The NOLA Heart Novels (Complete Series)

by Maria Luis

  No one said anything as she slipped on her tennis shoes by the front door, or when she said, “I’m sorry. Please tell me if you need me.”

  From the way Anna’s gaze flickered with agony, Shaelyn didn’t suspect they’d be calling her anytime soon. Without another word, she let herself out of their house and took the patio steps two at a time. She didn’t glance back as she hurried to her car, mainly because tears blurred her vision and also because she didn’t think she could handle turning to look back and not seeing Julian on the front step waving like a manic, the way he usually did.

  Her phone vibrated with an incoming text. She didn’t need to look at the screen to know who it was. Shaelyn climbed into her car, slammed the door shut, and briefly thought about driving over to NOPD Headquarters to give Brady a piece of her mind.

  No, that wouldn’t do. She’d wait for him at his house. What she had to say had no place being said out in public. Without checking her phone, Shaelyn threw the gear into drive.

  The fifteen minute drive from Anna’s to Brady’s house passed all too quickly, and the next thing she knew she was parking in what had become her usual spot, avoiding the Crater of Doom and marching up his front steps.

  “He’s not home!” came the warbled shout from next door. “Hasn’t been there since last night.”

  Shaelyn’s nails dug into her palms as she turned to Crazy Shirley. “That’s fine,” she clipped out. “I’ll wait.”

  Shirley nodded, then leaned on the railing of her porch so that she could get a better look at Shaelyn. She leaned so far out that she threw up a hand to block the glare of the sun. “You here for more nookie?”

  He isn’t getting any even if he begs and brings me to Disney World. The thought that she’d jumped into bed with Brady, that she’d trusted him when she’d trusted no other man with her body, made her feel queasy.

  Crazy Shirley rolled her eyes at Shaelyn’s silence. “You young folk—so uppity about sex, like we all haven’t been there and done it before.” She gestured with a sharp flick of her hand, moving toward her front door. “Secrets will do you no good, dear.”

  Ha. That Shaelyn knew well enough already.

  Crazy Shirley disappeared into her house, and the urge to check Brady’s text message was too strong to ignore now. Had he tried to defend himself? Or maybe—her heart clenched at the thought—the only reason he’d agreed to help Julian was because he’d already been on the search for Anthony Mardeaux and it had worked out to his benefit.

  Hadn’t he said that his chance for a promotion rested on this case? Oh God. Had their entire relationship been a lie? The errant thought that perhaps he’d strung Shaelyn along in order to use her for information nearly sent her to her knees. Logically, she realized that she had always been the one to bring up Tony. But her heart was hammering so fast, and her head was pounding, and all of the what-ifs were crowding in and making it hard to breathe.

  To think straight.

  She heard his heavy footsteps crunching on the gravel before she saw him. Heard the way he whispered her name as though he’d expected this all along.

  He’d expected the end, when all she’d been thinking about was how they were just beginning.

  When she hadn’t texted him back, Brady knew she’d come here. To his house, which had rapidly begun to feel like their house. He’d left Headquarters with coworkers pounding his back for a job well done. Even Cartwell stopping by his desk to talk “shop” about the promotion was not enough to keep Brady at his desk, in that office.

  Not when there was a solid chance that he might never see Shaelyn again.

  Last time she’d fled across the country when it had just been a miscommunication. This was no miscommunication. He’d fucked up so badly that he wasn’t all too sure he could bounce back from it.

  Didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try to make up for what he’d done.

  He’d try forever if she let him.

  Taking the steps two at a time, he made sure to keep his distance when he caught sight of her expression. She looked ready to bolt. With an internal shout of despair, he noted the dried tears on her cheeks and her bloodshot eyes.

  He’d done this.

  He took one step toward her. “Shaelyn—”

  In response, she fell back a step. A shuddering breath made its way through him and he shoved his hands through his hair. “Let’s go inside and talk,” he tried again. “I’m sure Crazy Shirley is listening to everything we’re saying right now.”

