by JoAnn Ross
“There's hope for you yet.”
Once he'd gotten to know Danielle, Jack had been surprised to discover that what he'd always taken as regal self-assurance, was actually innate shyness and a critical case of the Melanie Wilkes Curse, which seemed to result in certain female children growing up unflaggingly sweet, malleable, self-effacing comforters of the emotionally wounded.
It was, Jack, suspected, a distinctly southern affliction. He'd sure as hell never run across it anywhere else.
“Nate told me you've been going up to the prison.”
He heard the question in her voice and chose to dodge it. “From time to time.” As the water deepened, he switched on the electric motor and sat down across from her, close enough that their knees were touching.
“I'm surprised. Since my father was the one responsible for you spending that year in the detention work camp.”
She didn't know the half of what the judge had done to him. To them both. But Jack wasn't prepared to share the truth. At least not right now. “Hell, he probably saved my life. I was on a pretty slippery slope in those days.”
“You weren't nearly as bad as everyone thought you were.”
“That was a matter of opinion.” When now familiar ghosts rattled their rusty chains, Jack wished for a whiskey. Or better yet . . .
She was definitely curious. Tempted. He saw it in her moon-spangled eyes, in the way her lips parted, ever so slightly as she looked at him.
When a jagged, white-hot bolt of hunger seared through him, Jack fought back the brutal urge to plunder, to crush his mouth down on hers, to tear off her clothes and taste her perfumed skin.
He wanted her bucking beneath him as she'd done that summer out on that moss-filled mattress at the camp, wanted to watch her eyes go blind as he drove her up, then feel her shatter as he filled her, reclaiming what had been stolen from him.
Deciding her taste would definitely be preferable to burning tobacco, he flicked the cigarette away.
“This would be a mistake.” Her wide fascinated eyes darkened as they stared at his mouth, belying her soft denial.
“Maybe yes. Maybe no.” He slowly leaned forward and felt her shiver when he touched the tip of his tongue to the sexy little indentation between her chin and her bottom lip. “But so what? You've never made a mistake in your life, chère?”
“That's the point. I've made too many.”
“It's just a kiss, Danielle.” He soothed her tense shoulders with his palms. Moved his hands down her arms until his fingers braceleted her slender wrists. Her pulse, beneath his thumbs, skittered. “I won't hurt you.”
But he once had. And they both knew it.
“Jack . . .”
Hearing the plea rather than the protest, he took her mouth.
Heat, thick and sweet as boiled sugar cane, surged through Dani's veins. Her breath choked up in her lungs as Jack leisurely, thoroughly kissed her.
Somewhere in the bayou, a hound howled at the rising moon. An owl hooted. A jumping fish splashed. But Dani ignored them as the outside world telescoped in, narrowing down to the almost painfully exquisite sensation of Jack's mouth claiming hers.
How could she have forgotten this? How could she have failed to remember how her mind clouded with only the touch of his firm masculine lips on hers? How could she have forgotten him?
The truth, she admitted, for the first time in more than a decade as he tilted his head, changing the angle, deepening the kiss, degree by breath-stealing degree, was that she hadn't.
In nine years of marriage she'd never had an orgasm with her husband. She'd never trembled at his touch, never wanted him to rip her clothes off and bury himself deep inside her with a force that would make her scream.
Lowell had certainly never made her scream.
The thought of how her husband might have reacted if she actually screamed during lovemaking caused a little gurgle of laughter against Jack's mouth.
“I must be losin' my touch if this is makin' you laugh.”
“That's not it. A thought just crossed my mind.”
“Why don't you think later?”
Before she could answer, his mouth was on hers again, sending her swirling back into the mists.
This kiss was harder. Hotter. Deeper. Dani moaned beneath the pressure of his mouth as it fed on hers. Her heart thundered in her ears as he dragged that ravenous mouth down her throat, teeth raking against her heated skin.
When he released his hold on her wrists, and cupped her breasts, she arched against his hand and feared they could both end up in the water when the pirogue rocked.
