KILLING ME SOFTLY (21 page)

Curtain of dark hair swinging against her face, she strolled into the office. "I just—I had a weird feeling after this morning."

So she'd felt it, too. Watching her—unable to look away, actually—he lifted a hand to the back of his neck and squeezed. "Just a lot going on."

Normally she stopped at his desk. This time she kept right on coming, not stopping until she stood behind his chair. And put her hands on his shoulders. "Here," she said. "Let me."

He tensed. It was a damn stupid reaction and he knew it. He'd had colleagues rub his back before. Marjorie could give a killer neck rub. He could close his eyes and enjoy feeling the muscles relax, not feel himself drowning in a scent that reminded him of brownies and musk.

"You're tight," Evangeline murmured, her fingers moving sadistically against his shoulders.

Instead of getting looser, his whole body began to harden.

"That your family?" Exerting every ounce of control to ensure he didn't do something stupid, it took Gabe a moment to realize Evangeline was referring to the picture on his desk.

"Mom and sister," he said, appalled at the hoarseness to his voice.

"She's a good bit younger than you then, isn't she?"

Gabe focused on the picture, used it to ignore the feel of Evangeline's hands kneading his upper back.

Camille
. It was the last picture he had of her.

She wasn't dead. At least he didn't think so. But no one knew for sure. She could be. There was always that possibility. But Gabe preferred to think of her living somewhere far away, maybe in a small fishing village along the Pacific seaboard, with a new name, where no one knew about her past. No one knew that she'd once been called Crazy Cami.

No one knew that she'd seen her father die in cold blood.

Suicide, the coroner said. Murder, Cami said.

"Gabe?" Evangeline's voice was warm. Concerned. And it drew him in a way he had no business being drawn. Blinking, he tore his gaze from the faded picture and focused on another one, this one of Val.

"I've got to go." He stood abruptly and pivoted toward Evangeline, saw her standing beside his big desk chair with her arms hanging by her side and confusion in her eyes. "I—I've got an appointment," he explained.

And he so categorically did not need her hands on his body.

She glanced from him to the picture of Val, then back at him. And flushed. "I—I didn't know." Because he hadn't told her.

Gabe told himself it wasn't disappointment that wound through his chest as he watched her walk away. And it sure wasn't regret he felt when the door to her office closed.

With one last look at the pictures on his desk—the montage of a life that seemed more fantasy than reality—he grabbed his keys and walked away from it all.

The first Robichaud estate burned to the ground. According to legend, the owner torched it himself after returning from the Civil War to find his wife gone, the house he'd built for her ransacked, stained by dirt and blood and betrayal.

To this day, the ruins remained.

Sometime later another house rose from the ashes, big and grand and breathtaking just as the original manor house had been. But shadowed somehow. Remote, forlorn, isolated. More Gothic than Greek Revival, with pillars and spires and dark, heavy stone.

Cypress trees remained like sentinels around the property, sheltering and protecting, separating the family from the town that flourished twenty minutes down the narrow road. Over the years the big house had witnessed birth and death, laughter and tears, love and lies.

People came and went, but the house stood. And the house watched. On some level, Renee felt as if the house knew.

The sensation slid through her the second Cain led her into the spacious foyer, with wood at her feet and a heavy chandelier hanging from above. The only natural light filtered in through a massive stained-glass dome, casting an odd fall of shadows against the floor and the wall.

Standing there, Renee could feel them all, generation after generation of Robichaud, watching her. Knowing her secret. Ready to defend. She'd been to this house before, after all, stood in this very spot. Then, Cain had held her hand gently, and his family's legacy had intrigued.

Now he would barely look at her, and his family's legacy alienated.

"I've got some calls to make," he said, leading her through the gorgeously furnished sitting room to a set of double doors. He pushed through them, ushered her into a sprawling paneled room. The achingly familiar scent of leather and patchouli seduced her before she even stepped inside.