  “Let her.” Her gaze narrowed on him. “After all, the entire city knows about Tony Mardeaux getting incarcerated for aiding and abetting in murder. Except for the people who mattered.”

  Jesus. Brady ran his hand over his face. What could he possibly say? Nothing beyond the obvious, which just so happened to be truth.

  “I wanted to tell you,” he said, wishing that she would let him hold her. Each tear she shed tore through him. “There were so many times that I wanted to, but I—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said coolly. “How long did you know?”

  His hesitation was the only answer she needed. She laughed caustically, a sound that dropped the burden of guilt more heavily on his shoulders. “That long, huh?”

  “Sweetheart, I—”

  “Don’t you dare,” she bit out fiercely. “Don’t you dare ‘sweetheart’ me.” If it were possible to shoot daggers out of one’s eyes, then the force of her fury would have already flayed him. “How long? It’s an easy enough question to answer. How long did you know?”

  Too long. He’d known for way too long to hope that this argument might be washed away with a new morning. “Since that first day that you came to my house,” he admitted somberly.

  Her shoulders physically wilted, and she released an almost inaudible whimper that wrenched his heart and yanked at his soul. Without even her saying so, he knew what she was thinking: that he’d known when she had allowed him to almost take her on his kitchen table. When she’d first started to let down her carefully erected defenses.

  And he’d known about Mardeaux ever since.

  “Please hear me out”—he tried to stave off disappointment when he held out his hands and she looked at him like he’d offered poison instead—“I wanted to tell you from the very beginning. Except that when you asked me to search for Mardeaux, I figured he was working a nine-to-five and partying on the weekends. I had no idea that he was a two-time felon. He was out on parole.”

  With a shaky hand, she pushed her ever-curly hair back from her face. “What were those charges for?”

  They’d been mentioned on the news today, but it was possible she hadn’t caught that part of the segment. Brady opened his mouth, instinctively knowing that he damned himself with every word he said. His present admission couldn’t make up for what he hadn’t said before. His hands curled at his sides. “Stealing cars.” His gaze uncomfortably slid away. “Aggravated battery, among a few others.”

  No, he thought sadly as he watched her hand leap to her mouth, Anthony “Tony” Mardeaux was no angel.

  “Did the murder case come after you and I . . .?”

  And so his grave digging began. “Before,” he told her bluntly, hating the way she flinched at his answer. “Though we didn’t know it then. The night you came over, I’d come off a long bender at work. We’d caught the main perp. He admitted to his involvement with the murders and that he hadn’t acted alone.”

  “Mardeaux.” Her hand went to her throat, fingers splaying on the underside of her chin as though she were trying to hold herself together. “He was talking about Mardeaux.”

  Brady dipped his head in acknowledgement. “We didn’t know it then. Not until his fingerprints came back. It was a screwy match, but there was enough circumstantial evidence, as well as the less than ideal fingerprints batch in the system, to link Mardeaux to the crimes. Except that we couldn’t find him.”

  He saw the minute that understanding dawned for her, making him genuinely wish that he was anyon
e else than what he was. Who he was. Ambitious to a fault, single-track minded. A man obsessed with a title that he no longer gave a rat’s ass about because of the woman standing in front of him.

  Except that the woman no longer wanted him.

  He felt compelled to mention that the nature of his job meant that some things were classified. Like the fact that Julian’s father was the lead suspect and accomplice to a bloody killing spree. Only when she inhaled sharply through her nose did he realize he’d spoken out loud.

  She came at him in a flurry of pointing fingers and flushed cheeks, and God help him, but he couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was. How she’d always been to him. His hands found her upper biceps. “That was a shitty thing for me to say,” he grunted. “Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you?” Shaelyn jerked out of his hold and spun away. “Brady, I can understand that your job is not exactly an open book. There’s a reason why officers have to take oaths and swear to secrecy or whatever they do. I’m not naïve or a fifteen-year-old girl pissed at her boyfriend.” His heart briefly soared at the thought that she might think of him as her boyfriend, before it crashed back to reality at her words. “My problem is that you knew about Mardeaux’s past before he was even involved in the case, and yet you didn’t say a single word. Would you have ever told me, or more specifically, Julian? Would you have lied for the rest of our lives?”

