KILLING ME SOFTLY (31 page)

The burn at the back of his eyes surprised him. So did the tightness in his throat. He blinked against the moisture and squeezed his eyes shut, drew their joined hands to his mouth and brushed a kiss along her knuckles.

Losing her had shredded not just his heart, but his faith and his humanity.

He'd never imagined finding her could be worse.

She'd taught herself not to imagine. She knew the danger. No matter how seductive the temptation to close her eyes and let herself be with Cain, to feel his arms close around her and hear the pounding of his heart, taste the saltiness of his skin, doing so was tantamount to taking a knife to her heart.

Because when she opened her eyes, he would be gone.

Against the far wall of the cabin, Renee watched the shadows dance. They moved slowly, erratically, sinuous and sensuous, brushing and merging, an erotic tango courtesy of the moon and the pecan trees beyond the window. All the while she held herself very still, not wanting to break the moment. She could feel him beneath her, his skin so slick and hot and vital, warming her despite the cool wind rushing against the outside wall. With her head resting against his chest she could hear the strum of his heart, knew that somewhere along the line the rhythm of her breathing had adjusted to keep cadence with his.

Silence wove between them, broken only by the fading song of the night. Neither of them had spoken since he'd shouted her name and she'd whispered his. Words had been unnecessary, unwanted intruders to the fusion found only in the absence of sound.

Closing her eyes, Renee concentrated on the feel of his hands, so talented. One rested against the small of her back, while the other played with her hair. It had always been like this in the aftermath, she remembered. He'd never had much use for words, but nor had he been a man to roll over and go to sleep, or worse, go shower. Unless the shower had been with her. He'd preferred to keep touching, subtle after-play that kept her body purring—and wanting more.

Safe, she realized as she opened her eyes. For the first time in almost two years, she felt safe, as though nothing could touch her, hurt her. There were still miles to climb, a killer to find, but the dark shadow was gone from her soul, and her heart hummed with a contentment she'd never imagined she would feel again.

"I think they were protecting me," she whispered, and felt him stiffen. "My dreams. If they'd been like this, there's no way I could have survived."

"Non."
His hand slid to her mouth, where he ran his index finger along her lips. "No words."

She shifted to look at him, found him staring up at the ceiling. There was sorrow in his eyes, a pain that scraped at her heart. She'd done this to him, she knew. Her secrets. Her lies.

"We haven't talked about it yet," she whispered, and the contentment in her blood wobbled. "I know you have questions, that there are things you want to know—
need
to know."

The hand at the base of her back slid to frame her face. "I know what I need to,
cher
." The words were low, hoarse, and they wrapped around her heart, and squeezed. He urged her closer and she went willingly, turning so that she straddled him. "You're here," he said as her mouth found his and the calm shattered.
"You're alive."

And as they came together again, this time slower, more deliberately, that was all that mattered.

The song of the warblers woke her. Renee lay still for a moment, listening to the lilting call of the migratory birds that flooded Louisiana in the fall. She'd missed the sound, she realized. She'd missed so much. The kiss of humidity. The grace of the oaks and the cypress. The birds and the flowers and—
Cain
.

She knew he was gone before she opened her eyes. The bed was too cool. With a hard kick to her heart, she sat up and shoved at the sheets, swung toward the front of the cottage—and saw him.

He stood not fifteen feet away, at the window with his back to her. He'd pulled on the jeans she'd so feverishly shoved from his body, but his feet and his chest remained bare. His hands were shoved into his front pockets.

She watched him, the rigidity of his posture, the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, and felt something cold and uncomfortable slide through her. He was a man of action, of hot driving passion and relentless energy. He was capable of great patience, as well. She knew that. He could exert nearly inhuman control when staking out a suspect, whether it be a criminal who belonged behind bars or a shy heron he wanted to capture on film. And when he made love. Then the combination of action and patience could make a woman forget her own name.

