The Forgiven

by Amanda Stevens

  Foley studied the corner of his desk for a moment, as if reluctant to meet Alex’s gaze. “This woman’s obviously after something. Money, would be my guess.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, only...”

  “What?” Foley demanded

  Alex shrugged. “She seemed so sincere.”

  Foley snorted in a very unlawyerlike fashion. He picked up his drink. “Convincing actresses are a dime a dozen, my friend. I’ve run up against a few myself.”

  They both had, Alex thought, Aubree being the most convincing of them all. Until she’d finally shown her true colors.

  “Look, Alex.” Foley sat forward, his eyes gleaming with indignation, anger and something else Alex couldn’t quite define. “You can’t believe there’s any truth to this woman’s claim. What proof does she have?”

  “None, that I know of.”

  “Then stop worrying.”

  Alex ran a hand through his dark hair. “I know what she says can’t be true, okay? Taryn is my daughter. I don’t have a single doubt about that. But there’s something about this woman...I can’t explain it.” He got up and walked to the wall of windows to stare out.

  The pavement below glistened in the aftermath of the rainstorm, and a mild breeze fluttered the umbrellas of an outdoor restaurant across the street. In the distance, the river was a wide, shimmering ribbon, trimmed by lights on both levees. Somewhere out on the water a tugboat horn sounded in the darkness as it guided a swollen freighter to its dock. The sound was mournful, lonely. For no accountable reason, it made Alex think of Naomi Cross.

  There was something about her that was too beguiling. A quality that was almost hypnotic. Alex had known beautiful women before. Naomi’s appeal was far more than physical. She exuded a kind of moral strength and inner courage that was rare enough to find these days. And in the depths of those lush brown eyes lurked an infinite sadness that had touched Alex in a way he couldn’t name.

  He frowned, steeling his resolve. Whatever her reasons, Naomi Cross was out to make trouble for him and Taryn, and he would do well to remember that fact. He turned now and faced Foley. “I don’t think she’s an actress. I wish it was nothing more complicated than that.” A fraud he could handle. “What worries me is that she seems to believe her own story. I’m afraid someone has gotten to her, and they’ve somehow convinced her that her daughter and mine were swapped at birth fifteen years ago.”

  Foley gave him a measuring look. “You mean someone like Judge Bellamy.”

  “He denies it, but can you think of anyone else who would want to cause me trouble?” Alex strode back across the room and sat down near Foley’s desk, but almost at once, he rose again and began to pace the ivory Berber carpet.

  “Now, just calm down,” Foley advised. “You have absolutely no proof that this woman is connected to Judge Bellamy. What we need to do is find out exactly who she is and what she wants.”

  Alex stopped pacing. “I know what she wants,” he said angrily. “She wants my daughter.”

  “Somehow I think we’re going to find out there’s a lot more to her story than she’s let on.” Foley glanced at his watch. “It’s late, but let me see what I can find out. I’ve got some connections in Mississippi. You say she’s from a place called Eden?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A lady from paradise,” Foley murmured.

  “Wait until you see her,” Alex said grimly.

  Foley glanced up. “That good, huh?”

  “She gives new meaning to the word temptation.”

  A little smile played across Foley’s lips. “In that case, maybe I should check her out for myself,” he drawled. “You know, as a favor to an old friend.”

  Alex clenched his jaw. “If you want to do me a favor, help me find a way to get rid of her.”

  Foley’s smile disappeared. “The first thing you need to do is stop throwing around phrases like that. If she were to turn up dead, it wouldn’t look too good, buddy.”

  Alex stared at him in shock. “Dead? That never crossed my mind—”

  Foley put up a hand. “I wasn’t suggesting that it had. All I’m saying is that given your history in this town, you need to be careful, especially where this woman is concerned. You don’t know who her friends might turn out to be. Or her enemies, for that matter.”

