A Little Bit Guilty

by Jenna Mills

  Her heart kicked hard and the truth sliced deep. An ambush, she realized. Gabe was not here for her, not here because of her.

  He was here for Marcel Lambert.

  He didn’t want to watch her. He didn’t want to look. He was not here for her. But from the second he’d spotted her chatting with Lambert in his goddamn ivory tuxedo, when Lambert had brought her hand to his mouth, the slow boil had taken over.

  He watched her now—talking with the district attorney, not a hair out of place, her makeup flawless and her sexy little black dress hugging in all the right places—and forced himself to see the evidence right in front of him.

  Someone had set him up. Someone wanted to see him fall for destroying the notes and letters and pictures; to use him to set Lambert free.

  And that someone was Lambert himself. That was how a snake operated. That was how he got away with murder.

  But his choice of weapons…

  Gabe watched the movers and shakers of New Orleans parade around him, watched Lambert laughing with a city councilwoman and a reporter for a news show, then Evangeline with Vince. Talking to him. So cool and calm and collected…as if she hadn’t almost been killed the night before.

  Everything inside of Gabe tightened at the realization, but he forced himself to hold on to it, forced himself to consider the possibility. The attorney in him knew that Evangeline could be a pawn. Lambert could have recruited her and sent her after him, assigned her to infiltrate his life, just as Val had been assigned to infiltrate his life.

  The comparison ground through him. He watched a waiter with a tray of red wine, wanted so damn badly to flag him down. But did not allow himself to move. A drink wouldn’t change anything. He knew that, knew he had to force himself to see, no matter how much he hated what he saw. He’d fallen for Val’s insecurity act, had actually felt responsible for her. When she’d cried, he’d held her. When she’d claimed he was all she had, he’d believed her. And when he’d brought critical information home from the office, she’d taken it, exploited it.

  “He sees you,” Jack whispered through the earpiece, and Gabe resisted the urge to turn and look, to hold Lambert’s gaze and let him know in no uncertain terms that he was on to him.

  But that wasn’t what tonight was about. Tonight was about letting Lambert feel in control. Tonight was about backing him deeper into a corner he had no idea was coming. “Keep on him,” Gabe instructed Jack, then turned and casually made his way toward the back of the aquarium, where an open-air patio overlooked the river. He plucked a stem of champagne on the way, smiling and nodding as if he had every right to be there.

  “Stop her.”

  The emphatically whispered words were not meant for him. But he stopped and turned, anyway, saw her. She remained with the D.A. That had not changed. But she no longer looked untouchable. No longer looked untouched. He saw her mouth work, saw her try to slip away from Arceneaux, but Savannah swooped in with perfect timing and reached for her hands, just as Cain closed in on Vince.

  Her eyes hardened with an odd combination of frustration and dread, but Gabe ripped his gaze away and strode from the room that reeked of perfume and cooking oil—and deception.

  Working his way through the humid rain-forest exhibit, he followed the path to the decoratively lit patio. Tiki torches swayed in the cool breeze. Strings of chili-pepper party lights illuminated the shrubbery like garish Christmas decorations. He walked amid it all and positioned himself with his back to the door.

  The perfect bait, he knew, could not be resisted.

  Almost like clockwork, footsteps sounded behind him. A man’s, he could tell from the heavy gait. Not a woman’s.

  Not Evangeline’s.

  He allowed himself no guilt, not even as his last sight of her flashed through his mind, of her trying to make her way to him, to stop him. Of Savannah stopping her, instead. Of the way Evangeline had looked at him, as if she saw a train wreck coming, but there wasn’t a damn thing she could do stop it.

  Which there wasn’t.

  “So glad you could join us tonight, Gabriel.”

  The deceptively benign words fell around Gabe like a hand of aces. He didn’t smile, though, didn’t give any indication that Lambert had just swallowed his bait, hook, line and sinker. He didn’t even turn. He merely gathered his cards close and stood there, looking out at the river while Marcel’s cigarette smoke swirled closer.

