Hall, Jessica

by Into the Fire

  She unlocked all five dead bolts on her door and pulled it open. "What, are you selling cookies?"

  "No." He stared at her oddly for a moment. "May I come inside?" He sounded as polite as a visiting priest.

  She stepped out of his way and then closed the door behind him. "J. D.'s back."

  "I know." He looked all around her front room. "This is a small place."

  "Not all of us can afford nineteenth-century mansions. I like it." She brushed past him to go into her tiny kitchenette. "Beside, I really only sleep here. Sit down—want a drink?"

  He didn't answer her or sit; he only stood in the middle of the room staring at the portrait of Marie Laveau over her sofa and the yellow blessing candles on the shelf beneath it. "You believe in voodoo?"

  "No, but some of my family does, and I don't have the heart to throw out the crap they give me." She poured herself a glass of raspberry tea, and after a hesitation, poured a second for him. "So what brings you to my humble, not very architecturally interesting, voodoo-infested abode?"

  "I needed to see you." He watched her come from the kitchen and stared at the glass she held out to him. "No, thank you."

  This close, she could smell the whiskey on his breath and see the slight glaze over his eyes. Despite his very sober appearance, she wondered if the oh-so-proper Marshal Cortland Gamble might be slightly smashed out of his gourd.

  You don't prod a gator with a stick, chère, her mother told her. Even when it don't look hungry.

  She set the glass down and kept her voice neutral. "What can I do for you, Cort?"

  He looked over her shoulder. "Is my brother here?"

  "No." She laughed as he went back to have a look in her bedroom anyway. "Fabio is, though, and he's very tired. Don't wake him up—I wore him out."

  Cort returned to the front room. "Where is J. D.?"

  "I don't know." He was beginning to worry her now. "Maybe you should go home now, Cortland. Sleep it off."

  "Have you slept with him?"

  She folded her arms. Here stood the only Gamble she'd ever been interested in, and he thought she was doing it with his brother. There was some kind of sick, twisted message in that. "Fabio? I wish. J. D.? Ah, no, sorry. Department policy, paragraph nine, subsection three: Female detectives will refrain from screwing their partners' brains out at all times."

  He didn't like that. "You're always laughing at me."

  "What can I say, you're a funny guy."

  "No, I'm not." He reached out and touched her shaggy hair. "Why Fabio?" he asked as he fingered the short strands. "Why not me?"

  Jesus, he really is smashed. Reasoning with him would be totally useless, so she might as well concentrate on hauling his butt back to the Gamble plantation. "He's richer than you. And nicer. Don't." As he tried to kiss her, she whipped her head to the side.

  "I want to."

  "I'm getting high enough from the fumes, thanks." She took his arm, trying to steer him toward the sofa. "How about you sit down, let me get dressed, and I'll drive you home."

  "I'm not that drunk, Therese."

  "You don't want me to make you blow up a funny little balloon, do you?" She gave up on planting him and headed for her bedroom. "Hold on, I'll be right out."

  Terri didn't realize he'd followed her in until he closed the bedroom door and locked it. She was not going to yell at him. He was intoxicated; he didn't know what he was doing.

  "I've been dressing myself since I was three, Cort. I don't need help."

  "I know what you need." He loomed over her, and brought her hand to the front of his trousers. The ridge tenting them was pretty impressive. He pulled off his shirt. "I'll give it to you."

  The temptation was equally daunting—he felt long and thick against her fingers, and lo and behold, the man had the chest of a god. The rest of him had to be as good or better. Terri hadn't had sex since... she couldn't remember—it had been that long.

  But this wasn't just any guy. This was Cort, and that was broken-heart territory from the borders in.

  Carefully she pulled her hand away. "I don't have any paper bags for you to put over your head for when you sneak out of here in the morning."

  "I don't sneak and I don't need a bag."

  "Go back outside and get a better look at the neighborhood, you'll change your mind real fast."

