Midnight in Ruby Bayou (13 page)

F
aith had been in the rented Jeep Cherokee twenty minutes before she finally lost her temper. It wasn't the strange city or lost baggage or traffic jams or any of the usual annoyances of traveling that made her angry. It was a soft-voiced, easy-moving, polite, and impossibly stubborn southerner called Owen Walker.

She had been able to ignore him while she was working sixteen hours a day to complete the Montegeau necklace. But she was finished now, and Walker was still there, still close, still getting under her skin like nettles or dreams.

Despite the anger seething through her blood, her voice was even as she turned toward him. “You're being completely unreasonable.”

“Your brother gave the orders, not me. Talk to him.”

“He's in Seattle.”

“Always knew that boy was shrewd,” Walker drawled.

She locked her teeth together, then carefully forced her jaw to relax. If she kept grinding her teeth, she would have hell's own headache. Just one of the small, memorable lessons life with Tony had taught her. She took a slow, deep breath. Then another. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth.

If arguing with Walker would have changed anything, Faith would have jumped right in. But she really needed to yell at Archer, and he was out of reach. Walker wasn't necessarily being an idiot. He was just following idiotic orders.

While Walker waited at a stop sign for a catering truck to clear the intersection, he eyed Faith warily. All the Donovans he had met, except her, had enough temper for two people. But it was looking like Faith was a Donovan through and through. She had a real temper. She was just a hell of a lot more careful about exercising it than her siblings.

He wondered why. The Donovans were very much a fight, hug, and make-up type of family. None of them liked to sulk and fester.

“Why,” Faith asked finally, her voice cool and calm, “should I come to a lovely, historic city like Savannah and then stay in some soulless modern hotel? Especially when I've already told my professional contacts that I can be reached at the Gold Room of the Live Oak Bed and Breakfast?”

Walker decided that he would rather have had an explosion than the remote politeness that frosted every word she spoke. The silvery blue of her eyes reminded him of glacier ice high in the mountains of Afghanistan. Cold enough to freeze a man's nuts if he got too close.

“Everyone who knows where you are also knows where the rubies are,” he said. “It's after six. The sun is down, the banks are closed, and the jewelry exposition building won't be open until tomorrow.”

“There's a safe at the Live Oak B and B. I made sure of it before I made reservations.”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, not impressed a bit. “I've seen those antique safes with their black doors and fancy gold lettering. Any ol' boy with sensitive fingers and brass balls could have those rubies in less time than it takes you to put on makeup.”

“First that ol' boy would have to know the rubies are in the safe,” she retorted.

He stifled a smile. “Amen. That's why we're going to—”

“A different historic inn,” Faith cut in. “Savannah is full of them.”

He thought about arguing, then decided to save his energy for a fight that really mattered.

“Sure thing, sugar,” he drawled. “Got any particular place in mind?”

“I'm working on it,
sugar
.”

She turned on the overhead light and flipped quickly through the Savannah guidebook she had purchased at the airport bookstore. Riverfront sounded good. She looked at the map in the center of the book, then at the next street sign she saw. The historically accurate streetlights were elegant and atmospheric, but they didn't illuminate much. The park squares were even darker. Finally she located her position on the map.

“Turn left at the next corner,” she said.

“Nope.”

Her head snapped up. “Why not?”

“One way. The wrong way.”

“Oh.” She looked at the map and adjusted quickly. “Turn left at the block after that one. If it's still going the wrong way, just take the first one that isn't.”

“Where am I going?”

“Is that the opening gambit of a philosophical discussion?”

He smiled a flat kind of smile. “Folks that don't finish high school don't have much use for high-flyin' discussions.”

She winced at the really strong twang in his voice. She was discovering that his accent deepened when he was irritated. Which meant that, once again, her sense of humor had pissed off a man.

The good news was that she wasn't dating Walker. If that sometimes seemed like the bad news, too, she had better get over it, fast. Any non-Donovan man who could make her lose her temper without even trying was someone she should avoid.