But this stillness was wrong. He wasn't staking anything out. And he wasn't making love. He was just standing there, as motionless as the old cypress just beyond the window. She'd seen that kind of stillness from him only once before—on the day they'd buried her brother. He'd stood at the edge of the cemetery, present yet apart, just watching.

The need to go to him, to put a hand to his back and reestablish the connection they'd forged in bed, swelled through her like a warm tide. She stood and reached for his shirt, slid her arms through the big sleeves as she crossed to him.

Through the window she saw the sun beginning its slow boil up from the horizon, bathing the swampy land in a faded palette of crimson and saffron. She'd forgotten how red a Louisiana sunrise could be, how pure and still and haunting. The trees stretched like shadowy silhouettes against a sky on fire.

Fragile
wasn't a word she liked, but as she neared him, this man she'd spent the better part of the night loving with her hands and her mouth and her body, she found herself fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. So much still stood between them. Secrets could hide in the darkness, but the light of dawn always brought exposure. She knew that, felt the fissure of truth deep inside.

For a moment she just stood there, absorbing the heat from his body and staring at the streaks and gouges in his back, marks she'd not been aware of making. Slowly she lifted her hand to trace a finger along the path—

"Don't."

The one word stopped her cold.

"Whatever it is you hoped to find," he added in that deceptively quiet voice of his, "doesn't exist anymore."

The slice of pain was quick and brutal, exactly what she'd been expecting the moment he'd walked through the door. Slowly, she let her hand fall.

"You know that's not true," she whispered. He wasn't a man to play lightly with forgiveness. She knew that. But then he'd touched her. Cradled her to his heart as if he never wanted to let her go. She'd felt the moisture beneath his eyes, tears neither of them had moved to swipe away. "Last night proved that."

"Life goes forward. Savannah, not backward."

"Maybe for you," she said, and didn't even try to stop her voice from tightening on the words. "But not for me. I can't just stroll on with my life as if nothing ever happened, as if I hadn't loved and lost and bled. As if I didn't know things, wants things. As if my heart didn't still cry every night."

He turned to her then, exposed her to the most scorched earth eyes she'd ever seen. "As if your killer wasn't a free man."

There it was, heaped right out between them. "Yes."

"Say it then," he added flatly. "Me. That's why you came back, isn't it? That's what you mean. You couldn't go on with your life while I got away with murder."

The words hit hard. Shame hit harder. She wanted to deny the ugly accusation, tell him he had it all wrong. But the words, the lie, wouldn't form. "That's—"

"I lost everything, damn you!
Everything
. My job, my integrity, my honor and self-respect. But none of that mattered." His eyes took on a dark glitter. "Because I lost you, too."

Renee wasn't sure how she stayed standing. She felt herself sway, felt her hand blindly reach for the back of an old chair. She curled her fingers around the wood smoothed by time and held on tight, refused to allow herself to remember another time she'd gripped the very same chair, not in agony, but in ecstasy.

"But I didn't, did I?" he bit out, and his voice betrayed the dark twist of emotion she knew he was trying to deny. "While I grieved you, you were God knows where, believing I'd tried to kill you and plotting your revenge." He picked up the folder she'd left open on the table, yanked out a page of her notes. "So now here you are," he said, and his eyes were on hers again, dark and damning, "with a new name and a new face, ready to crucify me for my sins."

The walls of the cabin started to close in on her. "That's not how it was."

His mouth went flat. "No?"

"No." She looked at him in the hazy morning light, at the hard lines of his face and the thickening shadow of whiskers along his jaw, the mouth as capable of pleasure as it was punishment, and felt something deep inside tear. She'd rehearsed this moment so many times, had forced herself to imagine the cold wash of hatred. But God, she'd never imagined she'd face him while her body still hummed from his touch, wearing only his big shirt, mere feet from the bed where they'd come together with a desperation that had stripped away the darkness and seduced her into believing the passion they felt for each other was strong enough to overcome the unforgivable.

That illusion crumbled now, leaving her naked in the only way that mattered.

