by Anne Stuart
He lifted his head for a moment to smile down at her. “Not smug,” he murmured. “Determined.” And his hand slid inside her unfastened jeans, touching her.
She arched off the bed with a little shriek, but he paid no attention, his mouth capturing her other breast as his fingers slid deep, touching her heat and dampness, carefully, cleverly, taking his time, until she called out again, this time with a sudden, expected tremor of release.
He yanked his clothes off, his eyes never leaving hers. He stripped off her jeans and threw them halfway across the room, and then he covered her body with his, with his long, lean, muscled beauty that was unlike anything she’d ever known. She wanted to touch him, to treasure him, to delight in him, but his mouth was on her breasts again, suckling them deep, his hands were between her legs and she was damp and aching for more. She reached down to hold him, but he’d already moved on top of her, between her legs, hot and heavy and ready for her.
“I can’t wait,” he whispered, his voice harsh with desire and an impossible restraint. “Come to me, Marguerite.” And he sank into her, deep and hard and wonderful.
She managed to bury her mouth against his warm shoulder as she held on to him, wrapping her legs tightly around his sinuous body. Her skin was on fire, a fire that was burning deep inside, glowing and trembling and roaring with sudden heat. She wanted more and more and more; she wanted to explode with the unexpected wonder and beauty of it, of him, of the man straining against her, inside her, filling her with his raw maleness, owning her, freeing her. She was lost in a maelstrom of sensation she’d never known, trying to hold on to something, some part of herself, but it was ripped away in their joining, and she knew she couldn’t fight it.
“Scream for me, Marguerite,” he whispered in her ear. “I want to hear you scream.” Sliding his hand beneath their sweat-slick bodies, he pressed his calloused fingertips against her clitoris, so different from how she touched herself, and the world exploded.
She did scream then, as he’d wanted, as she never had in her life. She felt her body dissolve, even as he surged and shuddered against her, and the flames engulfed them, destroying and devouring them, until there was nothing left but ashes. Sex and heat and damp and completed.
Reality intruded in bits and pieces. The sound of rain on the roof. The crackle of the fire. The feel of the mattress beneath her back, the sweat slick body still tight within hers. She didn’t want to let him go. She wanted to hold him with arms and legs and body and soul; she wanted to keep him with her. But it couldn’t happen, and she’d known before this had even started that it was doomed.
She edged out from under him before he realized what she was doing, but he caught her arm and pulled her back against him, wrapping his body around her, pulling the sleeping bag over them. “Don’t run, Marguerite,” he whispered. “Don’t argue, don’t worry, don’t think about tomorrow. For right now think of nothing but your own pleasure.”
“Laissez les bon temps rouler,” she murmured in a husky voice, and his slow smile broke her heart.
He reached down and brought her hand up to his mouth, kissing her lightly. “Yes, chère. At least for tonight.” Moving over, he kissed her mouth again, losing himself in her.
And she went along, willingly. Just for tonight, she told herself. She could be foolish, and selfish, and wild and in love. She could be as crazy as Peter Delacroix.
Tomorrow the world, and sanity, would intrude. For now, the night was hers.
Chapter Seventeen
THE RAIN HAD FINALLY stopped. Peter had no idea what time it was, and he didn’t care. It was probably around three or four in the morning. Just a few more hours to daylight. A few more hours till Margaret would have to face the enormity of what she’d done, what she’d accepted. A few more hours until she would change her mind and run.
He didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to waste one minute, one second of this night. He wanted to spend it watching Margaret’s sleeping face by the fitful firelight. He wanted to touch her, to lose himself in her arms again and again and again.
He had to restrain himself. They’d fucked. They’d made love. Then they fucked again, with a fierce, desperate intensity, and he wanted her again. He might be insatiable, but chances were she was completely worn out. Much as he wanted to make love to her once more, lose himself in his sweetness, the kindest thing he could do was to let her sleep. If she panicked in the morning, there was nothing he could do about it, except try to calm her fears.
He brushed her thick red hair away from her face. He’d spent the past month, since he’d first seen her, having erotic fantasies about her and her glorious hair. To his amazement those fantasies had been tame in comparison to the reality of it. He still felt caught in her, wrapped deeply inside her body, bonded to her in ways he hadn’t even begun to imagine. He didn’t know how he was going to be able to let her go.
But go she would. There was no future for them, at least not any that he could see. The best thing he could do for her was send her away. He had to. But if he did that he really would go crazy.
He turned his head to stare out into the rain-swept night. She felt so good lying curled up beside him, her hair flowing over his chest. If only he could stop time, stop everything, and leave them suspended in this rain-locked house.
“What are you thinking about?” Her voice was low and husky as she snuggled closer.
He looked down at her. “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said, only half remorseful.
“I didn’t want to sleep.” She stretched, rolling over on her back and staring up at him. “You didn’t answer me. What were you thinking about?”
“About you. About me. About this mess, and how impossible it seems.” Leaning over, he kissed her eyelids.
“What happened two years ago?”