“If lack of a diploma bothers you that much, why don't you do something about it?” she asked neutrally.

“It doesn't.” Not usually. But somehow it bothered Walker with Faith. He would have to think about that. “I've met a lot of dumb folks with advanced degrees. I've met some smart ones that never finished middle school. And vice versa. It's the person, not the paper, that matters.” He turned left. “I hope this is the street you wanted. Master Oglethorpe must have been sucking up bourbon and branch water when he laid out this town.”

She looked at the street sign. “This is the one. And what do you mean? The old part of town is beautifully laid out. The squares are magnificent. Centuries-old oaks and magnolias and all that lovely moss, plus flowers and monuments and even some fountains. According to the guidebook, there will be azaleas and camellias blooming everywhere in a month or so.”

“The squares are nice enough if you go for that sort of thing,” he said, giving her a sideways glance to judge how well she was taking the bait, “but you have to zigzag around them like a drunk to get from one place to another. Damned inefficient, if you ask me.”

“ ‘Nice enough if you like that sort of thing,' ” she repeated under her breath.

She started to explain to him about barbarians who couldn't appreciate civilized amenities such as historic, shady squares interrupting and slowing down modern traffic. Even as she opened her mouth, she sensed the leashed anticipation in him. At that instant he reminded her of her closest brother, Kyle, when he thought he was going to sucker one of his sisters into a just-for-the-hell-of-it argument.

“Yes,” she said smoothly, “I guess they are. Keep zigzagging like a drunk until you find a way down to the riverfront.”

“Where are we going?”

“It's a secret. You might find a way to steal the rubies if I tell you ahead of time.”

“Have you forgotten that I'm, uh, wearing the rubies right now?”

Humor flickered through her as she remembered where the ruby necklace was—wrapped in a chamois pouch that was tucked in a smuggler's pocket in his underwear. He didn't clang when he walked, but he did look a little like he had spent his youth on horseback.

“Hardly,” Faith said. “Brings new meaning to the concept of family jewels.”

He smiled a slow, easy kind of smile. “Sure does. Are you going to put that on the exhibit card in the show?”

“I don't think there's a category for most unusual method of transport.”

“Nothing unusual about it. An old Pakistani taught it to me. And it's not the worst place in the world to carry contraband. In fact, smugglers sometimes get much more, uh,
personal
about hiding small stuff.”

“I'm not going there,” she said firmly.

“Neither is your necklace.”

Struggling not to laugh, she let go of a long breath and the subject at the same time. He had topped her again. With or without diplomas, Walker was quicker on his verbal feet than anyone she had ever been around but her siblings.

That shouldn't have surprised her. Someone who could clean Archer out in a poker game was hardly stupid.

Walker turned off the boulevard onto a steeply slanting cobblestone street that looked as old as some of the massive oaks. The Jeep bumped along happily, more at home on an uneven surface than on city streets.

“There,” Faith said, pointing to the right.

She directed him onto a narrow cobbled roadway that dropped down the face of a stone revetment. The rock face held an eroding bluff in place. On the other side of the narrow road, a row of two- and three-story buildings lined the lower bank of the Savannah River. At one time the buildings had been riverfront factories or warehouses chock-full of goods and cursing stevedores. Now they had been converted into pricey inns, shops, and restaurants.

Walker parked beside a white Cadillac, directly in front of a no-parking sign. Before he even turned the engine off, Faith got out and headed for the black awning and beveled glass doors of the Savannah River Inn.

“I'll stay here and guard the goods,” he told the empty car. “Yeah, I'll just do that little thing. No, no problem. We're here to serve.”

He turned the key enough to kill the engine, keep the radio awake, and run down the automatic windows. A whiff of southern river floated in over the hot pavement and engine smells. Savannah was enjoying a run of unseasonably warm weather. Not enough to bring the bugs out yet. Just enough to begin thickening the sky with humidity, forerunner of the blazing quicksilver heat haze that settled each summer over the Low Country like an insistent lover.