  * * *

  A KIND OF HUSHED QUALITY had fallen over the French Quarter since the rain, and a fine mist blurred the sharp edges. Even the garish neon signs advertising exotic drinks and topless dancers took on a dreamlike quality that made Naomi feel as if she were almost floating along the sidewalks.

  She wasn’t at all apprehensive on the streets. It was still early, and now that the rain had stopped, both locals and tourists alike had come back out. In spite of the Quarter’s reputation, Naomi had never been frightened of it.

  Leaving Royal Street, she turned right on St. Peter, and as she neared Bourbon Street, the crowd thickened, spilling from the sidewalks onto the street. Rock music blared from open doorways, and Naomi was momentarily jostled by a group of students crossing the intersection, in a hurry to get to the next bar.

  “Laissez rouler les bon temps!” they called to her.

  Naomi smiled and nodded politely, declining their impulsive offer to join them at Pat O’Brien’s for a round of hurricanes. After that, she tried to keep to the inside edge of the sidewalk, blending as best she could into the shadows of the buildings.

  After a while, she began to feel hungry, and she found a quiet little restaurant that advertised fil;aae gumbo and crawfish ;aaetouff;aaee on its windows. She took a seat in a corner, facing the door, and watched the street as she waited for her order.

  A man came in after her, brushing raindrops from his dark hair. He was tall and thin, but muscular, as if his job required him to keep fit. He wore jeans, a black T-shirt, nondescript except for a serpent tattoo that ran all the way down his bulging forearm to coil around his wrist. His gaze brushed Naomi’s, then moved on, but in the instant when their eyes met and held, a chill like nothing Naomi had ever experienced swept through her.

  Someone walking on your grave, Grandma Eulalia would have told her.

  Only a handful of customers were seated at the tables, but the man found a place at the bar. His back was to Naomi, but she had the uncomfortable notion that he was watching her in the mirror, that if she looked in his direction, their gazes would meet again in the glass.

  She wanted to get up and leave, but just then the waitress brought her food, a steaming plate of rice and spicy jambalaya. The aroma was so enticing that Naomi decided she would be foolish to let herself be chased away by a man who had followed her into the restaurant with no more sinister purpose than to have a beer and strike up a flirtation with the cute blond bartender.

  The young woman seemed to know him, and Naomi began to relax. She was letting her imagination run away with her. Letting the ambiance of the French Quarter get to her. The man was obviously someone who came in here often.

  Putting him out of her mind, Naomi ate her food, sipped her iced tea, and after a while the soft murmur of voices around her began to lull her. Resisting the lethargy, she tried to plan her next move, but in truth she had no idea what she would do if she couldn’t appeal to Alex DeWitt’s sense of justice. If she couldn’t somehow convince him that she had given birth to the daughter he thought was his.

  Naomi tried to put herself in his position. It wasn’t difficult. She knew what it was like to lose a child. She’d lost two daughters. No one knew better than she how blindsided Alex DeWitt must have felt earlier in his office. How threatened.

  As she lingered over her tea, Michael Connelly’s words came back to her. “I don’t know if Alex DeWitt was involved in his wife’s murder or not. No one does. But I can tell you this. A man who kills once, even in passion, usually finds it much easier to kill a second time if he feels threatened.”

  Naomi tried to shove the warning aside. She didn’t want to speculate about the night
Aubree DeWitt had been murdered. She didn’t want to contemplate how dangerous Alex DeWitt might become if she persisted in her mission. She didn’t want to think of him as a murderer, she realized, and it wasn’t just because of the danger he could pose. Alex DeWitt, for all the harshness of his words and the coldness in his eyes, had touched something deep inside Naomi that no man had ever touched before.

  Oh, she’d fallen for Clay Willis in a big way, and she’d given herself to him one rainy April night because he’d been good-looking and charming and, to be truthful, Naomi had been curious and too impulsive by half. She’d also been a romantic back then, and a dreamer.

  She’d made love a half dozen times with a boy who couldn’t leave town fast enough once he’d learned she was pregnant. But she’d never been with a man, and that fact had never hit her more forcibly than the moment Alex DeWitt had looked up from his desk and seen her.