“I knew it.” His deep voice was rife with satisfaction. The pressure lessened, as his mouth cruised up to nibble on her earlobe.
“What?”
“That you'd taste good.” He teased her nipples into aroused, aching points. “Feel good.” A small, needy sound escaped from between her ravished lips as anticipation wound like a tightened spring. “That some things never change.” Proving that he still knew his way around women's clothing, he unfastened the back of her bra with a single deft motion, freeing her breasts to his touch.
“It's only chemistry.” She moaned as his kneading caress grew increasingly rough and caused a low, throbbing ache that seemed to vibrate all the way into her bones.
“Don't knock chemistry.” His touch gentled again; but the feel of his fingers trailing slowly down her torso was no less seductive as they left a weakening trail of sparks on her flesh beneath the cotton T-shirt. “It's what turns dinosaurs into gasoline, carbon into diamonds, and hops into beer.”
He palmed her, the heel of his hand pressing against the placket of her shorts, sending time spinning backward, tempting her nearly beyond reason. When she felt those same wickedly clever fingers that had unhooked her bra move to the button at her waistband, Dani drew back.
“As much as I appreciate the science lesson, Professor Callahan, if it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon not tip the boat over.” Even as she struggled for some semblance of composure, the ragged need in her voice gave her away.
“We'd have to be a helluva lot more sedate than I intend to be with you, that's for sure,” he agreed easily. “Anytime you want a refresher course, just whistle.”
Dani knocked away his hand when he moved to refasten her bra, wanting—needing—to do it herself and gain some control over the situation. “You really can be horrendously insufferable.”
He flashed her a wicked, cocky smile. “It's one of my many charms.”
“Insufferable,” she muttered, folding her arms across breasts that could still feel the erotic touch of his hands as the pirogue drifted back into the reeds.
Jack stood up and began using the pole again, pushing against the mud to navigate. They could have been the only two people in the world as they continued through the inky black darkness, the boat's yellow headlight cutting a swathe through the rising fog on the way back to Blue Bayou.
The scent that had blossomed from Dani's pearly white skin lingered in Jack's mind as he returned to Beau Soleil. He'd said good night to her at her car, which she'd left in Pete's Marine's parking lot.
She was right about having changed. She was no longer that nubile teenage princess who could crook her little finger and bring every male in the parish to his knees. Every male but him, he'd once vowed.
Before that fateful summer, Jack had prided himself on his ability to avoid her silken snares. He'd initially considered Danielle Dupree a pampered, spoiled girl who flirted, flattered, and charmed as only a pretty southern belle could. It was only when he'd discovered that beneath the polished veneer was a very vulnerable, very lonely young woman, he'd fallen. Hard.
After tying the pirogue to the dock, he spent a long time sitting on the gallerie, staring out over the inky water. And remembering.
At seventeen Jack had believed himself to be the toughest guy in the bayou, and there'd been few who'd argue his self-appraisal. He'd been hell on wheels, driving his maman crazy, bringi
ng her to frustrated tears more than once, but there had been so goddamn much anger driving him, he couldn't stop. Not even for her.
Not even when his older brother Finn had come home from college and broken his nose after he'd been caught siphoning gas from Judge Victor Dupree's caddy.
Whenever Jack viewed his life, which he tried like hell not to do all that often, it seemed to be divided into chapters.
The first consisted of those years when his dad had been alive and his mother had done whatever mothers did to create a warm and comfortable home.
Then had come the flash point, that sweltering summer day a wild-eyed, pissed-off swamp dweller had burst into the courtroom determined to kill Judge Dupree for signing the restraining order aimed at keeping an abusive husband from continuing to beat his soon-to-be ex-wife black and blue. Jack's father, Blue Bayou's sheriff, had been on the stand, testifying in a DUI case. When he saw the revolver, he did what came naturally. He dived onto the judge, pushed him down, and got himself mortally wounded in the process.
