by JoAnn Ross
Although it had to be at least ninety degrees, with a humidity equally high, her nipples pebbled as if she'd dived naked into the Arctic Ocean. She dearly hoped it was dark enough for him not to notice.
It wasn't. “You can lie to me, sugar. You can try to lie to yourself. But your pretty angel's body is saying something else. It remembers, she. The same way mine does.”
Dani managed, with herculean effort, to drag her gaze from his, but couldn't resist skimming a look over his broad chest and still-flat stomach, down to where his erection was swelling against the faded placket of his jeans.
“See something you like, chère?”
Heat flooded into her face. “You know how it is,” she said breezily. “You've seen one, you've seen them all. It is comforting to discover that not everything around Blue Bayou has changed. You still have sex on the mind.”
“Mais yeah,” he countered without an iota of apology. His wicked eyes glittered with predatory intent as they took a blatantly male appraisal from the top of her head down to her sneaker-clad feet. Then just as leisurely roamed back up to her face. “The day I stop reacting to a desirable female is the day I tie some weights around my neck and throw myself in the bayou as gator bait.”
Dani was no longer a virginal Catholic girl experiencing sexual desire for the first time. She was a grown woman who, in the years since she'd left home, had overcome a broken heart, married, given birth to a son she adored, and, if it hadn't been for that wayward piano, would have been the first divorcée in Dupree family history.
This bayou bad boy leering at her should not make her stomach flutter and her pulse skip.
It shouldn't.
But, heaven help her, it did.
As they resumed walking toward Beau Soleil, she vowed not to let Jack's still powerful sexual magnetism turn her into some fluttery, vapid southern belle who'd swoon at his feet. Or any other part of his anatomy.
But when he put a casual, damp hand on her hip to steady her as she climbed up the braced stairway to the gallerie, Dani feared that if she wasn't very, very careful, she could discover exactly how dangerous supping with Blue Bayou's very own home-grown devil could be.
Jack had taken an immediate inventory the minute she'd stepped out of the boat. Five-five, a hundred-ten pounds, blond hair, and although he hadn't been able to see them from the gallerie, he knew her eyes were a bluish green hazel with gold flecks. Other than that scratch on her cheek, she had no distinguishing marks or scars. There were probably millions of women in the world who'd fit that physical profile. Yet in none those women would the physical details have been put together in a more appealing package.
He'd managed to convince himself that just as he'd changed over the years, Dani would have, too. It was true she'd changed. For the better.
There were the expected outer differences: hair that had once flowed to her waist was now woven into a loose braid that fell a bit past her shoulders. Despite the slenderness Nate had reported, her body was more curvaceous than it'd been when he'd last seen her. Touched her. Tasted her.
When they entered the house, the light streaming from the chandelier in the grand entry hall revealed bruise-like shadows beneath her eyes. Long-dormant protective instincts stirred.
Dangerous thinking, that. Bad enough the way those wide, hit-you-in-the-gut expressive eyes still dominated her oval face, bad enough that he could remember, with aching clarity, the taste of her unpainted lips, and God help him, it was fuckin' damn deadly dangerous the way whatever sunshine scent she'd splashed on before leaving town smelled like heaven and drew him like a silver lure.
She'd been forbidden fruit thirteen years ago. Jack was trying to recall all the reasons she still was when he heard a familiar clattering sound.
“Oh, shit. Brace yourself.” He managed to jump in front of Dani just as the huge ball of yellow fur came barreling into the hall, tore past him like a running back evading a blocker, stood on its hind legs, braced both huge paws on her shoulders, and began licking her face.
“Well, hello,” she greeted the dog, with amazing aplomb for a woman who'd just been attacked by a beast that weighed nearly as much as she did.
He grabbed the leather collar and yanked the stray to the marble floor. The dog wagged its tail and continued dancing around Dani. There was a muddy pawprint the size of Jack's spread hand above her left breast.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered. “She tends to be standoffish with strangers.”
