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Authors: Jenna Mills

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Suspense

Sins of the Storm (9 page)

BOOK: Sins of the Storm
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“Never thought what?”

It would have been easy to turn away toward the window. To focus on the shadows of the trees shifting against the night sky.

But that was the easy way out, and Camille was done with easy. “When I write a book, I don’t do it from the outside looking in.” Couldn’t. “I go to where it happened. I ask questions.” And got door after door slammed in her face. “I go to the police and request files, I pored over every detail, taking pictures and notes, absorbing….”

Absorbing.

“And they just look at me,” she said, and absolutely refused to let her voice break again. “The cops, the lawyers. They look at me like I’m the lowest form of low, like I’m scum or a pariah, that I get off wallowing in other people’s pain….”

While on the inside, she felt it all, every blow. Every stab. Every gunshot. She felt and she…absorbed.

“And maybe I even understand,” she said. “They don’t know me. They don’t know who I am or what I’m about.” That too many nights when she closed her eyes, she could still see her father slumping to the floor. “So it’s easy for them to pass judgment. It’s easy for them to condemn.”

Around them the night shifted in a constant array of shadows, but Jack didn’t move—she could barely tell that he breathed.

“But I never thought,” she said, careful to keep her voice calm and level, quiet, “you would look at me the same way.”

He winced. It was violent and visceral, and it touched her somehow, made her ache in ways she’d never wanted to feel again.

“But I should have,” she said. And then she turned, and did what she’d known she would do all along.

She walked away.

She can’t move. Everything is still, frozen.

Crouched there in the shadows, she wants to scream. Her brother is home, his best friend. Her mother. They’ll come. They’ll wake her up. Jack will make it go away….

The words chilled. He looked up from the laptop, didn’t want to see. To know. To remember. But he’d already walked away three different times. He’d fed Beauregard and done a quick walk of the grounds, secured the house. He’d flipped on the television, checked in with Russ and Hank.

Poured two fingers of scotch that he wouldn’t let himself drink.

Kept going back for more.

There’s a door to the backyard. If she can just get to it—

She,
goddamn it. They were Camille’s words, Camille’s life. But she used the third person as if she spoke of someone altogether different….

She does. She yanks it open and runs into the rain.

Get back here, girl!

But she keeps running. She can’t go back…can’t let the man who killed her father catch her. He’ll kill her, too. She knows that, feels the cold certainty of that with each step she takes.

Spanish moss slaps at her; mud slips between her toes. The lightning keeps flashing, the thunder shaking the sky. But she never slows. She knows this land. Jack has shown her. He’ll come for her. That’s the thought that drives her. Jack and her brother. They’ll find her—make it all go away.

Make sure the bad man pays…

Jack shoved from the small table and stood, sent the chair crashing to the floor as he pivoted and strode for the spare room, put his hand to the doorknob.

And turned.

She lay there, goddamn it. She lay on her side, in his spare bed. Sleeping.

Quietly—nice and freaking slow—he closed the door and walked away.

 

There were no prints at his grandmother’s, or Camille’s childhood home. The only tire tracks belonged to Saura’s convertible and Jack’s squad car. There was nothing out of place, nothing broken, nothing to indicate anyone other than Jack and Camille had been at the house the night before. If he hadn’t been there himself, Jack would have thought—

She’s delusional…
he’d heard the principal of their high school say.
Makes up things….

A wild child,
the woman in the trailer next door had said.

Why, if I didn’t know better,
the sheriff had once remarked,
I’d think she has a—

Death wish.

Jack shoved aside his fourth cup of coffee. She couldn’t go anywhere, he knew that. Unless she went on foot. Russ was stationed at the end of the drive. Beauregard was out front. But—

Death wish.

The words, the memory of the chilling passages he’d read the night before, pushed him to the front door. He kept trying to think of her as she’d once been, Gabe’s little sister, freckles and pigtails and all. But the truth was she hadn’t been that girl since the night she’d seen her father die. She’d changed after that, started taking chances, daring her family to stop her. They’d caught her drinking, experimenting—

Kiss me, Jack…teach me how.

