Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle

by Lisa Jackson

  “You don’t trust anyone.”

  She considered. He wasn’t too far off the truth, but she hadn’t always been so cynical or jaded. Although she’d never been one of those upbeat, innocent Pollyanna types, there was a time, a time before she’d gotten involved with Cole Dennis, when trust had come much more easily. Bits of her memory might be foggy or missing, but she hadn’t forgotten that.

  “Deeds is a good guy.”

  “If you say so.” She wasn’t convinced. The defense lawyer was just too damned slick in his tailor-made suits and expensive shoes. And then there was all that talk from ADA Johnson about how Deeds would, if given the chance, tear Eve’s testimony to ribbons. Nope, she didn’t like him.

  The timer dinged, and, using an old oven mitt, Eve extracted the steaming cup from the small oven then handed the mug and mitt to Cole. “Sorry. It’s hot.”

  “Thanks.” He blew across the cup. “What did the police say about the newspaper clippings?”

  “They think whoever planted them in my car might have been trying to tell me that I could be Faith Chastain’s long-lost child.”

  “What?” He held his cup in midair. “What long-lost child?”

  She explained. He already knew that she was adopted but hadn’t heard the latest speculation. “Isn’t that a bit of a leap?” he asked. “From clippings to missing daughter?” He took a sip from his cup. “That…that’s too out there. Who would know that information? No, I think this has to do with your dad’s murder and the fact that Faith was a patient at the hospital when he was on staff.”

  “There’re only two ways to find out.”

  “Two ways?” he asked.

  “Well, I could sit around and wait for the DNA test results, or I could go out to the campus of Our Lady and see if there’s anyone there who might know something.”

  “The hospital’s been closed for years.”

  “But the convent’s still open, and I’m willing to bet some of the nuns who worked at the hospital might still be alive and living there.” She walked to the drawer where she’d put the envelope holding the photocopies of the clippings. As he sipped his coffee, she sorted through them. “Let’s see…. Okay, here we go. This one”—she handed the sheet to Cole—“quotes Sister Rebecca Renault, who is now the Reverend Mother. I remember her from the hospital.”

  Cole’s eyebrows drew together as he scanned the article.

  “I think I’m going to try and talk to her,” Eve said slowly.

  “You believe she’ll remember something?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot.”

  To prove her point, she picked up her cell phone, called information, and was connected to the convent, where a secretary told her that the Reverend Mother’s schedule was full for the next several days but that if she called back at the first of the following week, something might be arranged.

  “Can you have the Reverend Mother call me back?” Eve asked, not about to be put off.

  “Of course. She usually returns calls before Vespers, but today she has appointments all afternoon. I’ll see if she can get back to you tomorrow.”

  “That would be great,” Eve said and gave the secretary her phone number. She hung up, feeling disappointed.

  “Struck out?”

  “Not yet.” Tapping her fingers on the counter, she added, “But close.”

  “Join the club.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I didn’t find anything on your father’s computer. No information.”

  “So much for us playing Nancy Drew.”

  He drained his cup, stood, and set it in the sink. “Speak for yourself. I’m not giving up.”

  “Fine, Nancy, what’s your next move?”

  “My next move? After you call me Nancy?” Cole smiled at her in surprise.

  Eve felt the change in atmosphere between them and suddenly wished she hadn’t been so open and teasing. “I just meant, what do you plan to do next?”

  “I don’t know. Give me a minute.”

  They stared at each other. Eve drew a breath. Oh, she was in big trouble.

  He took a step forward and she said, “Don’t.”

  “It’s still there, isn’t it, Eve?”

  “No. I don’t remember.”

  “Sure you do.”

  She held her hands up. “No…no…”

  Cole crowded into her space. She told herself not to lift her eyes, not to look at him, NOT TO DO ANYTHING, but she slowly raised her gaze.

  “Yes,” he said. Then he pulled her against him and before she could utter another word of protest, pressed coffee-laced lips to hers.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kissing Eve was a mistake. He knew it instantly. He knew it before it happened, but he hadn’t been able to stop. Touching her, holding her tight against him, hearing her heart beating so close to his own, feeling her breasts crushed against his chest, tasting her, for God’s sake—all of it was a colossal error in judgment.