  The man who’d lived a charmed life while Gabe’s father lay interred in darkness came to stand beside him—close without touching—and did as Gabe did, looked out over the river. “I can only imagine how difficult it must be,” he commented blandly, “being here among your peers and the press, seeing the way they look at you. Knowing that they know…everything.”

  Everything. The word dangled in the breeze, carrying with it the whisperings that followed Gabe everywhere: about Val and his suspension from the D.A.’s office, the handgun found in his house, about his drinking and need for pain pills. And just as when he knew a jury was turning his way, Gabe blanked the slow gleam of satisfaction—for such a smooth operator, Marcel Lambert was ridiculously predictable.

  “That why you’re out here, Gabriel? You needed to get away from it all…find some fresh air?”

  Watching a barge on the river, Gabe brought the champagne flute to his mouth and sipped. “Is there something you wanted?” he asked. “I’ve already tried the oysters.”

  Lambert’s laugh was smooth and polished, so pathetically civilized. “Let me call someone to come get you,” he offered. “Your mama maybe? I’ve been meaning to call Ruthanne, tell her how glad I am that dead girl in Florida didn’t turn out to be our little Camille.”

  Gabe refused to allow his jaw to tighten, knew Marcel was simply attacking from another angle. But the nasty jab unlocked the memory, and for a brutal second he saw the sheet-draped body on the table. He and Jack had looked at the sheet a long, long time. The description had matched. The young woman had been blond and pretty, with green eyes and delicate features, freckles. She’d been five foot six, just like Camille. The tattoos on the body had not been there before, but a lot could happen in ten years.

  She’d died a hard, violent death.

  Gabe would never forget the way his knees had wanted to buckle when the coroner had pulled back the sheet and they’d seen the young woman’s face. He’d crossed himself. Jack had just stood there, staring….

  “But wait a minute, your mama’s out of town, isn’t she?” Lambert asked, as if he gave a flat red damn. But then, that was the game he’d been playing with Gabe’s family for over twenty years. “Heard she had some trouble.”

  Gabe put the champagne flute onto the rail, kept his face expressionless. As a young man, when he’d first joined the district attorney’s office, he’d let Lambert’s thinly veiled taunts get to him.

  But he was a man now and he knew how to play the game.

  “Did you have a point with all this?” he asked in a tight voice, allowing Lambert to think he had the upper hand.

  “Just worried about you, son, that’s all. After everything you’ve been through…”

  Again Gabe let Lambert’s comment dangle between them, let the silence stir with the breeze rustling the strings of lights. All the while he looked out into the darkness, where a brightly lit paddleboat-turned-floating-casino glided to the dock following one of its requisite cruises.

  “She’s so quiet,” Gabe commented. Still. Like a spider waiting in her web. “The river,” he clarified. Seemingly benign, wide and grand and constant, running like an old friend through the city. Through everything. “It would be easy to be deceived, wouldn’t it?” he mused. “Easy to forget what she’s capable of.”

  The tip of Lambert’s cigarette glowed against the night. “Perhaps.” Lowering his arm to the rail, he let his thin cigarette dangle between his fingers. “Mais, she has not won yet, has she?” he said with the misplaced arrogance of someone who thought they’d gotten away with murder. Twice. “No ma
tter how hard she’s tried, no matter how much collateral damage has fallen, I am still here.”

  Gabe savored the slow, sweet rush of adrenaline. They were so not talking about the river.

  “Borrowed time,” he muttered. “Isn’t that what the government says?” That one day the river and the swamp would reclaim the city that care forgot and she would fade to nothing but memory.

  This time Lambert laughed. “Posturing,” he boasted. “It’ll never happen.”

  Gabe strummed his fingers along the rail. “My father always said—” he started, but then Jack’s voice was there, an urgent whisper through the earpiece: “You’re about to have company.”

  “Your father said what?”

  Gabe turned toward Lambert, giving himself a better look at the path leading from the rain-forest exhibit. “Never is a dangerous word,” he said. “Almost like asking for—” he saw her then, saw her emerge from the heavily foliaged path, practically at a dead run or, at least, as close to a run as her strappy heels and sinful little dress would allow “—trouble.”

