by Tami Hoag
“Dinner with your parents was an interesting occasion,” he said.
“They're not my parents,” Laurel blurted automatically, a hot flush stinging her cheeks as he looked at her with one dark brow raised in question. “What I mean to say is, Ross Leighton isn't my father. My father passed away when I was small.”
“Yes, I know. Killed, wasn't he?”
“An accident in the cane fields.”
“You were close to him.” He stated it as a fact, not a question. Laurel said nothing, wondering how he knew, wondering what Vivian might have told him. Wondering if he was privy to Vivian's plans for the two of them.
He shot her another steady look. “Your aversion to Ross,” he explained. “I suspect you never accepted his taking your father's place. A child loses a beloved parent, resentment toward the usurper is natural. Though I should think you would have gotten over it by now. Perhaps there's something more to it?”
The answer was none of his business, but Laurel refrained from saying so. Her skills were rusty, but the instincts were still there. Danjermond's were honed to perfection. He didn't have conversations, he had verbal chess matches. He was never off duty. Every exchange was an opportunity to exercise his mind, sharpen his battle skills. She knew; she had been there. She had been that sharp, that focused. She knew an answer to this question would put her in check.
“I'm sorry about the scene my sister caused,” she said casually. “Savannah does love to be dramatic.”
“Why are you sorry?” He stopped the Jag for the red light at Jackson and pinned her with a look. “You aren't the one who caused the commotion. You have no control over your sister's actions, do you, Laurel?”
No. But she wanted to have. She wanted control. She wanted the components of her world to fit neatly into place. No messes, no unpleasant surprises.
Danjermond's gaze held fast on her. “Are you your sister's keeper?”
She shook off the thoughts and kicked herself mentally for not seeing the potential hazards of this subject she had diverted them onto. “Of course not. Savannah does as she pleases. I know she won't apologize for disrupting Vivian's gathering, so I will. I was merely taking up the gauntlet for etiquette.”
“Ah,” he smiled, looking out over the hood of the car, “the gauntlet. You might have been a knight of the Round Table in a past life, Laurel. Galahad the Good, adhering to your strict code of honor.”
He seemed amused, and it irritated her. Did he think he was too urbane, too sophisticated for the quaint, provincial ways of Bayou Breaux—he the privileged son of old New Orleans money?
“Hospitality is the Southern way. I'm sure you were raised to have better manners than to, say, interrogate a guest,” she said sweetly, shifting to the offensive.
He looked surprised and pleased at her parry. “Was I interrogating you? I thought we were getting acquainted.”
“Getting acquainted is generally a reciprocal process. You haven't told me anything about yourself.”
“I'm sorry.” He sent her a dazzling smile that had doubtless knocked more than one simple belle off her feet. Laurel reminded herself she was no simple belle, had never been. “I'm afraid I find you such an interesting and enchanting creature, I lost my head.”
The sincerity in his voice was too smooth, too polished to be real. Laurel had the unnerving feeling that nothing on this earth could rattle Stephen Danjermond. There was that sense of calm around him, in his eyes, in the core of him. She wondered if anything could ever penetrate it.
“False flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. Danjermond,” she said, glancing away from him to her reflection in the mirror on the visor. “I hardly look enchanting tonight.”
“Fishing for a compliment, Laurel?”
“Stating a fact. I have no use for compliments.”
He turned in at the drive to the carriage house that served as Belle Rivière's garage and let the Jag idle in park. “Practicality and idealism,” he said, turning toward her, sliding his arm casually along the back of the seat. “An intriguing mix. Fascinating.”
Laurel's fingers curled over the door handle as he studied her with those steady, peridot eyes. “I'm so glad I could amuse you,” she said, her tone as dry as a good martini.
Danjermond shook his head. “Not amuse, Laurel. Challenge. You're a challenge.”
“You make me feel like a Rubik's Cube.”
He laughed at that, but his enjoyment of her spunk was cut short as his pager went off. “Ah, well, duty calls,” he said with a sigh of regret, punching a button on the small black box that lay on the seat between them. “Might I beg the use of a telephone?”