  He turned on the lamp, then came over and tugged at the belt of her robe. She stopped him, and he looked into her eyes. "I need you, Terri."

  Maybe he hadn't had sex in a long time. That might explain his choice. "Why now? Why not in 2001, or last Christmas, or next Tuesday?"

  "I've tried not to think about you," he told her. "For years, ever since they made you his partner. I can't do it anymore." He untied the belt and parted her robe, then stared down at her.

  She knew her breasts were small and she was too thin, and she had to struggle with a terrible urge to jerk her robe shut. "As you can see, I'm built for speed, not display."

  "You're..." He dragged in an unsteady breath as he cupped her and circled her nipple with his thumb.

  She braced herself. "Anorexic? Unappealing? Androgynous?"

  "Art. A work of art." He closed his arms around her waist and his mouth over her breast.

  The last of her good intentions went straight to Jail, no passing Go, no collecting two hundred dollars. What the hell—she'd have one good reality-based fantasy to masturbate to for the rest of her life.

  "This is just sex, right?" When he only moved from one breast to the other, she clenched her hands on his waist. "Uh, safe sex?"

  He stood up and stuffed his hand in his jeans pocket, and then slapped several square packets into her palm. "Safe enough?"

  She pretended to check them. He came prepared, bless his stony little heart. "Latex are good." Though they looked kind of small—or maybe that was like objects reflected in car side mirrors. Next to him, a prizewinning bull would look pretty puny right now.

  She placed all but one of them within reach of her bed, then shrugged out of her robe and sat down on the side of the mattress. "Come here."

  He walked over to her, but she put her hands on his hips when he would have joined her. "Stay right there." She set the condom aside to work on his jeans, and didn't look at him until he pulled his long legs out of them and kicked them aside. Then she lifted her lashes and stared.

  He was, well, large didn't quite encompass it. Gargantuan might work. Or lethal weapon.

  Something panicky fluttered in the bottom of her stomach as she touched him. Smooth, satiny skin over what felt like iron. T think we might need to sew two together."

  He cradled the back of her head, rubbing his fingers against her scalp. "Put it on me."

  So her hands shook as she took out the condom, and she fumbled a little. If she'd been thinking clearly, she would have done something sexy like pop the condom in her mouth and roll it down over him with her tongue and lips. Instead she felt like she was playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey—and losing.

  His big hand came down and helped her, and together they rolled the thin latex sheath down the wide, thick length of him.

  She uttered a shaky laugh. "Houston, I think we're good to go." She crawled backward onto the bed, and he came down after her, blocking out the light with his shoulders, meeting the slight curves of her frame with the heavier, corded perfection of his own.

  For some reason she didn't know where to start touching him, so she pretended to fuss with the pillow under her head. He was arranging her legs, placing her feet flat against the bed and bending her knees up on either side of him. She didn't know anything about him as a lover, and worse, she was probably the ugliest woman he'd ever been in bed with. That was a title she could have lived without.

  But if lever hear him say that, I get to kill him.

  "Relax." He stroked his palm down the inside of her thigh. "You're all nerves. Tell me what you like."

  She didn't need his pity, either. "Could we move on to entree, please?"

&nb
sp; Cort gave her a slow, sexy smile. "Yeah." He curled his hands around her tense thighs and dropped down between them.

  "I didn't mean... uh..." Her back arched as she felt the languid pressure of his tongue laving against her, parting her and tasting her. "Me..."

  He made himself comfortable, stretching out his body as he feasted on her with his mouth and his tongue. He licked all over her first, like a boy with an ice-cream cone he didn't want to melt, and then he went exploring. By then Terri was panting and twisting under him, trying to move so that he would touch her where she needed it.

  When she made a frustrated sound, he lifted his head. "You want me to stop?"

  She groped until she found the drawer to her side table, pulled out her spare revolver, and pointed it at his face. "You want to die?"

  He only chuckled as he used his fingers to open her. He looked at her for a long moment before lowering his mouth and applying short, wet hard strokes to her clit.

