He would make no allowances for someone like her.
She scrambled away from him, rising to her knees at the coffin’s edge. Lewis Crompton reached out to place a hand under her elbow. Even with his help, however, clambering down in her suit skirt was going to be about as graceful an operation as a toddler escaping its crib.
“Wait,” Kane commanded. “I put you in. The least I can do is get you out.”
“You don’t have to—” Regina began.
It was too late. As his grandfather stepped back out of the way, Kane put a hand on the high wooden side and vaulted to the floor. Turning at once, he slid one arm under her knees and the other around her shoulders, then lifted with easy strength. He swung around, lowered her feet. The toes of her sensible pumps touched the floor while she rested against the taut, unyielding body of Lewis Crompton’s grandson.
She glanced up, and her gaze was snared by the mesmerizing blue of his eyes. His hold was firm, possessive. In his face, marked by the red flare of her handprint on his cheek and the scratch left by her nails across the bridge of his nose, was a host of inclinations only half-suppressed.
He was a man who knew women, she realized, knew their reactions and weaknesses and wasn’t above using them to make a point. He was well aware of what he was doing to her and deliberately prolonging it. She pushed away at once as she recognized another attempt at intimidation.
“Thank you,” she said in tones as cool and measured as she could make them.
“My pleasure, ma’am.”
He tilted his head briefly as he released her. That gesture had the same careful courtesy and hint of deferential charm that had so impressed Regina in Kane’s grandfather when Crompton had first welcomed her into his home. Regardless, she felt her hackles rise. She was being mocked by Kane Benedict. Why, she wasn’t sure, still she didn’t doubt it for a second.
This man had kissed her. It was a stunning thought. The smooth, sculpted contours of his mouth, bracketed by slashing indentations that just missed being dimples, had touched her lips. He had sampled her as a wine connoisseur might taste a new vintage. And she could not help wondering, for a flickering instant, just how he might rate her. That brief vulnerability was even more disturbing than his touch.
Turning to her host, she said crisply, “I’m afraid the whole thing was as much my fault as your grandson’s since I let my curiosity get the better of me. Forgive me for snooping?”
Kane made a soft, startled sound under his breath. It helped Regina’s feelings to know that she could throw him off stride.
“That’s very generous of you, my dear,” Lewis Crompton answered, his gray gaze twinkling as he divided his attention between her and his grandson.
“Not at all. Could we get back to the jewelry you were showing me? It makes me nervous to think of it lying around where anyone might find it.”
The older man gave a genial shake of his head. “No one here at Hallowed Ground would think of touching a piece of it. Anyway, I believe we should postpone our discussion. I don’t imagine you feel up to it just now.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” she said. “Time is important to you, or so I understood, and your collection is such a large one that I don’t think we should waste—”
“Now, now, there’s not that much of a hurry. Tomorrow or the next day will do just as well. Truth is, I don’t like the look of that bruise on your temple. It might be best if Kane ran you by the hospital emergency room, just to be sure you’re all right.”
Regina put a hand to her forehead, wincing a little as she found the sore spot. Regardless, she wasn’t some fragile Southern flower, ready to wilt at the first sign of trouble. With precision, she said, “I don’t believe that’s necessary.”
“I insist. It’s the least we can do under the circumstances.” There was a note of command in the older man’s voice as he glanced toward his grandson.
“By all means,” Kane said promptly.
“No, really. The jewelry—”
“Tomorrow will do just as well, I promise,” the older man said in calm certainty. “Let Kane drive you.”
“I couldn’t leave my rental car here.” The excuse was valid and she seized it with gratitude, since it seemed her host really was calling a halt to the appraisal.
“Someone will deliver it to wherever you’re staying, if you’ll give me the keys.” Kane put out his hand for them as if expecting her to obey without question, as though he thought he and his grandfather knew what was best for her. It was unmitigated male chauvinism, but about what she might have expected. Southern men were known for it after all.
“No, thank you,” she said through stiff lips. Swinging away, she started toward the sitting room where she had left her handbag. The swift movement made her feel dizzy and a little sick, but she kept walking. A minor concussion could be a distant possibility, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t about to let Kane Benedict control another second of her time.
“You recovered quickly, I see,” he called after her. “I’m glad your scare wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”
He was telling her he suspected she had not been as upset as she pretended. “I wasn’t scared, Mr. Benedict,” Regina said as she turned in the doorway, “just claustrophobic. There’s a difference.”
“I imagine so. You might call me Kane, so you’ll recognize the name when I check on you later.”
“Don’t bother.” The words were as close to a dismissal as she could make them.
“Oh, it’s no bother,” he said, his smile crooked as he met her gaze across the room. “No bother at all.”
He knew she didn’t want to see him, but meant to force the issue. Perhaps he thought he could shake her again, make her say something she didn’t intend. Or possibly he meant to take up his questioning where he had left off. Well, she wasn’t going to play his game. She had too much at stake. No matter what Kane Benedict thought, said, or did, he would get nothing from her. She would do the job she had been sent to Louisiana to accomplish, then she would be gone. She had no other choice.