He’d smelled the beer on her breath, but he’d also seen the stabbing desperation in her eyes. That’s why he’d never told Gabe. That’s why he’d tried to help her himself…even as he’d wanted to turn her over his knee or lock her away. The writing had been on the wall. She was on a collision course with trouble.

Yanking at the screen door, he strode onto the porch. No matter how many years had passed, little had changed. It wasn’t the senselessness of her father’s death that drove her, but the fact that no one took her seriously. No one believed her. No one had stood by—

Beauregard came bounding from the tree line—

Alone.

Chapter 9

F
or a cruel second, everything stopped. Jack’s heart slammed hard. He started to run as the moment slipped back into focus and he saw the bright yellow Frisbee in his dog’s mouth…and heard Camille laugh.

“Good boy!” she praised as the dog raced up and dropped the toy, panting. Camille hugged him, then launched the Frisbee toward the pines.

With an excited bark, Beauregard took off.

In the middle of an overgrown flower bed, Camille knelt with gloves on her hands and a stack of weeds by her knees. With the early-morning sun raining down on her, she picked up the rusted pruning sheers and went to work on an out-of-control rosebush.

Roses, Jack…please. We have to have roses….

The memory stopped him. He stared at Camille excavating the rosebushes his wife had insisted on planting. She’d tended them daily….

That should have been his first clue. When the roses had stopped blooming, when they’d started growing tall and spindly. When the black spots had overtaken the lush green. He should have known, should have realized that Susan had stopped caring.

He saw now the glow on Camille’s face as she again greeted Beauregard and launched the yellow disc. Again went to work on restoring the roses.

The wind blew, he knew that. He could see the Spanish moss swaying. For the first time in over a year, the warmth rushed up against his face.

He felt only cold.

Quietly, he stepped from the porch and went back inside. Shut the door.

 

She knew the second he left. She knelt with her shirt caught on a thorn and tried to breathe, told herself not to turn. Not to look. But she glanced over her shoulder anyway, and found the porch deserted. The way she’d known it would be.

Frowning, she looked up as Beauregard dashed back with the Frisbee. “Such a good boy,” she told him, taking the well-chewed toy and tossing it toward the trees.

The temptation to follow was strong. She could lose herself in the woods, work her way back to the highway. There she could hitch a ride to her rental. Jack would notice her gone, and he would follow. But she’d not said a word about the pictures she’d taken of the map. She could start looking without him.

She stood and pulled off the gloves. She could. She could slip into the woods. She could follow her father’s map. No one would know.

Beauregard barked excitedly and came galloping back.

“Come on, boy,” she said, turning to the house. Because it was the smart thing to do, she told herself. Jack was a cop. Lambert was getting desperate. If by some chance he followed, tried to stop her—

That’s why she went back into the house. She knew what happened when people took unnecessary risks—she’d written about the outcomes too many times: the serial rapist who coerced women into opening their doors by claiming to be looking for a lost puppy named Sam. And the woman in San Jose, the one who’d agreed to help a crippled man into his van. She’d been brutally assaulted, used as a sex toy for five days until her body had given out.

That’s why Camille gave Beauregard a smooch, then walked into the stillness. Because it was the smart thing to do. The safe thing.

Not because she couldn’t stop thinking about the gleam in Jack’s eyes when he’d stood in the shadows of his living room.

We’d be in my bed…naked.

The quiet drew her to the kitchen, where she found him at the sink. In his left hand he held an old mug with a hand-painted crawfish on it. His right hand was in a fist. His athletic shorts were gray and baggy, his tank top white.

Even standing that way, all alone and isolated, he made her blood hum.

“It was hers, wasn’t it?” she asked.

He stiffened.

“The rose garden.” The one neglected to the point of abuse. “It was your wife’s.”

He put the mug on the counter, but did not turn. His shoulders, so much wider and wearier than all those years ago, rose with his breath. “Yes.”

The weeds had been everywhere, their roots deep and tangled. The bushes themselves had been spindly, the leaves covered by black spots and aphids, the stalks depleted by dead wood.

“Is that why it bothered you to see me out there?” The question was quiet, even though there was nothing quiet inside her. If not for what Saura had told her, Camille would have had no idea about Jack’s wife. There was no trace of her—not in the house in which she’d once lived, the garden she’d once tended. The man who’d once pledged to love her forever.

