CAROLINE FELT LIKE she was dying inside, bleeding to death from a thousand tiny cuts.
Reed and Holly were on the street in front of the theater. Reed lay on his side on the broken pavement. It was too dark to reveal much about his condition, but from the restless movements of his legs Caroline knew that he was still alive. Holly knelt near his head. His very posture conveyed abject fear. DeBlassis and one of the other men—he was clasping his shoulder, so Caroline assumed he was the driver, whom Holly had shot—stood over them. Moonlight glinted on the barrel of DeBlassis’ gun. She had no idea where the other two men were, although she was as sure as it was possible to be of anything that they were hunting her and Ant.
At the thought, her heart shivered with fear.
“We got to do something,” Ant whispered. Crouched beside her, he sounded as anguished as she felt. They were hiding behind the half wall of the bumper car ride at the far end of the street. With the roof and three walls enclosing them, they were enfolded by darkness, sheltered and protected by it. Derelict bumper cars dotted the space behind them, providing plenty of camouflage, or at least so Caroline hoped, for their own shapes. The smell of damp, of mildew, was unmistakable. The smooth metal floor felt slightly slimy beneath her feet.
“There’s nothing we can do except go for help,” Caroline whispered back, ignoring her own nearly irresistible need to rush to Reed. He was wounded, and she had no way of knowing how badly, no way of knowing if he was still bleeding, no way of knowing anything, and it was tearing her up inside, but the hard truth was there was nothing she could do. She was handcuffed and weaponless. To allow herself and Ant to be taken would only ensure that they all died. She had to place her faith in the thought that they wouldn’t kill Reed and Holly until they had her and Ant, and continue hiding as they made their way toward the fence in hopes that they would find some way to get through.
Please, God, keep them safe, was the prayer she sent winging skyward, and prepared to move.
“Come on,” she whispered to Ant. “We’re going now.”
“He’s my brother.” Ant sounded on the verge of tears. “I can’t just leave him.”
“If we don’t, they don’t have a chance,” Caroline replied, knowing it was true.
With another long look at the captives, Ant nodded, and they cautiously started to move. Bent almost double, they were hurrying along the wall toward the opening that permitted access to the ride when a big black car rolled past with a sound scarcely louder than a whisper. Caroline heard it before she saw it. Freezing so fast that Ant bumped into her, she watched its progress over the top of the wall with her heart in her throat.
Its headlights lit up the scene at the end of the street: she was able to clearly see Reed and Holly, and the men standing over them.
She was so riveted, and she guessed Ant was, too, that the first inkling she had that anyone was behind them was when she heard a gloating, “Got you, bitch,” and her heart leaped and she turned her head to find herself looking into the mouth of a gun.
SUV guy was taking no chances this time: he marched her down the street toward the others with a fist in her hair and his gun nestled below her ear. She was so frightened she was dizzy with it. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Ant was being towed along behind her. She couldn’t really see him, but she could hear the ragged gasp of his breathing, feel his fear.
Her mind worked feverishly to find some way out, but there didn’t seem to be any. Bottom line was, they were caught.
As horrible as the corollary thought was, as much as she shied away from facing it, that meant they were all four probably going to die.
The black car had stopped and cut its headlights. Whoever was inside the car had gotten out. Three people walked toward where Reed and Holly lay on the ground.
Moonlight touched a man’s white hair. Caroline’s eyes widened. Her heart leaped.
With hope? With dread?
Whatever else he was, he was her father.
“Dad,” Caroline cried even as SUV guy pushed her past the car so she and Ant and their captors became part of the group around Reed, too.
Martin Wallace’s head whipped around so fast that she knew he hadn’t been aware of her presence until she had called to him.
“Caroline.”
His tone made her go cold all over. It was—full of pain.
What had DeBlassis said? He’ll do what he has to do.
She could see the glint of Reed’s eyes, see that he was looking at her, and one tiny part of her brain rejoiced that he was in good enough shape to be awake and aware. She was being marched over to stand beside him and Holly. Ant was, too. Her father watched, but made no move to interfere.
