Children of Destiny Books 4-6 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 10)

by Ann Major

  Maybe the big, bad cop hadn’t forgiven her, but he wasn’t as immune to her as he pretended he was.

  Noelle Martin’s bitten lips tasted salty; her slim fingers were clenched tightly on the steering wheel. She wanted a cigarette, but she had quit smoking two years ago. So she grabbed a CD and jammed it into her player. [JO29]Instantly the Mercedes was flooded by Chopin’s hauntingly lovely “Raindrop Prelude.” Her favorite piece. Not that it soothed her. The prospect of facing Garret had her emotions in so much turmoil, nothing could have calmed her.

  Even as her silvery blue sports car purred past the weird, dead forest where moss had grown too thickly, smothering the cypress trees and converting them into figures of gauntness and dread, she whispered shakily to herself, “You could go home now. It’s not too late. No one would ever know you had this crazy impulse.”

  Home—back to the glitter and safety of New Orleans. Back to the Garden District. Back to her world of wealth and privilege and rank. Back to Beaumont, whom she would no doubt be married forever and ever to.

  Dear God... Her nerves had her talking to herself.

  She needed something to drink, but her can of soda was empty.

  Stubbornly she pressed down the accelerator pedal. She had to see Garret. Even if they’d all forbidden her to. Even though he himself had made it clear he never wanted to see her again.

  He was in trouble because of her. Sometimes it seemed that his life and hers were woven so tightly together, it was impossible to separate her soul from his. Garret’s mother, Mannie, had been the kindly cook in the Martin household. Noelle had grown up adoring her. Noelle remembered that dark night Garret’s father and little brother had died. She’d been six years old when it happened. Father and son [JO30]had been walking home after fishing at the bayou. A truck full of logs had been rushing past them on a curve. One of the bands holding the logs to the truck bed had snapped, and the logs had broken free and crushed his father and brother. Noelle had convinced her father to hire Garret to help their gardener.

  Garret had worked[JO31] after school and every summer to help support his mother and sister. He’d been wild, but he’d put himself through college. While working full-time on the police force, he’d gone to graduate school and had risen unbelievably fast in his career.

  He and his mother had started a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans, Mannie’s, that had become a phenomenal success. He’d married Annie, and they had torn down the shack he’d grown up in and built their darling cottage on his land behind Martin House. He kept a houseboat moored in a particularly beautiful bend of the bayou a couple of miles from his house, a place that had been a favorite childhood haunt of his. He had a yacht in New Orleans docked near Mannie’s and he slept on it sometimes. Not that his achievements and standing on the force were enough to satisfy her family.

  Sometimes it seemed that all her life Grand-mère and Papa had forbidden her to do the things that had really mattered to her. They’d been against Garret. She had wanted to be a nurse; they had stopped her. Grand-mère had been horrified at the thought of a Martin being employed in a hospital, working as a mere nurse.

  Grand-mère was of the old school. “Nurses see too much ugliness. Girls in your position marry well. If marriage and children are not enough, you can serve the community in dozens of acceptable ways. There are boards ladies can serve on, volunteer work, charities...”

  As a child Noelle had collected injured and stray animals. That had never been “acceptable,” either, although in the end, Grand-mère had had a special little cottage built in the back yard to house Noelle’s menagerie.

  “Your soft heart will be your doom,” Grand-mère had predicted direly on more than one occasion, but she had softened her prediction with one of her rare smiles.

  Now, after her stroke, Grand-mère smiled even less than before. For a while she had been unable to talk. Tottering around on her silver cane, she was no longer the formidable matriarch. She seemed unbelievably delicate, but she was dearer to Noelle than ever. Noelle didn’t ever want to hurt her again.

  Noelle gripped the steering wheel. Garret had lied about the bank robber and thereby jeopardized a job he valued immensely because of her. Why?

