A Little Bit Guilty

by Jenna Mills

  “Thank you.” Those were the right words. Her chest tightened, but she did not allow herself to look away, not while Gabe watched her so closely. Not while he held Jimmy’s baseball. Her desk was locked, her laptop password protected. There was nothing lying around. She was more careful than that. He may have spent the night, but he hadn’t found anything.

  But he had tried. She knew that, too.

  For over three months there’d been nothing. After learning she’d been feeding him false information with the sole intent of seeing if it went any further, he’d frozen her out of his life, made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her. That he stood here now, barefoot with a cup of coffee in his hand…It was a gift-wrapped opportunity she’d never expected. But wasn’t about to turn away.

  Even if that meant resurrecting the eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting between them.

  “I know this is the last place you want to be,” she said, and if she’d had any doubt that while she slept, something had changed, the way Gabe continued to stand there so casually, looking at her with the discovery of a man who’d just made love to a woman for the first time, put a quick end to that.

  “Not the last.” Eyes glittering, he studied the baseball a heartbeat longer before returning it to the curio cabinet. Then, frowning, he stunned her by closing the distance between them.

  His hand came next, slow and steady up to her face. His touch, excruciatingly gentle. “Dizzy?”

  “No.”

  “No fresh blood,” he said, lifting the edge of the bandage.

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “This bruise isn’t something you can hide,” he warned, frowning. “There’ll be questions.”

  “I know.”

  “The D.A. isn’t going to like it.”

  In fact, he was going to hate it. Vincent Arceneaux made no secret of his political aspirations. Everything in his life was carefully engineered, from the clothes he wore to the woman he’d married, the home they lived in and the car he drove. His staff was no different. He demanded perfection.

  A black eye was not perfection.

  “I’ll handle Vince,” she said, realizing that Gabe’s fate rested in her hands. She could tell the D.A. the truth, that she’d followed Gabe to a warehouse. Gabe, who was on leave, Gabe whose involvement in the case could result in a mistrial. The truth, the fact she’d caught him sneaking around, could slam an end to his career—and ensure Marcel Lambert’s acquittal.

  Lifting a hand, she eased Gabe’s from her face. “I’ll tell him I was mugged.” The Gabriel Fontenot she knew would never ask, not the question, nor the favor. But she would cover for him, anyway, and in doing so, she would be one step closer to righting a very old wrong.

  “Filing a false police report is against the law,” he pointed out. “You could go to jail.”

  And she would definitely lose her job. “Let me worry about that.”

  Why? The question flickered in the cobalt of his eyes. Briefly. Then it was gone. Because they both knew the answer.

  “Quid pro quo,” he muttered.

  Something for something. A favor for a favor. “No.” Then, because she didn’t understand what she saw in his eyes, she turned and walked into the kitchen, opened the cabinet and reached for a mug. Her throat tightened when she saw the alligator on the old chipped pottery, the name in a childish red font. Jimmy.

  Hearing Gabe approach, she slid the mug to the back and reached for one that simply said Lawyers do it until justice prevails.

  “It’s Wednesday,” she said, reaching for the coffeepot. “The month is March.” She poured. “My name is Evangeline. You’re Gabe.” After returning the pot to the burner, she turned to him, and reminded herself to breathe. Gabriel Fontenot had a way of making even a courtroom seem too small, the way he stood and the way he watched, the barely concealed sense of…containment.

  Her kitchen didn’t stand a chance. Even barefoot wearing a pair of faded jeans with his back against the wall, he dominated the small room.

  “Hold up some fingers,” she said, calling on one of the quirky little smiles she used when asking a witness a seemingly out-of-left-field question.

  Gabe’s eyes gleamed. Never looking away, he lifted his left hand and folded down his ring and middle finger.

  “Three,” she said, trying not to wonder why a man who spent his days in an office had such callused hands—and how in the world she could have missed that fact the night before. His palm was wide, square, his fingers long and thick. “Try again.”

  This time he lowered his pinkie, but lifted the middle finger.