“So I see.” She scratched the enormous head that thrust itself beneath her palm. “I had no idea you had a dog.”
“She's not really mine.” If he owned a dog, it'd damn well be better trained, like the obedient German shepherds he'd worked with on various drug-smuggling investigations. It sure as hell wouldn't jump up and slobber all over people the minute they walked in the door. “I'm just letting her crash here for a while till I get around to taking her to the shelter in town.”
“I see.” It was clear she didn't believe him. Which wasn't all that surprising, since he was starting not to believe it himself. “What kind of dog is she?”
“My guess would be a Great Dane-yellow Lab-Buick mix.”
Her answering laugh slipped beneath his skin and over his nerve endings like quicksilver. “I always wanted a dog.”
“I never knew that.”
“There was a lot you didn't know about me,” she said mildly. “Why are you locked up inside on such a lovely night, sweetheart?” she asked the dog.
“Because last night she decided to go nine rounds with a skunk, and I don't have enough tomato juice left for a rematch,” he answered for the mutt.
“Poor baby.” Dani smiled at the dog, who appeared to grin right back. “What's her name?”
“Turnip. Because she just turned up,” he elaborated when she quirked a brow.
“Well, it's certainly original.”
Her smile faded as her gaze drifted to the mural that covered the walls of the two-story hall, rose to the plaster ceiling medallions he'd repainted, then up the curved sweeping staircase that had shown up in more than one movie.
“That's odd.”
“What?”
“I'd always heard that when you come back home as an adult, things are supposed to look smaller, less grand than you remembered them.”
“Hard for Beau Soleil not to look grand. Even in the sorry state it's in.”
“True.” The mural depicted Acadian forced deportation from Nova Scotia and the deportee's subsequent arrival in Louisiana, continuing up the stairs with the story of the star-crossed lovers Evangeline and Gabriel, immortalized by Longfellow. “It's different,” she murmured. “But the same.”
“I had it cleaned and touched up. It was a bit tricky because in the nineteenth century murals were painted right onto the plaster, which aged as the plaster aged. These days they're done on canvas that's glued to the wall, so the owners can take them with them when they move to a new house.”
“Well, isn't that handy.” She turned toward him, her expression bland, but the quick, intense flair of passion in her eyes warned that she wasn't as calm as outward appearances might suggest. “I'm going to be honest with you, Jack. I hate the idea of you living in my home.”
“Fair enough,” he allowed. “But you hatin' it isn't going to change a thing.”
“Of all the houses, in all the world, why did you buy this one?”
“Would you have preferred I let the bayou claim it?”
“Of course not.”
“How about the mob? Would you have enjoyed coming home to tourists playing blackjack in the summer parlor to a background music of slot machines?”
“You're supposed to be an intelligent man,” she said through set teeth. “You should be able to figure out the answer to that yourself.”
She moved along the wall, from where the men, women, and children were being herded by British troops onto the ships of exile during Le Grand Derangement —The Great Madness—out of Nova Scotia, eventual
ly to the Evangeline oak where the long-suffering, tragic heroine awaited her beloved Gabriel.
“It has such a tragic ending,” she murmured, seeming to momentarily put aside her pique. “For a love story.”
“Most love stories are tragedies.”
“Do you honestly believe that?”
“Sure.” He shrugged, wishing he'd kept his big mouth shut. “Look at you and me.”
She paled, then quickly recovered. “I didn't come here to talk about us,” she repeated, giving him a haughty-princess-to-serf look that didn't exactly have him quaking in his boots. It hadn't worked on him back then, and sure as hell wouldn't now. “And that summer didn't have anything to do with love.”
“Maybe not. But it sure was hot.” He leaned closer. Skimmed a palm over her shoulder. “And a lot of fun while it lasted.”
“Definitive point. It didn't last that long.” She batted away his light caress and headed toward the kitchen. “And don't touch me.”
