by Jenna Mills
The man who’d condemned her without giving her a chance to explain.
The one who took pain pills or drank too much.
Or the Gabe who stood there now, in the shadows of twilight, looking down at the woman who’d fed him false information, but wanting to take her face into his hands, anyway, to put his mouth to hers and see if she still tasted like peppermint and innocence and—
Salvation.
The word should have made him turn away. Sweet mercy, it should have made him rip away.
But he lifted his hands to the sides of her face, feathering along the bruise at her cheekbone—the bruise he had put there. “You didn’t know me,” he murmured again, and this time his mouth lowered toward hers. In some distorted corner of his mind he heard her sharp intake of breath and knew he should pull back, but he could grab on to nothing except the longing flooding her eyes, the way her lips parted in a silent echo of his name.
Warmth swam through him the second his mouth took hers. She should have shoved him away. Instead, she stepped closer, moving into him, against him, and lifted her arms to curl around his neck. And held on tight.
Then her mouth was moving against his, his against hers, soft at first, gentle and sweet and tentative, giving way to a hard rush he’d tried so damn hard to destroy. It broke through him now, had him pulling her into his body. She moaned softly and threaded a hand through his hair, opened her mouth and let him in.
The dark swirl sucked harder, deeper, threatening to pull him under. But he didn’t care, didn’t fight the irrational greed, just slanted his mouth against hers and ran his hands along the soft lines of her body—the way he’d done before.
Before.
Before he’d analyzed anything too closely and before he’d fallen, when he’d just let himself feel. And want.
And damn near drown.
Chapter 7
T he need rocked Evangeline. It was base and it was primal and it streaked through her on one powerful wave after another. In some barely functioning realm of her mind she knew she should pull away, shove at him with everything she had to put as much distance between them as she could, end this stupid charade. Russell Rae and Lilah didn’t exist, couldn’t exist.
It was Gabe kissing her, Gabe! But as his mouth moved against hers, everything blurred and there was only Gabe. He was a strong man. He prided himself on staying in control. But there was nothing controlled about the way his hands moved along her body—or the way her body responded. Heat swirled, making her knees go weak and overriding every sliver of caution or fear, leaving only a restless ache, the same ache that had shredded her the first time she’d realized she wanted a man she’d believed to be without conscience.
It was supposed to be black-and-white. For the first time in her life, it was supposed to be black-and-white….
But now the gray consumed her. His hands slid intimately along her body, along the curve of her waist and over the swell of her bottom, urging her closer and making it impossible not to feel the ridge pressed against her abdomen.
For over three months there’d been nothing. No touches, no smiles, no looks. And she’d told herself it was better that way. That she wouldn’t lose focus. But beneath that facade the heat had smoldered, and now the truth of it washed through her—and shattered. She’d come to New Orleans to prove this man guilty of jury tampering—
She ripped out of his arms and staggered back. “No…”
Gabe stood there in the clothes of Russell Rae, his hair rumpled and his mouth swollen from the sheer greed of her kiss, but in the dark blue of his eyes glowed a horror that sliced clear down to the bone. “Evie…”
“No,” she said again, and this time she moved, turned from him and practically ran from the room, the bed she’d wanted him to lay her down on. And feel him over her—inside her.
In the main room she headed straight for the front door and yanked it open, welcomed the slap of rain-cooled air like a touch of salvation she did not deserve.
Here the grayness fell gently, surrounding and swirling, bringing with it the mist and the sweet, misplaced scent of honeysuckle. She breathed it in, crossed to the rail and held on tight, closed her eyes and tilted her face toward the soft spray.
When she’d first come to New Orleans, everything had been so clear. Jimmy was in prison and her mother lost to alcohol, juror number three dead. The pieces had all been there; the opportunity she’d spent twelve years creating. Then she’d walked into that dinky little cafeteria and had seen Gabe staring at the charred remains inside a coffeepot. He’d turned to her and—
Banking the memory, she forced herself to go further back, to think of Jimmy, to remember his smile, his laugh. The life he’d dreamed about. He’d wanted to be a pediatrician. Her big bad jock of a brother had wanted to give his life to children….
“Evie.”
Gabe’s voice went through her, soft and warm and unbearably tender, just as his touch did. She stiffened, could feel him behind her. The heat of his body should have chased away the chill of the early-evening rain.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please.”
For a moment, there was only the patter of the rain, the pounding of her heart. Then she heard him let out a hard breath as he removed his hand from her arm and stepped away.
“My grandparents lived in a house like this,” she said without thinking. Her gaze remained fixed on the trees, the wind playing through the Spanish moss. “In the country, away from everything.” With cats. Lots and lots of cats.
“Did you spend much time there?” Gabe asked, and the question brought a hot sting to her eyes.
“My dad died when I was eight.” After all this time, the words, the memory, still stung. “He was a family doctor and a child had been sick.” Monique Hebert. She’d been six, her fever a hundred and four. Now she was twenty-eight, had four kids of her own. “He’d stayed with her at the clinic until her fever had broken.” Closing her eyes, she saw him as he’d been the last time she’d seen him alive, when he’d given her a hug and a kiss, apologized for having to cancel their fishing trip, but promising they would go the next day. “He fell asleep on the way home,” she whispered. “Wrapped his car around a tree.” And the pain of it, even now, after all this time, made her hands curl more tightly around the wood of the rail.