  Unsettled by the thought, Naomi paid her check and left the restaurant. She turned right on Dumaine, strolling past the Voodoo Museum, closed now for the evening. Some of the shops along the street were dark as well. The carving of an ebony cat, blending almost seamlessly with the shadowy interior of a small art gallery, stared at her balefully from the window. Naomi stopped to admire the piece, and when the amber eyes blinked, she jumped, realizing belatedly the animal was real. The cat yawned, stretched, then settled back down to his perch in the window. And Naomi moved on, slightly unnerved by the encounter.

  As she turned on Royal, the crowd on the streets thinned, but she still wasn’t afraid. The hotel was just a short distance away, and she kept to the outer edge of the street now, avoiding the dark, shadowy doorways and alleys where someone might lurk.

  A few stores down, a group of middle-aged female tourists were peering into the window of a jewelry shop, oohing and aahing over the contents. When they moved on, Naomi stopped to see for herself what had drawn their attention. Nestled on a bed of black velvet, an array of colored gemstones—tanzanite, pink tourmaline, and green garnet—set in heavy, ornate gold glowed softly behind the plate glass window protected by wire mesh.

  Naomi had no idea whether the jewels were real or not, but they were certainly beautiful, and like any woman, she took a moment to admire them, although she knew they were as far out of her reach as the moon. The only jewelry she’d ever owned, other than several pairs of inexpensive earrings and a string of faux pearls she’d purchased from a clearance table at Lawson’s Department Store in Eden, was a tiny gold and topaz ring left to her by Grandmother Eulalia.

  Naomi didn’t consider herself poor. She’d inherited her home when her mother died, and even though the salary she drew from her position as one of the directors of the Children’s Rescue Network was meager—she and the other directors would have it no other way because every spare dime went into the search and rescue of missing and exploited children—it met her living expenses in Eden. And if there was no money for extras, well, finding a single clue that might help track down a missing child was far more precious to Naomi than any diamond.

  She started to turn away from the jewels, but a movement inside the shop stilled her. Remembering the cat moments earlier, Naomi wasn’t overly alarmed, but then, as she peered into the window, she realized that the motion hadn’t come from within, but from somewhere outside.

  Her pulse quickened as a man’s reflection materialized in the glass. He was standing behind her at the edge of the street, staring at her reflection in the glass. As their gazes met, he lifted a cigarette to his mouth, and Naomi could see the glowing tip reflected in the window.

  Fear darted through her even as she reminded herself that there were a lot of people on the street. A man standing on the sidewalk smoking was hardly cause for alarm. But...there was something familiar about him.

  The image of the tattooed man at the restaurant immediately leaped to her mind, and Naomi whirled, her heart pounding in her throat.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He was walking off, his back to Naomi. She could see smoke from his cigarette drifting on the night air as he approached the crowd of tourists who’d wandered on to the next store window. He said something to one of the women, and they all laughed, as if whatever he’d told them had been very clever and amusing. Then he moved around them and continued down the street.

  He never looked back. Naomi never saw his face. She couldn’t say with any certainty that he’d been the man she’d seen earlier at the restaurant. But an uneasiness crept over her just the same, and she turned, hurrying toward the lighted flags that marked the front entrance of the Spencer.

  Her footsteps echoed hollowly on the pavement, and a chill ran down her spine. Suddenly Naomi couldn’t shake the notion that she was being followed. She could feel a dark gaze on her, and the hair at the back of her neck prickled in warning. She even thought she could smell cigarette smoke.

  She spun, searching the street behind her, and she saw a brief flurry of movement as someone darted into a recessed doorway.

  In a full-blown panic now, Naomi whirled, and abandoning all pretense of calm, sprinted toward her hotel, resisting the urge to glance over her shoulder yet again. She knew he was behind her, perhaps gaining ground. She couldn’t spare even one precious second. She had to make it to the hotel—she had to get inside...behind locked doors.