“You can’t just let them kill us,” she begged him, shattered that it appeared he was willing to do just that. “Dad.”
His stony face and lack of reply sent her stomach plunging clear to her toes.
“Please,” she begged, and then SUV guy said, “Shut up,” and, with his gun still pointed at her, shoved her down to the pavement so her knees scraped painfully against the concrete. Kneeling beside Reed now, she heard him say something to her, but she was still focusing so intently on her father that she didn’t understand the words.
“You don’t have to be here for this, Martin,” said the man at her father’s side. Caroline really looked at him for the first time and recognized the man as the mayor, and finally felt like the world as she knew it had truly spun out of control. She had known Harlan Guthrie for years, had liked and respected and supported him. And now—the cold truth was that he was a murderer. The mayor put a comforting hand on her father’s arm. “I’ll handle it. You go on home.”
“You ever thought that maybe we should end this?” Her father’s voice grated on Caroline’s heart. It was heavy, sad—and resigned. “Maybe this has gone far enough. Maybe we never should have started it. Maybe we were wrong.”
“Hell, Martin, it’s a damned war and you know it. The scumbags are taking over our city. Putting ’em in jail is a waste of time—they just get right back out. They prey on innocent citizens. The tourist industry—it’s our lifeblood, and we’re going to lose it. What we’re doing here may be outside the law, but it’s not wrong. We put our own private team together, and we pay ’em to take out the people who need to be taken out. It’s either that, or let them have the city and run everybody else out.” He looked at SUV guy and gestured. “Get these folks on out of here, Purnell. Then get the place cleaned up.”
“Yes, sir,” Purnell replied. Reaching down, he grabbed Caroline by the arm and jerked her up. Holly was being pulled to his feet, too, while Ant was already upright and DeBlassis was leaning over Reed. Caroline realized that what she had just heard was Mayor Guthrie giving the order for them to be killed.
The taste of fear was sour in her mouth.
“Dad.” A whole lifetime’s worth of feeling was in that cry. Caroline jerked free, ran toward the man whom she had both loved and hated, admired and feared in equal measure, in one last desperate appeal. Her eyes widened as his gun hand came up and he aimed. She heard Reed yell a hoarse, “Caroline,” and her father fired his gun and she screamed, all at the same time.
But she wasn’t shot, it wasn’t her whom he had hit, and there was another scream behind her. As she collided with her father’s chest she realized it was Purnell who had been shot, that he must have been targeting her as she ran, and then her father was taking her to the pavement with him as gunfire erupted around them and what seemed like dozens of men swarmed out of the darkness with weapons at the ready screaming, “Freeze! FBI!”
* * *
HALF AN HOUR LATER, having been given rudimentary treatment at the scene, Reed was being loaded into an ambulance. He’d been shot in the leg, nothing life threatening, although the EMTs had described it as a serious enough wound, and was being taken to the hospital. Ant was being taken to the hospital, too, for observation after his ordeal. Holly, who refused to be separated from Ant, was already in the ambulance with
him. Caroline, who refused to be separated from Reed, was going, too.
Having just released Reed’s hand, she was standing by the ambulance’s wide back doors as Reed’s stretcher was lifted through them when her father came up to her. She hadn’t spoken to him since he had gotten up from the pavement and been engulfed by the onrushing tide of FBI agents. She’d been shocked to learn from the FBI agent who’d asked some questions of her and Reed shortly thereafter that her father had been wearing a wire and that the FBI had been using him to take down the mayor and the whole Rescue New Orleans operation even as they had stealthily infiltrated the amusement park’s grounds to rescue her and Reed and Holly and Ant.
Looking at her father, she realized that she didn’t know what to say. Their relationship had always been so fraught with tension and mixed emotions. But in the end, when it counted, at least he hadn’t been prepared to let her die.
On the whole scale of father-daughter relationships, it probably didn’t count for a lot. But it counted for something.