  “Three,” she said again. Then, after rattling off the name of the president, the date of the next national election and the Saints’ most recent draft pick, she smiled broadly. “See?” She brought the mug to her lips. “All better.”

  Vintage Gabe, the coffee was strong, deceptively smooth.

  “Evie.”

  The nickname burned in ways the hot coffee never could. She lowered the mug and looked at him, felt her heart beat low and hard and deep. For years, she’d cringed when anyone called her Evie. It hadn’t been their right, their place. Only one person had ever called her Evie. Hearing the name on anyone else’s voice had been…wrong.

  Until Gabe.

  He’d only said it once, the night after he’d buried a friend—Evangeline still couldn’t believe Detective Alec Prejean had turned up alive a few months later. But they hadn’t known that then, hadn’t known that he’d been thrown from the explosion. For Gabe there’d only been the sobering truth that he was the one who’d sent Alec to the warehouse. She’d found Gabe after the funeral alone in his office, with a bottle of whiskey and a mountain of guilt. Against every scrap of better judgment, she’d reached for him. Evie, he’d rasped, and in the blind moments that had followed, she’d never felt more needed in her life.

  Then he’d torn away, walked away.

  After that, he’d never called her Evie again. Until now. He’d been silent since following her into the kitchen, had just stood and tracked her movements. Now there was a thickness to his voice at complete odds with the hard edge to his eyes. “Stop.”

  The single word came at her like a hammer, reminding her why defense attorneys hated going up against this man. She felt herself wince, but refused to voice the question: Stop what?

  Remembering.

  Second-guessing.

  Wanting him to be someone other than who he was.

  “This isn’t a game,” he said quietly. “Last night was real. The warehouse was real.”

  And he was real. He’d been so last night when he’d skimmed a finger over her face while he thought she was sleeping, and he was real now, standing in her kitchen. And he’d been real when he’d stood in the courtroom, a rookie prosecutor angling to make a name for himself by sending a twenty-year-old kid without a penny to his name to prison, for a murder he hadn’t committed.

  “Trust me,” she said, angling her chin. “I’m well aware of that.”

  “You should never have followed me inside.”

  What she never should have done was forget.

  “I could have hurt you a lot worse,” he said, frowning at the side of her face.

  Automatically, she lifted a hand to finger the bandage.

  He stepped closer and kept his eyes concentrated on her face. And though he didn’t touch, she felt. This was…different. The way he was acting, the way he was looking at her.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask.”

  The urge to step back was strong, the need to breathe without drawing in the scent of leather and sandalwood and man. Of Gabe. But she didn’t let herself move, made herself tilt her chin and look up at him. “Ask what?”

  “What I was doing there last night…why an A.D.A. on leave was at an abandoned warehouse at dusk.”

  All throughout her little receptors started to vibrate. She had wondered. That’s why she’d followed him, to see if he was finally going to hand her the evidence she’d been cr
aving since the hot afternoon she’d sat in stunned silence as the jury foreman had read a verdict there’d been no proof to support.

  All these years later, her body still tightened at the memory—and the sight of the young attorney going out to celebrate, while her brother had been carted off to prison.

  The sight of Gabe walking into the warehouse had simply confirmed what she’d known all along—that a technicality like being on leave wouldn’t stop him from going after what he wanted. And for some reason, what he wanted was Marcel Lambert behind bars, regardless of due process or law or truth.

  Reaching for her mug, she brought it to her mouth and took a long, bitter sip.

  “You were there because of Marcel Lambert,” she said as if it were the most natural answer in the world. Then she laid down her bluff. “You got the same tip I did.”

  His eyes went dark. “I didn’t get a tip.”

  It wasn’t easy to surprise Evangeline Rousseau. In the few months she’d been with the district attorney’s office, she’d gained a reputation for thoroughness and tenacity. If there was a stone to be turned, she turned it. An angle to be played, she played it.

  A shade of gray to be finessed, she finessed it.