Little white lights danced in the winter-bare branches of the ornamental trees on either side of the inn's entrance. Up on the bluff, a live oak spread its massive arms, embracing the night. Streetlight picked out the resurrection ferns that clung like orchids along the broadest branches. Right now there was nothing pretty about the ferns. Shriveled, withered, brittle with drought, the ferns were curled in on themselves, waiting numbly for life-giving rain. When water finally came, the ferns would stretch and grow green, rippling gracefully with renewed life.

But that was a month or two away. Tonight the ferns simply waited and hung on to the half life that was all drought permitted.

A car cruised slowly up the alley. Automatically Walker watched the vehicle close in. Then he saw the light bar across the top of the American sedan.

The cop ignored the illegally parked Jeep. He was used to late check-ins, and Savannah had learned to make allowances for tourists, especially in the off-season.

The gentle, warm, humid breeze flowed through the windows, as familiar to Walker as the shape of his own hands. The air smelled of the boundary where freshwater met salt, where pines gave way to marsh grasses, and hot days became velvet nights. Except for the city sounds and the lights blocking out the stars, he could have been back in Ruby Bayou, soft-footing it through the night with a .22-caliber rifle in one hand and hunger in his belly.

He and his brother had fished, shrimped, oystered, and trapped crawdads with equal success, but even allowing for the fact that Lot was four years younger, Walker always had been the better shot. It was a matter of patience. Lot didn't have much.

The lack had killed him.

Walker closed his eyes against a shaft of pain that had dulled but never vanished in the years since Lot's death. Walker had stood over his brother's barren, windswept grave and vowed never again to be responsible for any life but his own.

He had kept that vow, despite the loneliness that echoed through him as surely as drought through the crumpled resurrection ferns.

“Wakey, wakey,” Faith said.

He opened his eyes. The fairy lights of the inn silhouetted Faith in rippling gold and turned her bright cap of hair into a halo. Her eyes were a silver mist shot through with twilight blue. Her gardenia-and-woman scent brought everything masculine in him to full alert.

He felt the smuggler's pouch between his legs with painful clarity. “I'm awake.”

Walker's husky voice tickled Faith's nerves like a warm, teasing breeze. She realized she was leaning too close, as though she was going to nuzzle his sleek dark beard to see if it felt half as velvety as it looked. Startled by her own thoughts, she straightened and drew back, but not before she caught a scent of soap and vital, warm male.

“They didn't have any adjoining rooms,” she said.

“That's the nice thing about soulless hotels, they—” he began.

“So I took the last room,” she cut in. “It's a suite. We flipped for the foldout bed. You lost.”

“I don't remember flipping any coin.”

“Memory is the second thing to go.”

“Do tell,” he said. “What's the first?”

“I forget.” She smiled at the look on his face and then laughed out loud. “Come on. You can see the river from the window and there's a great big ship coming up the channel. It looks like it's close enough to touch.”

Walker thought of all the huge freighters that came and went from Elliott Bay. Anyone with eyes could look out of the Donovan buildings and count ships from all over the world. But Faith was excited, as though she lived in a desert and never saw anything bigger than a puddle. Her enthusiasm was contagious. Like her smile.

“Besides, there are two other conventions in town,” Faith said, “so the place is jammed. We wouldn't have gotten this room if someone hadn't canceled at the last minute.”

“Speaking of that, you should—”

“I canceled the B and B as soon as I took this room,” she said quickly.

“Did you leave a forwarding address?”

She almost had, but she wasn't going to admit it. “Just the booth at the jewelry show. And I called home, of course.”

Walker wasn't worried about the Donovans knowing where Faith was. It was the greedy folks who knew she had a million in anonymous rubies that worried him. “Good. I'd hate to have to drag you off to some less historic place out on the highway just to get a night's sleep.”

“When you talk to Archer—”