No Limits

by Alison Kent

  “I hear sleep’s good for that.” His eyes flashed, but not with his smile as much as with the fire to right a grave wrong.

  “You try closing your eyes when you see nothing but water ready to swallow you whole like some big gulping mouth.” Not to mention headlights flying at you like bullets, or the grille of the truck they belong to grinning like the devil rising from hell.

  Even worse was seeing it all with her eyes wide open, and feeling the impact in every one of her bones hours later. She’d lived a life of luxury, and Pilates or not, had no idea she could hurt this bad.

  “I brought food for a week—”

  “Food for one. I only need coffee.” Even that was imposing, but she honestly couldn’t find it in her to care. As long as he was one of the good guys and could get her out of this nightmare and back to New York…

  “For one, yeah. But there are groceries to be had down here in the bayou, chère.” He pulled open the door. “Let me unload the goods, get the generator going, and then you can tell me how the heiress to the Ferrer fortune wound up ass over end in the swamp.”

  Nine

  B y the time his guest returned, freshly showered and shampooed and dressed in his things, Simon had thrown together a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee, and toast. He didn’t immediately turn around and greet her but focused on piling the food on paper plates, digging into his box of grub for sugar and powdered cream.

  Concentrating on what was simple kept him from facing the complications that came attached like baggage to Michelina Ferrer. It was a different sort of baggage than what he’d been dealing with the last few weeks, but her being here was still going to weigh heavy on his mind.

  Dealing with Bear and Lorna and the property would be enough to try any saint. Add King to the mix, and, well, Simon’s patience wouldn’t pass the first test. And now he had a mystery on his hands, a crime that needed more explanation before it would begin to make sense.

  That was the only reason he finally turned around, the only reason he lifted his gaze from the food he carried to the woman standing in the frame of the kitchen doorway toweling dry her dark hair.

  Her face was the same one he’d seen on “Page Six,” on magazine covers, on TV. The same one from his billboard. The same one…but not.

  Her skin was scrubbed clean. She wore nothing glossy on her lips, nothing colored and glittery on her eyes, nothing to smooth out her cool ivory skin. She had freckles on her nose, two small red zits on her chin.

  And her eyes were sad and scared, not sassy or sultry or seductive. A big problem, her eyes. An equally big one, her unbound breasts beneath his gray T-shirt, the curve of her hips and thighs in his long-legged briefs.

  He set the food on the table, cleared his throat, went back for the Styrofoam cups filled with coffee and for plastic-ware. He didn’t turn back toward her until he heard her sit, the chair legs scraping across the worn linoleum, the creak of the wood beneath her weight.

  The table hid most of her body. He could still make out the shape of her breasts, the fullness, the upper slope that made him wonder about the weight he’d feel beneath. But there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to avoid her face, so bare and exposed, or her eyes.

  He had to look at her to get her story. He had to watch her expression, see the truth, her fear, find out how much she knew or had guessed or thought about what had happened. This is what he did—gathered information, ferreted out intel, zoned in on the pertinent details, used it all to come up with a plan of action.

  He needed one. Desperately. One that had nothing to do with her body being naked under his clothes, one that addressed the fact that she was Michelina Ferrer. And she was miserable, frightened, and lost.

  He couldn’t help it. He feared that juxtaposition—what he knew about the celebrity versus what he sensed about this woman with her armor washed away and fearing for her life—was going to make it hard to keep this job from turning personal.

  “Let’s start at the beginning.” He stopped, scooped up a bite of eggs. “You are Michelina Ferrer.”

  “Micky. Michelina is what my father calls me to make sure I know I’m in trouble.”

  “How old are you?”

  She arched one of those famous dark brows. “My age is relevant how?”

  “I wasn’t sure if the being-in-trouble-with-your-father thing was past tense or present.” Then again, he’d seen her antics reported in the press. The parties. The other women. The drinking. The men.

  She looked down at her plate, piled eggs onto her toast as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. “I’ll no doubt be in trouble with my father over something until one of us buries the other.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, and he wondered what her father would think about the trouble she was in now. If he would worry more about the reputation of Ferrer Fragrances or his daughter’s safety should news get out about the danger she’d stumbled into.

  “Micky, then. What could possibly bring you to Bayou Allain?” If he knew why she was here, he might be able to figure out why someone would run her off the road.

  Then he wondered if whoever it was had fled once the car hit the water, or if they’d stuck around to see if she climbed free of the wreckage and followed her here. His stomach knotted around the bitter coffee and overcooked eggs.

  She sighed, sat back in the chair, pulled her heels up into the seat, covering her legs with his shirt as she did so, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I came to visit a friend. It was a spur-of-the-moment trip, and I didn’t let her know I was coming. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  Something in her expression, in the way she’d physically curled in on herself, made him wonder what had happened right before that spur of the moment, and if she’d headed south to avoid having her father call her Michelina.

  “Who’s the friend?”

  “Lisa Weston.” She shook her head. “Lisa Landry. We went to school together,” she was saying when Simon interrupted.

  “Landry? As in Terrill?” Whoa.

  She nodded. “She’s married to a deputy. Her father-in-law was a judge here, but then you probably know that, this being your house.”