“I remember when you liked me touching you.” Begged him to, actually, but Jack decided she wouldn't appreciate him reminding her of that.
“That was then. This is now.”
“Oui. But like you said, some things, they don't change.”
“Dammit, Jack—”
This time when she slapped at his touch, he caught hold of her hand. “I still want you, 'tite ange.” God help him, it was the truth. Understanding all too well the dark, drowning sense of inevitability his fictional drug agent felt when he was in the same room with the gorgeous, lethal drug dealer's daughter, Jack drew her closer, until they were touching, thigh to thigh, chest to chest. She was like the Evangeline and Gabriel mural, he considered. Different, but the same. “And you still want me.”
“You need a little help with your dialogue.” Jack got a perverse kick at the way she lifted her chin. The out-of-reach bayou princess was definitely back. All that was missing was a satin ballgown and sparkly tiara. “The only thing I want from you is a carpenter.” She pulled away.
Though it wasn't his first choice, he let her. “And supper,” he reminded her.
“Not even that. Just tell me what it'll take to get your cooperation, short of taking my clothes off,” she tacked on quickly when his mouth twitched. “Then I'll be on my way.”
“You've been livin' in the city too long, you.” To please himself, he played with a silky strand of hair that had escaped the braid. “Where people don' know how to take time to enjoy themselves.” He wanted his hands on her. His mouth. And that was just for starters. “Things move a little slower here in the swamp.”
“Tell me about it. I could have built the damn Taj Mahal in the length of time it took to maneuver my way through the byzantine maze the zoning bureau refers to as policy and procedures to get a permit to get repairs done on the library.”
“You could have gone back to home.” It'd be better—safer—for both of them if she did.
“I did.” She tossed up her chin in a way that made Jack want to kiss her silly. “Blue Bayou is my home.”
Jack sighed. Skimmed his thumb up her cheekbone. “Let's clean this scratch. Have ourselves a little gumbo. Then we'll talk.”
Dani didn't want to stay. For a multitude of reasons. The first being that it hurt, really hurt, to see someone else, even this man she'd once loved, living in the home that had belonged to her family for so many generations. The home she'd always envisioned raising her own babies in.
She also didn't want to stay because Jack made her uneasy. He may be a hotshot writer now, he may have worn a tux when he mingled with Russell Crowe and Jennifer Lopez at the premiere of the movie made from his first book, he may have been interviewed by a breathless Mary Hart on the famed red carpet at the Academy Awards, but beneath the polish he'd picked up since she'd known him—loved him—were those same rough, workingman's hands that had once caused such pleasurable havoc to her body, the flowing black pirate's hair, the unyielding jaw, the lush, sensuous mouth that suggested all sorts of sins and might have appeared feminine had it not been for the contrast of his ruggedly hewn face that had been compared to a young Clint Eastwood. Put it all together and you got a combination more dangerous than mixing TNT and nitroglycerin and setting a match to them. A danger a prudent woman would avoid.
“Sit down on that bar stool and I'll get the medicine kit.” His take-charge attitude grated, even as his roughened voice curled through her like dark smoke.
“I'm perfectly capable of taking care of a little scrape by myself.”
“You're a guest,” he said mildly, as if living in Beau Soleil for a few months made him damn lord of the manor.
Acting as if it were his perfect right to touch her, he put his hands on either side of her waist, lifted her onto a bar stool at a curved granite counter that hadn't been there when she lived in the house. When he left the room, Dani slid off the stool, seriously considered pulling the plug on this fool's effort and escaping back to town. Where it seemed she belonged, since there was no longer any place for her here at Beau Soleil.
“Going somewhere?” he asked casually when he returned with a brown bottle.
“I've decided I'm not hungry after all.”
“Then you just watch me eat while we talk about your problem. Meanwhile, let's get this clean.”
“Ow!” She drew her head back at the sting when he touched the dampened cotton ball to her cheek.