He made his call in the privacy of Caroline's study and left immediately after, leaving Laurel feeling a mix of relief and residual tension. She had dreaded the prospect of introducing him to Aunt Caroline and Mama Pearl and having to sit through coffee and conversation. She had escaped that fate, but the tension lingered.
It lingered, still, as she wandered the cobbled paths of the garden in her bare feet. What a nightmare that Vivian saw them as a match.
Even if she had been in top form, Laurel wouldn't have wanted anything to do with him personally. He made her uneasy with those cool green eyes and that smooth drawl that never altered pitch or tempo. He was too composed when she felt as if she were scrambling on the side of a steep hill, scratching for a handhold. He was too intensely male, she supposed.
An image of Jack came to her, unbidden, dark, brooding, intense. Intensely male in a more basic, primal way than Stephen Danjermond . . . and desire stirred when she thought of him.
It made no sense. She had never been attracted to bad boys, no matter how seductive the gleam in their eyes, no matter how wicked their grins. She was a person who lived by the rules, stuck to them no matter what. There hadn't been a rule made Jack Boudreaux wouldn't go over, under, or around. She had always been one of the world's doers, tackling problems head-on. Jack's credo was to avoid as much responsibility as he could, to lay back and have a good time. Laissez le bon temps rouler.
It made no sense that she should feel anything toward him except contempt, but she did. The attraction was there, pulling at her every time he looked at her. Strong, magnetic, beyond her control. And that made her uneasy all over again. He was trouble on the hoof. A man with secrets in his eyes and a dark side he took great pains to camouflage. A man whose baser instincts ran just beneath the surface. Dangerous. She'd thought so more than once.
“Dreamin' about me, sugar?”
Laurel started, clutching at her heart as she whirled around. Jack stood just inside the back gate, leaning indolently against the brick gatepost. Shadows fell across his face, but she could feel him watching her reaction, and willed herself to relax and stand calm.
“You don't give a fig how much it sells,” she said, dryly. “You write horror because you love to scare people. I'll bet you were the kind of little boy who hid in the closet and jumped out at his mother every time she walked past.”
“Oh, I hid often enough.” His voice came so softly, Laurel thought she was imagining it. Low and smoky and laced with old bitterness. “My old man locked me in a closet for a couple of days once. I never tried to scare anybody, though. Mais non. My sister, Maman, and me—we were pretty much scared all the time as it was.”
His words, so casually delivered, hit Laurel with the force of a hammer. In just those few sentences he had painted a vivid and terrible picture of his childhood. With just those few words he had stirred within her compassion for a small, frightened boy.
He stepped out of the shadows, into the silvery light, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders sagging. He looked beat, drained. She had no idea what he had been doing in the time since he had stormed away from Frenchie's, but it had sapped his energy and etched lines of fatigue across his face.
“Oh, Jack . . .”
“Don't,” he said sharply, shaking off her sympathy. “I'm not a little boy anymore.”
“I'm sorry,” sh
e whispered.
“Why? You were Blackie Boudreaux in another life?” He shook his head again, took a step closer. “Non, 'tite ange. You weren't there.”
No. She had been busy surviving her own nightmare, but she wouldn't say that, wouldn't share it . . . had never shared it with anyone.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What are you doing out at this hour?”
“Prowling.” He smiled slowly, his gaze roaming deliberately down from the top of her head to her tiny bare toes. “On the lookout for ladies in their nightclothes.”
Laurel had forgotten her state of undress. Now that Jack had so graciously pointed it out to her, she was acutely conscious of the fact that beneath a thin T-shirt that fell shorter than a miniskirt, she wore nothing but a pair of lavender panties. His grin deepened and he bobbed his eyebrows, an expression that clearly said “Gotcha.”
She crossed her arms and scowled at him. “People can get shot creeping around backyards in the dead of night.”
Jack let his gaze melt down over her again, lingering on the plump curves of her breasts. “Mmmm . . . you don' look armed, sugar, but you could be dangerous—to my sanity,” he growled.
