by Ann Major
After such noble praise of Cici, Logan’s gaze swung across the room to the young woman. Her fragile face framed by masses of gold curls looked tense and shadowed in the morning light. Beneath his scrutiny, she blushed and averted her eyes.
“Last I heard, Belle Rose isn’t and never was her home,” Logan said. “She should lease some other place. Grandpère, I don’t think…she’s the best influence on you…in your present state.”
“Let me be the judge of that. I’m not the man I was, and Cici’s never been the girl I thought she was.”
Logan swallowed. He felt guiltier than he ever had for the past, so it didn’t help when he noticed Cici’s hands that were knotted in her lap were trembling.
Had she had trouble sleeping last night, too. Had she relived that damn kiss on the gallery again and again as he had, wanting more? Or did she hate his guts as she had every right to do?
“I want you to relent and let her stay…near me,” his grandfather persisted.
For another long moment Logan’s gaze lingered on Cici’s pale, contrite face. Strangely, he felt touched by his grandfather’s request and like his grandfather, ashamed of his own actions nine years ago.
Most of all he hurt. But he couldn’t undo the past. Jake had left because he was furious at Logan for doing his grandfather’s bidding by bedding Cici just so he couldn’t have her. He’d said he was tired of the way the Claibornes always thought they could manipulate other peoples’ lives.
Logan had tried to explain why he’d acted as he had to Jake at the time. “Grandpère said the family couldn’t afford another marriage like our parents’. One of us had to do the smart thing. He knew you’d probably go the whole nine yards, including marriage if you slept with her, so he told me to make love to her. To save you, Jake,” he’d said.
“What are you, his puppet? Cici doesn’t deserve that. She’s not like Mother. You’re not like Daddy. Funny, I used to think that was a good thing. I used to admire you. You always worked so hard, made such good grades. Now, I just want out of this family.”
Jake’s fist had slammed into Logan’s jaw on his way out. Logan hadn’t seen him since.
Suddenly the wrenching pain of the past held Logan’s heart in a death grip. He’d thrown Cici away, blindly, stupidly. He’d told himself he’d done it for Jake. For his grandfather. For the family. And for Cici even, because she would have been unhappy in his uptight conservative world. He’d convinced himself he’d done the right thing.
Damn it, he’d been so sure of himself back then.
But could he say he’d acted honorably toward all concerned? Toward Cici?
Logan shut his eyes. Then he pressed his eyelids and sucked in a long breath.
“I’ve always trusted you to do the right thing,” his grandfather said. “You used to watch out for your brother. It was almost like you were older and wiser. Because I trusted you, when Jake ran out, I cut him off without a cent, and I gave you the reins of Claiborne Energy. And, yes, you made the family a fortune. I was proud of you, boy. Back then that was all I cared about.”
“And now…”
“For nine years I’ve been estranged from Jake, and now Cici tells me he’s doing well. She says that after he ran off, he went back to school, that he’s done wonderful things in Florida and in New Orleans.”
“I tried to tell you…”
“Before I got sick, I was a stubborn fool. I didn’t want to hear about him, did I? Praise of him made me feel guilty. I know I tried to teach you to be exactly like me, but I was wrong about that, too. Don’t be like me, boy. If I’ve learned anything in this last month when I’ve felt so weak and old and useless, it’s that a grandson like Jake is worth more than any amount of money. I should never have set you on a collision course with your twin and then disinherited him for getting angry at us. And now…for Cici’s help in talking Jake into coming to my birthday party, I want to repay her kindness by letting her live in the garçonnière.”
“Did you ever think that maybe the reason Jake’s such a success now is because I saved him from Cici? From the way she’s been playing you since her return, I’m beginning to think you had her figured right back then.”
Uttering a soft, wounded cry, Cici sprang to her feet. In a halting voice she whispered, “I can’t listen to this. I’ll be right outside, Pierre. Don’t wear yourself out defending me.” Then on a whisper of wood trailing across carpet, the door closed behind her.
“It’s my fault you think she’s as trashy as Bos. But you’re wrong. She’s a very sensitive woman with a great heart, and she’s made a success of her career…even if it hasn’t been all that lucrative. I want to help her, to make up just a little for what I did in the past.”
Had she been whining about money to his grandfather at a time when he’d been weak and needy? Was that what she wanted—money?
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe she’s using you to get back at me? For sleeping with her? For jilting her?”
“Cici would never do that.”
“Oh, wouldn’t she?”
Abe stalked into the office before Logan, who wondered if he wasn’t being set up, could say no more.
