d trained herself not to dream. She’d trained herself not to remember, not to let the images slip through the darkness of her mind. She’d trained herself to forget, to focus on the goals that drove her.

But sometimes he’d come to her anyway. Sometimes she’d seen him as the boy he’d been, and sometimes she’d imagined him as the man he’d been destined to become. The pilot.

Especially after she’d used her research skills to confirm Captain Jacques Savoie had, in fact, been stationed in Kirkuk….

She’d seen him then, sometimes in his flight suit, sometimes laughing with fellow soldiers, but sometimes alone in the desert, with the blood-red sky behind him and the sea of sand surrounding him.

“Jack,” she whispered now, and against every crumb of self-preservation, she was doing it again, reaching for him, sliding her arms around his waist and linking her hands at the small of his back, holding on…. “I don’t regret anything.”

Hair, darker now than it had been before—the rich color of pecans—fell against the cowlick at his forehead much as it had in her dreams.

And it was all she could do not to lift a hand, slide it back…. “There’s been no one else.” Not even after she knew Jack had married another. Her friends had tried to set her up, had arranged a parade of blind dates. But Camille had never let anyone in, had refused to allow anyone to distort her focus. Distract her.

“I didn’t want to give myself to someone like that again,” she said, even as he slid a hand along her arm and up her neck, to cup her face. “Didn’t want to give them that kind of control over me.”

His eyes, laser-beam intense, locked onto hers. “Is that what you thought it was,
’tite chat?
”

Above the roar of the ocean, she barely heard the question.

“Control?”

Not then. Not until later. “I loved you.” After so many years of denying and pretending, saying the words was like shoving a huge rock off her heart. “With everything I had.” Hero worship, Saura had called it, and maybe she’d been right. “I know you never saw me like that,” she acknowledged, refusing to look away, even when the glitter in his eyes turned to more of a gleam, and her blood started to hum. “Never thought of me like that, but after Daddy died…” She closed her eyes, opened them a moment later. “I don’t know how I would have made it through that without you.”

His smile was slow and warm, a dark, mesmerizing curve of his mouth. “You would have.”

Her heart gave an odd little thump. “I wanted so badly for you to see me as anything other than Gabe’s little sister.” For him to touch her as he touched her now, with a hand to her face and a hand to her back, their bodies pressed close. “I wanted you to see me for who I was…that I was growing up.”

His eyes gentled. “Camille—”

“This,” she whispered, skimming her mouth against his, sliding her hands to his shoulders and holding on tight. “And this,” she said with another kiss, this one harder. Longer. “It was all I wanted.”

He swore softly.

“It took time,” she said, still pressed up on her toes, her body against his, so close she could feel the slam of his heart, “but I taught myself to stop wanting. To stop remembering…dreaming.” And then Saura had shown up on her door one impossibly gorgeous afternoon, and she knew the time for making her move against Marcel Lambert had come. “So when I came back, I didn’t want to see you, Jack.” But had known that she would, that their paths would cross. Their agendas would clash. “Because I didn’t want to feel that way again.”

His thumb skimmed the freckles across her nose. “So you broke into Whispering Oaks—” He almost sounded amused.

“I knew you wouldn’t approve.” And the smile simply happened, curving her mouth the way it had all those years before when he’d caught her hanging curtains in his and Gabe’s fort. She’d known he would be irritated.

That had been part of the fun.

“I knew you’d want to stop me.” He’d always tried to do that. As a foolish teenage girl, it had struck her as impossibly heroic.

As a woman, she’d recognized the rigid edges of control.

“And I couldn’t let you do that.” Couldn’t let anyone do that. “I’d already lost fourteen years,” she said as he brushed back a few strands of hair that had fallen against her face. “
Fourteen years
because of Marcel Lambert. I wasn’t willing to lose a single second more.”

He smoothed the damp strands back, left nothing between them but the raw, naked truth. “And you thought I’d do that.”

“It’s exactly what you tried to do.” And she’d been so determined to defy him that she’d never let herself look more closely, to see the demons that drove him.

“All I could think was that I had to stop you from stopping me, even if that meant treating you like you were the enemy.” A stranger. A man with whom she shared nothing…wanted nothing.

“That’s why I didn’t tell you everything.” Why she’d told lies and kept secrets, why she’d forced his hand: to make sure the softness didn’t come back, the wanting didn’t start all over again.

“I tried to be Cameron Monroe. I tried to be a stranger, to look at you and not see, not remember.” Not want. “But I couldn’t do it, Jack. I didn’t know how to leave you alone, not when I could tell you were hurting.”

Didn’t know how to leave him alone, even now, when survival instincts demanded that she walk away.