The reality of that scraped. Not that Jack had asked another woman to be his wife, but that he could erase her from his life so completely. “Because I was trespassing on hallowed ground?”

A strangled sound broke from his throat. He twisted toward her, came close to stopping her breath with the shadows in his eyes and the nasty scar on his right thigh. “It’s not hallowed ground.”

“Then why?” Questions surged. Why wouldn’t Jack talk about his wife? Why had he abandoned her garden, something that had clearly once meant a lot to her—the trio of weathered angel statues told Camille that. And the poem on a rock.

And most troubling of all, why didn’t she see even a trace of pain in his eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

The slight twist to his mouth was the only warning she got. “Just what is it you want me to say, sugar?” Not
’tite chat.
“You want me to bring you some ice-cold lemonade and talk about plans for your book? Just how much detail you plan to—”

Frustration nudged in. “Jack—”

His smile was slow, tortured. “Or maybe you’d rather not talk at all….”

Before the tactic had worked. She’d gotten too close, and he’d chosen to push her away by making it clear what he wanted to do with her—if she’d been a stranger.

But she wasn’t a stranger—and she was done being manipulated.

“Now that’s a real darn good idea,” she said, stepping toward him—and had to wonder if he realized he was the one who’d taken a step back.

With a quick glance around the utilitarian kitchen, she gestured toward one of the rail-back chairs at the table. “Sit.”

The planes of his face, so wide and classically Cajun, tightened. “Now why would I want to do that?”

“Because I asked you to.”

“Then what?” The clipped words were hard. The gleam in his eye was not. “You gonna tie me up?”

“Do I need to?”

His gaze met hers, and for a dizzying moment all those walls between them, those tacked together of regret and guilt, the sins of a long-ago storm and the threats still lurking in the shadows, fell away. There was only a man and a woman, and the slow burn of awareness: the rules had changed. The dynamics had shifted. They weren’t children anymore.

And the games they played had irrevocable consequences.

“Fair is fair,” he drawled with a wicked little smile, then blew her mind by doing as she asked. He lowered his big body into the small chair. It was almost as if he wanted—

Almost as if he wanted to find out what came next as badly as she did.

She stepped toward him. “Now turn around.”

His tank top fell loosely against his shoulders. “Why’s that?” he asked. “You gonna do something you don’t want me to see?” The brown of his eyes deepened. Darkened. “Or maybe…there’s something
you
don’t want to see?”

Her heart kicked. She knew what he was doing, playing the game he’d started the night before. Chicken, they’d called it as children. Get on a collision course and start walking, running, see who would blink first. Who would turn away.

Who would run.

“Maybe I want you to let go.” To see if he could. From her earliest memories he’d always needed to be in control. That was nothing new. But there was a jagged edge to the need now, a broken desperation that had not been there before. It was almost as if—

It wasn’t
almost as if.
It
was.
All along the interstate stood trees, big, tall, most of them bent. Only a few stood as they had before, unmoved despite the carnage around them. They’d endured and they’d survived, while so many around them had fallen.

“But you can’t do that, can you? You can’t let go, not even for a second…not even to enjoy.”

The change was subtle. His eyes darkened, went languorous and sleepy. “A man doesn’t have to let go to enjoy,
cher.

Cher.
The lazy, smoky endearment did vicious things to the point she was trying to make.

“You might be surprised.” Then, while he sat there in that small chair, his big body twisted toward hers, she lifted her hands to his shoulders.

“You’re tense.” Hot. She worked her fingers against the corded muscles of his neck and his back, the way she’d done so many times before. Then there had been the excitement, the giddiness of a girl with dreams.

Now the burn streaked to her bone.

Once this man had been a dreamer. Once, Jacques Savoie, the skinny kid with the hand-me-down clothes and worn-out tennis shoes, had talked of the future. He was going to join the Air Force. He was going to serve his country. He’d smiled and he’d laughed, even when Camille had found him standing outside her kitchen, listening to her mother and father arguing about Jack’s father.
He’s no good,
her mother always said.
Cares more about that ridiculous stained glass window than his own kid….