“If this is a bad moment…” Abe paused.
Pierre cleared his throat. “No. It’s a wonderful moment.”
After a few more seconds of silence so tense it nearly hummed, the old man continued. “I’m glad you got here this fast, Abe. Things around here are about to change. I’m tired of rest and relaxation at home. It’s time we moved forward. First, I’ll be coming into the office twice a week—starting Monday. Second, I’ll be moving into my old office. The young lady who’s waiting for me outside has hired me a driver.”
“Grandpère, do you really think you’re strong enough? It’s bad enough that Cici is using you to get back at me.”
“Third,” his stubborn grandfather continued with a frown, “I’ll want you to write up an airtight lease. On the garçonnière behind Belle Rose for the little lady in the waiting room. Miss Bellefleur is a long-time family friend. Really, she’s practically a granddaughter. She’ll be wanting a twelve-month lease.”
“Twelve months? You can’t be serious, Grandpère.”
Again his grandfather ignored him.
“You see, Abe, she’s writing a book with the working title, Lords of the Bayou.”
Logan stared gloomily at his polished desk. No doubt she’d slam him as the environmentalist’s worst nightmare. He’d have all the tree huggers picketing him again.
“The garçonnière is quiet,” Pierre continued. “She says the setting is perfect for her research, especially since I’m there to help her. She’s won all sorts of awards, so it’ll be an honor to have her, not to mention a joy to work with her. I have a library full of history books on the subject, and I can put her in contact with all the right people.”
Logan had the power to override his grandfather’s decisions, but he loved and respected the old man too much to belittle him like that.
Fortunately, the tense meeting with his grandfather, who began to fade the moment Abe left, didn’t last much longer. No sooner had Cici ushered the old man downstairs to her Miata than Hayes walked in, his excuse being a thick stack of legal documents on the Butler merger that needed his signature.
“From the look of your face, I’d say it’s pretty clear who won round two. But cheer up. She’s damn sure worked a miracle where your grandfather is concerned. The old man looked as fit as a bull when he was climbing into her sports car. Nothing like a young girl to get an old man’s blood up, now is there?”
Suddenly, for no reason at all Logan wanted to punch Hayes’s lights out.
“Hey, how come you didn’t mention she was a knockout?”
“Don’t…don’t say another word. And as for her being a knockout, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay the hell away from her.”
“I see. You sure had me fooled. Me and everybody else. We all thought you were serious about Alicia.”
“Right.” But Hayes’s dark eyes were glinting, and the corners of his lips were twitching with amusement, as he fought a losing battle not to smile.
“You said Mitchell Butler’s story might have a few holes in it.”
“So far it’s only a hunch.”
A sad, lost, homesick feeling swamped Cici as something vicious stung her above the elbow.
“Ouch!”
She quit knocking on her uncle’s door long enough to slap at two giant mosquitoes on her arm.
Closing her eyes, she listened for a long moment. Not that she could hear anything from inside her uncle’s cabin over the chorus of whistles and chirps coming from the swamp.
“Uncle Bos, why don’t you open the door? I know you’re in there. I know you left the bar because I’ve already been there and Tommy told me you’re not feeling well. He sent me over with some of his spicy boudin, made just the way you like it. And Noonoon and I cooked up a big pot of gator gumbo. The roux came out real good. We threw in some cayenne pepper, onion, celery and bell pepper.
She drew a breath and stared at the huge stack of wire crawfish traps, gill nets and hoop nets leaning against the ten-foot pilings beneath her uncle’s shack. “Uncle Bos, I’m beginning to feel stupid yelling at your door.”
Her gaze wandered from the bayou with its dark, funereal vegetation, past the wreckage of his old rooster pens, to the ruined ponds behind their sagging fences where she used to help him raise thousands of little turtles that they’d marketed as pets to kids all over America. Other than the aluminum outboard tied at the end of his dock near the thick stand of tall rozo cane instead of her red pirogue, not much had changed.
Well, maybe the dark brown water had crept a little closer to the house, land being a vanishing commodity in Louisiana thanks to Logan and his kind.
“Okay. If you’re going to be stubborn, I’ll just leave the pots on your doorstep and come back for ’em later. When you’re done, you can leave ’em outside for me to pick up.”
Slowly she climbed down his stairs and walked past his motorcycle and then further out onto the dock to stare at the glimmering reflections in the bayou. Sagging posted No Trespassing signs were nailed to every cypress tree trunk. Her uncle, who’d always been something of a loner, wasn’t the most welcoming type.