  Simon was mulling over her connection to the Landrys and the odds of tying it to her accident when she added, “And neither one of them knows where she is.”

  His head came up and he frowned, watching as she reached for her toast, now sagging underneath the weight of the egg mountain she’d made. “What do you mean, they don’t know where she is?”

  She shrugged as she chewed and swallowed, then reached for her coffee and drank. “Just what I said. They haven’t seen her since Monday.”

  Today was Thursday. Double whoa. “Has she officially been listed as a missing person?”

  “Her husband’s law enforcement. I’m assuming he’s got that covered.”

  True enough. “What did he tell you?”

  She continued to cradle her cup. “I haven’t seen him to talk to. I only talked to the judge, if you can call what went on talking.”

  “What did go on?” He knew how Bear Landry operated, how intimidation was as natural to him as the tumbler of scotch in his hand.

  She took on a look of disbelief. “I don’t remember ever being bullied minutes after meeting any man. Or letting anyone I don’t know so thoroughly provoke me that I say things I’m afraid I’ll regret.”

  Eh, yeah. She’d definitely met the judge. “From what I’ve read about you, that’s not so unusual. That regretting business.”

  She narrowed her eyes, the glare not one of denial, just one letting him know she didn’t care for the reminder, even if he wasn’t too far off the mark.

  “This was different. I’ve never been run down for speaking my mind. By the press, sure. Not by a truck the size of a small building.”

  “Tell me about the truck.”

  “It was big.”

  Uh, not helpful. “Color? Make or model?”

  “I know taxis. I don’t know trucks.”


  “A pickup with a bed? An SUV?”

  “It was behind me. All I saw were the lights. And eventually the grille.”

  “No emblem in the center? Stickers on the bumper? More than one person inside?”

  She shook her head, kept shaking it.

  “What about a horn? Did the driver honk at you?”

  She frowned, concentrating. “He might have.”

  “What did it sound like?” he asked, and when she looked at him as if she didn’t understand, added, “The truck’s horn. The sound.”

  “Like a horn. I don’t know. Loud. That’s all I remember, and I might even be imagining that. Maybe it was the sound of the impact, or the sound of hitting the water.” She shoved away from the table, surged to her feet, was across the room and in front of the window before he could react.

  Probably a good thing, her leaving the table, since he didn’t know what his reaction would be. She was smart. She had snap. Even after what she’d been through, she hadn’t been cowed.

  But she was frustrating him all to hell, and he didn’t know if that was because she couldn’t answer his questions, or if it had to do with seeing her wearing his clothes.

  He glanced over, saw her start to lean forward, her hands on the lip of the sink, then jump away, pressing her back to the side of the refrigerator.

  Her face was pale, her brown eyes even darker with the surrounding skin gone white. “Does anyone know that you’re here?”

  That he was coming? Yes. That he was already here? On his feet, Simon strode to the window. A dusty white pickup had just appeared at the head of his drive. “I’ll see who it is. You bag up your trash and haul ass upstairs. Take it with you. Breakfast for one I can explain.”

  He continued to watch the truck’s approach while behind him Micky scurried around grabbing up the evidence of her presence. He turned back long enough to see her snatch two eggshells from the pile on the stove, as if he wasn’t capable of downing the half dozen he’d scrambled.

  The idea made him want to laugh. Micky’s panicked movements made him want to smile. Both responses were way out of line. Nothing about this scenario should have inspired so much as the thought of laughter.

  But then Michelina Ferrer had no idea who he was. Or that small-town criminal minds were nothing in the scheme of what he’d faced as an operative for SG-5.

  Ten

  M icky huddled on the floor of the closet in the second-story bedroom farthest down the hall from the stairs. She’d left the door cracked an inch for air and for light, but even that felt like too much exposure.

  She wanted more than anything to close her eyes and sleep, but she couldn’t. Not until he came back and told her she was safe. Not until she knew more about what had happened after she’d left Red’s.

  She hoped Simon would get her the answers. At least the ones that would explain who had run her off the road and why—and how Lisa’s disappearance fit in, if it did.

  Then there was the question of where she was, this house, her hideout. And the other one nibbling at her with tiny pointed teeth.

  Who in the world was Simon Baptiste?

  He owned this place. He lived in Manhattan. She lived in Manhattan. She’d taken refuge in this place.

  She wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, but this fluke was too close for comfort. If he’d followed her here, if Papi had sent him, she wanted to know who he was. A bloodhound nose that good would be a big help in finding Lisa.

  His following her she could buy—with a really big stretch of credulity. But her ending up in his house—out of all the places along all the world’s bayous—she couldn’t buy as anything but a quirk of fate.

  And that reasoning made it a lot easier to accept that he wasn’t in cahoots with the bad guys. That he really was on her side.

  He couldn’t have known about the billboard on East Houston if he hadn’t seen it or had someone tell him it was there. And even Papi wasn’t good enough to have hired a P.I.—should that be what Simon was—who owned property in the town where she’d gone to lick her self-inflicted wounds.