  The wet road that led to Garret’s house was a shiny, black ribbon curving relentlessly beneath a tunnel of deep green velvet. Her family’s plantation and Martin House lay just beyond his land. And beyond Martin House was Sweet Seclusion, a crumbling plantation house attached to several thousand acres of sugarcane land, all owned by Raoul Girouard, a tough, remote man much older than herself, to whom scandal and romance and mystery had attached itself. There was not a mother in the parish who did not tremble if their daughters even glanced at the dangerously attractive Raoul. Grand-mère disliked all the Girouards intensely. So did Garret. For a while Raoul had fancied Noelle’s baby sister, Eva. But Noelle had been the cause of their breaking up.

  At the moment, though, Noelle wasn’t thinking about Raoul, or the problems he had caused her. Her thoughts were focused on Garret.

  During happier times, Garret had told her that the live-oak alley that led to his house had been planted over a hundred years ago by a prosperous sugarcane planter, an ancestor of his, that once there had been the glimmer of white columns at its end, but that the plantation house had burned during the Civil War. Before falling on hard times themselves, the Girouards had either bought or stolen the Cagan family land acre by acre.

  The shack Garret had grown up in had been torn down. Now there was only Garret’s modern cottage, built on brick pilings, Louisiana style, on the original site of the plantation house. Behind his cottage lay the smooth green sheet of the bayou.

  She passed a marsh-ringed lagoon where a fishing boat was docked. Ramshackle buildings, trailers and automobiles sat in the backwash.

  Noelle Martin saw No Trespassing signs in the high grasses along the bayou’s edges. Other signs were nailed crookedly to tree trunks in the dense forest. The signs had not been there two years ago, and they made her journey seem more forbidding. Garret didn’t want trespassers. He didn’t want her.

  She rounded a curve. Suddenly a lone mailbox loomed out of the high weeds beside the road. She braked and read the name, Garret Cagan, painted on it in neat, bold black letters. The name, Louis Cagan, was scribbled in a child’s illegible hand beneath his father’s. Louis had clumsily painted a red crawfish beside his name. The father’s name had been repainted recently, but the son’s had not. That made Noelle wonder if Louis had been banished again to live in exile with his grandmother in her nearby cottage.

  Noelle remembered Louis—big soft eyes, golden hair—a thin, delicately-built, sensitive boy, who was nothing like his father. He had an incredible imagination and knew the swamp like the back of his hand. Louis had been four when she’d last seen him and still scarred from having witnessed his mother’s death. The first words he’d spoken since Annie’s death had been to Noelle. “Don’t leave!” he’d cried, hurling himself into her arms when she’d told him goodbye. She’d hugged him close, her tears mingling with his.

  She’d carried him in her heart, his loss as vivid and heartbreaking as the loss of her own child. What had happened to that dear, lonely little boy in the two years since she’d seen him?

  The sun vanished behind a black cloud, and darkness crept over the forest. A cool wind had begun to blow from the north, and she remembered a cold front was due. Her stomach knotted, and she sucked in a deep breath. She felt so strange, so scared, but she’d come this far.

  The private driveway to Garret’s cottage was a short, oyster-shell zigzag through trees hung with verdant creepers and wisteria. She drove slowly, but all too soon his un-painted cypress house with brick trim and green shutters came into view.

  The house seemed lost and forlorn looking in the shadowy gloom.

  “Mon Dieu...” She stared at it wordlessly, trying not to remember, and yet remembering everything. As a child she’d often come here seeking Garret, so he would take her fis
hing in the bayou. As an adolescent, she’d come by to tempt him. When she’d gotten older, he’d brought her here and made love to her.

  Because of her family, they’d parted. She’d been seventeen when they’d sent her away to school. He’d married. He’d built a house here. Louis had been born. Then an ex-con who was trying to kill Garret had shot Annie by mistake. Garret had blamed himself. Two years later, Noelle had tried to comfort him in his grief. They’d had an affair again. Briefly. Before the scandal, before her family had sent her away because of him a second time.

  Noelle shook herself. Today there was only silence. Only the trees, tense and close.

  It was just a house, a house in the woods, she told herself frantically, but there was a buzzing in her head that wouldn’t stop. And her throat was tightening.

  Just a house... Just a quaintly charming house of Louisiana colonial design, a cypress cottage nestled under the gnarled branches of a live oak, where once a happy family had lived. Just a house that was neatly maintained by the grim man who now lived in it alone.