  Colossal!

  But it had been such a long time since he’d felt her bones melt as they kissed, and when he slowly, steadily walked her backward so that her spine was pressed against the wall and her arms surrounded his neck, he couldn’t breathe.

  “This is…this is wrong,” she whispered when he finally lifted his head.

  “Yep.”

  “We shouldn’t. I mean…we just can’t.”

  “Uh-huh.” He kissed her again and lost himself in the feel of her. She closed her eyes and moaned almost imperceptibly. Through her T-shirt, he felt the soft, pliant muscles of her back, the indentation of her spine. His fingers dipped lower, into that smooth curve and just below the waistband of her jeans.

  Heat sizzled through his blood.

  Desire pounded in his ears.

  He remembered making love to her. The power. The passion. Sometimes teasing and laughing, almost girlish, other times all feminine, nearly feline seduction, Eve had always been passionate.

  He remembered the time he’d come home and found her waiting for him in the bed, and when he’d stripped his clothes off to join her, she’d laughed and run to the shower, already warm and steaming when he’d caught her and had lifted her up to make love to her with her shoulders pressed to the tile…. And the time they’d been hiking, cresting a mountain ridge, and all she’d had to do was turn, her hair catching in the sunlight, her eyes squinting up at him, her breasts heaving from the exertion of the climb, her lips curving upward in invitation…

  But now, here, in her grandmother’s kitchen, he kissed her hard and felt her response. Familiar. Tempting. Oh so arousing.

  One hand tangled in her short curls, pulling her head back, bowing her neck as he kissed her at the base of her throat.

  Desire thundered through him.

  He found the button of her faded Levis, popped it open. The zipper hissed downward with the slightest of pressure. And then he was cupping her, fingers brushing silky panties.

  “Oh God!” Her eyes flew open. She blinked, and the arms surrounding his neck stiffened. “Cole. No…oh no.” She pushed away from him and stared at him in horror. “We can not go there! Oh my God, what was I thinking?”

  “You weren’t.”

  “And neither were you.” Stepping away from him, she rezipped her pants, buttoned them, and straightened the hem of her T-shirt. “No way. I can’t do this. I just…can’t!”

  He raked a hand through his hair and willed his half-masted erection to relax. “If you expect me to apologize…”

  She looked up at him, her aquamarine eyes dark with desire, her cheeks still flushed. “Apologize? No. I’m not blaming you. For God’s sake, Cole, I’m not some whimpering virgin going to point a finger at you. You know that. You felt my response.” She drew a breath and said in self-condemnation, “I wanted to go to bed with you, to lose myself, to just end this nightmare for a while too, but considering everything…” She threw up a hand, then finger-combed her short hair.

  “Considering everything.” He ha
d to agree with her, but damn, he wanted her. His stupid cock wasn’t taking the hint, and he turned his back on her and forced his mind to a different place. A darker and more dangerous place. The reason he was here.

  “I spent last night thinking,” he said. “Whatever is going on, it’s dangerous and we’re both involved. Someone, and I’ll be damned if I know who, is making certain we’re in this together.”

  She nodded and, as the cat wandered into the room, picked him up and stroked his long fur.

  “So it only makes sense to me that we should fight it together.”

  “How?” she asked, lines appearing between her eyebrows.

  “I’m not sure yet. But someone sent you clippings about Faith Chastain. Someone followed you from Atlanta to do it. Someone killed your father and made damned sure that I’d show up there.” She nodded again, pensive. “What made you leave Atlanta when you did, Eve?”

  “It was time to go. I’d really worn out my welcome. Kyle and Anna Maria weren’t getting along, and I felt that I was exacerbating an already bad situation.”

  “It had nothing to do with my release?”

  “Not directly, no. I knew you were supposed to be getting out, yes, but wasn’t certain as to the day.”

  “Did you call your father and tell him you were on your way home?”

