by Ann Major
Logan wished to hell he couldn’t remember the way slanting sunlight had washed Cici’s breasts with light and shadow as she’d stood in her pirogue the first day he’d come home. When she’d seen him, she’d jumped out of the boat and had run into the woods, her long legs flying gracefully. When he’d followed her, she’d said hi and her dark eyes had sparkled with such joy, she’d bewitched him. After that, she’d been too shy to say more, and, hell, so had he.
Logan’s eyes narrowed, and Noonoon changed tack.
“She only be here a week, Miss Cici, and Mr. Pierre, he already plum crazy about her.”
“He told me,” Logan said coldly, imagining Cici preying on the vulnerable old man.
“He been doing real good. I know you wants him to move to New Orleans and all…”
“To a fabulous assisted living arrangement near my house that I can personally supervise.”
“But places like that aren’t home, and we all know how busy you be. How often could you get yourself over to see him? Mr. Pierre, he be happy here. Old people at those homes just sit and stare.”
“You can’t take care of him day and night. You have your own family.”
Since the house was open to the public, Noonoon’s main job was as a housekeeper, not a caregiver to his grandfather. She’d agreed to help with him temporarily.
“Well, now that Miss Cici is here…”
“She’s not staying.”
“Well, she sing and play the piano for him every day. She talk to him. Most nights they eat dinner together. She cooks. You remember how she loves to cook.”
“The way she runs around all over the world, she won’t be here that long.”
“You sure about that? She shore is settlin’ in. Says she’s tired of all that running, that she’s had enough pain to last her a lifetime. And she have her book to write.”
“Not another book. I hope she’s focusing on something that has nothing to do with me this time.”
“She hasn’t mentioned you.”
He wasn’t reassured. Cici’s book on the oil industry in Louisiana after Katrina had made Claiborne Energy look bad. Had she mentioned even once how many people had jobs because of Claiborne Oil? No, her book had been full of pictures of rusting pipelines and oil-covered wildlife and shots of boats on water that used to be land with captions blaming companies like Claiborne Energy for the state’s vanishing marshlands.
“And she wants to see about her uncle Bos and all,” Noonoon was saying. “He’s not too strong, you know, after his treatments. Stubborn cuss, though. She calls and calls him, but he still won’t speak to her. You’d think after all these years, he’d forgive her. All she ever did was be friends with you and Jake.”
Guilt made a muscle in his jaw pull. So, she was still estranged from her uncle. Just like he and Jake were estranged from each other…because of that summer. Not that most decent people in these parts thought Bos was worth knowing. Still, he was her uncle. He’d taken her in when she was orphaned.
Bos and Grandpère’s enmity had sharpened over the issue of Bos’s cockfighting. Once fighting cocks had become illegal, the two had had fewer issues to quarrel over.
“Cici said she wants to live somewhere quiet, and you of all people know the garçonnière is mighty quiet.”
“You gave her the garçonnière? My old rooms?” He was shouting, and he never shouted. Not even when someone as hard as Mitchell Butler tried to screw Claiborne Energy for millions.
“Mr. Pierre, he be the one who rent it to her,” she defended herself softly.
Remembering the cute red Miata parked by the two-story octagonal building, Logan’s pulse began to thud. So, the dangerous, flashy sports car was hers. Why was that a surprise? Cici had a reckless streak. And no wonder…with that trapper cockfighting, swamp-rat of an uncle who’d raised her, mainly by neglecting her.
If his grandfather had been himself he would know that Cici couldn’t be dedicated to him in any real way. No, she probably had some secret agenda.
“Sorry I raised my voice,” Logan whispered, straining for control. “This isn’t your fault. Or hers. It’s mine—for not moving Grandpère sooner. I’ll deal with her now.”
“Oh, Miss Cici, she don’t like anybody bothering her in the afternoon. Not unless it’s an emergency. You see, she writes when Mr. Pierre naps. Then at four she and Mr. Pierre, they give the last tour together. I reckon she be free to talk around five.”