  Gabe looked at her now, at the quick flare of her eyes and felt the sweet curl of satisfaction. His blunt answer had surprised her. She’d given him an out he could easily have taken. Yes. He’d gotten the same tip she had. Someone had lured him to the warehouse on the promise of juicy information. End of story.

  But Gabe wasn’t ready for this story to end, not so long as Marcel Lambert’s fate rested in Evangeline’s hands. Even if that meant he had to hold those hands to make sure Lambert paid for his crimes.

  “Then, what?” She took a long slow sip before continuing. “You were the something interesting I was supposed to find? Someone knew you were going to be there and deliberately set me up to find you?”

  The same someone who’d stolen his files. “Which you did.”

  She shifted, allowing the brown hair to fall into her face. “But why me? If someone wanted you out of the way—”

  “Not if.” Someone definitely wanted him out of the way—and out of the D.A.’s office. He wasn’t imagining things. It wasn’t the whiskey or the pain pills. He was definitely being followed. A locksmith had verified that his dead bolt had been jimmied.

  “You have Arceneaux’s ear,” he pointed out, though it was hard to believe at the moment. Wearing a huge gray New Orleans Saints T-shirt hanging to her knees, her toenails decorated with small pink flowers, her hair uncombed and her face scrubbed clean, she looked more like a coed than a cutthroat attorney.

  Val had—

  Val.

  Christ. Val had possessed the same ability.

  “The D.A. relies on you,” he said, “trusts you to warn him of situations that could taint his office. All you have to do is tell him what you found—” he tried to look at the ugly bruise leaking from behind the bandage…the bruise he’d put there “—where I was.”

  He could still feel her beneath him, the brutal stab of awareness when he’d realized whom he’d driven to the ground.

  Biting down on her lower lip, she pushed past him and crossed to the far side of the kitchen—which wasn’t that far—putting as much space between them as possible. Which again, wasn’t that much. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for our anonymous tipster to call the D.A. directly?”

  She had fresh flowers on the small round table—nothing fancy, just the grocery-store kind. The table was dark and distressed, maybe an antique, but far more likely from the flea market. In one neat little stack she had three catalogs and four magazines. He’d thumbed through them all the night before.

  “Depends on the game being played,” he said, watching her set the mug on top of the newsmagazine. Games, after all, were her specialty. “It would have been more straightforward to call Vince, yes.” But straightforward wasn’t how Marcel Lambert played. “Except, now they’ve got you as well as me.”

  He saw the exact moment recognition struck. “You think someone set us up.”

  The only question was whether she was involved, or truly an innocent bystander. “Someone knew exactly how each of us would act,” he said, crossing to the table. His money was on Lambert. “That your presence would destroy my meet.” He spun one of the two chairs around and straddled it. “That you would stop me, but your guilt wouldn’t let you turn me in. Then they would own us both.”

  And in doing so, someone had all but gift wrapped the opportunity Gabe had been looking for. If Evangeline’s need for penance led her to keep quiet, then he, in turn, had just as much leverage over her as she did over him.

  Her hands curved around the back of the other chair, but she did not sit. She looked beyond him toward the small window where a set of wind chimes hung from a plant hook. Ceramic flowers. He didn’t need to turn around to see them. He knew they were there. He knew how many cans of Diet Coke were in her refrigerator, and that she had a weakness for graham crackers.

  A man could learn a lot about a woman while she slept.

  “Why risk tampering with a jury,” he pointed out when she continued to say nothing, “when you can tamper with the prosecutors? Bait a trap and wind them up; put them on a collision course.”

  The heater rattled on as she turned back to him with steel in her gaze. “There’s just one problem with that theory. No one owns me.”

  Her bravado served her well in the courtroom. It would serve him well, too.

  “Then call the D.A.” Pulling the phone from his waistband, he slid it across the table. “If you don’t—”

  “I’m not calling Vince.” With the words, she slid the hair from her face and, damn it, everything inside him tightened. Because he could see more of the bruise—and because she’d called the D.A. by his first name. There’d been dinners. She’d been seen laughing with the D.A.’s wife at one of Lambert’s charity auctions. “If someone wants to play, let them. But I won’t be manipulated—and I’m not hanging you out to dry.”