“You doing all right?” he asked her, and she nodded.
“You?” she countered, and he nodded, too.
“Dad—” She broke off, unsure of what she wanted to say. Finally she went with a simple, “Thank you.”
“You know, tonight’s the first time you’ve called me Dad since you were a little girl,” he said, and because it was true she didn’t reply. Then he shook his head at her. “You didn’t really think I was going to stand by and let them kill you, did you? As soon as Ware called me, that night after he’d kidnapped you, I realized that there was no way you were coming out of this alive if I didn’t do something. Guthrie wouldn’t have wanted to take the chance on leaving you alive: he had too much to lose. Orders would have gone out, and you would have been caught in the crossfire of a rescue attempt, or something similar. I wasn’t about to let that happen, so I did the only thing I could think of: I contacted the Justice Department and agreed to turn state’s evidence and wear a wire and do whatever I had to do to bring the whole operation down. I’m not coming out of it too badly—I won’t be prosecuted as long as I testify against the others—but I did it for you.”
“To tell you the truth,” she responded, because the time for a little truth was clearly at hand, “I wasn’t sure what you’d do.”
For a moment he simply looked at her.
“I know I haven’t been much of a father to you,” he said heavily. “I know I put you and your mother and sisters through some terrible things. I was under a lot of stress back then, and I was drinking heavily, as I’m sure you remember, and I was out of control. But now, I’m asking you to forgive me. You’re my daughter, and I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
Love, Caroline decided as she looked at him, was a strange thing. Like a persistent weed in a sea of pavement, it could survive in the nooks and crannies of the heart, and just when you thought it had been completely ripped out by the roots, it would shoot right back up.
“I’ve always loved you, too,” she said, and knew that despite everything it was true.
Then she patted his arm and he covered her hand with his. Their equivalent of a hug, she supposed. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was something. For them, maybe, a new start.
Miracles happened sometimes, didn’t they? It was Christmas, after all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
FOUR DAYS LATER, Reed was in his house in Bywater. He was in his small kitchen, kicked back in the wheelchair he was relegated to until his leg healed enough for him to graduate to crutches. Dinner was cooking, and the smells of a dozen good things hung in the air. The kitchen was white with touches of blue, with pots bubbling on the stove and the counters crowded with the desserts they would enjoy later, and with everything Caroline needed for baking. Because Ant had been sad about missing Christmas, they were having Christmas today.
Him and Holly and Ant and Caroline. All four of them, together.
It was Holly and Ant’s first Christmas without their mother.
It would be the first Christmas he had actually celebrated since Brandon’s death.
They had him chopping things: bell peppers and garlic and onions for the Shrimp Courtbuillon Holly was making. According to Holly and Ant, that was the dish Magnolia had made for the holiday meal every year, and it meant Christmas to them. Holly swore she’d taught him everything she knew, and Reed had told him to have at it. Caroline, on the other hand, was a big proponent of Christmas ham. She had one baking in the oven at that moment, while she did something that involved braiding bread dough on the counter near where Reed sat with his wheelchair pulled up to the well-scrubbed wooden table that anchored the center of the room. Since he couldn’t stand for longer than a few minutes at a time, the consensus of the other three had been that chopping was all he was good for, and so he had a knife and a cutting board and was chopping away.
“You ain’t doin’ that right, Dick.” Holly eyed Reed’s handiwork critically. He was at the stove, stirring tomatoes into a roux. Ant, who sat on the opposite side of the table busily deveining shrimp, looked over at what Reed had done and nodded agreement with his brother as Holly added, “You got to make it real fine.”
“Nobody likes big ol’ chunks in the sauce,” Ant concurred.
“If I chop it any finer, it’s going to be mush,” Reed retorted, pausing in his work to frown down at the vegetables he’d already reduced to slivers. He had to blink to see them clearly: the onions were making his eyes water.
“Keep on chopping,” Holly directed. “Tiny little pieces. Even-sized.”
Reed started chopping again, more vigorously, blinking with every other stroke of the knife.