“I’m sorry,” Gabe said, and the edge to his voice said that he really was. Because he knew, too. He knew what it was like to be a child and lose a father.
“We’d moved in with his mother after that.” And her own mother had started to drink. Not a lot, just enough to take the edge off, she’d said. “My brother—” Took over. As handyman for their widowed grandmother, support system for their lost mother, surrogate father to a heartbroken little girl.
He’d been ten years old.
“Your brother?” Gabe’s voice was oddly quiet. “I didn’t realize you had one.” Just as she’d not realized he had a sister—because both had been lost to them: one through tragedy, the other through malfeasance.
“He’d tried to make everything okay,” she said, seeing Jimmy as he’d been—tall and lanky, with a smile that could melt your heart, but with dark, old-soul eyes that could just as easily break it. “He…grew up too fast.”
“I’d say you both did.”
“We had to.” The way Gabe had had to. “He’d tried to pretend it was okay, that he hadn’t wanted to play baseball or go to parties, that going to college hadn’t mattered.” He’d almost thrown his future away. “But before his senior year—” She laughed softly. “Actually, I don’t know what happened. My grandmother took him somewhere one afternoon, and when they’d come back, something had changed. He had changed. The next day he’d signed up for the baseball team.”
And for a few tenuous months, she’d had her brother back. He’d continued to do too much for all of them, but he’d followed his own dream, as well. He’d pitched the state championship game and run track; he’d dated; he’d kept his grades high. Then he’d gone to
New Orleans—
“Evie?”
Her heart kicked hard. Not because Gabe stepped closer, but because of the nickname, the one Jimmy had coined when she’d been just a little girl, without a care in the world other than where her new kitten was, but already convinced beyond reason that her brother hung the moon.
“What happened?” Gabe’s voice, so low and gentle and…concerned, made her throat tighten. “What happened to your brother?”
He knew. Without her saying even one word, he knew something had gone wrong. And she hated it, damn it. She hated that this man could read her so easily, read her so well, when he himself was a master of the bluff. Every time she thought she had a handle on him, he went and did something to muddy everything. Like kiss her as if he somehow needed to.
Blocking the memory, she lifted her face to the drizzle and welcomed the sting. “I always loved storms,” she said. “I’d sit on the front porch with my mom and grandmother and watch them roll in, watch the sky darken and feel the wind pick up.” See all the cats scramble under the wood-framed house. “It never occurred to me that anything bad could happen.”
That realization had come later.
Gabe came up beside her and propped a hip against the old rail. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
She knew better than to look at him when everything inside of her felt so raw and exposed. But she turned, anyway, and found him watching her not through the calculating eyes of an attorney on the hunt, but the too-dark eyes of a man on the outside looking in.
“No,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around her body.
He should have gotten the hint. But Gabriel Fontenot never did anything she wanted him to do. Instead, he eased the damp strands of hair from her face.
“It’s getting colder,” he said, but rather than letting his fingers linger against her cheek, he pulled his hand back. “You should come back inside.”
What she should do is leave. Gabe could wait for Jack on his own. His friend could give him a ride back to New Orleans. But she stepped toward the glow spilling through the door from inside.
For Jimmy, she told herself as she walked into the main room. For the truth, she amended as Gabe draped an old quilt around her shoulders. She would stay to make sure Jack saw everything, every letter and poem, every picture.
With twilight spilling around them, she let Gabe lead her to the cozy cream-colored sofa with its pattern of peach and buttery yellow hydrangeas—she’d come too far to push him away now, she told herself. She would stay, and she would watch and she would make sure she saw everything.
Even what she didn’t want to.
Dusk deepened into night. The rain had stopped, leaving only the steady wind to rattle the cabin. And, for the second time in forty-eight hours, Gabe watched her sleep.
She lay curled on the sofa, the soft pink quilt covering most of her body. More of her hair spilled against her cheeks. Her breathing was deep, rhythmic.
She’d fought it. Unlike the night after the warehouse, when she’d dropped off despite his presence in her apartment, this time she’d tried not to fall asleep. She hadn’t wanted to let her guard down. But he’d seen the fatigue in her eyes and had settled down in a recliner with the Cameron Monroe book and pretended to read.
Ten minutes later she’d been out.
He wanted to be glad. He should have been glad. With her asleep, there could be no more revelations, no more recollections of a childhood broken by tragedy, of a love of thunderstorms or a brother she’d lost. No more long confused looks.
No more careless, reckless kisses.
But, damn him, he still wanted to touch. It would be so damn easy, too. All he had to do was cross the braided rug and go down on his knees and slide his finger along the line of her jaw…to the smear of green and purple that punched through him like a fist to the gut, visible now after the concealer she’d applied that morning had worn off.
Instead, he kept vigil by the window, where he would see the headlights of Jack’s cruiser cut through the night.