  “Not that day, but I’d called him sometime the week before, I think. I can’t remember the exact date.” The cat wriggled in her hands, and she let him hop to the floor. Samson shot like a streak to the door, pacing and meowing.

  “So only you, your brother, and your sister-in-law knew for certain that you were leaving?” Cole asked.

  “Even Kyle wasn’t sure, I don’t think. I’d been talking about it and had one bag packed, but the morning I woke up and thought ‘I’m outta here,’ he wasn’t around. Anna said he ran to the store.”

  “What about friends or neighbors? Did you phone anyone and tell them you were coming back?”

  “No, but my physical therapist, Nita, she was aware that I was moving.” Eve walked to the door of the mudroom and opened it. Samson shot outside.

  Cole looked away, didn’t want to concentrate on the way the denim of her jeans fit around her ass. He grabbed a chair at the kitchen table, twirled it, and straddled the back. “Anyone else?”

  She shut the door then returned to the kitchen, where she started making more coffee. “Probably my shrink, a guy named Calvin Byrd.” Glancing over her shoulder at him, she rolled her eyes. “I got his name from Anna Maria. A mistake. I saw him a couple of times then stopped. I told him I’d locate someone down here if I thought I needed a session. He wasn’t all that cool about it. Thought I was in major denial, which maybe I was.” She rinsed out the pot, filled it, then poured the water into the reservoir of the machine. “That’s about it, I think. Anna could have told her friends, I suppose.”

  “Whoever left you the clippings was ready for you. Waiting. Have you seen that truck again?”

  She found her bag of coffee beans. “I think so, but I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Yesterday, after I left the police station, but…I tried to double back and get behind him for a better look and maybe get the numbers of his license plate, but it didn’t happen. I lost him.” She cast him a rueful smile as she poured beans into the grinder. “I guess it’s me who’s not cut out to be Nancy Drew.”

  She pressed a button, and the screaming, whirling sound of coffee beans being pulverized destroyed any chance of conversation.

  “I just don’t understand what the hell’s going on,” she said once the grinder was silent again.

  “Neither do I.” Cole rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m going to talk to the police. Maybe later today. Whenever Deeds can arrange it. I don’t know what’s going on, Eve. But someone made damned sure that I was at your father’s house the other night. I think it’s time I came clean.”

  “Good.” She was relieved. “And in the meantime?”

  “As I said, let’s pool our resources.” He walked over to her as she lined the coffeemaker with a paper filter and poured in the dark powder. “I don’t like it that someone’s following you, breaking into your car.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “So I think I should camp out here.”

  “No!” She spun so quickly she knocked into the coffeemaker, and water sloshed onto the counter. “You’re kidding, right?” When he didn’t respond, she laughed, grabbed a paper towel from a roll sitting on the counter, and began blotting up the spill. “You can’t ‘camp out’ here, for God’s sake! What do you think you can do, protect me? Oh, Cole, think about it. I was the one who said you tried to kill me.”

  “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to believe!”

  “Eve…”

  “All right. Yes, I don’t think you would want to hurt me. I don’t think I ever really thought that, but when I go back to that night and concentrate…I see your face and a gun that fires.” She finished wiping the counter and tossed the soggy towel into the trash. “But you still can’t stay here. That’s out of the question.”

  “We’re going to have to have a little faith in each other if we’re going to do this.”

  “That works two ways, Counselor.” As Mr. Coffee gurgled and spat, she folded her arms under her breasts. “I wasn’t involved with anyone other than you,” she said positively. “But the police say I wasn’t raped during my blackout period, so…” She shuddered. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. But I don’t remember anyone but you, Cole. I was in love with you. I hoped to marry you and…” Her eyebrows slammed together as she studied a coffee stain on the tile. “I never cheated on you.” She rubbed at the stain then lifted her gaze to meet his. “I would know if I had, wouldn’t I?”

  It killed Cole to see her indecision. Looking past his own anger and betrayal, he suddenly understood how truly devastating her memory loss was for her.

