by JoAnn Ross
She made it sound so simple. Too simple. Roarke knew there was a trap somewhere; he just couldn’t concentrate on searching it out when his body ached as if it had been used for a punching bag. Which it had been.
“You have to admit, it’s the perfect solution.” She took a burgundy washcloth down from the antique gold ring and knelt beside the tub. Roarke’s pain was forgotten as he watched her deliberate, almost-seductive movements.
She dipped the washcloth in the water, then gently washed away the dried blood on his face with a tenderness he’d only ever received from his mother. He’d been eight years old, covered with chicken pox that itched like the devil. Years later, he could still remember the soothing touch of Mary O’Malley’s fingers as they’d smoothed the pink calamine lotion over those red bumps.
Of course his mother’s touch, as wonderful as it had been, had not excited him in the same way Daria’s did as she trailed the cloth down his throat and over his chest.
“It’s an attractive solution,” he admitted. “I’m not certain it’s perfect.”
“Believe me, it is.” She frowned at the darkening bruises, then squeezed the cloth, causing a stream of warm water to flow over his battered flesh. “You’ve saved my life three times in the past two days. I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to repay you.”
Roarke sucked in a breath as the treacherous cloth dipped beneath the water and moved steadily lower, over his rib cage, his belly.
“Several ideas come to mind. And as tempted as I am to take what you’re offering in exchange for continued protection, it isn’t necessary. Because I’m sticking around for as long as it takes to get my story. Since keeping you safe seems to be the only way to do that; you don’t owe me anything. Including sex.”
Knowing how difficult it must have been for her to have agreed to a no-strings affair in the first place, Roarke felt exactly like the bastard he was as he viewed first the shock, then the humiliation move across her face. And then, watching the way she stiffened her shoulders, he felt even lower than a snake in a rut.
“I assume a big macho man like you can handle the rest by yourself.”
Her words matched the coolness that had replaced the pain in her gilt eyes. He would have believed the ice-princess act was real if the slight trembling of her hand, as she held the washcloth out to him, hadn’t given her away.
“I’ve been taking care of myself for a very long time.”
“And you like it that way.”
His gaze met her challenging one. “Got it on the first try.”
“Fine.” She threw the cloth against his chest, spun. on her heel, and walked back out the door. She didn’t really slam it, Roarke decided. But she came damn close.
Sighing, but knowing he’d done the right thing for both of them, he retrieved the washcloth from Beneath the dissolving bubbles and scrubbed his body with a vengeance, hoping the pain would overcome another, far more primal.
9
ACCUSTOMED TO SOMETIMES having to go for days without sleep, Roarke was up before dawn. He went into the kitchen and started the coffee brewing. His original plan had been to leave the city before first light, but since she’d admittedly been through a lot, he’d decided Daria needed to sleep.
Sugar had arrived earlier with the van, which he’d left for Roarke and Daria to use. A woman detective had followed Sugar to the house and they’d left together in a nondescript Ford Taurus.
“That smells wonderful,” Daria said as she entered the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of gray leggings and an oversize gray Loyola sweatshirt.
When he’d packed her things, Roarke had thought her wardrobe—which seemed to be mostly proper business suits—too understated for his taste. Her underwear, however, had been an entirely different story. As he’d gathered up the frothy confections the vandals hadn’t destroyed, he’d decided that she must have bought out the entire lingerie department at Royal Street’s famed Fleur de Paris. Incredibly, just wondering what she was wearing beneath that drab outfit made him hard.
He handed her a cup.
She took a sip, then sighed her appreciation. “And it tastes as good as it smells.”
Her soft sigh and the way her eyes turned the hue of molten gold made him want to drag her down onto the kitchen table, or beneath it. When she looked up at him, saw the masculine desire in his dark gaze, she blushed and quickly lowered her eyes. When he found himself wanting to see if he could make her entire body flush, Roarke decided it was time—past time—to get back to the business at hand.
“How’s your memory?”
Too vivid for comfort. As she recalled, with exquisite detail, the erotic dream she’d experienced just before waking, Daria felt the fever rise even hotter in her cheeks.
“I haven’t remembered anything else about the murders.”
“I have a plan to see if we can remedy that If you’re willing.”
“Absolutely.” She would do anything to banish the annoying fog that still hovered over part of her mind.
“It could be dangerous.”
“Gee, that’ll be a unique experience.”
Her dry tone almost made him laugh. “Nothing like living on the edge to get the blood racing,”
Her blood had certainly raced last night when she’d been bathing him. Before he’d sent her away. “I’m afraid I might be turning into an adrenaline junkie,” she admitted.
“You could well be. But believe me, baby, it’s a rough addiction to kick.
“By the way, Mike wants to send an artist over. To make a sketch of the murder victim you remember from the bayou.”
The very thought sent a frisson of fear skimming up her spine. “All right.” She didn’t want to have to think about that, didn’t want to remember the horror of watching that poor man die, but knew she had no choice.
“And then, after that’s taken care of, I want to get you out of the city.”
“Where? To another safe house?”
“Sort of. It’s in the bayou.” He’d no sooner said the word when Roarke saw her body stiffen.