He’d been waiting for that question, knowing she deserved the truth, or as close as he could come to it. “Damned if I know. We were on the verge of separating. I was staying here, working on the place, and Rosanne was up at Maison Delacroix. I was building bookshelves when the police came by to tell me my wife had been murdered and they’d like me to answer a few questions.”
“But you didn’t kill her.”
“No, I didn’t kill her,” he said bitterly. “Even though I wanted to. Even though she deserved it. It was far simpler to divorce her, even if she did want to take me for everything she could.”
“Would she have been able to do that?”
He shrugged. “I doubt it. I would have gotten a better lawyer than Wendell, and she would have had a fight on her hands. It would have been ridiculously easy to prove adultery on her part, and Louisiana is still provincial enough to think wives should either be faithful or discreet. Rosanne was neither.”
“Who killed her?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can think of a half a dozen people with motives, but none with the circumstantial evidence they had on me.”
“You shouldn’t have been convicted on circumstantial evidence.”
“You forget this is Louisiana. Things don’t work quite the same way. Besides, I had a rotten lawyer.”
“Why did you have Wendell?”
“He was there. He was family. And I knew I was completely innocent. I didn’t think I’d have any problem. The jury thought otherwise, and I happened to be saddled with a hanging judge. Louisiana still enforces the death penalty, you know. I think they almost equal Texas in state executions.”
“So you decided to fake being crazy?”
He nodded, not meeting her questioning gaze. “When it looked like there was no other way out. In the meantime I’ve been spending a fortune on private detectives. In two years they haven’t come up with a damned thing.”
“Maybe you haven’t had the best detectives.”
“I’ve got to trust Wendell to do something right, haven�
�t I? He feels guilty enough at not getting me off.”
A shadow darkened her beautiful green eyes.
“Wendell’s hiring the detectives?”
He wanted to kiss that troubled expression from her mouth. But he’d kissed her too much already, and her lips were red and swollen. “Is there a problem with that?”
“I guess not. Are you sure he believes you’re innocent? He told me you were absolutely crazy.”
“That’s all part of the plan. You asked Doc Pitcher and he told you the same thing, didn’t he? And you believed him.” He couldn’t resist; he kissed her very softly.
She slid her hand around his neck, drawing him closer. “I don’t know what I believed,” she whispered.
“And what do you think now?”
“I don’t want to think. I want to feel.” She pressed her mouth against his, sliding her arms around him as he covered her, and for a while there was no room for thoughts and doubts at all.
HE WAS MUMBLING in his sleep. The first light of a gray, wet dawn had just begun to penetrate the window, when he began thrashing around, the red down sleeping bag tangling around his long legs. Margaret put a hand on his chest, hoping her touch would calm him, but he jerked away, muttering something angry.
She touched him again, shaking him, but he knocked her away. “Damn it, no,” he said, over and over and over again. “Fire . . . no . . . damn it, leave her in there. No,” he said, his voice rising into a panicked shout. “No, no, no!”
He sat bolt upright, covered in sweat, his eyes glazed and staring. She sat up with him, unable to tell whether he was awake or asleep. “It was a dream, Peter,” she said in her calmest voice, longing to take him in her arms, not daring to. “Just a nightmare.”
“No,” he said again, his voice muffled and sleep drugged. “Running . . . Running away.” And then he lay back down again, mumbling. “Can’t catch me. Run . . . lie . . . not there . . .” And closing his eyes, he drifted off to sleep.
Margaret didn’t move. She sat there staring down into his beautiful, troubled face. The face of a liar, the face of a murderer. He hadn’t been at the cottage, working on bookshelves. He’d seen the fire, run from the fire that had engulfed his wife’s body. Had he set the fire?
What in heaven’s name was she doing in his bed? What was she doing, thinking of curling up beside him again and waiting for him to wake up and answer her questions? All he’d do was lie again, and she’d want so much to believe him she probably would. Her life would be dependent on her belief that murdering Rosanne was a one-time fluke.
She could do it. She could ignore safety and common sense and be willing to take that chance, to put her life at risk. She just couldn’t do it to Carrie.
Slowly, carefully, she slid from beneath the sleeping bag, off the mattress and onto the bare wood floor. Her clothes lay scattered around the room, and as she remembered the abandon with which they’d been discarded, a hard, harsh sob fought its way up her throat.
She made it halfway down the stairs before that sob broke loose. The noise of the rain on the slate roof would have drowned it out, along with the noise of her bare feet tiptoeing soundlessly down into the living room. She didn’t stop to look around her. She didn’t dare. She’d fallen in love with a stupid car, she’d fallen in love with a tumbledown house, but most of all she’d fallen in love with a man, a man who could tear her apart. A man who already had.
She and Carrie couldn’t stay in Louisiana. No matter how much Carrie loved it here, no matter how much she felt she belonged; the place was too dangerous, for her mother’s heart, for her mother’s life. Carrie had put down roots easily enough in Delacroix Landing. She’d do the same in Orlando, Florida. Wouldn’t she?
And what about her own feelings? Hadn’t she put down roots, ones she’d fought from the very beginning? Hadn’t she been enchanted with New Orleans and the sheer exuberant tackiness of Mardi Gras? Hadn’t the bayou, the steamy weather, the live oaks and Spanish moss felt curiously familiar? And hadn’t this house, this man felt like home?