  But Eve, hearing her own confusion, seemed to shut down, cut herself away emotionally. “If this is going to work, we both have to start over,” she said briskly.

  He nodded. Resisted the urge to pull her close to him again. “I know.”

  “It’ll take trust, and that’s a pretty tall order for each of us.”

  “The way I figure it, we don’t have much choice.”

  She handed him a cup of coffee. “Okay then.”

  “Okay.”

  Cole gazed at her over the rim of his mug. A tenuous pact had been formed between them, an alliance, whether Eve realized it completely or not.

  They were together!

  Eve and her lover.

  From his vantage point on the property of the vacant house whose yard abutted the grand Renner home, he had a perfect view of the kitchen. He rarely dared come this close, but he’d taken a chance, been drawn to stop as he drove past when he noticed the battered old Jeep: Cole Dennis’s rig.

  Through the watery glass he saw him kiss her, force himself upon her, and she, of course, did little to resist.

  His nostrils flared. He chewed nervously on a fingernail. He swore that, even from this distance, he could smell them together, the stink of their rutting, the reek of their sex. His skin wrinkled in revulsion, and the stench of it burned his airways.

  Eve the princess.

  Now Eve the whore.

  Sensual, flirting, and dangerously cunning.

  How she used her feminine wiles so indiscriminately!

  And yet he wanted her.

  Desperately.

  Achingly.

  A bad girl. The kind his mother had warned him against.

  If he closed his eyes, he could hear his mother’s voice as clearly as if she were standing next to him beneath the protective branches of this willow tree.

  “You mustn’t want her! She’s unclean! A whore! Spawned by Satan!”

  Though Mama had been dead for years, he still heard her recriminations, her dire warnings, her heartfelt prayers, her quiet sobs…
r />   Hers had been a low, soft voice, one that on the surface seemed kind and caring. But beneath the warm, dulcet tones there had always lurked a warning. Strict. Insistent. But sugarcoated with a false Southern gentility. A voice that had permeated his days and nights and scraped through his brain.

  “Oh, sweetie, don’t you ever go near those girls,” she’d admonished him time and time again. At school, where the nuns had still worn voluminous habits, on the playground where other children were laughing and running and screaming in delight, in the car as they drove. An image from his youth flashed behind his eyes.

  He’d been eight years old, and she was dragging him through the city to mass at St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter.

  He remembered standing in front of the old church, feeling small as the three whitewashed spires knifed upward against a cloudless summer sky. Horse-drawn carriages creaked by, big wheels turning, horseshoes ringing on the cobblestones. People were bustling around the Cathedral and Jackson Square.

  His mother caught him looking at a curlyhaired girl who had been about his age. The girl, wearing a yellow sundress and matching ribbons in her hair, was walking with her mother across Jackson Square, pausing at the statue of Andrew Jackson upon his rearing horse to look back over her shoulder and smile at him, her brown tresses bouncing.

  His mother had intercepted the glance and recognized pure evil in the girl’s innocent brown eyes.

  “Stay away from her,” his mother had said, spinning him around to face her tall, trembling, furious form. “She’s one of them.” She hissed this into his ear, and he’d smelled the scent of the same perfume she always wore, a cloying scent he could remember decades later.

  “Do you hear me, Son? That girl will make you want to do vile, nasty things that will take you down a path that leads straight to the depths of hell. They’re all sinners. Oh, I know they look pretty and innocent. Believe me, I know. But they are all the same. Never, Son, do you hear me, never trust them. They are all like Eve with the apple in the Garden of Eden. Born of original sin. You understand, don’t you? You must never, never touch them.” Mama had shifted, placing her body directly in his line of vision, casting a cool shadow over him. Bending slightly so that she was peering through the black lace of her hat, she had glared hard then, her eyes wide and unblinking, her pupils mere pinpoints in pale blue irises. “Girls like that one are heathens, honey. Daughters of Lucifer. Do you hear me?” Her glossy red lips pulled into a tight smile. Her fingers dug into his arm so deeply, the sharp, polished nails had pinched his skin, painfully etching tiny white crescents on his flesh, nearly drawing blood.