A dreamer,
Camille’s father had corrected. Gator Savoie was a man who believed in pursuing his dreams, his passion…. He didn’t believe in boundaries, in quitting. He didn’t believe in limits.

But then Camille’s father died, and Gator walked out of a bar and into the fog. Some thought he was dead, by his own hand or someone else’s. Others thought he was running. Hiding. A coward.

At the time, Jack had been fifteen, grown-up enough to step forward when his mother’s world crumbled. He never complained, just stepped in to steady the ship. He’d worked at the grocery and mowed lawns, did odd jobs around town; he’d cared for his mother after she found a lump in her breast. But all the while, he’d never stopped dreaming about flying F-16s. Never stopped believing it would happen.

And he never, not once, stopped caring.

Not for his mother—not for Camille. Even when she’d pushed him. Even when she’d lashed out. Even when she’d tried to tempt him, hoping she could make him see her as something other than his best friend’s little sister. She’d offered him back rubs, had run her hands along his spine, just as she did now. The more responsibility he heaped onto his shoulders, the more desperate she’d become to…She didn’t know what.

It was only that one night that she’d gone too far.

From outside the kitchen window the air-conditioning kicked on, and against her arms Camille felt the rush of air. But the heat, the stillness, deepened.

Jacques Savoie had gone after his dreams, but he’d come home without them.

And deep inside, even though she’d promised herself she would never let herself be vulnerable to this man again, that she would walk into town, then walk right back out, Camille wanted to know why.

“You have to let go.” The words were quiet, gentle. The pressure of her fingertips was not. “Jacques…you have to let go.”

To quit treating her as if she were the enemy.

“Breathe,” she murmured, using her thumbs to release a knot beneath his left shoulder blade. “Quit trying to carry everything on your shoulders.”

The rough sound was the only warning she got. He closed his eyes and dropped his head, almost seemed to sag beneath the weight he did not want anyone else to see. Quietly she accepted the little surrender and kept on working, squeezing and rubbing against his back. There were scars, she noted. Scars she could feel with her fingers, and those she felt with her heart.

Both on the outside, and the inside.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” she told him, but as soon as the words left her mouth, the bitter aftertaste of a lie set in.

Everything was not going to be okay. She would write her book. She would do whatever it took to make sure Marcel Lambert went down. And then, for the first time in two decades, she would be free. Doors would finally close, the final chapter would be written. She’d be able to move on, move forward.

But Jack…

She closed her eyes and slid her hands along the warmth of his flesh, felt her throat tighten. Hard cords of tension riddled his back. She worked against them, tried to make them loosen.
Let go…

“Lower.”

The muttered word drifted through her as if somehow he’d turned the tables while she closed her eyes, and now he was the one who touched. In places she didn’t want to be touched. She opened her eyes and swallowed hard, slid her hands toward his lower back. “Here?”

“Lower.” It was more a rasp than a word, stilling her hands.

“Jack—”

“Not yet,” he murmured. “You’re not quite there yet, darlin’.”

Heat licked deep, unleashing the little voice inside, the one that shouted for her to step back. “Where?” Her throat burned on the question. She looked at him seated in the rail-back chair, his head bowed forward. “Where do you want me?”

He twisted toward her, all but eviscerated her with the slow burn in his eyes. “This isn’t about what I want, sugar. This is all about you.”

Everything inside of her stilled.

“You want in, right?” Sunlight glinted through the window, but shadows fell against the bruise of his temple. “You want inside. You want to know where it hurts. Isn’t that what this is all about?”

She knew where it hurt. “You make it sound like a crime.”

“What then?” he asked in that same husky, lazy bedroom voice. “You find the weak spot, and then what? You going to fix me? Make everything okay?”

Her throat tightened. “It’s not weakness—”

Nothing prepared her for his laugh. It rumbled from his throat, and came horribly close to shattering her heart. “Tell me something, sugar. Has this worked in the past?”

This time she did retreat. And this time she did let go.

“Is this how you do all that research you’re acclaimed for?” he asked. “This how you find out all those dirty little secrets no one wants you to know?”

BOOK: Sins of the Storm
9.42Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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