Jake Callahan hadn't been wearing a bulletproof vest. It was too hot, and besides, Blue Bayou was a peaceful place. A good place to raise a family, his dad had always told his maman, who'd smile and agree. Of course, she'd agreed with just about everything her husband said. And he'd agreed with her right back.
They'd been, even after two decades of marriage, flat out crazy about each other, which had embarrassed the hell out of Jack on more than one occasion.
Like the night before the shooting, when they'd slow danced a lot closer than parents were supposed to at his father's surprise fortieth birthday party. The night his father had eaten smoked boudin and chicken, laughed with his many friends, and kissed his wife as they'd danced to a sad Cajun song about love gone wrong.
Fourteen hours later Jake Callahan was lying in his middle son's arms, blood spurting out of a wound in his broad chest, turning the black and white marble floor into something like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Jack had come to the courthouse with the po'boy his mother had fixed for his father's lunch. He'd arrived just in time to catch the action. But hadn't been able to do a damn thing to save his father's life.
And had never quite forgiven himself for that failure.
“Fuck.” He rubbed his forehead. Squeezed his eyes shut and welcomed the swirling white dots that replaced the scene that was frozen, like a fly in amber, in his mind.
Chapter Two consisted of those years when he no longer gave a shit about anything. Or anyone. Least of all himself.
The judge, perhaps out of a feeling of guilt, obligation, or kindness, Jack had never figured out which, hired the widow Callahan on as Beau Soleil's housekeeper. While Jack began his downward slide into delinquency. He ditched school, drank too much, smoked too much—pot and Marlboros—and if trouble was anywhere within a three-parish radius, he'd find it.
When he was seventeen he stole Sheriff Jimbo Lott's cruiser to go drinking and racing the backroads with a trio of badass buddies who probably hadn't had a working brain between them. There'd been a new moon. The night was pitch, the fog was rising off the water, and Jack had been plowed when he spun around a corner too fast and went sailing into the bayou.
They'd all gotten out with only a few cuts and bruises. It had taken a salvage team from nearby Lafourche parish to pull the wrecked cruiser out of the mire.
And the judge finally lost patience with his housekeeper's son.
Since the parish was too small to have a juvenile court system, Judge Dupree claimed jurisdiction. Justice may have been blindfolded, but she was swift.
The judge made a few phone calls, and within an hour Jack had been interviewed by an intake case worker, referred to the D.A, who'd immediately pressed charges, landing Jack before the bench, where the judge sentenced him in less time than it had taken him to hotwire that patrol car and he was sitting, handcuffed, behind the grill in the back of a DPS cruiser headed to the Juvenile Detention boot camp before the sun had risen.
At the time he'd been too drunk to be fully aware of the events of that night, but later, when he sobered up and remembered the stone-cold hatred in Sheriff Jimbo Lott's eyes glaring at him across the courtroom, Jack realized that the judge could well have saved his life.
By lights out that first night, Jack had also come to the conclusion that compared to most of the other delinquents in the camp, he was a wet-behind-the-ears baby when it came to hard crime. He stopped swaggering and actually listened to the Scared Straight lectures given by the Angola lifers who were bussed to the youth camp each month.
It didn't take long to figure out that as much as he might hate his life, a future behind prison bars was no future at all.
He made goals. The first was to get out of this place alive. Understanding that education was his way out of Blue Bayou, his second was to graduate on time from high school, join the navy, spend some time seeing the big wide world outside the swamp, then let Uncle Sam pay for college.
His third goal was somehow, someday, to make his mother proud of him.
For twelve excruciatingly long weeks he wasn't allowed any interaction with the outside world. Even phone calls were off limits.
When Marie Callahan finally arrived with Nate at the camp for her first visit, Jack would have had to have been blind not to see the hurt in her moist green eyes. She never laid a guilt trip on him. She didn't have to because always hovering unspoken between them was the shame Jack would have caused his father if Jake Callahan had still been alive.
He did his time, building up his body with intense physical training and building his mind in the library, where he read every book in the place. Twice. On the day before his eighteenth birthday, Jack walked out of the camp gates a free man.
