Sins of the Storm (7 page)

“I kept thinking about Bayou d’Espere,” she whispered. “The trees and the beautiful houses, and I was terrified that I’d look up and find some reporter in one of those dumb boats making his way down Main Street, and that everything would be gone.”

“Then why didn’t you come back?” The question was low and hoarse. “Why didn’t you try to help?”

“I couldn’t.”

She kept saying that. That she couldn’t come back. That it wasn’t that simple, that easy. “Why not?” Somehow he kept the accusation from his voice. “People were desperate for volunteers—”

She twisted and damn near slayed him with the glow in her eyes. “I bought a plane ticket. I had my bag packed—”

He gave her a second to finish. When she didn’t, he lifted a hand to slide the hair from her face. Nice, he told himself. And. Slow.

But all those hard edges kept grinding away. “But what?”

“I kept calling Mama’s house, Gabe’s office, anywhere I could think of to get information.”

But the lines had been down. He’d been trying, too.

“Then I ran across a news story about the courthouse, all the cases pending trial…and he was there.” She moistened her lips before continuing. “Gabe was. He was quoted,” she said.

Jack remembered the story—he’d seen it himself. It had run on one of the cable news networks. The air had damn near burst out of Jack’s chest when he’d seen Gabe’s tired, shadowed face on the television.

“He talked about how he’d gotten his family to safety,” she said, “but then he’d gone back to the courthouse with the D.A. and a few of the other A.D.A.’s, to keep things safe.”

Jack let out a rough breath. “So you decided you weren’t needed after all.”

The stillness was immediate, in her body, her eyes. “It wasn’t a question of being needed.”

“Then what?” Secrets screamed from every tight line of her body—a woman’s body that the girl had not possessed.

He wanted…the secrets. He wanted the secrets. “What
was
it a question—”

The sound of a floorboard creaking killed his words. He spun, reached for his gun.

“Jack—”

He pulled her away from the window and positioned her against the wall. “Stay here.”

“No, don’t go—”

“I’ll be back,” he promised, already running. Someone had been inside. Someone had been crouched in the darkness, listening. Waiting.

At the door, he grabbed the knob and turned the small lock, pulled it shut behind him and ran toward the front of the house.

She counted to ten. That was the only head start she would give him. By eight the sound of his footsteps had fallen silent. By nine, the front door had slammed shut.

By ten, there was nothing.

She broke from the wall and ran through the darkness, complete now, a total blackout. Jack had taken his flashlight, but she didn’t need it. The room stood empty. The door was just across—

Her foot slammed into something solid and unmovable.

She staggered and flung out her arms, went down hard. She tried to catch herself with her hands, but her wrist twisted, leaving the impact with the hardwood floor to sing through her bones. For a moment she sprawled on the floor of her father’s study in much the same place that she’d once seen him go down, and tried to breathe.

“Cami.”

The voice slipped through the stillness, and stopped her cold.

“Camille Rose.”

Her heart kicked. The voice…it was low and raspy, and through the darkness of her mind, something stirred.

“It’s been a long time, sweet girl.”

Sweet girl.
The nickname speared deep, sent the room into a hard tilt. Only one man had ever called her sweet girl….

“Daddy…” The word slipped past the horror. She heard her voice break, could do nothing about the way her throat closed up.

“That’s my girl,” he said. “Easy does it.”

The spinning intensified, whirling, blurring. Faster. Crueler. Harder. She fought it, fought the vertigo, the memory, somehow pulled herself to her knees, forced a breath. “Who are you?” she demanded.

Not her father, she knew. Not. Her. Father.

“You know who I am,” he whispered. “You’ve always known.”

She blinked hard, told herself it wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. Wasn’t there. She was alone. Jack would—

The light blinded her. It came on without warning and shot across the room, locked on her like the beam of a searchlight. “Still so damned pretty…”

That voice. She knew that voice, had heard it….

No. Denial streaked through her.

No.

He’d been in the room the whole time. He’d been in there when she and Jack had stood at the window, when they’d talked about Katrina. The man who now held the flashlight on her had made the noise deliberately to lure Jack away from her.