  Again.

  The unspoken word echoed through the silence.

  He stood. “Be very sure, Evangeline.” The words were quiet—deceptively soft. “Know who you’re crawling into bed with—and why.”

  Her eyes, the color of the storm clouds that liked to hover over the Gulf, met his. “The past can’t be undone, Gabe. What happened with Val can’t be erased. Trust me, I know that.”

  The words were equally quiet, but they slammed into him with the force of one of those afternoon storms. He didn’t want that from her. He didn’t want quiet. He didn’t want to look into her eyes and see regret…or compassion.

  “I’m not calling Vince,” she said again, and even though she wore that ridiculously big T-shirt, the fierce angle of her chin reminded him of the way he’d once seen her go head-to-head with a slimy ambulance chaser. “If you want to turn this into a game, fine, go ahead. Threaten me. Call him, yourself, if you like, tell him my dirty little secret, that I found you trespassing into my case but didn’t turn you in. Do it. Enjoy it—that’s your decision. I’ve made mine.”

  The thrill of the hunt pulsed deeper. There was no turning back, he knew. No time for second-guessing decisions. Evangeline knew the rules, the stakes. She’d made her bed, all but invited him in.

  He’d be a fool to ignore the opportunity. He’d take what she offered and get what he wanted. He’d right a wrong. He’d taste justice.

  And then he would walk away. And not look back.

  Because guilt, he knew, made people far too careless.

  “Tell me about Wild Berry,” he said, rocking forward on the chair’s legs. “Did you get a tip to go there, too?”

  She tensed. “Come again?”

  With a nod he gestured toward the living room, where her small desk sat by the window. “Your calendar.” He’d felt like a son of a bitch when he’d put his hand to the file drawers. But then he’d seen his sister through the darkness of his mind. Camil
le, wet and scared, twelve years old and cradled in his best friend’s arms. Jack had been the one to find her after she’d turned up missing—after their father had been found dead.

  Suicide, the coroner said. A single gunshot to the head.

  Camille’d said different. She’d said there’d been a second man in the room with her father….

  Her accusation had been all Gabe needed to give Evangeline’s file drawer a solid pull. Whatever information she’d amassed against Marcel Lambert, whatever evidence…

  The drawer had been locked, her computer password protected. “I saw it when I was looking for a piece of paper. You’re going there, aren’t you? To Darci’s hometown.”

  Suspicion lit Evangeline’s eyes. He could tell she didn’t buy his story, but she’d also just vowed she wasn’t going to turn on him.

  Frowning, she walked toward the sink, picked up a small glass and filled it with tap water. “She was nineteen years old, Gabe.” And finally, finally, she sounded like the Evangeline he’d first met, the colleague who’d sometimes propped a hip on the corner of his desk to discuss the nuances of law.

  “A kid,” she said as if she’d known Darci somehow. Leaning forward, Evangeline put her hand to the flowers and pushed them back from the edge of the vase, then poured the water from the glass. “She’d only been in New Orleans a few months. How does that happen? How did she—”

  “How did she what?” He’d seen the crime-scene photos. Darci had been a pretty girl. She’d had a mother and a father, a goldfish. She’d collected magnets. “Meet Marcel Lambert?” Gabe had seen the two of them together, only days before Darci was killed. The bastard had brought the girl into his own house, right under his wife’s nose. “Become his mistress?”

  Evangeline stared at the flowers. “Get herself murdered.”

  One little mistake, that’s all it took. Giving trust to someone who didn’t deserve it. Letting your emotions trump caution. “She met Marcel Lambert…became his mistress.”

  Evangeline shifted to brace her hip against the side of the old table. “You want it to be him, don’t you?” There was no accusation in the question; only understanding—and a dull blade of curiosity. “That’s why you can’t let this case go, because you want to make sure Marcel falls.”