“I tried to ignore the shadows in your eyes, to keep it all business. I told myself you didn’t need me….”

Against her bottom lip, his thumb stilled. “So goddamned brave—”

“I told myself you were broken, that you didn’t want to be fixed. That’s why you looked at me with those flat eyes.” Why he’d been so detached. “And I thought that by being someone different, treating you like
you
were someone different, I’d create distance…that I wouldn’t be vulnerable.” Because a stranger wouldn’t care. A stranger wouldn’t try to reach him.

A stranger couldn’t touch.

But it was he who touched now. “That’s not what you created.”

Wrapped in the thick terry cloth robe, with her legs bare and the warm breeze swirling around her legs, she finally realized the truth: her plan had backfired.

“No,” she whispered. Without the ties that bound them, the lines that had once defined them, without the shadows that haunted, even now, there’d been only heat. “You were the only one,” she told him. “The only one who could derail me.”

Make her want—make her bleed.

His eyes almost seemed to glow. “Protect you.”

She tried to back away. Couldn’t.

Tried to slip back into the role of Cameron Monroe—couldn’t do that, either.

“When I heard you go down in the bathroom…” Even now, the memory of that sickening thud chilled her to the bone. “I knew you were in there, that you were hurt—”

He pulled her closer, tangled his hand in her hair.

“—and none of it mattered…nothing did. Not the book or Marcel Lambert, not the revenge I’d craved for so long. Because you were hurt and all I could think—”

The glitter in his eyes killed her words. Everything else faded, leaving only the relentless pounding of her heart—and the way Jack looked at her, the way he stood so horribly still, as if he didn’t trust himself to let go, to move…to so much as breathe.

But then his hand shifted and his fingers found her mouth, pressed. “Don’t.”

S
hadows slipped and fell, pushed in from all directions. But they didn’t touch Camille. She remained only inches away, her eyes wide—glowing, damn it. Her eyes glowed with a promise that damn near gutted him.

He’d thought her dead. He’d thought something horrible had happened to her. That had been the only way to explain her disappearance. The Camille he’d known—the Camille he’d loved—would never have abandoned her family.

But then he’d crept through the darkness of Whispering Oaks and found her, caught her going through one of the crates he’d left out as bait. With her hands to the wall, she’d slowly turned to him.

We all have choices, Jacques. Isn’t that what you always said?

Now the bulky white robe served as a sharp contrast to the angle of her jaw. She studied him through those amazing eyes. Waiting. And all Jack could think—

He wanted to touch. He wanted to drink. Christ, he wanted to drown. She’d walked away from everything, had given up the life she loved, to keep her family safe.

The tightness in his chest spread with insidious force. Lambert would pay for what he’d done to her, what he’d done to them all. He’d pay for what he’d cost her, what he’d taken from her.

For what he’d taken from Jack.

Slowly he let himself step closer. “Last night,” he said, careful to keep his voice nice and slow, steady, “I told you that men like me don’t make love to women like you.”

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t for her eyes to gleam. “And then you walked away,” she said. “Without answering my question.”

The need to touch collided with the need to protect. “I didn’t think I needed to.”

Her smile widened. “Didn’t think you needed to…or knew I wouldn’t believe you?”

From beyond the balcony, a boat horn sounded. “I’ve seen things,” he told her. “Done things—”

“No.” She rested her hand on his jaw. Slid her fingers along the whiskers he hadn’t shaved since she’d walked back into his world. “That’s not what this is about.”

He stiffened.

“You’ve
lost
things,” she corrected in that steady voice of hers, the one that soothed, even as it lashed. “That’s what this is about. You’ve lost…and you don’t want to lose anymore.”

The words, the truth, came at him like a quick punch to the gut.

“But tell me something.” Feathering her fingers higher on his face, she slid her thumb along his cheekbone. “What exactly were you trying to warn me about?” Light played against her face, but the gloom pushed closer. “That when a man like you takes a woman like me to bed it’s not making love? That it’s crude and base…meaningless….”

The image formed before he could stop it, of her naked and beneath him—on top of him. Sliding against him. Of her hair spilling against him, her mouth slanting against his, giving and taking, demanding; her body soft and warm and—

“Or that a man like you,” she continued, raising to her toes and never looking away, never hesitating, bolder now than she’d been all those years ago, “doesn’t let himself anywhere near a woman like me?”

It all started to crumble then, to blur, all those hard dark lines he’d drawn, the need to touch and the need to protect, leaving only a boiling urgency that incinerated everything but the truth.

“I didn’t want you to be Camille,” he said hoarsely. She’d given him the truth, damn it, every raw piece of it. She deserved the same. “I wanted you to be this reckless, irresponsible stranger.”