“What do you want?” she demanded, and then she refused to kneel there like some trapped animal one second longer. She brought herself to her feet, lifted her chin. “Jack will be back—”

“You know what I want,” the man said. “You’ve always known.”

She wanted to back away. She wanted to charge forward. But she allowed herself neither. Not when the glare of the light blinded her. Not when she didn’t know exactly where he stood, or if he had a gun. “The map.” There was absolutely no emotion to her voice. “You want my father’s map.”

“Always such a good girl. I knew you’d come back someday.”

The memory stabbed—the photographs on the table depicting her mother’s car. She’d been driving down Canal Street. It had been dusk. The light had been green.

Gloria Fontenot had never seen the car barreling down Rampart…

The accident scene. Camille’s mother sprawled against the front seat of the car. The blood. The paramedics running toward the demolished car. Her mother on the gurney—in the hospital. All a not-so-subtle warning for Camille to stay away.

“You son of a bitch!” she hissed now, as she’d been unable to do all those years ago, when fear had paralyzed her, made her weak even as she tried to be strong.

She’d never realized that in playing his game, she’d all but handed Marcel Lambert sure victory.

“Shoot me!” she dared, and this time she moved, took a long step toward him. “Go ahead, do it. Shoot me.”

His laughter was soft. “You know that’s not what I want.”

“You don’t scare me,” she said with another step, and then she smelled it, the trace of cigarette smoke—and the whiskey.

Just like that night so long ago.

“Because you can’t hurt me,” she said. “And we both know it. If you do—”

“Camille!”

The voice slammed into her, had her spinning toward the door. “Jack! Don’t—” But it was too late. The loud crash broke through the darkness and he was there, charging into the room.

“I have a gun!” he shouted.

Then a grunt, a thud. Footsteps racing from the room. Silence within.

Camille lunged and dropped to her knees, reached for Jack, until she found him sprawled just inside the door. “Jack. My God—”

“Maudit fils de putain!”
In one svelte move he was on his knees and running his hands along her body. “Sweet Mary, are you okay? Did he touch you? What the hell—”

“I’m fine.” She kept her voice steady, even as part of her started to shake. “He didn’t touch me.”

But Jack did. Jack touched her, slid his hands along her arms to her neck, her face. He held her there, his hands against her cheeks, and even without light, she could see the primal gleam in his eyes.

“It was a trick,” she said. “He wanted me alone…thought he could scare me.”

“Who?”

She swallowed hard, knew she had to tell him. “The man from that night,” she said. “The one who chased me.”

For a moment silence screamed between them, stillness, as they kneeled a heartbeat from each other in the darkness of her father’s study. The warmth of Jack’s breath feathered over her, the erratic riff of his heart punished.

“He was here,” Jack finally repeated, and the words were cold and furious, brutal.

Maybe it was the edge to his voice, the way he’d charged in without one clue what he would find. Or maybe it was the lingering echo of the thud, that moment when she knew he’d gone down.

Or the fact he’d stayed with her, he’d reached for her, made sure she was okay…while Marcel Lambert got away.

It could have been any of those things, or none of those things. But in the end it didn’t matter. In the end there was just her and Jacques, again, and she lifted her hands to his.

“He wanted the map,” she whispered.

Jack swore lowly and creatively, purely in Cajun. And all that cold she’d been fighting for longer than she cared to remember, started to slip away.

“Kinda makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?” About the map—and the warmth. “If that stained glass window really broke…why is Lambert so hot to get his hands on my dad’s map?”

Around them, the stillness extended. Even the cicadas had fallen quiet. “He’s not going to win,” Jack muttered. “So help me God that bastard is not going to win.”

“No,” Camille said. “He’s not. That’s why I’m here, Jack.” That’s why she had to write the book.

He pulled his hands from beneath hers without warning, and stood. “Come on.”

Through the shadows, she saw him reach for her. From the moment she’d decided to write
Sins of the Storm
, she’d known this man, Jacques Savoie—not Marcel Lambert—would be her biggest challenge. She’d known how easy it would be to slip into roles of the past, she the adoring little girl hanging on his every word. She’d known, and she’d prepared.

But now all those plans crumbled, and she put her hand in his and let him help her to her feet.