A party had been in full swing when he arrived at Beau Soleil. Surrounded by a gaggle of adoring boys, Danielle could have been Scarlett O'Hara at the barbecue at Twelve Oaks.
He was headed to the kitchen when she spotted him.
“Jack! You're home!” Before he could escape, she'd run around the end of the sparkling blue pool and taken hold of his hand. “Come dance with me.”
Wanting to save the bus fare, he'd hitched his way home, leaving him hot, dusty, and sweaty. He figured he fit into this scene about as well as a skunk at a garden party.
“I don't think that's such a good idea.”
“Oh, pooh, don't be a spoilsport.” Her remarkable eyes danced, her moist, too-tempting cherry pink lips coaxed. “It's my seventeenth birthday and I refuse to take no for an answer.”
He couldn't help laughing at her persistence. She's always been a sweet, pretty little girl, who'd, his brothers had ragged him, obviously idolized him as she followed him around Beau Soleil like a little blond puppy. Then, when she turned fourteen and began being battered by female hormones, she turned as dogged as one of his daddy's old tracking hounds.
There'd been no escaping her. If he was working in her daddy's fields, she'd show up with a thermos of icy sweet tea that tasted, beneath the sweltering summer sun, like ambrosia. If he was lying beneath his car, cussing up a blue storm while fixing yet another damn oil leak, the enticing scent of flowers would waft into the garage over the smell of grease and there she'd be, pretending to be in desperate need of a screwdriver for some alleged household chore.
And Jack had definitely learned to stay away from the swimming pool, where she'd lie in wait, a wild child in a skimpy bikini she didn't begin to fill out, too young to know what kind of danger she could be courting.
He'd done everything he could at the time to convince Danielle that he wasn't interested, even while he tried not to break her innocent heart. Finally, after attempts to hide from her had failed and reasoning only fell on deaf ears, he'd had no choice but to tell her straight out that he already had a real woman, someone who knew how to please a man, a woman who didn't have to sneak out of the house to be with him and leave his bed before dawn because it was a school day.
She'd surprised him with he
r remarkably calm reaction, but it was obvious from the pain in her expressive eyes that she was crushed. Before he could try to smooth things over, he'd gotten drunk, stolen Jimbo Lott's cruiser, and ended up in juvie camp.
Danielle hadn't visited him. Her father certainly wouldn't ever have permitted that and neither would Jack. But not a week went by that he didn't receive a letter from her, telling him all about the goings on at Beau Soliel and at school, how his maman was, and his brothers. The tone was always light and chatty, in no way revealing either her crush or his curt treatment of her.
“Please, Jack?” she'd wheedled prettily that fateful night. “Surely you're not going to cause me crushing humiliation by rejecting me while the entire parish is watching?”
No. He may have been known around these parts as Bad Jack Callahan, but even he wasn't that cruel.
“Just one dance,” he'd said. “Then I've gotta go tell maman I'm home.”
“She'll be so thrilled. She wasn't expecting you until tomorrow.” There was honest warmth in her smile.
“They needed my cot, so they sprang me a day early.”
“I'm glad.” She went up on her toes and twined her slender white arms around his neck. Her young firm breasts softened against his chest.
As he'd drunk in the scents of shampoo and lingering sunshine and everything that was sweet and lovely and innocent and female, Jack had smelled the snare the same way a wild animal could sense a trap buried in the swamp.
He'd reminded himself of his plan to escape this small town, warned himself that the southern belle who felt too damn good in his arms represented a helluva lot more trouble than he'd already managed to get involved with over his admittedly rocky eighteen years. Then hadn't listened to a word.
“Dieu, when you're right, you're right,” he muttered now.
There were still times when he thought back on it and was amazed at the risks they'd taken. Crazy. That's what they'd both been that summer.
He wasn't going to think about Chapter Three, Jack decided. Those days returned to haunt him enough while he was sleeping; there was no point in reliving them when he was awake.