Nor did she want one. Not now, not ever.
Swinging from the two men, she walked away. She didn’t look back.
2
Kane watched from the parlor window as Regina Dalton marched down the drive and got into her car. She moved with swift steps and no trace whatever of sexy hip sway. She had forgotten him, had no idea he might be watching her movements. Regardless, the sight of her skirt conforming to her slender form, the flash of skin above her knee as she slid into the car seat, caused a drawing sensation in his groin. That kind of instant juvenile reaction was extremely inconvenient under the circumstances. It wasn’t the right time or place and certainly not the right person. The Fates had a warped sense of humor.
“I won’t belabor the question of your misconduct,” Kane’s grandfather said as he moved to join him at the parlor window, “but I will point out that I’ve been handling my affairs for some time without your interference. If—and I do mean if—I had been about to make a valuable gift to that attractive young lady, I would consider what you just did an act of unmitigated gall.”
“I know,” Kane said in moody acceptance as he gazed after Regina Dalton’s rental car driving away.
“Another question altogether is why you believed I’d succumb to an itch for a female young enough to be my granddaughter.”
Kane sent a brief smile over his shoulder at his grandfather. “You always did like redheads.”
“She does have amazing hair, doesn’t she? So bright it makes a man want to touch it to see if he’ll get burned. Not that either of us paid much attention.”
Kane, recognizing the sly dig behind the last words, made a sound between a snort and a sigh.
“That’s what I thought.” The older man chuckled. “I could put her off so she stays around a while.”
“Not,” Kane said evenly, “on my account.”
“Too bad.” As a large yellow tomcat appeared from under a rattan table and glided f
orward to wind around his leg, the older man reached down and picked him up. Draping the animal over his arm and smoothing the fur, he went on. “You should have driven her back to her hotel.”
“I think she’d had enough of me for one day.”
“Very likely. Can’t say I blame her, either, considering the hand you had in her injuries.”
“It was that damn cat.” Kane thrust his hands into his pants pockets as he turned and leaned his backbone against the window frame.
“Samson here may have started it, but you compounded the problem. What set you off?”
Kane was silent a moment, then he said, “I came in the back way, through the kitchen. Dora told me you had someone with you. I was going to join you, but stopped a second outside the door you’d left open like a gentleman, not wanting to barge in if your business was private. Something about your guest, the way she was smiling at you, struck me as all wrong.”
“Seductive, you mean?” His grandfather’s eyes narrowed.
“It seemed that way at the time.” Kane lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “Are you sure she’s legitimate?”
“You think she might not be?” His grandfather watched him with lively interest as he stroked the huge, apparently boneless, cat.
“I don’t say I’m infallible, but I have an instinct for phonies. It goes with the built-in lie detector tucked into a corner of my brain.”
“Maybe the lady scrambled them both,” Lewis Crompton suggested blandly. “The kind of charge she packs can make all sorts of things go haywire.”
“Hell, Pops.”
“Actually, it does me good to see you’re not immune,” he went on as if Kane hadn’t spoken. “You used to be a rounder and a half, like your dad and all the rest of that Benedict crew out at the lake. Your grandmother, rest her soul, lay awake many a night when you were a teenager, worrying about what crazy-wild thing you’d do next. That was when she wasn’t laughing over your stunts.”
“Wild?”
“Wild,” Pops said with finality. “Remember the time you and your cousin Luke stole the gym teacher’s Frederick’s of Hollywood underwear and hung it from the water tower because she dared suggest Luke’s girl—April Halstead, that would have been—dressed too sexy? And what about that boat race on the lake where the loser had to cook dinner for the winners—in the nude. Your cousin Roan lost, didn’t he? That was the same summer you, Luke and Roan spent on the NASCAR circuit with that killer car the three of you hot-rodded and called The Whirlwind because it was always spinning out.”
“All right,” Kane agreed, holding up a hand. “You made your point.”
“You grew out of it….”
“With good reason.”
“True. A woman can take the wildness out of most men, but especially the Benedicts. They fall hard, and none are more faithful when they decide to settle down. Your problem was choosing the wrong female. But you went too far the other way after it ended, got downright stodgy.”
Kane gave him a warning look. His grandfather wasn’t the only one who didn’t appreciate interference in his private life.
“You can’t deny Francie did a number on you before she took herself off.”
“No,” Kane returned. “Though what it has to do with Regina Dalton, I can’t begin to guess.”
“She got to you,” his grandfather said simply, a gleam half-concealed in the swamp-fog gray of his eyes. “She touched off whatever imp of Satan it was that used to move you, make you act before you thought things through. Did my heart good to see it after all this time.”
“That wasn’t the idea.”
“I know it wasn’t. You judged that young woman and found her guilty between one heartbeat and the next. That’s not like you at all.”
Kane let that pass. “I suppose you checked her credentials before you let her waltz in here?”
“Did that,” the other man agreed with a nod. “She came highly recommended, has worked with the big-name jewelers and auction houses, particularly in the past year or so. She’s careful, she’s thorough, known as one of the best at authenticating Victorian pieces. I feel lucky she was able to fit me into her schedule on such short notice.”