“Like Mama used to say, you need to learn to wield your knife with finesse.” Coming from Ant, that pronouncement both touched Reed’s heart and sent his gaze shooting toward Caroline, who made a little choked sound that he saw was her trying to stifle a laugh.
Her eyes twinkled at him as she said, in the tone of someone who was stoutly defending him, “I think he wields his knife with a great deal of finesse.”
To Reed—although thankfully not to Holly or Ant, who appeared oblivious to the double entendre that suddenly made his blood as steamy hot as the kitchen—that was so suggestive that he barely missed cutting off his own thumb with the knife. What he did, instead, was hit a particularly large chunk of onion in such a way that it sent a spray of juice directly into his eye.
He yelped, clapped a hand to his eye, and immediately made a bad situation worse.
“Here, use this.” Caroline was beside him, thrusting a damp cloth into his hand. Reed pressed it to his burning eye.
“That’s good enough, Dick,” Holly said. Through the blur of his watering eyes, Reed watched him head for the table. “I need to put them in now, anyway.”
“Yeah, they don’t look too bad,” Ant agreed.
As Holly scooped up the vegetables, Reed said to Caroline, “Wheel me out of here for a minute, would you? I need some fresh air.”
“I’ll be right back,” Caroline said to the boys. Then she wheeled him into the small hall that connected the living room.
The moment they were out of sight of the kitchen, Reed dropped the rag, tilted a look up at her, and growled, “Just wait till later. I’ll show you some finesse.”
As Caroline gurgled with laughter, he caught her hand and dragged her down for a kiss. His hand slid beneath her hair to cup her head, his fingers threading through the silken fall with sensuous pleasure. Her mouth was hot and luscious and sexy as hell, just what he’d always wanted. In fact, she was just what he’d always wanted. The best Christmas present ever.
He was just about to tell her so when Holly yelled from the kitchen, “Caroline! Timer’s going off on the oven! You want me to do something?”
As he vaguely became aware of a tinny beeping that he recognized as the oven timer, Caroline pulled her mouth from his to yell back, “No, I’m coming.” Then she looked down at him.
Her eyes had th
at green gleam that he loved and her cheeks were flushed and her mouth looked like it had just been thoroughly kissed, which it had.
“I’ve got to go cook,” she said, and dropped another quick kiss on his mouth. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he answered. She gave him a dazzling smile and then was on her way back to the kitchen.
Luckily he didn’t actually need her to push his chair: he could manage just fine on his own. Making the executive decision that he needed to give his eyes time to recover from the onion assault before he returned to grunt duty in the kitchen, he rolled on out to his living room, stopping just over the threshold to look at the scraggly Christmas tree that Holly had hauled in from somewhere (Reed didn’t want to know) and decorated because Ant had been sad about missing Christmas. There were piles of presents under the tree, including the engagement ring he’d wrapped that morning and meant to give Caroline later. Well, actually he hadn’t wrapped it. He had swaddled the small velvet box in tissue paper and stuck it into a red gift bag, but the idea was the same. Getting away from her for long enough to buy it had been a trick—they had been practically inseparable since he’d woken up from surgery in the hospital—but he’d managed it. Later, when they had some time alone, he meant to propose.
Maybe she would think it was too soon. If so, then he was willing to wait. For however long it took her to make up her mind. But as for himself, he didn’t want to waste a minute. One thing he’d learned through all this was that no one knew what would happen in the next hour, let alone the next year. Unexpectedly, against all the odds, he had found love, and hope, and happiness, and he was grabbing on to them with both hands. He meant to hold on to them for as long as he could.
He had his job back. He was getting his life back.
His boy was tucked away in his heart, and would be there forever.
But there was room in there, too, for Holly and Ant. He’d already been talking to Holly about finishing school and maybe someday considering becoming a cop. Given Holly’s sleuthing skills, that career path seemed like a no-brainer. And he meant to do his best by Ant, helping to see him through his teen years with some degree of stability.
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