  The blood drained from her face.

  Garret’s house could never be just a house to her. This place was a part of her. As he was.

  Every window was immaculately shined. The ironwork and shutters were painted. Garret’s garden was planted in straight rows of emerald green. He’d never been one to shirk physical work. Garret’s airboat was tied at the dock. His fishing nets were hung on a fence to dry. She felt his methodical, organized presence seeping into her bones.

  Everything was just as it was.

  No...

  Once Louis’s toys had been strewn around. His bike. Carlotta, the basset hound Noelle had given him, had been lazing on the porch. Tiger, Louis’s striped gray cat with the green eyes, had been howling about something.

  The house seemed too still, too perfect. Like a dead person laid out for a wake. Like something that had once been alive but no longer was.

  Like Garret, who’d buried himself alive.

  She cut the engine, and Chopin’s climactic finale died abruptly. She grabbed Garret’s jacket and opened the door. The cool muggy air pierced her with that peculiar marsh smell of damp and decay. The last of the late-afternoon light was going, and the dense forest was filled with an eerie silence. It was getting colder, and she’d forgotten to bring a coat.

  Although Garret’s white truck was parked in front of the house, no light shone from the windows, and his pirogue was gone. Noelle remembered that he liked to hunt and trap on winter weekends. Sometimes he fished to help supply the restaurant. With Annie dead and Louis probably living with Annie’s mother, there was no telling when Garret was coming home.

  He would be back, though, and she wasn’t leaving until she saw him.

  The cream-white folds of Noelle’s thin silk dress swished as she forced herself to walk toward the house. His leather jacket was slung over her arm. Her heels made hollow sounds like faltering heartbeats as she climbed the stairs and walked across the porch. She began to knock. When he didn’t answer, she sagged, shivering, against the wall. Slowly as she stood there, her surroundings came to life, the humming, buzzing, droning, splashing cacophony of the bayou. The sun was going down in a blaze of scarlet through the trees.

  There was a mysterious beauty about the forest, but the loneliness of the place made her ache for Garret. How had he gone on living out here? By himself? Rejecting Louis?

  A thin whine mounted steadily. Something bit her on the ankle, then the other leg. First there was one mosquito, then a few more, then millions, ravenous after a day of fasting in grassy marshlands. The cold wet air was alive with them. She started slapping her legs until they were red and stinging with pain, but there were too many biting her for her to slap them all.

  She was jumping, hopping, shivering from the cold. If she didn’t go inside, she would either freeze to death or be eaten alive.

  Her fingers trembled on the latch of the screen door.

  Garret would be furious. He wouldn’t want her inside the house.

  Mosquitoes bit Noelle on the nose, her eyelids.

  It was wrong to go in with him gone.

  A sharp icy blast of wet air swept the porch. Lightning flashed from the bottom of a low-bellied cloud, and cold rain began to gust in torrents.

  With a cry of dismay as she began to get wet, she pulled the screen door open and ran inside.

  *

  The single lantern in the bow of the pirogue glowed eerily through the floating wisps of ground fog. It was two o’clock in the morning, and Garret Cagan was bone weary. Suddenly a bolt of lightning scribbled exquisite patterns across the ink-black sky. If the norther was violent and dangerous, it was also beautiful. For a microsecond the marsh was illuminated, and the gaunt arms of dead cypress trees cloaked with moss were silhouetted against the brilliance. Then the blackness grew blacker than before, and the stillness intensified.

  The bow of Garret’s pirogue was piled high with nutria pelts. The grasses and traps had been alive with animals. In a bucket, the dozen crabs he’d caught made scratching sounds. A stringer full of fish was tied onto the stern. It had been a good afternoon and night for checking his traps and fishing.

  But it was getting colder, and despite his jacket, Garret was shivering. It had rained off and on all evening. He ached with exhaustion from the long hours sloshing alongside his pirogue or poling it. He was starving, too, and sick of the mosquitoes. He wanted to get home, light the stove, clean his catch, eat and fall into bed.