Cain's study. Little had changed in the starkly masculine room since the last time she'd been there, when they'd made love on top of his desk. A fireplace dominated one wall, floor-to-ceiling bookcases another, windows a third. The room was dim, cozy, meticulously well ordered. The furniture was large. The feel was intimate.

"Make yourself at home," he said from behind her, but the words carried no warmth. She turned to see him unlock a beautifully carved cabinet and withdraw a thick folder. "This will keep you busy until I'm back," he added, handing it to her.

She took the file and watched him leave, reminded herself of the opportunity she had to seize.

One week. That's what she'd given herself. One week to shatter the lies and expose the truth. No alibi lasted forever, after all, and despite the extensive legwork she'd done to reinforce her alias, Cain was a thorough man. Very. Thorough.

In every way that mattered.

She harbored no doubt that he had a team of investigators scurrying around, checking every entry on her carefully constructed Web site, every source. Every lie. Death made a great disguise, but already the edges were crumbling. She saw it in Cain's eyes, felt it in his touch.

He recognized her. Maybe not on the conscious level, maybe not in any way he allowed himself to admit, but on some deep, intrinsic level, he recognized her. Responded to her. It was only a matter of time before that place figured out what his logical, analytical mind could not accept.

She'd known better than to reenter his life. She'd warned herself to steer clear. But being near him and not reengaging with him would be like knocking the stars out of the night sky.

It just wasn't going to happen.

And now she was again in his house. Once the sprawling old house had excited her. Now it condemned. Conventional wisdom cautioned that stepping foot inside Cain's ancestral home was like slipping into bed with the enemy, but as time dwindled, so did options. She could spend what time she had left with people who wanted to believe Cain was guilty, or she could grab every second possible with the man she'd never stopped loving.

If her heart was wrong, she was in big trouble closing her eyes in his house. But if someone else made a move, nowhere or no one offered more sanctuary than the secluded mansion.

Throat tight, she moved through his space, touching and feeling and smelling. Remembering. Until she saw the tree.

The chill was stupid. She knew that. It was just a photograph, one she'd already seen displayed in Cain's gallery. But she crossed to the wooden frame anyway and lifted her hand, traced a finger along the trunk of the sprawling oak. Light slanted through the branches and made the moss glow. Toward the bottom, a thick branch that should have been truncated when the tree was young dipped low to create a bench, the kind of place where you could curl up and lose yourself.

Where she had once lost herself.

She knew that tree, standing so proudly in a remote area over forty miles from Bayou de Foi. Adrian had stumbled across it while hunting. Romantic that he was, he'd said it reminded him of the tragic Longfellow poem
Evangeline
.

Hot moisture surged against the backs of her eyes. Blinking it away, she looked at the file Cain had handed to her. And felt her breath catch all over again.

The more things fell apart, they more they fell together.

There was just one word written on the plain manila folder, in a bold, neat hand.
Savannah
.

The paneled room closed in on her, and through the silence she could almost hear the chant of his ancestors. Liar. Fraud.
Judas
.

And her hands wanted to shake.

Her life. The one she'd lost, the one she wanted back. It was in this folder. Through Cain's eyes. Pictures, maybe. Articles. Police reports. Maybe notes. She knew he'd kept them on all his cases. Personal thoughts and speculation, motivations. Strategy.

Why, then, had he just handed it all to a stranger?

Through the closed-circuit television, he watched her. She'd crossed to his desk and now knelt in his big chair, flipping open the contents of the folder and spreading them against the glass top of his desk.

He knew the exact moment she saw the second file.

Everything about her froze. He'd given her access to everything she claimed to want—but she couldn't take her eyes off the plain manila folder with one word written on the outside:
Fox
.

He wanted her to open it. That's why he'd left it in plain view. He wanted to see how she reacted to the fact that he was as interested in her secrets as she was his.

Slowly, he lifted a hand to the screen.