  He wanted to reach for her so badly, but knew that she would once again reject his touch. His arms hung listlessly at his sides. “I would have said something. At some point.”

  Her mouth thinned. “At some point,” she reiterated brokenly.

  “Yes.”

  She made a move to sweep past him. Brady was quicker, and with one step to the right he effectively blocked her path to the front porch steps. “Let’s go inside and talk this over,” he pleaded, and for a brief second he thought she might waver from leaving. From leaving him. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  “I think I’ve heard everything I care to learn, Brady. If there’s anything I’m missing, I’m sure a quick Google search will do the trick.”

  The harsh words made him flinch, and he reacted on instinct alone, as well as on the gut feeling that the reason behind her anger wasn’t solely because of Mardeaux. “You’re scared, Shae. If you think about it for a minute, you’d see what I’m saying makes sense, though it doesn’t make up for me keeping quiet. I couldn’t say anything to you.”

  Her hazel eyes swung toward him, a little wide, a little unfocused. “I’m not scared of anything, Brady.”

  Surprise hit him that of all the things that he’d said, that was the one she reacted to. There was more at work here, so much more than just being mad about Mardeaux.

  He took a step toward her. Awareness dawned, and the words flew from his mouth, sounding as shocked as he felt down in his core. “You’re scared. After everything between us in the last few weeks, you’re still scared of this. Us.”

  God, all the puzzle pieces fit together so neatly now. It didn’t lessen the pain, though, of hurting her . . . and of her words hurting him. “You’re using my deception as a way out.”

  Those hazel eyes of her flicked to the ground, and he watched her shoulders lift in a shuddery breath like she was desperately trying to regain the threads of her composure.

  He took another step toward her, but she was so wrapped up in the thoughts in her head, that she didn’t seem to even notice. In a low voice, he said, “I make the perfect scapegoat, don’t I? Yes, I didn’t tell you about Mardeaux. That’s on me. But you run, Shae, that’s your M.O. You run whenever things get tough. And you’re on the verge of running again right now . . . aren’t you?”

  Don’t run from me. The words beat at his skull, hammering so profusely that he almost shouted them.

  “I—” She cut off abruptly, taking the heel of her palm to swipe across her eye. She did the same to her other eye, but a tear escaped her rough touch and slid over her cheek. “You lied, Brady.”

  “I did,” he said, unwilling to throw out another falsehood.

  “I can’t do this.” Her feet propelled her backward. “I can’t—I wanted so badly to make a difference for Julian. I wanted to prove to my family that they could trust me. I wanted to mean something.”

  “You do mean something to them.” To me. “Don’t let yourself think otherwise.”

  “I might have, before.” Her brittle laugh was raw. “Julian and Anna learned about Mardeaux at the same time that I did. We all heard you on the Channel 5 News when you said that ‘this will be a relief to see their loved ones’ murderers placed behind bars.’”

  His mouth opened. Then he lifted his hand to his chest because, hell, he had to wonder how much pain a heart could endure before it straight-up just gave out and called it quits.

  Julian knew.

  Spinning away from Shaelyn, he curled his hand into a fist and punched the closest object to him: the porch column that he had so carefully repaired two years ago. The wood cracked under the force of his swing, but he had a good feeling that his knuckles hurt more.

  Neither the wooden column nor his knuckles hurt as badly as the thirteen year old boy who’d wanted nothing more than to have a father figure in his life.

  “Fuck,” he ground out as the throbbing in his knuckles spread to the rest of his hand.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Shaelyn whispered from behind him. He didn’t turn around. Couldn’t. What was there to say? His every argument had a counterargument. More importantly, he didn’t want to argue.