  A violent tremor seized Garret, and he bent over the pole of his pirogue, pushing the shallow dugout craft along the canal with the skill of a Cajun born to the bayou. Before Annie’s death, Garret had hated these cold, wet winter nights. He’d preferred staying home with her and little Louis in the cozy warmth of their cottage.

  Now he rarely stayed home. When he got in from work—he’d been putting in hellish hours at the restaurant ever since he’d been suspended from the force—he either took the truck and went to see Louis, who now lived at Annie’s mother’s, or he took the pirogue out into the swamp.

  An hour later, when Garret’s pirogue glided up to his dock, a blue-gray fog was rising from the blind lake. He’d put out his lantern, but every time he moved the pole, the water glittered with the silent fire of phosphorescent plankton. Cajuns called it ghost fire. Garret’s pole clattered against the wooden dock. A flock of ducks exploded from its feeding grounds and sprayed the night with a shower of falling pixie dust.

  Garret stared in wonder. He had never seen the ghost fire so bright before. It meant good luck.

  His handsome mouth twisted bitterly.

  He’d never been lucky. He’d been born poor but ambitious but had seen enough of the rich life to want it and feel shut out. He’d lost everything he’d fought so hard for—Annie, Louis, Noelle. And now his job.

  He grabbed his ten-gauge, slung the nutria pelts over his shoulder and strode toward his cottage. He’d loved two women. The one he’d wanted the most thought she was too good for him. The one he’d married had died. Garret still felt guilt over that because the crook who had shot her had been gunning for him.

  Annie could have raised Louis; Garret didn’t know how. What did a man like him know about raising a kid like Louis? Louis seemed so fragile, so like Annie. Garret was afraid to try, afraid he’d do it all wrong. Still, every time he thought of Louis, he felt a tug of remorse. It was his own fault Louis wouldn’t talk.

  When Garret had become a cop, he’d known that he was risking his life every day he worked, but his own life had always seemed a cheap thing to him. He’d never thought of the risk to Annie and Louis. Because of his own selfish blindness, Louis was growing up a lonely, silent, motherless boy. He was fatherless, too. And Garret couldn’t forgive himself.

  Annie had died because of him, and he was forgetting her. He wasn’t doing right by her child. He never longed for her anymore. Unless he had a photograph, he couldn’t picture her face. Their time together now s
eemed so far away. He felt so cold, so hard—almost inhuman sometimes.

  It was Noelle he remembered. Noelle, whom he’d grown up with. Noelle, the rich, spoiled girl he had always wanted. Noelle, who’d twice betrayed him. Noelle, who’d destroyed Louis all over again.

  Why the hell had he put the only thing he still had left, his career, on the line for her?

  Chapter Three

  The minute he stepped inside his house, Garret’s sixth sense told him something was different. He hadn’t seen the blue sports car hidden by the trees. His black gaze scanned the kitchen, den and dining room but found nothing amiss.

  There was a half-empty soda can in the sink. His leather jacket was on the table, but he was too tried to really see it. His mouth twisted in wry self-deprecation. Must be his tiredness making his cop paranoia work overtime. One of the reasons he went out into the swamp alone was to get that sort of junk out of his mind.

  Hell, there was no one here. It wasn’t as if he had friends anymore.

  He propped his ten-gauge in a corner. He opened a cabinet and pulled out his bottle of whiskey and took a swig straight from the bottle. After a while he took another pull from the bottle, then a few more. The liquor burned his throat, but it warmed him all the way down. It took the edge off his loneliness; it removed the swamp damp and chill from his bones. He shrugged out of his jacket.

  He shouldn’t drink alone. Not straight out of the bottle. Hell. He did a lot of things he shouldn’t do. Still, the next time he felt the need, he splashed his whiskey into a glass.

  Swiftly, skillfully he cleaned the fish, wrapped all but two in butcher paper and put them in the freezer.

  Then he saw the mud on the floor. Damn. Later for that, too. Wearily he pulled off his thick-[JO32]soled rubber boots and took them out to the porch. He stalked across the room to the bedroom. The carpet in the bedroom absorbed the thud of his heavy tread as he crossed the bedroom and went into the bathroom. He peeled off the rest of his wet clothes and quickly took a hot shower.