The wince just kind of happened. It was dark, there was no reason he should have seen it, no reason he should have known. But he was there anyway, sliding an arm around her waist. “You’re hurt—”

“No,” she managed. “Just my wrist…”

On a low oath he loosened his grip on her hand. “What kind of a sick bastard—” he started, but did not finish. Because they both knew. “He’s not going to get to you again,” Jack promised, heading toward the door. “Not without going through me first.”

T
he cozy Acadian house, set back from the road and surrounded by pine and cypress, didn’t surprise her. Jack had grown up in a trailer. His father had talked about building a house for his family, had even drawn up plans. Jack had shown them to her and Gabe…sometimes the three of them had trekked through the woods looking for the right spot.

But then, after the night a single bullet shattered too many lives, she’d never heard Jack mention the house in the woods again.

She’d never heard him mention his father, either.

It was as if that boy and that man had simply ceased to exist.

Until now. She paced the sprawling main room, with its distressed hardwood floor and paneled walls, large windows overlooking the wide porch, the woods farther back. Beyond them, hidden by the darkness, a lake.

But inside…not much.

A man’s house, she told herself. Jack was a bachelor. He lived alone. She wouldn’t expect curtains. She wouldn’t expect rugs and throw pillows, candlesticks on the mantel or coasters on the coffee table. But somehow their absence…

Their absence was wrong. Jack had brought a wife with him to Bayou d’Espere, and even if she was gone now, there should be some remnant, some lingering whisper of the life they’d been building together.

The piano made Camille smile. It had been Jack’s grandmother’s. The fiddle mounted above, his grandfather’s. As kids she and Gabe had sometimes gone to their house on Christmas Eve, listened to the elder Savoies play their instruments and sing carols. Jack had been learning to play the fiddle when his grandfather passed.

Throat tight, Camille ran her finger along the top of the piano, where most people would have placed photos or other memorabilia, maybe a metronome.

But her fingers encountered only dust.

Turning, she wandered to the sofa and flipped through the newspaper tossed on the trunk that served as a coffee table—and saw the book.

Secret Sins.

The title glared up at her. Just below, she saw the name of the woman she’d worked hard to become, Cameron Monroe. She picked the paperback up, could tell it was new.

And dread settled like a heavy weight against her chest.

“Here you go.”

She spun toward the voice, saw him emerging from the kitchen with two mugs in one hand, first-aid supplies in the other, and a slightly more pronounced hitch to his gait. He’d barely spoken since leaving her childhood home, had spent most of his time on the phone with Detective D’Ambrosia and Russ. Since he’d led her inside there’d been nothing other than a clipped “wait here.”

Now Jack strode toward her, all six foot two of him, in the same faded jeans he’d been wearing all day. His shirt was black, a button-down open at the throat with the sleeves rolled up, a tear at the bicep and below the left breast pocket. His dark brown hair fell against the cowlick at the center of his forehead…and revealed the gash at his temple.

“Drink up,” he said.

She took the mug and brought it to her mouth, but when she sipped, it was not chocolate that made her senses hum. “Trying to knock me out?” she asked, half smiling, half accusing, but Jack had already turned away. She took another sip, this time savored the slow burn of whiskey.

“You better let me have a look at that,” she said.

He set the peroxide and cotton balls on the trunk. “Look at what?”

“Your forehead…he gashed you pretty good.”

His hand came up to finger the wound. “Just the surface.”

“All the same—”

“Camille.” Only her name, that was all he said, but the sound of it on his voice did cruel things to her heart. It strummed low and sent a dangerous heat whispering through her blood.

It was the first time in years he’d spoken her name in anything other than anger or frustration. Or regret.

“Jacques.” Her own voice thickened on his name, and when she looked into his eyes, the agitation in those dark chocolate depths knocked the breath from her lungs. “You’re hurt—”

Like a curtain falling, the slow wash of emotion vanished, replaced by a steeliness that chilled.

“This isn’t about me,” he said, moving toward her. But he did not reach for her, did not touch. “This is about you, and Marcel Lambert, and a game that is not going to have a happy ending.”

Happy ending.
The words lanced through her.