  She stopped. “Gabe—” she mouthed without voice, and, damn it, he didn’t understand what he saw in her eyes, the horror and the suspicion, the dread. It was almost as if—

  Almost as if she’d been afraid of what she might find.

  The urge to go to her ground through him, to pull her behind him and away from Lambert, where the other man couldn’t touch her, couldn’t so much as see her.

  Couldn’t use her.

  “Well, well,” Lambert drawled, because he had turned and he had seen. “This evening just keeps getting more interesting by the second, doesn’t it?”

  Something dark and punishing drove Gabe. He strode toward Evangeline and reached for her, touched her even though he’d told himself that could never happen again. “You need to go.”

  She didn’t move. “What are you doing?” she whispered fiercely. “Do you have any idea—”

  “I have plenty of ideas,” he snapped before she could finish. And they all pushed in on him, hard and brutal and jagged. Evangeline and Gabe and Marcel were three players on a stage, each with their own unrehearsed script.

  “Gabe—” she started, but he didn’t let her finish, not when he had one more card to play. He tugged her toward him and stabbed his hands into her hair, tilting her face toward his.

  Then he crushed his mouth to hers and kissed her.

  Chapter 10

  E verything blurred. Evangeline told herself to pull away, but shock held her immobile. Gabe’s hands were on her face, not roughly like the glitter in his eyes had promised, but with a gentleness that ripped through her. Too many nights she’d jerked herself from the shadows of her dreams, unable to forget the way he’d been touching her, the gentleness and the hunger.

  He touched her that way now, when he shouldn’t be touching her at all. Not after the finality with which he’d walked away the night before, not with Marcel Lambert looking on. She’d braced herself, had been certain he was going to drag her away from his clandestine meeting with Marcel.

  Instead, he’d reached for her, and in that one hazy moment, everything Evangeline thought she knew crumbled. Confusion bled and need burned. Denial shattered.

  She knew the kiss had nothing to do with dreams or nightmares and everything to do with the scene she’d just walked in on. But there was something in the slant of Gabe’s mouth that had not been there before, not in her dreams, not in the stolen moments the night before. Now there was frustration and now there was sorrow. But it wasn’t a hard kiss, wasn’t unrestrained. There amid the taste of champagne, she found a tenderness and a regret that almost destroyed.

  And then she knew, then she realized. As his hands tangled in her hair, it wasn’t tenderness that she tasted. It was deliberateness, the cool, cold calculation of a man executing his bluff.

  She pushed against him. “Don’t—”

  But Gabe only smiled. “Why not, catin? Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting all along? To lure me in—”

  Moments before, everything blurred. Now it stopped. “What are you—”

  Gabe didn’t let her finish, just turned toward Marcel. “She’s all yours,” he said, and started to walk away.

  The truth cut from all directions, the punishing possibility that Gabe thought she had something going with Lambert. That she worked for him, that she was the one who’d been sent to sabotage the evidence and frame Gabe, to destroy his career and his vendetta. “Gabe—” she said, but the freezing look in his eyes stopped her. Because she knew. She’d walked into this trap. She’d set herself up for this fall. She had lied to Gabe. She had tried to lure him in. She had wanted only to use him.

  And now, God, she realized that somewhere along the line she’d made a huge mistake—but she wasn’t sure when. When she’d let Gabe touch her and felt the awakening inside, the longing? When she’d found herself walking into her own trap and responding to the man she’d trained herself to hate?

  Or further back, in the beginning, when she’d first targeted Gabe, first believed he’d tampered with the jury that had taken Jimmy’s future from him?

  “You’ve got this wrong,” she said, because it was important to her that he know the truth, that he not believe she’d been part of a seedy alliance with the man who’d killed his father.

  But the indifference in Gabe’s eyes told her it was too late. The lies were already there. The betrayals and the deception. She was the one who’d been unable to answer one simple question: What kind of man do you think I am?

  “Do I?” he asked. But before she could answer Saura and John D’Ambrosia strolled in from the rain-forest exhibit. Their fluid body language was that of lovers, but the gleam in their eyes warned there was nothing casual about their appearance.