“I’ve got a place I used to use for hunting and fishing,” he explained. “We’ll be safe there while Mike works the case on this end and we see how much of your memory returns.”
“It’s more than that, isn’t it? You’re hoping taking me out there might help me remember the faces of the men who shot that man.”
His expression was as grim as her thoughts. “Yeah.”
Daria was grateful to him for not trying to evade the truth, even though he had to know that she dreaded the very idea of returning to that place of nightmares.
“I’ll go.” The words were exhaled on a soft, shimmering sigh of surrender. She had no choice, Daria knew. Because something told her that the answer to all this could be found out in the dark, mysterious bayou swampland.
He’d known she would agree. Now Roarke could only hope that his admittedly risky plan wouldn’t end up getting them both killed.
The former police artist was friendly, efficient and talented. He patiently drew and rejected features until he had pieced together a sketch that somewhat resembled Daria’s recollection of the murdered man’s face. But Daria was not satisfied. “It could be anyone,” she muttered as she looked down at the composite drawing.
“You’d be surprised how helpful they can be,” the man assured her. “And you did real good, Ms. Shea. That teardrop tattoo, for instance, suggests he’d killed someone. If he served time, we should be able to match him up to a mug shot.”
Personally, Daria thought the odds were slim. Hopefully, Michael O’Malley would turn out to be as good a detective as Roarke kept saying he was. Because for that black-and-white sketch to be any help, he would have to be a combination of Sherlock Holmes, Columbo and Sam Spade.
“I wonder if it’s someone I prosecuted,” she murmured.
“It could be somebody you sent away,” Roarke said at the same time.
They exchanged a look and Daria found herself being warmed by the first g
enuine smile he’d given her.
“That’s a distinct possibility,” the artist agreed as he sprayed the drawing with fixative, then put his charcoal pencil and paper tablet back into his leather case. “You could be looking at a gang killing.” He turned to Roarke. “You gonna keep in touch?”
Roarke nodded. “Mike’ll know how to get hold of me.”
He walked the artist to the door, leaving Daria in the kitchen. She heard their murmured conversation and wondered if they were talking about her.
“Keith was once the local representative for the police union,” Roarke said when he came back.
“Oh?” Realizing he was not a man prone to small talk, Daria wondered why he was telling her this.
“Funny thing.” He refilled his coffee cup, then held the carafe out to her. Her nerves were already jangling from having to recall what she’d seen in the bayou, and Daria turned him down with a shake of her head. “Turns out that the state organization contributed to your fiancé’s campaign.”
“That’s not unusual. Candidates always try to get the endorsement of the local police unions.”
“True enough. But this was a little different. Some of the brass made not-so-veiled suggestions that it might be beneficial for all concerned if the cops themselves contributed to the campaign.”
“They threatened them?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.” He took a drink, eyeing her over the rim of the cup, watching her for any sign of prevarication. If he’d paid more attention to Natasha that morning, she might still be alive. “Encouraged them to do their civic duty by electing a law-and-order candidate is probably a better way to put it.”
“I can’t believe people would be killed for not contributing to a campaign.”
“That’s a little Draconian. Even for Boudreaux,” he admitted. “But they were skating on some very thin legal ice. What would you have done if you’d happened to run across illegal campaign contributions?”
“File charges,” she said without hesitation.
“Against your own fiancé?”
“If he was breaking the law, I’d have no choice.”
Roarke shook his head, thinking how simple the world would be if it consisted of absolutes—black and white, good guys and bad.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said when he didn’t immediately answer. “You believe I’m too old-fashioned. Too rigid.”
“Louisiana isn’t exactly known for its rigidity,” he reminded.
“I know. And that’s part of the problem. Not just here, but everywhere. People think that rules and laws don’t matter anymore. They feel free to break them—maybe starting with the little ones, like speeding, or cheating on their taxes, and then pretty soon they’re not paying child support and then—”
“It’s a slippery slope to Angola,” Roarke broke in.
“You don’t have to laugh at me.”
“I’m not. Not really.” Because he wanted to kiss her, and that was just for starters, Roarke turned away and poured the rest of his coffee down the drain, then put the cup in the dishwasher. When he turned back to her, his expression was as serious as she’d ever seen it. ”I admire you. But not many people would share your unwavering commitment to the law.” Which meant that the suspect list could be a very long one.
“Believe me, I know that.” She surprised him by laughing. “Otherwise, I’d have a one-hundred-percent conviction rate.”
She stared at him. “Roarke...”
He didn’t say a word. Just stood there, waiting for the memory to come into focus.
“Damn.” She covered her face with her hands. “I was so close.”
He hated seeing her so distressed. “It’ll come,” he assured her yet again.
Because he was beginning to care for her in a way that could only complicate things, he knew that to raise the level of intimacy would be even more dangerous this morning than it had been last night. He was too much like his father—he was a rover, a man incapable of settling down in one place, with one woman.
Life had made him cynical; experience had made him unwilling to trust anyone, with the exception of his brother. An intelligent, levelheaded woman like Daria Shea shouldn’t want him but, amazed that she did, he pulled her hands away from her lovely, troubled face and lowered his mouth to hers.