Her gaze met his. And slowly she stepped away.

He wanted to bring her back.

“Because then you wouldn’t care what happened to me,” she whispered with no accusation in her voice. No recrimination. “Is that still what you want?”

He stepped toward her, stopped when she lifted her hands to the sash at her robe.

“That if you touch me,” she said, “if I touch you—” with a quick flick the sash fell away and the robe fell open “—that it means nothing?”

Before there’d been shadows. Now the soft glow of the lamplight played against the curve of her waist and the swell of her hips. “No,” he rasped, or at least he thought he did. It might have been a strangled sound. He wasn’t sure. Didn’t know. Didn’t much care.

“Everything,” she said in that same soft, steady voice, the one that fed that broken place inside him. Then she was moving toward him and putting her hands on the buttons of his shirt. “That’s what it means to me.” The top button flicked open, then the next, the next, until his shirt hung open and she smoothed her hands against his chest. “Everything.”

One step. That’s all he needed to take. One little step. Toward her. To slide the robe from her shoulders, to let it puddle at her feet. One step to pull her into his arms. One step to taste and touch—

But he did not let himself move. Because once he started—

He was a man who liked it nice and slow…but there was nothing nice or slow about Camille Rose Fontenot. Not before—not now. She’d always reminded him of one of those storms that blew up in the afternoon, wild and dangerous, but beautiful, evocative. Unpredictable. He never knew when she would strike, how she would strike—if she would strike.

Never knew what would be left standing in her wake.

When he looked at her, something inside him went a little crazy. And the tighter he held, the more he tried to control, the more it all spun away from him.

“Camille, I never meant to—” But then she slid her mouth along one flat nipple, used her tongue to flick and tease, and he couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t pretend he didn’t want her, that he hadn’t wanted her since the moment he’d found her at Whispering Oaks.

Long, long before that.

Need blanked him. He took her by the arms, lifted her toward him until she looked up from his chest, looked up with her hair falling against her mouth and a low gleam in the blue of her eyes.

“You make me crazy,” he muttered, but didn’t fight it anymore, not as she smiled a lazy smile.

“And that’s not what you want?” she whispered. His mouth slanted against hers with an urgency that rocked him. She tasted of peppermint toothpaste and determination, of courage and dreams and—

Heaven help him. She tasted of salvation.

The word should have stopped him. Instead he pulled her closer, kissed her deeper. Their mouths met and clashed, demanded and took. And her body, so warm and sinuous, pressed to his. He could feel her breasts, bared by her open robe, pressed against his chest. And the need to touch them, taste them, fired through him.

“It’s called a free fall,” he muttered against the moist warmth of her mouth. Trying to keep it slow, to not go too fast, he eased the robe along her arms, let it fall to the floor. “When the instrument panel goes out or the engines fail…when no matter how hard you try to regain control the plane just keeps falling.”

She tilted her head, gave him access to her neck, even as her hands fisted against the fabric of his shirt, and pulled.

“It’s subtle at first,” he murmured against her neck. “Gentle almost.” He reached her collarbone as she tugged his shirt from his arms. “Because you’re so damn high you barely notice.” With the words he slid lower, brought his hand to the swell of her breast. “But then it accelerates, gets faster.” There he flicked. “And in those last few seconds before impact—”

“I’m not going anywhere, Jack.”

The promise in her voice broke through the haze, had him glancing up to find the light in her eyes.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said again, this time softer, and the vise around his chest, the one that had been constricting ever since she arrived, ratcheted even tighter.

“Yes,” he said slowly, deliberately. He’d tried, damn it. He’d tried. “You are.”

Her eyes darkened, but before she could voice the question, he lifted her into his arms.

Nothing prepared her. Nothing could have. Not the dreams, the memories. Nothing prepared her for the way he crushed her in his arms and strode toward the bedroom, slowly, deliberately, never looking away from her, not even to flick on a light. He just held her, and carried her, brought her to the bed and eased her down, put a knee to the mattress and went down with her.

Somewhere along the line, someone had turned down the sheets.

With a slam of her heart Camille looked up at Jack, at the slow burn in his eyes and the hair against his cowlick, his wide, flat cheekbones and full lower lip, the whiskers shadowing his jaw. And all she could think was more….

“Jack…” He braced his hands on either side of her and leaned down, but with a throaty laugh she eased him back to his knees and came up on hers. There they faced each other, and there they kneeled. There she ran her palms along the strength and the warmth of his chest.

“We’ve got all night,” she whispered, and would have sworn she heard a ragged sound rip from his throat.

His gaze dipped, lingering on her breasts before sliding lower. He didn’t touch, though, not with his hands. But she felt the kiss whisper through her blood. “So beautiful….”