“How can he manage walking so far in his condition?”
Noonoon’s sharp look made him wince as he remembered he hadn’t seen his grandfather in a month.
“Miss Cici got him off his walker. Gave him a cane and bought him a new, lightweight wheelchair. She hired Mr. Buzz to build ramps everywhere. She pushes Pierre when he be tired. With the ramps he can get up to all the slave cabins now.”
More ramps? Logan’s pulse in his temple had speeded up. He didn’t believe Cici had come home to care for his grandfather. She had never known how to take proper care of herself. No way could she take care of Pierre. Not for the long haul.
His grandfather needed dedicated nurses and the latest, modern, long-term care, and he was going to have them.
More to the point: his grandfather was his responsibility.
The sooner he dealt with Cici and sent her packing, the better.
Two
C ici turned off the hot water and sighed. For the first time in a long time, she felt good, surprisingly good. Almost at peace with herself.
Maybe taking a break from her cameras and all the death she’d seen in war zones and coming home had been the right decision after all.
She stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel from the rack and flung it on the floor. Planting her bare feet with their hot pink nails on the thick terry cloth, she sucked in a breath and savored the sensual feel of warm water rushing down her breasts and belly and thighs onto the towel.
Her toes curled into the soft terry in sheer delight. She, who’d lived for months in tents with no running water, appreciated a hot shower in a safe, familiar locale as the luxuries they truly were. Whipping a second towel free, she wound it around her curly, wet hair and began to rub.
The windows were open. The sweetness of the faint breeze that brought the scents of magnolia and crepe myrtle and pine through the second-story windows caused her to shiver.
Frogs sang. No, they roared in chorus right along with the bull alligators after the rain last night when she’d taken Pierre’s pirogue and had paddled it out into the brooding swamp to watch the herons and egrets and buzzards flying home to their nests.
She squeezed her eyes shut and listened. She could almost hear the stirring of moss in the cypress trees.
“Aah,” she murmured, sighing heavily and yet very happily. She knew she was procrastinating, that she should be at the computer writing, but she couldn’t resist taking a moment to appreciate fully the bliss of being home after years of exile.
Writers had so many excuses for not writing. Life versus work was a biggie. How could you write if you did not let yourself experience life?
Content to procrastinate, she took in a deep breath and then another. Until this particular, miraculous moment, for such moments of true awareness were small miracles, she’d never let herself admit how much she’d longed to come home and see Belle Rose again. For always, always Belle Rose, ever since she’d been orphaned at eight and brought to live in her Uncle Bos’s shack on marshy land that bordered the Claibornes’ superior property Belle Rose had stood like a vision of paradise in her imagination.
There was no place for her at Belle Rose, yet she’d always wanted to belong. The closest she’d ever come to that had been when Uncle Bos had worked briefly as a part-time gardener for the Claibornes, and she’d had free run of the place. That’s when she’d formed the habit of following Logan everywhere any time he was home.
“What the hell?” the deep, too-familiar voice of the present master of Belle Rose roared as lustily as an
y bull alligator.
For a second or two she felt the same rush of adrenaline in her stomach she’d known when that bullet in Afghanistan had whizzed by her face, missing her by mere inches.
You had to get close to death to film it.
She opened her eyes, and when they fastened on the tall, broad-shouldered man, who was in her bedroom, she screamed.
For nine years she’d imagined what clever thing she’d say or do if she ever saw Logan Claiborne again. She’d give him a piece of her mind, for one thing. But in this long, nightmarish moment, she just stood where she was like a dumbstruck idiot. Vaguely she noted that his eyes were as wide with conflicting emotions as hers probably were.
If he’d taken a single step toward her or said something clever and belittling, she would have screamed again. But since he was as paralyzed as she, she did nothing. Absolutely nothing.