  Silently he stood, waiting for her to deliver another bomb that would send him reeling. The bomb she delivered next was expected.

  “I think it’s best if we don’t see each other anymore.”

  “You’re running,” he said bluntly. “Instead of taking the time to work this out, you’re going to run away again, just like when we were eighteen.”

  “I’m not running,” she told him except that she no longer sounded so sure of herself. If anything, she sounded . . . broken. “I’m not.”

  A humorless laugh worked its way out of Brady. “You are, and I shouldn’t even be surprised. That’s what you do when things get tough, Shae. You take off and pretend it never happened.”

  He heard her quiet sob, and he itched to go to her, to soothe her hurts and her worries. But he couldn’t, not right now, when he was the only one willing to fight for their relationship. His heart was bleeding, too.

  He dragged a hand over his face, wishing that his chest didn’t feel like it might cave in. “If you’re going to leave me, Shaelyn, just do it.”

  “I’m sorry, Brady, I can’t . . . ”

  He didn’t want her tears. He wanted her to fight for them. “Go, Shae.”

  For a moment, there was no movement, no noise. The quiet right after the bustling storm.

  Then, he heard her quiet “good-bye,” before her tennis shoes softly padded down the front steps.

  After everything, their relationship had combusted into nothing but silence.

  Over his shoulder, he heard the cranky holler of his neighbor. “Woo-wee, Detective! You young’uns sure know how to put on a performance!”

  The only performance right now was Brady maintaining a straight composure when, on the inside, he felt dead.

  28

  In the two weeks that had passed since her and Brady’s major fallout on his front porch, Shaelyn had learned a few things:

  Anger faded pretty quickly and when it did, all that was left was comfort in the form of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream and Jose Cuervo.

  Showing up sloshed to work only to beg for forgiveness from your boss (who just so happened to be your cousin, who may or may not hate you) resulted in being sent home. Good news: she wasn’t fired. Even better news: she’d had the opportunity to speak with Anna and Julian, and they’d hugged it out. There were tears and a few awkward moments, but the hugs had been genuine. Bad news: Anna now had shadows under her eye
s that hadn’t been there before the Mardeaux Meltdown, and Julian’s attitude had shifted from sarcastic teenager into teenage belligerence.

  Avoiding Brady came easier than expected. In the fourteen days which had passed, he had not made a single effort to reach out to her. Which left her with,

  She did not care about Brady. Not one bit. Except that she did, and her heart felt close to breaking, she hurt so badly.

  “Are you sure you need another drink, cher? I think maybe three ought to be enough.”

  Shaelyn peered blearily up at her grandmother. “It’s a Friday night and I feel miserable. A fourth sweet tea and vodka isn’t going to kill me.”

  Meme Elaine harrumphed, shoved the bridge of her glasses up the slope of her nose, and snagged Shaelyn’s empty tumbler. “I never took you for a wallower, Shaelyn Magnolia.”

  “I don’t think ‘wallower’ is a word.”

  “At my age I think I’ve earned the right to make whatever I want to be a word.” Despite her tipsiness, Shaelyn didn’t fail to notice the way that her grandmother’s cocktail mixture was more sweet tea this round and less vodka. Fun killer. “My point still stands: wallowing doesn’t suit you.”

  Sliding the glass tumbler across the table, Meme Elaine kicked out her chair with the tip of her hot-pink cane and sat down. “Call him, Shaelyn.”

  She took a swallow of the amber liquid.

  After The Argument, as she’d taken to calling it, Shaelyn had turned to her grandmother for support. She’d explained everything—minus the sexy times—in full detail, including her past working for Carla Ritter. Surprisingly, Charlotte had never confessed Shaelyn’s darkest secret to her mother-in-law. And if Elaine Lawrence had felt an inkling of disgust or disappointment in her only granddaughter, she hadn’t given any indication. Instead she’d mixed Shaelyn a drink and patted the spot on the couch beside her.