Laurel tried to scoot away from him and found he had backed her around into a position that trapped her between an armless statue of a Greek goddess and the bench where he had caught her reading his book.
“I wasn't aware your sanity was in question,” she said sarcastically. “The general consensus seems to be that you're crazy.”
He chuckled and inched a little closer to her. “You got a lotta sass, 'tite chatte. Come here and give me a taste.”
He didn't give her a chance to say no, but closed the distance between them and stole a kiss, slipping his arms quickly around her. Laurel reacted with an unfamiliar mix of desire and pique. Temper overruled temptation, and she started to bring her knee up to teach him the wisdom of asking for permission. Jack reacted instantly, twisting out of harm's way, throwing Laurel off balance. Before she could realize what he was doing, she was sprawled on top of him on the stone bench, her chin on his chest, eyes round with astonishment.
He sat with his back propped against the wall, one foot planted on the bench, one on the ground. He grinned at her. “All right, sugar, have your way with me.”
“I'll thank you to let me up,” Laurel said primly, shoving against his chest.
“No,” Jack murmured, holding her, pulling her back down when she would have shot to her feet and stormed away. He wanted to hold her, needed to feel her softness against him. He pulled her close and nuzzled her ear while he rubbed a hand gently over her back. “Stay,” he whispered. “Don't go, angel. It's late, and I don' wanna be alone with myself.”
His strength wouldn't have kept her there, but the need in his voice was another matter altogether. It was subtle, couched in threads of humor, but there nevertheless. Laurel stilled against him, her eyes finding his in the moonlight, searching, wondering, a little wary.
“I never know who you are, Jack,” she said softly.
She wouldn't want to know who he really was, he thought. If she knew everything about him, she wouldn't stay. If she knew anything about him, she would steer clear, and he would never have the chance to hold her, to take some solace in the feel of her against him—never have the chance to lose himself, however briefly, in the sweet bliss of kissing her.
He couldn't run that risk tonight. He had spent too much time tearing up what was left of his conscience and flogging what was left of his soul. He felt too beaten, too battered, and she was too pretty and too good.
Too good for the like of you, Jack . . .
She stared at him, her eyes as dark as midnight, as uncertain as a child's. In spite of all she'd been through, an aura of innocence still clung about her like a fading perfume. Like Evie. God, what pain that thought brought with it! If he touched her, he would sully her innocence, destroy it as he had destroyed Evie. But he wasn't strong enough to be noble, wasn't good enough to do the right thing. He was a bastard and a user and worse, a man caught between what he was and what he wanted. And he was so damn tired of being alone. . . .
“You don' trust me,” he whispered, tenderly brushing her hair from her eyes. He grazed his fingertips along the delicate line of her cheekbone. “You shouldn't. I'm bad for you.”
The warning was diluted to nothing by the sadness in his face. His mouth twisted into a half smile that was cynical and weary. His dark eyes looked a hundred years old. Bad Jack Boudreaux. The devil in blue jeans. Self-professed cad. Warning her away. He didn't see the paradox, but Laurel did. He was nobody's hero, but he would save her from himself.
She had spent too much of her life with people who claimed to be good and weren't. Jack claimed to be bad, but if he were truly bad, she would have known, would have sensed, wouldn't have wanted him to kiss her, to touch her, to hold her while the night lay warm and fragrant around them.
He's dangerous. . . .
Yes, she had thought that. And if Jack himself wasn't dangerous, then what she felt when he was this near surely was. She couldn't fall for him, not for his body or his tarnished soul or his allure of the forbidden. There was no room in her life for a rogue. She couldn't have her heart broken again; she was still trying to glue the pieces back together from the last time she had come apart.
She could feel it beating, thumping against Jack's chest through the thin fabric of her white T-shirt and his black one. She held her breath and counted the beats, her eyes on his, wondering why she didn't take her own advice and walk away.
“Well, hell,” he muttered, pulling her closer, “you don' wanna believe me, I might as well prove it.”