  Unless Papi had made the connection in the past, anticipating that one day she’d run to Lisa—and had arranged to have Simon in his pocket just in case.

  Or maybe Simon really didn’t own the house at all.

  Stop! No more analyzing the situation to death. Her instincts insisted that her questions about Lisa had made someone uncomfortable, and that that someone had taken pains to make sure she didn’t ask them anymore.

  She thought of Kingdom Trahan, Mr. Southern Hospitality himself. Had his Cajun charm been a ruse designed to get her to open up about her visit? How could he have known that having no luck elsewhere, she’d stop in at Red’s—except that Red’s was the only place to stop?

  She thought back to the man who’d nearly knocked her flat on her way out of the bar. She wondered if he drove as recklessly as he walked, if he drove under orders to see that she met her end.

  Now she was overanalyzing and overdramatizing. Except what she was thinking made too much sense not to be exactly what had happened.

  And none of it would she ever be able to prove.

  Simon leaned a shoulder against one of the beams flanking the stairs to the porch, tucked his fingers in the pockets of his jeans, and watched the approaching truck navigate the ruts in his road. He didn’t know any of the local bubbas who had the run of the bayou, but he doubted this visit was about seeing if the prodigal son had come home.

  He knew a whole lot of the folks in Bayou Allain blamed him for King’s troubles. They saw his time in the service as a dodge to keep him out of Louisiana and Kingdom out of his hair, when the truth was, with his cousin despising his position as landlord, he’d felt it best to make his life elsewhere.

  But, no. This bunch of rowdies wasn’t expecting to find the owner of the property waiting to greet them. They braked the truck in its tracks when they saw his vehicle parked along the side of the house.

  Simon pushed away from the beam—it was really in no shape to hold his weight, and falling flat on his face would kill his advantage—and moved from the porch to the top step.

  At his movement, the truck started up again, though it seemed in less of a hurry than before, the occupants no doubt throwing together a quick story explaining why they’d ignored the posted NO TRESPASSING signs.

  The truck rattled to a stop not far from where he stood, and two men he’d never seen climbed down from the cab. The driver left the engine idling.

  Simon would’ve complained about the noise making conversation difficult, except the noise would also mask any sounds coming from inside the house. “Mornin’, gents. What brings you out to my place?”

  After a glance skittered between the two strangers, the beefier one moved his chaw from one cheek to the other, spit a dark stream of tobacco to the ground, and said, “Your place, huh? Guess that would make you Trahan’s cousin. Baptiste, right?”

  Simon gave a single nod. “That would be me.”

  “You got any identification?” asked the second one, a slender stick of a man. He slapped a palm on the hood of the truck, then moved his hand when the metal began to burn.

  “You’re the one trespassing,” Simon said, biting back a laugh. “I could ask you the same.”

  The first man stepped forward. “I believe you’re who you say. I’ve seen pictures from your trial.”

  “That so?” Simon crossed his arms, raised a brow. “That trial was near on twenty years ago, boo. You doing a research paper or something? Digging into the local past?”

  The man didn’t miss a beat. “You weren’t around when your cousin came home after he was sprung from Angola. The TV ran the whole story again. With pictures of you and King both.”

  But no Lorna. Simon wondered if his cousin had even mentioned to anyone that Lorna had been there that night. “News around here must still be as slow as the bayou if that story got a rerun four years after the fact.”

  Another stream of tobacco juice hit the g
round, this one only inches from the bottom step of the porch.

  “A family that’s suffered as much tragedy as yours tends to get a lot of attention. Not saying it’s deserving, mind you. Just that here we see to our own. We don’t run halfway around the world to solve problems others don’t want us involved in.”

  If Simon had given a shit what these two yokels thought, he’d have been down the steps introducing them to Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, whom he’d charged with enforcing his NO TRESPASSING signs.

  But the greeting he’d been given was no less than he’d expected, so he looked from one to the other and did his best to piss them off with a smile.

  “Guess the years have been good to me seeing that I’ve stuck in your mind all this time.” Simon watched the first man’s face mottle up and grow red. “Now, since we’ve established that I’m who I say I am, let’s get back to you two.”

  “We’re working with the sheriff’s department. Search and rescue.” This from the man who’d been rubbing at his burned palm all this time. “Not sure if you would’ve seen it, but a car went off the bridge last night. We can’t find hide nor hair of the driver.”

  Simon knew the bayou, knew if a body didn’t surface, folks would assume that gators had eaten their fill. The idea of these two skunks getting away with murder because of Micky going into the water where she had rankled.

  And realizing he hadn’t pictured that scenario earlier, that of Micky thrashing her way out of her car and into those steel-trap jaws, made the eggs in his stomach curdle. He’d seen a gator take down a deer. Thinking of Michelina Ferrer being in that situation…

  “Course that’s not too surprising when you think about all the things that call that water home,” the skinny one finished.

  Simon’s head came up. “Convenient for whoever it was who ran the car off the road.”

  The big guy butted in. “The sheriff’s not saying she was run off the road. Who told you that?”

  “She? If you haven’t found the driver, how do you know you’re looking for a she?”

  “Car’s a rental. Woman picked it up yesterday in New Orleans.”