What a complete and utter fool she’d been! And now that she’d been a fool, her next step was cowardice. She was heading straight back to Maison Delacroix, secure in the belief that Peter couldn’t follow, at least not for a few days. He couldn’t get his tame doctor to trump up an excuse that quickly. They’d at least have to have the semblance of some sort of treatment after Peter’s recent outburst.
By the time he came back, she’d be long gone. Her instincts had always warned her against Dexter’s family, and her instincts had been right. She’d had no choice but to accept their charity, but she couldn’t do it at the expense of her child’s safety.
She’d wait until Monday. She could pack everything, sneak it out to the Cadillac and pick Carrie up after school. They could probably make it halfway into Alabama by nightfall, and Florida wouldn’t be that far away, and Gertrude wouldn’t dare complain, not when she realized Margaret could spill the whole mess.
Damn them, she thought, fumbling with the front door lock. Damn them all.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Peter was standing on the stairs, wearing hastily donned jeans and a furious expression on his face. He took another few steps down toward the living room.
She kept struggling with the lock, her hands shaking too much to be efficient. She could feel him moving closer, and she wondered whether his lies were even more vast than she’d imagined. Whether, on top of everything else, he really was crazy, and that, in his madness, he might kill her.
“I expected you to run,” he said. His voice was a cool, mocking drawl, so very different from the husky murmuring of a lover. “I just thought you’d have the guts to hold out a little longer. At least until daylight. Maybe even through the entire weekend. You could have decided on Monday morning that I really was a murderer and run away then. That way you could have had a hot weekend before you got to wallow in your neurotic fantasies.”
That stung her enough to make her whirl around. He’d stopped at the bottom step, close enough to reach her if he moved fast enough. “You’re a liar.”
“I never said I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t here working on bookcases when Rosanne died. You were at Maison Delacroix.”
His eyes narrowed, and his expression was both thoughtful and wary. “What makes you think that?”
“You talk in your sleep,” she spit, turning back to the recalcitrant doorknob.
This time it opened beneath her hands, and she stumbled out into the rain, landing on her knees in a puddle of water.
She half expected him to come after her. To try to stop her, to try to reason with her, maybe even to try to kill her. But he stood in the door, watching her as she scrambled to her feet and headed for the huge black Cadillac at a dead run, and his voice trailed after her.
“It’s not over, Marguerite. Not by a long shot.”
And before she’d even managed to start the car he’d turned his back on her, slamming the door of the decrepit old cottage.
MAISON DELACROIX was still and silent when Margaret drove back home. She had no idea what time it was. The old Cadillac had no radio, and its clock had stopped working probably a decade ago. The heavy, soaking rain had turned the sky a dismal gray, and all Margaret wanted to do was crawl into bed.
The front door was locked. The back door was locked. And every window in the place was dark. The Jaffreys and the Delacroix were asleep like innocent babes, Margaret thought morosely. How in the world was she going to get in?
It only took her a moment to remember what had precipitated her flight. It couldn’t have been more than twelve hours ago that Peter had started smashing furniture through the French doors in the living room. Wendell had taken off early in the evening, and Remy had dipped a bit too deeply in the bourbon to be of much use. The rain was probably still pourin
g into the room, soaking the faded Aubusson carpet and rotting the floor.
But she’d underestimated Gertrude’s force and her devotion to the house. Someone had draped a tarp over the window, keeping out the bulk of the heavy rain, but it wouldn’t keep out a determined woman, Margaret thought, ripping down the heavy canvas and leaving it lying in a pool of rain as she stepped over the broken glass.
She stopped for a moment, standing very still in the shadows and remembering those nightmarish moments. Peter, furious, dangerous and impossibly exciting. Wendell, driven to vicious brutality. She’d seen the deep purple stain on Peter’s rib cage. She’d put her mouth on the bruise; she’d put her mouth all over his body, she’d . . .
She shoved her fist in the mouth to quiet the sob of anguish. She couldn’t afford to give way again. She’d cried too much, and now she was done. She wasn’t going to shed another tear until she and Carrie were safely in Florida. Then she’d ration herself, ten minutes of crying a day. She could work it down to five, then every other day, and before long she wouldn’t have to cry at all. Anything was possible.
She only hoped she’d be gone before Wendell returned. She didn’t know what had prompted his savage rage. Frustration, perhaps. Guilt, or a misplaced jealousy. She couldn’t ignore the fact that he’d been courting her. He hadn’t liked her spending even an afternoon working with Peter. How had he felt when he saw her kissing him?
It didn’t matter. Even if he returned before Monday she’d manage to fob him off. She’d spent half her married life locking her emotions away, keeping a bland, calm face to the world. She could summon those defenses once more, until she never had to see a Delacroix again.
She didn’t bother to strip off her clothes before climbing into her big tester bed. She couldn’t bring herself to shower. For one thing, she was afraid she’d awaken some of her curious in-laws. For another, she was too bone weary. She’d have to sleep with the scent and the feel of Peter clinging to her skin, and hope that her dreams wouldn’t be erotic ones.