But around him, there was only gray. In the sharp, tailored suits Evangeline wore to the courthouse, with her hair swinging in a smooth curtain and her makeup perfect, she looked like a woman who needed nothing or no one. But here, now, dressed like Lilah, with her eyes closed and her lashes sweeping against her cheeks, she looked soft—and oddly lost.
He’d thought that before, in the beginning when he’d found her talking in hushed tones into her cell phone. She’d turned abruptly, startled, and he would have sworn he saw fear glowing in her eyes. The urge to protect had rocked him.
But then, after he’d discovered her role in the D.A.’s sting, he’d realized he must have walked up on her talking about her strategy or her progress. That’s why she’d looked so uncomfortable.
Since then, he’d barely seen her at all. And on those few occasions when he had, all he’d seen was the lies and the deception, the severe suits and lying smile, dark brown eyes that could con as easily as they could seduce.
Until now. Now he saw what he’d not allowed himself to see before, what he still didn’t want to see. Watching her sleeping on the sofa, he saw the woman he’d once thought her to be: softer than she wanted most people to realize, warm and courageous, dedicated to truth but with a core of vulnerability she went to great lengths to conceal.
Just like Camille.
Frowning, he looked away from her to the window, but found her there, too, her reflection glowing against the darkness. His sister was out there, too. He knew that, believed it in his heart. He would know if something bad had happened to her. Even when a body had been found in the Everglades matching her description, even as he and Jack had sat silently on the plane racing east, he’d known the blond woman who’d been raped and strangled was not his sister.
She was still out there. Still alone? he wondered. Or had she found someone to trust? Would she have disclosed her secrets, her losses? Did she have someone to gather her close as he’d done so many times—as Evangeline’s brother would have done for her, in those dark days following her father’s death—to hold her and promise everything would be okay?
He’d lost his sister. Evangeline had lost her brother. They’d both lost fathers….
He brought his hands to his temples and rubbed, but the dull throb didn’t lesson. It was past ten. He’d talked to Jack forty-five minutes before. The fire was out, but his grandmother was shaken. Gabe had advised him to stay with her, get her settled. The cottage could wait.
He stood that way, staring into the darkness for an inhumanly long time. Then he went to the kitchen and got a glass of water, pulled the pain pill he’d taken from Evangeline from his pocket. Just this one, he told himself. To dull the edge. He hadn’t taken anything prescription in weeks—
He popped it and chugged the water, put the glass into the sink. But he did not return to the main room, to Evangeline. He knew better than to set himself up for a fall. Instead, he went to the bedroom and reread every letter, looking for something they’d missed before. It was close to thirty minutes later before he brought the prom picture with him to the old recliner and flipped it over in his hands.
I’ll love you forever.
The words should have brought back the sting of Val’s deception. He’d been on the verge of marrying her. But she was gone now, dead, and sweet twisted mercy, when he thought of her, when he tried to remember the life they’d shared or the future she’d claimed to want, it wasn’t anger or grief that he felt, but disgust.
Not at her, but himself.
For a man who prided himself on being master of the bluff, it stung to realize how thoroughly she, in turn, had bluffed him.
He flipped the picture back over and looked at Darci. Someone had bluffed her, too. Someone had played her, plied her with empty words, then discarded her when she no longer fit their purposes,
And he’d bet his life it wasn’t the acne-prone boy in the tacky white tuxedo.
Gabe wasn’t sure how mu
ch time passed, or when his eyes grew heavy. The pain pill, he realized, fighting it, but everything faded and in the darkness of his mind he found her there; Evangeline, dressed in white and easing in and out of the shadows, her hand held out to him….
He came awake hard, jerking up and straining against the shadows. The heat and the smell hit him simultaneously. Coughing, he squinted and bolted to his feet, spun. The kitchen stood empty. The front of the cabin was untouched. But the bedroom door was closed—and he’d left it open.
And from beneath it, leaked whitish gray smoke.
Adrenaline kicked. He ran for the door and put his hand to it, found it hot to the touch. “Sweet Christ,” he said as something crashed from within and the first flames licked through the rafters.
“Gabe?” Evangeline rasped, coughing, and he twisted, lunged for the sofa. “Wh-what’s happening?”
He reached for her, pulled her into his arms even as he ran. “Fire.” At the front door he grabbed the knob and twisted, but nothing happened. Swearing softly, he jerked again; this time harder. But the door wouldn’t budge.
“G-Gabe—” she coughed “—c-can’t…breathe.”
He spun, saw that flames had replaced the smoke snaking from beneath the bedroom door. There were two windows in the front room. He ran to one of them and flipped the lock.
It didn’t budge.
“Gabe!” Evangeline shouted, fisting her hands in his shirt.
He turned just as one of the rafters smashed onto the sofa.
“Son of a bitch!” He ran to the other window and shifted her in his arms, released the lock and jerked.
It didn’t move.
“Hang on!” he called over the roar of the fire. They were not going to die in here. She was not going to die. He was not going to let her.
Even if someone wanted them to.
“Stay here,” he said, easing her from his arms and positioning her away from the window, away from the glass he was about to send shattering. He reared back, but before he could smash his foot through the window, Evangeline grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