She just stood there without a stitch on and let him gape at her. For the record, and she being a journalist kept minute records, a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings and visual images did storm through her. At first, they flew so fast and hard she couldn’t focus on any particular memory. Still, for a second or two she felt keenly in touch with her younger, more vulnerable self—that naive, innocent eighteen-year-old girl who’d loved him, trusted him and had been shattered by his callous treatment.
How could he have misused her so? They’d grown up together. She’d always had a crush on Jake, his wilder twin. Logan had been more like a brother to her, the brother who’d mainly ignored her but with whom she’d felt safe and comfortable around because no powerful childish crush got in the way and had made her shy around him.
He’d played in the swamp with her when she’d been a child. He’d taught her to tease alligators, collect egret feathers, trap crawfish. Then they’d grown up, and she’d given up her infatuation for Jake and had fallen in love with Logan. Hadn’t he really, always been her hero? Then he’d made his move, and soon after, her fantasy world had come crashing down around her.
In this very room, or at least the bedroom where he stood, she’d lain naked beneath Logan, warmed by his larger body, never guessing he’d made love to her to save his brother. For an instant those fleeting, pulsing moments of cherished togetherness after he’d taken her virginity became too vividly real, stinging her with raw pain and fresh heartbreak all over again. All through those long summer nights, he’d made love to her again and again.
Every night she’d waited for Bos to go to his bar. Then she’d run through the woods to the garçonnière. She’d felt so piercingly alive in Logan’s arms. And every night their passion had built.
She’d believed he’d loved her—until that last night when Jake had found them together and Logan had told her why he’d really slept with her—to save Jake from making a misalliance. Then Logan had walked out on her, and her fairy tale had ended.
For days she’d believed he’d come back and tell her he was sorry, tell her he loved her. How little she’d known back then of men.
When she’d called him two months later in the fall to talk, before she could tell him her news, he’d silenced her by coldly informing her he’d married Noelle.
She’d needed to talk to him. She’d felt so alone when she’d hung up the phone knowing she had to face a difficult situation by herself. So abandoned. Because of him, for years she’d hated all men, especially him.
At some point, she’d quit blaming men in general for his crimes, but she’d clung to her intense dislike of him.
But the shock of seeing him like this, with his cold, blue, too-adult eyes burning every part of her body, from her pert nipples to the soft, damp brush of gold between her legs, was so powerful, even her hatred could not compare.
Finally, she regained enough presence of mind to remember her towel. Scowling at him, she leaned down to get it and wrapped it around her with jerky, big movements, making sure she covered the moon-shaped scar on her abdomen first.
Even so, when she looked up, guiltily, warily, she found his male eyes still blazing too hotly with the unwanted memory of her naked body, and his gaze made her own nerves buzz. But covering herself only seemed to intensify the raw, unwanted intimacy between them.
Blushing while fighting not to remember those hot summer nights they’d shared in this very bedroom, she swallowed and tried to make her voice fierce and defiant. “You should have knocked, damn you.”
“I did.”
“Then you should have waited until I answered.”
“Yes,” he agreed, finally having the decency to look away. His gaze drifted over her desk that was littered with papers and index cards and photographs, some of him. “I should have.”
A flush of dark color climbed his cheeks when he saw the newspaper clippings of his own ravaged face. The shot, which he couldn’t stop staring at, had been taken shortly after Noelle’s death.
Why, oh why did I leave that particular picture out?
“I didn’t think,” he said. “I never thought you’d be…”
“Nude?”
His angry blue gaze snapped back to her face. “Why didn’t you lock the door? And how could you just stand there…flaunting yourself, like you liked me seeing you.”
“Stop right there!” Heat engulfed her and not the good, soothing kind. This fire was a fury that devoured her.
“Damn you! This is not my fault! Nothing is my fault! You barged in here! And because you did, you found me stepping out of my shower, as I have every right to do…”
“Yes, I’m sorry. You’re right!”