“Hold still.” He caught her chin in the fingers of his left hand and continued to clean the scratch.
“Dammit, you're doing this on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Using that instead of some nice modern antibiotic cream.”
“This happens to be all I've got in the place. Besides, I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy. And I don't remember you being such a whiner.”
“I'm not.”
“Good. Then why don't you shut that pretty little mouth up and think of something pleasant.”
“Such as the sheriff throwing you out of Beau Soleil?”
His damnably sexy lips quirked, just a little, revealing that her barb hadn't stung. “Never happen. Old Jimbo Lott'd have to get off his fat butt first.”
“He was at the library fire.”
“That's not such a surprise. Mos' everyone likes to see the results of a job well done.”
This time it was surprise, rather than pain, that had her pulling away. “Surely you're not suggesting Sheriff Lott set that fire?”
“I'm not saying he did. But I'm not sayin' he didn't, either. The man's definitely got motive and opportunity.”
“What motive would he have to burn a library?”
“Maybe he doesn't want you setting up housekeepin' in Blue Bayou. Maybe he doesn't want you makin' some nice cozy place for the judge to come home to.”
“I don't understand.”
“You don't need to, you.” He tossed the cotton ball into a wastebasket and capped the hydrogen peroxide. “All you have to do is just stay at Orèlia's till the judge is sprung. Then go back home to D.C. or Virginia, or wherever you came from.”
“I came from here. Washington was never my home. Nor was Virginia. It was only where I had to live because my husband was a member of Congress. This is my home,” she repeated. And she wasn't going to let Jack or Jimbo Lott or anyone else chase her away.
“Maybe it was once upon a time ago, but as you pointed out, I'm livin' in it now. So, looks like there's nothin' to keep you here in Blue Bayou.”
“Only Dupree roots going back generations. Roots I want to pass on to my child.”
A guilt she was never very far away from stirred as Dani recalled another child she'd once longed to bring home to Beau Soleil. She took a took a deep breath and decided this was the time to bring up a thought that had been spinning around in her mind ever since Nate first told her that Jack had bought Beau Soleil.
“What if I were to make you an offer? Would you leave?”
He arched a black brow. “You always have been one for s
urprises, chère. Didn't realize you had that much money stashed away.”
“I don't,” she admitted. “But maybe we could work something out.”
“For old time's sake?”
She wouldn't have thought, since he'd been the one to run away, that Jack would want to bring up old times. “Not exactly. But as you pointed out, Beau Soleil needs a lot of work. Surely the renovation must interfere with your writing.”
He shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Not that much. I'm pretty much in a zone when I'm working. 'Sides, I sorta like bein' a man of property.”
“Why can't you be a man of someone else's property?”
“Because I want Beau Soleil.”
“And the great and mighty Jack Callahan gets everything he wants, right?”
His eyes shadowed, just for an instant, then hardened. “Not always.” The cigarette dangled from his lips as he skimmed a long, intimate look over her. “But if you were to sweet-talk me real nice, sugar, you and I might just be able to work out some sort of arrangement.”
He'd proven himself untrustworthy at eighteen. Dani didn't trust him now. “What kind of arrangement?”
She knew she'd made a mistake asking the question when his eyes glinted and his smile turned from sexually seductive to downright feral. “I could always take it out in trade.”
Heat as red as the glowing end of his cigarette shot into her cheeks. “Isn't it strange how time dims memory? I certainly don't remember you being so disgusting.”
That was it. If she didn't leave now, she'd give into impulse and start throwing the knives from the nearby oak rack at his head. She'd just have to take her search for workmen a bit farther, to Baton Rouge or New Orleans, perhaps.
“You don't wanna leave now.” He caught her by the waist again as she began to march away. “Just when things are beginnin' to get interesting.”
“Obviously we have a different definition of interesting.” She managed to keep her tone cool even as those long fingers digging into her skin beneath her T-shirt made her feel shaky. Edgy. And, heaven help her, needy.