“And why,” Kane asked as he watched his grandfather, “was time so important? It wouldn’t be because you’re in a hurry to raise money?”
The older man grimaced. “I wondered when we’d get to that.”
“I imagine so. Last I heard, Gran’s jewelry was to be handed down.”
“You’re our only grandchild, in case you haven’t noticed. You don’t seem in any hurry to provide a wife or great-granddaughters to wear cameo earbobs, so handing them down doesn’t look likely any time soon.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Kane warned. “You’re selling the collection to pay the legal fees for the suit, the fees due me.”
Lewis Crompton set the cat on the sofa back nearby before he answered. “That it’s your firm I owe the money to has no bearing. I take care of my obligations.”
“Not like this.”
“I don’t think that’s for you to decide.”
“Not even when it’s my children being robbed?”
Lewis Crompton gave him a grave stare. “Unfair, Kane. Besides, there’s your partner to consider and that female paralegal you hired for this case. Not to mention the Benson girl who answers the phone for you.”
“Melville and I do have other clients,” Kane said shortly.
“Sure you do, but you’re not chasing around all over gathering evidence for them, now are you? Or getting ready to face a barrage of high-powered New York legal eagles for their sake? I won’t have you paying for my defense out of your own pocket. That’s final.”
Lewis Crompton was as proud and stubborn an old coot as had ever lived. Kane admired and respected him for it; the last thing he wanted was to hurt him. Still, he couldn’t stand by and see him reduced to selling the family jewelry. “It’s not going to bankrupt me.”
“I know that, but I don’t intend to be a charity case.”
Their gazes caught and held, gray eyes and dark blue, boring into each other. Neither would back off. That was until Kane finally swore and curled his fingers into a fist. “If I ever get my hands on the greedy little bastard doing this to you, I’ll kill him.”
“Fine,” his grandfather said dryly, “and I’ll bury him, give him a royal send off to show him how it’s done.”
Kane spared a tight smile. “Serve him right, to be put six feet under in one of his own cheap tin caskets.”
“At the very least. Though I’m not the only one he’s pushing to the wall.”
The attitude was typical of his grandfather. He was also right. The farmers and truck drivers and field workers up and down the delta were worried about the prices the big funeral service company would charge once Crompton’s Funeral Home was out of business. Sam Bailey over at the feed store had mentioned it just yesterday. It was a crime, Sam said, to make people mortgage their futures to bury their loved ones. He was behind Lewis Crompton a hundred percent in the trial coming up.
Crompton’s Funeral Home was a part of the community, an established tradition since 1858. It had come into being when a great-grandfather who’d run a livery stable had taken a glass-sided hearse with black plumes at its four corners in trade for a used buckboard. He had soon discovered he could make a little extra by transporting the departed to their final resting places. One thing had led to another until he’d become a full-fledged undertaker.
As generation after generation of Cromptons cared for those who had gone on, the family became more intimately involved with the events that made up the lives of their friends and neighbors. To provide service, ease grief, and help conceal the deepest secrets and improprieties brought out by death became a sacred and immutable trust.
No faceless funeral conglomerate could ever hope to deliver that same degree of discretion and comfort. The organization headed by Gervis Berry had mounted a huge public relations campaign designed
to convince customers of the quality of its organization, but the truth was, it was a sham. Close inspection revealed shoddy merchandise, cut-rate services, and underhanded practices as the order of the day.
Melville, Kane’s partner, was particularly incensed by the practices he was turning up in the course of his investigation. Melville was African-American, and many of the more bald-faced offenses of Berry Association, Inc. seemed to be directed toward his people. Fending off the takeover bid against Crompton’s Funeral Home had become a crusade for him. Not only had he accepted the firm’s continuing out-of-pocket expenses without complaint, but often footed the bills himself.
That didn’t make it right, of course. Not in Lewis Crompton’s eyes.
“I’ve been thinking,” the older man said, breaking the silence. “Maybe we should offer a settlement.”
“Now? Just as things are getting started?” Kane couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.
“Can’t think of a better time.”
Kane watched him a moment. “Because of the money, I suppose?”
“Because it’s dragging on too long, getting too complicated. I don’t like what it’s doing to you, either. You look as if you haven’t slept in a week.”
“And you’re wondering if I’m going off the deep end, thanks to the little incident just now.”
“I didn’t say that,” his grandfather protested. “From what I can tell, you and Melville have Gervis Berry dead to rights. I think we can win this thing. But I’m not a vindictive man, and I’ve better things to do with my days than spend them in court. I’d like to offer a fair settlement. You could tell Berry I’ll drop my suit in return for his pledge, in writing, that he’ll go away and leave us alone here in Turn-Coupe. Plus enough to reimburse you and Melville and make good the damage he’s done, say a couple of million.”
“I don’t think he’ll go for it, Pops. Berry has no idea of fairness in the sense you mean. Any offer to settle will be seen as weakness, and he’ll move in for the kill.”
Kane Page 2