“He doesn’t scare me,” she said with another sip of the laced cocoa. “He’s desperate, grasping at straws.” Because for the first time, little Cami Rose was not playing by his rules. “If he’d wanted to hurt me—”

“He did hurt you, damn it!” Now he touched. He put his hands to her shoulders and dragged her so close she could see that he was right, that the wound at his temple was little more than a bruise—much like the scrapes on her knees.

“He hurt you then, and he hurt you tonight, and
maudit
I’m not going to let him do it again!”

Everything inside her stilled. She looked up at him, at his wide cheekbones and the whiskers darkening his jaw, and felt something inside of her shatter.

That’s why she stepped back. When all those broken edges inside collided with each other, and the memories poured free.

“You blame yourself, don’t you?” The question was barely more than a whisper. “You blame yourself for what happened.”

His eyes darkened. “I’m a cop. I should have recognized the trap. I should have—”

“Not tonight,” she said. “But then, all those years ago, when we made love.”

The words, bottled up for so long, stung on the way out.

Jack stood so very still, the mug still in his hand, a mug, she would guess, that contained far more whiskey than cocoa.

“You blame yourself for taking advantage of me.” She pushed—even though if anyone had taken anything, advantage or otherwise, it had been her. She’d just wanted.

God, she’d wanted so much.

“For hurting me,” she said. “You think that’s why I left.” It had been to get away,
to breathe.
But only at first. “For stealing my happy ending.”

She saw his throat work, his eyes burn.

“And for her, too, don’t you?” she went on, not sure where the insight came from, not sure why she kept prodding when any smart rational woman could see that Jacques Savoie was not an animal who enjoyed having his back against the wall. “Your wife.”

His nostrils flared. “Don’t psychoanalyze me.”

She gestured toward the old piano, the mantel, where a wedding picture should have sat. “Then where is she? Where is your wife?” The word hurt. “Why isn’t she here?”

He didn’t look to where she pointed, just kept his eyes on hers. “She’s dead.”

There was absolutely no emotion to his voice. “I know that,” she said, softer this time. Her mother had told her about the accident, the horrible speculation that Susan Savoie had been drinking—just like Jack’s father. “But you’re not.”

The second the words left her mouth, she realized her mistake.

Jacques Savoie, the son of the town drunk, a boy who’d left behind his childhood to chase his own dreams, who’d gone to war and almost lost his leg, who’d returned to find the land of his birth ransacked by Mother Nature, who’d been driving home one night when he’d seen the car wrapped around a tree—and found his wife thrown twisted in the wreckage. He stood here now with a glitter in his eyes…but inside, he was as dead as everyone he’d buried.

“It wasn’t your fault.” She moved before she could talk herself out of it. She crossed to him and took the mug from his hands, set it on the trunk. “None of it.” The need to comfort, help him out of the dark place into which he’d retreated, drove her. She reached for him—

He stiffened. “You don’t want to touch me right now.”

The words, a cold, seductive gauntlet, stopped her. “Why not? You might do something we’d both regret?”

“You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

“Don’t be so sure of that.” The quickening started low, spread fast. “This is me, Jack.
Me.
Cami. Camille Rose. You can pretend I’m a stranger all you like. You can pretend I don’t know you, that I don’t
understand.
” Heart slamming, she took one slow step toward him. “Because God knows it would be easier that way, wouldn’t it? But inside you know the truth. We both do. No matter what happened that night at Whispering Oaks—” when a bottle of wine had transformed an emotional goodbye into a life-changing mistake “—no matter what happened in Iraq,
with your wife…
nothing can change who I am to you. Or what I know.”

That somewhere deep inside, he was still Gator’s son, whose life had spun so horribly out of control despite how tightly he’d held on.

Slowly, as he did almost everything, with that exquisite, almost terrifying deliberation, he stepped toward her. “You think I want you to be someone else?” The question was so soft she had to concentrate to make out the words. “Is that what you think this is about? That I won’t let myself see you?”

She tried to swallow, found her throat dry. “It’s kind of hard to think anything else.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked. “Is that what this is all about, the way you sneaked back into town without so much as an e-mail to let me know you were going to be here? Isn’t that what
you’re
doing? Trying to pretend the past isn’t there…that you’re not still that wild child desperate for someone to pay attention to her…that I’m not—”

The glitter in his eyes went out. And some crazy little voice warned her to back away.