  A couple came out of the wrought iron gate of the hotel’s courtyard and turned up the street toward Naomi. When they saw her, breathless and running, they stopped, giving her a curious glance as she flew by them. She slowed and glanced back. They were still gazing at her, but beyond them, the sidewalk was empty.

  Naomi nodded to the couple briefly before disappearing through the gate. She hurried through the courtyard, then entered the hotel through a side entrance.

  Waiting for an elevator, she let her gaze scan the narrow lobby. The dark, heavy antiques and luxurious damask drapes evoked a different era. Naomi could easily imagine hoop skirts swirling through the tall, arched doorways and jewels glittering beneath the crystal chandeliers. But at the moment, she was too caught up in her own anxiety to fully appreciate the grace and Old World charm of the Spencer Hotel. She was sure someone had followed her, but if he watched her now from behind one of the potted palms, Naomi couldn’t spot him.

  The bell sounded, and as the elevator doors slid open, she stepped quickly inside. Staring straight ahead as she rode up to the fifth floor, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirrored walls. Her short dark hair was all askew, and her cheeks were flushed with color. After all these years, she hardly noticed the haunted look in her eyes anymore.

  Fluffing her hair as she tried to calm her nerves, she left the elevator and strode down the hall, inserting the card into the lock and then slipping inside her room. She threw down her purse and key, and was just about to draw a breath of relief when someone rapped sharply on the door.

  Naomi jumped as her gaze shot to the dead bolt. She’d turned it, hadn’t she?

  She walked over to the door as the knock came again. Whoever stood outside in the hallway was growing impatient.

  “Miss Cross? I know you’re in there. I saw you come in. Please open the door. I need to speak with you.”

  The deep voice, muffled through the heavy wood, was unnervingly familiar, and Naomi knew it at once. She glanced through the peephole anyway. Alex DeWitt was standing just outside her door, and Naomi’s heart gave another painful thud.

  He’d seen her come in, he said. Was he the one who had been following her?

  Fear prickled down her nape. A shiver of something else slid along her backbone.

  In spite of the warning bells that sounded inside her, Naomi reluctantly drew back the door.

  He seemed to suck the air right from her lungs, and she found herself clutching the door, torn between running away from her fears and standing firm against them. She chose the later. After all, this was the man who stood between her and her daughter.

  She moved aside to allow him to enter. “How did you know
where to find me?” she asked, closing the door behind him.

  “I have very resourceful friends.” Rain glistened in his dark hair, as if he had been out walking in the downpour. Again Naomi remembered the reflection in the store window, her certainty that someone had followed her.

  She was a tall woman, but he towered over her. Beneath the starched fabric of his white dress shirt, she could imagine the ripple of lean muscle across his chest and abdomen. He looked strong, powerful. Sleek as a panther and perhaps just as dangerous.

  And she was alone with him in her hotel room.

  At thirty-three, Naomi had never been alone with a man in a hotel room. She had rarely been alone with a man at all. The Cross women had a penchant for picking mates who took off and left them when the going got tough. Her grandfather had never married her grandmother Eulalia. Her father had left when Naomi’s sister, Abby, was just a baby. And then, of course, Clay Willis had joined the army to avoid marrying Naomi. Of all the Cross women, only Abby had been smart. Only Abby had chosen a career instead of a man until the right one had come along.

  Sometimes Naomi couldn’t help but envy her sister. Abby had it all now. A fulfilling career. A man who adored her. But that was all another story, and Naomi didn’t have time to dwell on the what-ifs or the what-might-have-beens. Not when Alex DeWitt was looking at her with what she could only surmise was suspicion. And anger.

  He walked over and tossed a folder onto the cherry-wood desk. The sound seemed to echo in the silence of the room. Then he turned slowly toward her. “I know who you are.”

  The nerves in her stomach rippled uncomfortably. “I told you my name this afternoon.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He nodded toward the file. “Take a look.”