The kiss was carnal from the first. Burning hot. Frankly sexual. He traced his tongue slowly around the inner edge of her lips, then slipped deeper, probing, exploring. Laurel tried to catch her breath and caught his instead, hot and flavored with the taste of whiskey.
He ran his hands over her back, chasing shivers, setting off new ones, sliding lower. Desire swelled inside her, pushing aside sanity, blazing a trail for more instinctive responses. She arched against him, losing herself in the kiss, in the moment. She tangled her hands in his hair. His hands slid over her buttocks, kneading, stroking. He caught the hem of her T-shirt and dragged it up, his knuckles skimming over the taut muscles of her back, skating along the sides of her rib cage.
Laurel felt as if she were tumbling through space, dizzy, hanging on tight to her only anchor. Then suddenly she was on her back with no roof but a sky full of diamond lights and branches strung with lacy moss, and Jack was at her breast, his tongue rasping against her nipple, his lips tugging gently. The sensation was incredible, setting off a flutter of something wild inside her, tearing away her self-control—
Control. Panic rose inside her. She never lost control. Couldn't lose control. She was no creature of passion like Savannah.
“No.” The word came out as a puff of nothing. She swallowed hard and tried again, pushing at Jack's broad shoulders as guilt and fear and a dozen other emotions twisted in her chest and tightened like vines around her lungs and throat. “Jack, no.”
His hand stilled as his fingertips were sneaking under the waistband of her panties. He raised his dark, glittering eyes to meet hers, his mouth poised just above the taut, swollen bud of her nipple. Laurel tightened her every muscle against the desire to just let go. She brought a chilling dose of shame down on her own head to cool the fire.
What the hell was the matter with her, succumbing to the charms of a rake like Jack Boudreaux? On a stone bench in her aunt's courtyard, no less. She barely knew him, didn't trust him, wasn't even sure she liked him.
Jack watched her, watched the flash of panic, the wash of guilt. “You want me, angel. I want you.” He shifted his weight, pressing his erection against her hip as proof of his statement.
“I . . . I don't.” Laurel bit down hard on the urge to panic. She kept her eyes locked on his, as if that contact somehow gave h
er a measure of control. Foolish. He outweighed her by eighty pounds. He could take what he wanted, as men had been doing since the dawn of time.
“Tu menti, mon ange,” he murmured, shaking his head. “You lie to yourself, not me.”
His eyes held fast on hers as he touched the warm, dewy cleft of her womanhood.
“I think you proved your point,” she said bitterly.
“You're a bastard, and I want you anyway. You've made that fact very clear.”
That age-old weariness crept into his expression again, seeped outward from some deep, dark well inside him. “Oui,” he said. He slid his hand back up over her belly and pulled her T-shirt down, covering her. He smoothed the fabric gently, regretfully, his mouth twisting. “And now I have the whole long night to wonder why I made it at all.”
Chapter
Thirteen
Laurel checked her reflection in the hall mirror, frowning. She hadn't brought a suit home with her. The best she could do was a loose-fitting navy linen blazer over a white silk tank and a pair of taupe trousers. The outfit was more formal than she had ever planned to look during her stay here, less formal than she would ever have allowed herself on the job. No win.
It seemed she was stuck in a groove of no-win situations. She didn't want to tackle anything more mentally and emotionally taxing than gardening, but had given her pledge to T-Grace and Ovide. She had no intention of getting involved with a man, but had tossed and turned until dawn thinking about Jack, dreaming about Jack. Jack, with his devil's grin. Jack, with his brooding intensity. Jack, with weary dark eyes that had seen too much.
What if she hadn't said no?
“You look very lawyerlike.”
Laurel glanced around to find Caroline on her way out for the day. “I don't want to do this,” she admitted glumly.
Caroline put her arm around Laurel's waist to give her a reassuring squeeze. “You don't feel ready?”
“No.”
She reached up to tuck an errant strand of ash brown hair behind Laurel's ear, her heart aching a little. Beneath the discreet makeup, behind the lenses of her oversize spectacles, Laurel had the look of a child braced for the first day of school—trying to be brave, wanting to stay safe at home.