"Everything was hazy," she said, and suddenly she was in the small narrow bed again, squinting against the harsh glare of light and blinking at the gritty dryness to her eyes. "I didn't know what had happened to me at first, only that I hurt, and that I was scared." She wrapped her arms around her middle and squeezed, remembered the pitying glances of the nurses when she'd called out for Cain, the hushed whisper of the doctor when she'd demanded to know what had happened to her. The tears in her grandmother's eyes when she'd held her hands and told her the truth.

"I was broken," she whispered, and with each breath she drew, her ribs and her lungs screamed, just as they had eighteen months before. "Weak." From the loss of blood, they'd told her. "I couldn't walk, could barely talk." The memories had come to her in garish snippets, fragments of memory out of place and time. "They wouldn't tell me anything at first, told me all that mattered was getting my strength together for the surgeries. But then I started remembering things on my own, fractured images that made no sense." The smell of an achingly familiar cologne. The sight of keys on the back of her grandpappy's old recliner. The sound of her name on a dark and drugging voice. And words, horrible, chilling words that echoed mercilessly through the silence…

Your brother named his killer before he died.

Cain … Evan … Lynn.

The chill sliced in all over again, this time for entirely different reasons. She hesitated, waiting for Cain to say something. Anything.

He didn't. He just stared down at her, his eyes hard and detached, yielding no trace of the lover who'd carried her through the darkness. There was only the fallen cop, and the man betrayed.

"I was in Nova Scotia," she told him, shoving the hair from her face. Beyond him, she watched the sun rise higher in the sky, bright slashes of light cutting through the thick cluster of oak and cypress and pine. "After my car went into the swamp I managed to escape, walked for hours before collapsing in an old shack. When I woke up next, my grandmother was there. She'd arranged to get me out of the country. The doctor said I'd been unconscious for almost a week, feverish from an infection and the loss of blood, that he hadn't known if I was going to make it, but that in my delirium I'd murmured one name over and over." Her heart pounded hard at the memory. "Yours."

His mouth twisted, but he said nothing. In his hand he still held a page of her notes, but somewhere along the line his fingers had balled into a fist. "It was another week before my grandmother told me why."

Now his face went even darker. And now he spoke. "Because I was the one who'd attacked you."

"They showed me newspapers." Blindly she reached for the file on the table and opened it, rummaged through the pages until she saw the ugly headlines and chilling pictures, the grainy image of Cain being led away with his hands cuffed behind his back and murder in his eyes.

The accompanying stories had been worse. He'd been found with her blood on his hands. His prints on the assumed murder weapon. He had no alibi. And he'd refused to defend himself. "Gran told me you'd confessed, that a close friend had gone to the police claiming she'd heard you crying, muttering over and over that you'd killed me."

A hard sound broke from his throat. "And like a good little girl you believed everything they told you."

She winced. "I had to consider the possibility."

He swore harshly and looked away, as though he didn't trust himself to look at her one second longer.

"It was the bad place!" she said, and God help her, she couldn't stand there one second longer, not without touching, without doing something to make him understand. She reached for him, grabbed his forearms and curled her fingers deep. "The one you taught me to visit. That's how you stay alive, you always said. By forcing yourself to the bad place, to see it and feel it and live it."

And she had. It had almost killed her, but to stay alive, she'd had no choice.

"Nothing made sense. In my heart I couldn't believe you'd ever try to hurt me, but no matter how badly I wanted to, I couldn't let myself think with my heart. I couldn't take that chance."

The muscle in the hollow of his cheek began to thump. With cold precision he uncurled her fingers from his forearms, then his eyes met hers. "Two days before you disappeared, Gabe took you jewelry shopping."

She stilled at the memory. "For a ring. For Val."

Cain shoved his hand into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled something out, looked down at his upturned fist and uncurled his fingers. "Not for Val."

Everything went white for one blinding, horrifying second. She stared down at his square palm, at the emerald-cut diamond surrounded by baguettes and set in platinum that she'd picked out, and felt what little remained of her heart shatter with a violence that stunned her.