  Terri had enough presence of mind to replace her gun before the first spiral of hot delight began uncoiling inside her. He forced her up hard and faster, smashing her through the first climax and into the second, and when she sobbed and twisted he held her pinned and moved her on to the third. Darkness and heat pressed in on her, and by the fourth she was reduced to mindless begging. Only then did he move up and position himself against her.

  "Therese." He waited until she opened her dazed eyes, then pressed in. Even with the soaked conditions down there, it was going to be a very narrow fit. She turned her head, but he immediately stopped, halfway lodged inside her. "Don't look away from me."

  She felt suddenly, irrationally furious. What did he want from her? He'd already ruined her for most of the men on the planet; did he have to own her soul?

  But Cort didn't know she loved him, and that was one thing he would never get out of her.

  She let her lips curve. "Do I have to get the gun again?"

  He held her hips down and penetrated her completely with a heavy, forceful push.

  All the breath whooshed out of her lungs. Narrow fit, hell. She might have to go for some repair work after. "I guess not."

  He didn't say much, but she wouldn't have heard him. He murmured her name, and watched her eyes as he plowed into her, slow and searching for all the right spots, then concentrating his strokes on them when he found them. They were both covered in sweat—somewhere in the dim recesses of what was left of her mind Terri realized she'd forgotten to turn on the A/C—and their skins made tiny kissing noises as he worked over and inside her.

  She wanted to hold on, to come with him, but the unyielding length of him working back and forth inside her was too much. She came with a thin cry, and Cort held himself deep inside her, let her ride it out on him.

  He dragged her to the end of the bed, his penis still deep inside her as he loomed over her, his feet braced on the floor, his hands hard on her hips. He never looked away from her face as he started again, harder and faster this time. And even when his thrusts slammed the head of the bed into the wall, and plaster dust drifted down from the gouges the headboard left in it, she never stopped watching his face. His eyes became slits, and then he stiffened and said her name one last time.

  She felt every pulse inside her as he came, and counted them silently, the way another woman would pluck petals from a daisy. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me...

  Terri didn't close her eyes until he collapsed on top of her, and then it was only to hold back the tears she wouldn't let him see.

  He loves me not.

  Caine drove Sable to a mobile-home park and told her to wait in the truck as he went to the door of a small, shabby-looking trailer. He knocked, then tried the knob and went inside. He emerged a few minutes later looking pale and shaken.

  "Caine?" As he put his hand on the steering wheel, she saw a streak of blood on the back of it.

  "Don't talk to me."

  He drove from there to a small fishing shack he and some of his men used when running his bigger boats on the Mississippi, and this time he brought her inside with him. He wouldn't talk to her or untie her, except when she asked to use the bathroom, and even then he stood watch outside the door, making it an embarrassing business.

  "Are you keeping me here?" she asked him as he sorted through the food he'd brought with him, but that only earned her a blank look.

  Slowly he seemed to recover from whatever had upset him, and he began to talk to her as he prepared their meal. Mainly he asked her a lot of questions— about Marc, but also about what she remembered of her mother, and why Ginny had been so afraid of people.

  "Mama was just shy," Sable insisted as he brought the pot of gumbo he'd reheated to the table. "She always kept to herself."

  "Ginny loved to talk to people. She sold more bait than any girl on the bayou." He spooned some rice into a bowl before adding the rich seafood stew to it. "It was only after the fire that she became that way."

  "You think she was afraid of someone." When he didn't reply, she made a frustrated sound. "Caine, Marc wasn't trying to kill me."

  He eyed her. "I can prove it."

  "Do you know who killed him?"

  "I thought I did." He reached behind her and untied her wrists. "I'm not so sure now."

  "Who? Was it Billy?"

  He thumped the bowl down in front of her. "Eat your gumbo."

  That night he made a bed for her with a sleeping bag on one of the wooden bunks, then sat up watching the night through the window. She was so worn-out from worry about what he might do that she drifted off to sleep before she could work out a way to escape him. Then it was morning, and Caine was shaking her and helping her up from the hard bunk.