Unlike the unbridled passion she’d sensed before, Roarke’s kiss was light as a feather and surprisingly tender. And it still possessed the power to make Daria’s toes curl in her sneakers. And, she feared, to break her heart.
She looked up at him when the brief gentle kiss ended. “What was that for?”
“For you.” He smiled and touched his fingertips to her cheek. “And for me.”
They exchanged a long look.
“We’d better get going,” he said finally.
As she left the house with him, Daria understood that in that silent, suspended moment, things between them had shifted yet again.
ROARKE KNEW THAT to many people, the word swamp conjured up unattractive images of snakes and gas and gators. Yet although he’d traveled to every corner of the globe, he’d never found a place as enchanting as Louisiana’s freshwater, forested bayous.
He suspected that all those people who so readily vilified the gloriously soggy acres that made up America’s largest swamp ecosystem didn’t realize that its rookeries were home to thousands of birds and in spring, the myriad unnamed lakes vanished in a dazzling display of flowers.
As much as he loved the city, for some reason, from the time his uncle had first taken him hunting in the Atchafalaya River Basin, it had become one of the few places he’d ever felt truly at peace.
“There’s a part of me that thinks I should be terrified,” Daria mused aloud as they drove through the vast fields of wetlands. “Considering the horrible thing I remember that happened out here.”
Since it was the first thing she’d said since they’d left New Orleans nearly an hour earlier, Roarke glanced over at her. “I hear a but in that statement.”
“A stronger part of me can’t help being calmed by the almost-surreal beauty.” She’d no sooner spoken than a giant heron took flight from the bayou bank in a graceful flurry of blue-gray wings.
It figured she would understand the mysterious land’s charm. Everything about the woman just kept pulling him in deeper. She hadn’t even complained about the eau de crayfish permeating the van. “The bayou’s not for everyone.”
“Thank goodness. After we crossed the bridge, I remembered working on a murder case where the suspect came from Houma. I spent a lot of time out here and fell in love.”
“Hopefully not with the suspect.”
She smiled at that. “No. With the land itself. It’s not the kind of love that hits like a lightning bolt—it sneaks up on you, fills empty places inside you that you never knew existed. After I left, I realized I’d taken a bit of it with me.”
She charmed him by blushing yet again. “I’m sorry. I realize that sounds hopelessly romantic, but—”
“It’s true.”
Roarke was tempted to ask her to marry him on the spot. She was too damn perfect For his own safety, he was going to have to find some flaw or he was sunk.
“The tourists go out in the commercial boats, see a few nutria, maybe watch the guide feed an alligator a piece of raw chicken from a fishing pole, eat some boiled crayfish spiced up with Tabasco sauce and believe they’ve been to the bayou.
“But it’s not that kind of place. You can’t drive up to it, take a few quick snapshots, then roar off again to the plantation tour, or the French Quarter, or on to Memphis to visit Elvis’s grave. It’s a wandering place.”
“Maybe that’s why you love it so,” Daria said. “Because it is a wandering place. And, given your career, you’re obviously a man with wanderlust in his blood.”
Just like his father. How many times had Roarke heard his mother accuse him of that? The difference was, Roarke decided, that although Patrick O’Malley continued to r
oam the world, taking his Pulitzer prizewinning news photographs, his middle son, at least; was beginning to get weary of chasing after something that always seemed just out of reach.
Not prepared to share his recent doubts about the direction his life had taken with this woman he’d already allowed to get too close, Roarke merely nodded and said, “You may have a point.”
There was something there, Daria mused, studying him surreptitiously as she pretended great interest in the acres of rice fields they were driving through. Watching the way his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched at her seemingly innocent statement, she couldn’t help wondering if perhaps Roarke O’Malley hadn’t spent the last ten years of his life running not to something, but from something.
As if deciding they’d talked long enough, Roarke reached out, turned on the van’s radio and tuned it to a local FM station. Daria listened to the plaintive Cajun song and, although she could comprehend less than half of the regional patois, the depressing story of a love gone tragically wrong came through all too clearly. Since she already had enough to feel glum about, she was relieved when it was followed by a brighter, jaunty tune about crayfish pie and jambalaya.
A comfortable silence settled over them as they continued deeper and deeper into the bayou. Knowing how the landscape always changed, how watercourses could become flats, how seemingly solid land could be turned into rushing water in the spring, how drowned land was reborn over and over again, Daria, wondered how on earth Roarke knew where he was headed.
But strangely, although she’d gotten the impression that he didn’t come home often, he seemed to be zeroing in on his destination with the instincts of a homing pigeon. In the distance, under the winter-pale sky, thunderheads rose like dark iron anvils.
They passed a cemetery, the graves built aboveground, as they were back in the city, to prevent the bodies from floating to the surface. The glint of sun on a broken angel’s wing triggered a flash of memory.
“Roarke!” She grabbed his arm, almost causing the van to veer off the narrow road.
“What?” He cursed mildly under his breath as he corrected the steering.