“I’m not finished. For your information, I’ve been taking showers these nine years since I last saw you! And nobody else, not even in a war zone, has ever barged in on me! You’re in the wrong—not me.”
“Okay. So you said…repeatedly. Enough already.”
“No. It’s not enough. You were horrible to me in the past. You’re horrible now. You always act high and mighty because as far as you’re concerned, I’ll be poor white trash till the day I die. I wasn’t good enough for Jake or you…and nothing I ever do will change that.”
He swallowed. The muscle that moved in his jawline when he was upset jumped violently. “All right. I hear you. You made your point.”
She most certainly had, but since he still hadn’t bothered to apologize, she felt consumed by smoldering heat and indignation…and by other awful emotions she didn’t want to name. How could he still affect her like this?”
Despite her discomfiture, his changed appearance registered. Not that she hadn’t seen pictures of him in magazines and newspapers and on the Internet from time to time. He was a rich, important man. His wife’s tragic accident and funeral alone had received a vast amount of coverage last year, all of which Cici had hungrily devoured.
Still, it was different, seeing him this close, knowing his anger was partly due to the fact that he wanted to be done with her, just as she wanted to be done with him.
She assessed him coldly. No longer was he the wiry boy she’d loved or even the gray-faced man in the photograph on her desks whose obvious grief had almost made her feel sorry for him. He’d filled out. And he’d grown, as men often do, even more virile and attractive than ever.
He was close-shaven. He wore an expensive white shirt that was so damp from the heat that it clung to his muscular body in such a way that she couldn’t help admiring that he’d kept himself in shape.
He’d rolled up the sleeves, revealing strong, tanned forearms. His chocolate-brown hair might be shorter, but it still looked as thick and sexily tousled as ever.
To all who didn’t know better, Logan appeared a respectable, wealthy businessman. But she, who wished she didn’t know better, knew the wildness and the dangerous darkness that lurked beneath that suave, too-handsome exterior. Like herself, Logan didn’t mind the edgy thrill of risk.
With an effort she reminded herself that Logan Claiborne was utterly self-serving and ruthless, and a smart woman would avoid him.
Still, he
looked good. Too good. And not just because she hadn’t dated anybody for a while.
Uncle Bos had been right about a few things. He’d said rich people could be crueler and colder than anybody, that she’d best stay away from the Claibornes and their like. “You’re swamp trash to them. You’re nothing more than a toy to play with. They throw girls like you to the sharks when they’re through.”
“Get out,” she said quietly and yet forcefully.
He crossed his arms across his broad chest and spread his legs in a masculine, stubborn stance.
“Not till we talk,” he said.
“If you think I’m going to stand here wearing only a towel and converse with you like nothing happened…after…after the way you barged in here, after the way you looked at me and accused me, you’re crazy.”
“Get dressed, then.” He turned his broad shoulders to her. When she didn’t move, he said calmly, “I won’t watch. I promise.”
“As if! As if I’d ever trust the likes of you again!”
He whirled, his blue eyes stormy when he faced her again. “Trust doesn’t even enter into it. You’re not staying at Belle Rose. Not one more night. You’re going to leave my grandfather alone. He’s vulnerable and old, easy prey…”
“Stop right there! For your information, I have a three-month lease and a publishing deadline to meet. And your grandfather, whom you claim to care so much about, was starving for affection. Starving. And I think I know something about how that condition feels—especially where you’re concerned.” She paused. “So, his needing me and befriending me when I came home feeling lonely and vulnerable and a bit alienated from my roots is a big part of why I have no intention of moving.”
“You’re just using him.”
“And you know that, how, you who could write a book on that subject?” She took a deep breath. “Get out of my apartment, or I’m calling the law.”
“This is Louisiana. I own the law. And since I didn’t sign your lease, it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Now get dressed, so we can settle this once and for all. I’ll wait downstairs.”