  He untied her again so she could drink her coffee and eat the dish of brown sugar and apple oatmeal he made for her, but when she studied the scalding hot coffee, he tapped her cheek. "You've never been a stupid girl, Isabel. Don't start now."

  They left the river and drove back toward the city, joining the long lines of cars doing the same. He made her wear one of his baseball caps over her hair, but otherwise didn't seem to be worried about driving around New Orleans with a known fugitive in his truck. On the contrary, he stopped and parked to watch two different parades, and admired some of the more outlandish costumes. Except for the fact that he wouldn't let her out of the truck, they could have been tourists.

  He's biding his time, she decided, but for what?

  Caine bought an enormous shrimp po'boy from a street vendor, then parked on a tiny side street around the corner and split the sandwich with her.

  "This is just so cozy," she grumbled. "We going dancing next?"

  He smiled a little. "I used to think about asking you out to a dance. Never mind that I didn't have any money, or even a decent set of clothes to wear. I just wanted to be the one you looked at, the one you smiled for."

  She frowned. "When was this?"

  "About the time you met that cop, when you were in college." He opened a bottle of soda and handed it to her. "That did hurt, Isabel, but I wanted you to be happy. I sure as hell wasn't good enough for you. So I sat back and watched him take you out."

  He was making it sound like he'd had some kind of crush on her instead of her mother, as she'd assumed. "Why didn't you ever...?"

  "Tell you? What, and have you laugh at me, feel sorry for me?" He shook his head. "I may come from poor, chère, but I've never been short on pride."

  "I wouldn't have laughed." She lost her appetite and handed him the rest of her section of the sandwich. They drove around the city for the next several hours, Caine stopping twice to take her into one of the little twenty-four-hour bars to get more drinks and let her use the facilities. She didn't try to run; she knew he'd only chase her down. When she got back into the truck after the second stop, he didn't tie her hands again.

  He stopped at another street vendor and bought her a sno-ball mottled brown and white from its topping of chocolate syrup and sweetened condensed milk. "You always lov
ed these when you were a little girl. I never could afford to buy you one back then."

  The way he was acting was starting to worry her. "I'm sorry if I hurt you, Caine. I never suspected you cared about me."

  "You made me want to be a better man, until that night you came running back from school." He met her gaze. "That's when I found out you were ashamed—not just of me, of all of us. All you wanted to be was like them."

  "No, I didn't." But some of the things she'd said that night came back to her, and she cringed a little. "Maybe I was. Caine, I'd just been through the worst experience in my life. The only reason they did that to me was because I was from the bayou, and they weren't."

  "What about your charity work? You figure they'll finally forgive you for being Cajun if you're giving handouts to the rest of us?"

  Finally she understood why he had been so opposed to the community project. "All I wanted was to help our people, not change or apologize for what we are. I'm proud of our culture."

  "We don't need city ways out on the bayou."

  "We need better schools and medical care and assistance for people like single mothers and the elderly. We need to help the fishermen get the financing they need to stay in business, and cleanup of illegal dump sites. There are a thousand things we could have for the asking, but no one knows how to file the proper paperwork, or what state agency to contact. I have that knowledge. That's what I want to do—bring our people and the available resources together."

  "You can't change the world, Isabel."

  "No. But I can try to change the little piece of it that belongs to us." She looked out through the windshield at a young mother pushing a baby stroller over the grass toward the playground. Her toddler son was chewing on one fist and banging the other against the padded frame. "That little boy out there will probably never go hungry. He'll get all the shots he needs, and have his teeth checked, and go to a good school. He won't have to give up his culture for it. Neither do we."

  Caine checked his watch and started the engine. "Time to get going."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Moriah wanted nothing more than to go home and lock herself in her room for a week, but since her mother was determined to find a new dress to wear to the Gambles' gala she forced herself to stay with Laure and keep her company.