Somewhere below, the waves lapped against the beach. And from the hotel grounds, music drifted. The breeze swirled warm and hypnotic as Jack’s hands found her breasts and her nipples pebbled. His thumb teased and his mouth claimed. On some hazy, peripheral level Camille knew this, but as she arched into his mouth, there was only Jack.

Jacques.

And an urgency that pounded harder and faster than any hurricane ever had. Ever could.

She held on, curled her fingers into his arms, dug in as the pleasure throbbed through her. She heard the little mewl, but it took a second to realize it came from her own throat.

Mindless she twisted against him, urged him to her other breast. He slid against her, let his hands lead and tease. Then his mouth closed around her other nipple. But his hands kept going, curving around her lower back to her buttocks, where he pressed. She could feel him then, all of him, a hard ridge straining against his jeans.

Sensation pulsed like a drug. She closed her eyes and sucked in a sharp breath, hung there in the moment.
With Jack.
But then need pierced and she shimmied away, let a wicked little smile curve her mouth as he came up for air.

And when she spoke, it was more breath than voice. “My turn.”

Earlier his eyes had glittered. Now they grew heavy-lidded. Camille lowered her face and claimed one flat mauve nipple. First with soft little kisses. Then an open mouth. Then her tongue. And this time she knew the low growl came from him. Driven by it, she ran her hands down his stomach to the trail of hair that led to his waistband. There, she bypassed the zipper and went lower, cupped against the rough fabric of his jeans.

He rocked against her palm, rode her as she pulled against his nipple.

Never had she imagined—never had she let herself dream. That morning when they’d left for the island she’d only allowed herself to focus on her father’s map, what they might find.

Never had she considered nightfall would find her naked in Jack’s arms, and that what they’d find would be each other.

She looked up at him, found his eyes closed. But his face wasn’t relaxed. It was pulled tight, locked in a struggle she was only beginning to understand. He’d been holding on so tight, for so long, denying, isolated….

“Jacques.” His eyes opened as she feathered her fingers along his jaw. “Let me love you,” she whispered against the ache in her heart. “Let me show you—”

He moved so fast she never had a chance to finish. The chain of restraint fell away and he was there, pulling her into his arms and taking her mouth with his own, easing her down against the soft cotton of the sheets. She pulled him down with her, curved one hand around his bicep as she pushed the other into his hair, held on as he deepened the kiss, as he gave and took and demanded. She arched against him, felt the ridge, the rub of denim, against her inner thigh.

And then his hand was there, sliding along her stomach to between her legs, where he slid first one finger, then two, to find her hot and ready. He slipped inside, and for an amazing second she hung there, and savored.

But just a second. Need surged, demanded. “Please,” she whispered as she caressed the warmth of his stomach to the waistband of his jeans. There she fumbled with the fly, freed him. Wasting no time she shoved against the denim as he kicked, and then he was there, all of him.

His eyes, gleaming like warm melted chocolate, met hers. “You,” he whispered, sliding the hair from her face, then reaching for her hand. She put her palm to his and closed her fingers around his, smiled slowly as she opened to him, felt him settle between her legs—and push inside.

Sensation streamed, swelled. Heat curled, and need demanded. After so many years of being alone, of trying not to remember, not to want, her body accepted him, welcomed him. Held him. Fourteen years had passed since she’d last been with a man,
with this man.
Then she’d been a child, her courage manufactured through a bottle of wine. Then she’d been desperate, devastated.

Now different needs drove her, deeper, more primal. She’d tried to stay away. She’d warned herself, knew the consequences—but flat didn’t care. There was only Jack and the feel of him moving inside of her, of his hand holding hers—and the reality that she never wanted him to let go.

That
she
never wanted to let go.

On a rough breath he pulled out and eased back in, rocked there, shredded what was left of her heart when he squeezed his eyes shut and threw back his head, the tight lines of his face suspended between excruciating pleasure—and even more excruciating pain.

“Love me,” she murmured into the silence, the stillness—and with the quiet words it all broke, and there was no more silence. No more stillness. No faint music and no wind, only the feel of their bodies moving together.

“Love me,” she whispered again, but this time without voice.

And as his eyes opened and met hers, as he drew her hand to the pillow beside her face and increased the tempo, that’s exactly what he did.

He’d forgotten.

During the fourteen years since he’d last seen her, he’d forgotten what she could do to him, how quickly she could unravel him, then wind him right back up into tight, soul-shattering knots. Her smile, so wide and pure and trusting, had been enough to knock the breath from his lungs. And when she’d matured from girl into teenager, when the awkward shyness had given way to a stabbing desperation, when she’d dared him to teach her to kiss—to love…