But an even crazier voice dared her to stay exactly where she was.

“What?” she asked against the tight band of emotion. “Not the what?”

“Because we can sure do that.” He rolled on in that same low quiet voice, as if she’d said nothing, asked nothing. “It sure would be more fun that way, wouldn’t it?”

If his expression hadn’t been so blank, the words would have slipped clear to her soul.

“We can pretend there’s absolutely nothing there….”

Strangers. With no past, no regrets. No guilt. No ties, no connections. Only the slow curl of heat. “Can we?”

“We can do anything you want.” His eyes took on a languorous burn. “As long as you’re sure that’s really the game you want to play….”

The rhythm of her heart changed, deepened. “Jack—”

“Because trust me, if that were the case, if we were really strangers…we sure wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

All these years. All these years she’d worked to carve this man from her memory, to think of him only as a boy, a childhood crush—to ignore the influence he’d wielded over her. She’d tried not to think of the man he would have grown into—and the damage that might have been done along the way.

But here, now, standing in his utilitarian living room in the little house in the woods, with the fronts of her legs brushing his jeans, she realized the man—with his man’s eyes and man’s hurt, his man’s dare—was far more lethal than the boy.

“And I sure as hell wouldn’t be worried about from which direction Lambert is going to attack next.”

Words. That’s all they were. Soft, stealthy. But they wove through her.

“We’d be in my bed,” he said, and this time he put his hand to her chin and tilted her face to his. “Naked.”

Everything stilled. She tried to piece it all together, to draw the line from point A to point B. She’d challenged him about his wife, the past. She’d tried to make him see none of it was his fault.

But somehow he’d twisted the conversation. He’d stepped off the defensive, and gone on the prowl. Because she was too close, she realized. She’d slipped too close to the place he kept walled away. Even from himself.

Especially from himself.

“You think so?” Her mouth curved. “That’s a mighty big assumption considering it takes two—”

“My point exactly.” Watching her, his eyes so hot she instinctively swallowed, he stroked his thumb along her lower lip. “If you didn’t know me…if the past wasn’t there…there’d be no reason to say no.”

The quiet words, so excruciatingly true, jammed the breath in her throat.

“But Cami knows,” he said, and his smile was no longer predatory, but oddly gentle. “Cami Rose has always known.”

She refused to step back.

“I see you,
Camille,
” he drawled, letting his hand fall from her face. “And trust me, I know exactly who you are.”

And he didn’t sound the least bit pleased about it.

It was an odd time to smile, but she did anyway. “Keep telling yourself that, Sheriff…and one of these days you just might believe it.”

The night deepened. Off in the distance heat lightning flickered across the horizon, but no thunder followed, and no rain would come.

Jack stood at the edge of the porch with his hands around the rail, and waited. At his feet, his big yellow Lab watched intently. Beauregard’s tail swished. His eyes glowed. In his mouth he held a slobbery, chewed-up yellow Frisbee. But Jack had played enough. Any minute headlights would cut through the darkness. His deputy had called shortly before eleven. And while Russ Melancon was a rookie, not yet twenty-five, the kid had the composure of a veteran.

But for the second time that day, he’d sounded…shaken.

From the oaks surrounding the house, the cicadas kept a steady rhythm. They would let him know when Russ drew close. They let him know everything.

Susan had hated the cicadas.

Within minutes their rhythm intensified, and like clockwork, the glow of headlights cut into the darkness.

All the while, inside, Camille slept.

Jack pushed the thought aside, didn’t want to think of her curled between the sheets of his guest bed in that oversize T-shirt he’d found her wearing that morning.

Instead he waited while Russ parked his squad car then strode toward the house.

“Got it, Sheriff,” he said, hurrying up the three steps that led to the porch. “I got the laptop.”

Through the yellow glow of the light, Jack noted the black briefcase, sleek. Stylish. It alone would set someone back a nice penny. “Camille’s?”

“Found a hotel receipt in Hebert’s wallet,” Russ said. “Down in Lafourche Parish. I went over and talked to the manager…found this in the Dumpster out back.”