From the start he'd sensed something off about her. A coldness. Maybe even ruthlessness. But now he realized there was nothing cold about the woman who disturbed him on too many levels to count. Emotion consumed her. Drove her. Tortured her to the point where she'd tried to scrape it all away. But somewhere along the line she'd surrendered to it. He wanted to know why.

Just as he'd known she would, she reached for the second file and opened it, skimmed through the three-page report inside. The relief that washed over her face was almost palpable. She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them and returned the file to its original position.

Then she returned her attention to Savannah.

It didn't escape Cain which file had concerned her more.

Frowning, he watched her reach for a scrap of newspaper and draw it closer, and though the monitor was black-and-white, he saw her expression cloud over. Curious, he glanced at the paper in her hand, saw the picture of him and Savannah.

Swearing softly, he picked up the phone and stabbed a series of numbers, waited impatiently. Not that long ago, he would have had answers by now.
Femme de la Nuit
had always come through.

When the harried female voice answered, he demanded to speak with T'Roy, who'd never quite measured up to his predecessor.

"Then find him," he instructed when the assistant insisted she didn't know where T'Roy was. "Tell him he's had enough time. I'll expect my report first thing in the morning."

He was tired of waiting. Tired of wanting. He needed the truth about Renee Fox, and he needed it before she slipped deeper into his blood. With one last glance at the monitor, he walked out of the surveillance room and headed downstairs.

He found her at the far side of the study again fondling the photograph in the wood frame. Through the monitor her movements had tantalized him. In person, they fired his blood.

"It's an odd thing," he said in a deliberately low voice, "when a man wonders what it would feel like to be a sheet of glass."

She went completely still.

"Don't stop on my account," he said, moving to stand beside her. He paused and breathed of her, the subtle scent of vanilla mingling with that of leather. "It's not every day a man finds a woman making love to a picture of a tree."

He saw her throat work, watched her hand fall from the frame. "I didn't take you for a man who liked to watch," she said, and he could tell the words cost her.

He moved closer, let his body brush hers. "Why not? I see something I like, where's the crime in enjoying?"

For a moment she just stood there, as though absorbing his words. Their meaning. Then she rallied. "No crime," she said, and stepped away from his touch. "But I pegged you as more of an active participant."

"I do that, too." God help him, he wanted to laugh.

She didn't seem to share the mood. "I'll bet."

He stuck out his hand.
"Mais oui."

Narrowing her eyes, she swatted away his arm and returned her attention to the photograph. "This picture. It's—"

"All wrong," he finished for her. He'd staked out the tree as though it were an elusive criminal, but had never been satisfied with the result. He'd yet to capture the ethereal quality.

"I was going to say beautiful."

Her praise affected him more than it should have. "Adrian Trahan showed me that tree," he surprised himself by saying. The memory washed through him, the damp spring morning, the two-mile walk through a boggy swamp basin. "Said it deserved to be remembered."

Slowly, Renee turned toward him. "Adrian?" Her voice was low, thick. "Why would he do that? You two hated each other."

Her surprise confirmed his suspicions. Renee's digging had not yet unearthed the truth. "Things aren't always what they seem," he said, curious to see what she would do with the new information. "Just because the gossip mill says Trahan and I were enemies doesn't mean I didn't know he didn't have a cat."

Cain wasn't sure what he expected, but it wasn't for her eyes to go dark. "Wh-what?"

"Inside jo—" he started to say, but stopped abruptly. Not a joke, not for damn sure. "Suffice it to say Trahan and I were on better terms than anyone knew. We spoke the same language."

Her gaze met his. "Then why pretend otherwise?"

"Cleaner that way. Less chance of Savannah or Saura getting caught in the crossfire." His gut winced on the faulty logic. "Or so we thought."

Renee studied him a moment longer, as though the lines of his face would somehow tell her if he was lying. When he didn't so much as blink or flinch, she frowned and wandered back to his desk, ran her hand over the book
Louisiana Lore and Legends.
He wondered if she'd noticed the library stamp inside the cover.

Pushing it aside, she reached for a yellowed newspaper clipping. "So who do you think did it?"