  The silence lasted only a heartbeat. As a horn blew from the barge on the river, Marcel Lambert laughed. “Ah,” he said. “The rescue party. How quaint.”

  Gabe pivoted, but said nothing, just started walking toward the path through the rain-forest exhibit.

  But Marcel wasn’t ready to let him go. “I’d be careful if I were you, Gabriel,” he called, and the way he enunciated Gabe’s name, the way a parent might speak to an errant child, made Evangeline’s skin crawl.

  Gabriel Fontenot was no child.

  “Boys who play games—” he warned.

  Gabe stopped, turned. “I’ll make note of that,” he said without one trace of the venom Evangeline knew he felt. “But you know what they say about people who’ve already lost everything.”

  Marcel picked up a champagne glass from the railing and lifted it toward Gabe. “You really think you’ve lost everything, Gabriel?”

  It shouldn’t have been possible for Gabe to look lethal, not while he wore an expensively cut tuxedo, with the breeze ruffling his burned-coffee hair and his lips curved into a smile. Maybe it was the whiskers shadowing his jaw. Or maybe it was the other shadow, the one that fell between the two men, of another man, a third man. Not Detective John D’Ambrosia, but Gabe’s father, who remained there, positioned between the man who might have taken his life and the son who’d vowed to avenge him.

  “I wasn’t talking about myself,” Gabe said in a chillingly soft voice. Then he strode from the patio. Saura and her detective fiancé shot a hard look at Evangeline, then Marcel, before they, too, slipped into the shadows, without ever having said a word.

  Sometimes, Evangeline knew, words were not necessary.

  But sometimes they were. A good man, she wished she’d been able to say. An honest man. A man of deep integrity. A man who’s loved and lost, who’s been betrayed. A man who grew up too hard and too fast, who took on responsibility when he should have been flirting with irresponsibility. A man who—

  God help her, a man she wanted. Even now, even still.

  “Well, that was certainly interesting,” Marcel mused, strolling toward her. He dropped his cigarette but did not crush it out. Nearing her, he offered her the champagne. “Have you
tried the shrimp remoulade yet? I really think you’ll enjoy it.”

  Evangeline wasn’t sure she’d ever wanted more to wipe a smarmy smile off someone’s face. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, but did not take the glass from his hands.

  “You do that.” He set the champagne on the railing, then reached inside his jacket and withdrew an antique silver case, tapped out another cigarette. “I have a few things to keep in mind, myself.” And then he was gone.

  Evangeline crossed to the railing and looked out over the river. To the south, a barge worked its way beneath the twin-span bridge that connected the Crescent City to its neighbor, Slidell. Both had been decimated by Katrina’s floodwaters. Both had sat in ruin and squalor. But now both were on the mend, hope taking root where once there’d been only despair.

  With the breeze whispering around her, she ran her finger along her bottom lip.

  She heard the footsteps too late. Throat tight, she started to turn, but he was on her before she could move, crowding her with his body. Something rough and dark and rancid smelling came down over her head, bringing with it a cloying darkness.

  “Scream,” the low voice growled in her ear, “and it will be the last mistake you make.”

  Evangeline didn’t come back. Gabe knew better than to watch, knew there was no longer a reason to stand vigil beside the eerily lit aquarium that doubled as a wall. He’d accomplished what he’d come to do. He’d baited the trap, watched Lambert come sniffing around. He’d played the game and hidden his cards. He’d pretended to be beaten. He’d pretended to be down.

  The lure was sweet: for years Lambert had hungered for the legendary stained glass that had vanished during the Civil War. Museums in France wanted it back. They were willing to pay.

  And Lambert…Lambert was willing to kill. Once he caught wind of the rumors Gabe had sent rippling through the city, that Gabe had located the object of his own father’s obsession, Lambert would not be able to resist. He’d come sniffing around. But this time it would be Gabe standing in his way and, unlike his father, Gabe was prepared. The trap would spring, and Lambert would be the one caught.