No wonder she’d never felt like she belonged. Uncle Bos certainly hadn’t wanted her. She’d been eight when her parents had been washed away by a wall of water caused by a crevasse, or a break in a levee, when the Mississippi had run too high one spring. Luckily she’d clung to a board that had swept her to a tree where she’d held on to a branch for hours.
No, her uncle hadn’t wanted to take in an orphaned niece, but he’d been her only relative. And he hadn’t believed in public welfare. At least, not for any relative of his, even if she’d been a little sissy who didn’t know the first thing about life in the wilderness.
He hadn’t understood her reading or her fascination with pictures in magazines. He’d called her lazy for writing and extravagant for shooting so much film. He’d quit school after the sixth grade because in his view education was a waste of time. Real life was fishing and trapping and hunting and carving and drinking, and pitting one of his prized cocks against another’s and laying bets. He’d made a small fortune cockfighting before it had been outlawed. Not that he was always a man to follow the law.
She and he had had nearly nothing, other than their mutual love of the swamp in common. Yes, she’d come to love the swamp, so mostly she’d tried to stay out of his way. Then, to make matters worse, there’d been the times when he’d vanished for days on end, maybe to attend illegal cockfights. Maybe to drink in the houseboat he kept in the swamp. Maybe to be with a woman. Who knew?
She’d hated being alone, but she hadn’t told anybody because she’d been too afraid the authorities would take her away from him. Logan may have suspected her plight because often when her uncle disappeared, he’d sent Noonoon over or had come himself to check on her and bring her food.
Back then, before Uncle Bos had fallen out with the Claibornes over his bar and cockfights, he’d worked part-time as a gardener at Belle Rose. She’d loved going over to the plantation, loved following the Claiborne twins around, loved hearing about all the exciting things they were doing from Noonoon, who’d often let her inside to help in the kitchen.
Everything at Belle Rose had seemed beautiful and as magical as the places she’d read about in books. After the twins’ parents’ fatal car wreck, Pierre had welcomed them. He hadn’t disappeared for weeks without telling them where he’d gone. He hadn’t made them feel lost and left out or like they didn’t belong. He’d taken them on wonderful vacations, too. When they returned, she’d pestered them into telling her everything they’d seen and done and into showing her their pictures.
How she’d longed for the stability she’d known with her parents, but that was a vanished world, one she only dimly remembered. Once her uncle had taken her to her old neighborhood. A new house had stood where her family’s home had been. The place had seemed empty and utterly foreign to her. She’d felt alienated. It was as if she’d never lived there. As if her life with her parents had been completely erased. How she’d craved to feel some sense of belonging somewhere.
Over time Belle Rose had become a symbol for the kind of home and loving family life and stability she’d longed for but didn’t think anyone like her could ever achieve again.
Cici leaned over and stared into the dark water. When she caught sight of her own reflection, she laughed out loud. Talk about a bad hair day!
Driving over to her uncle’s with the top down hadn’t done her crazy, Princess Leia hairdo any good. She looked like she’d sprouted a pair of wild pompoms above each ear. With a smile she remembered watching part of an old Star Wars movie with Noonoon’s granddaughter, who’d wanted to pretend she was Princess Leia after the film was over. Cici had fixed Latasha’s hair and then her own.
She was still laughing at the memory when she heard the unmistakable sound of a big car on the gravel road. Turning, her smile dissolved the second she recognized the grim, broad-shouldered man in the silver Lexus pulling up beside her Miata.
What was he doing here? Logan Claiborne was the last person she felt like talking to after the horribly humiliating scene in his office yesterday. He wasn’t welcome here, either. Her uncle held a long-standing grudge against all Claibornes.
Squaring her shoulders she headed toward the tall man in the three-piece black suit who was swinging himself out of his car while scowling at her.
Ignoring the acceleration of her heart and his forbidding expression, she said, “Didn’t you see the signs? You’re not exactly welcome here, you know. Tommy told me…”
Logan shot her a tight smile. “Tommy can go straight to hell.” As always his narrowed, blue gaze lingered a little too long on her breasts.
She was wearing a tight black T-shirt today with big pink letters that said, Pretty Woman. Not that the T-shirt was anything a Princess Leia clone should be caught dead wearing.
“You’re not too welcome here yourself from what I hear,” he said.
“Your being here will make me even less popular, but that’s none of your business. I’ve been reading up on the Butler-Claiborne merger on the Web. Don’t you have big important rich guy stuff to be doing back in New Orleans? Or maybe you could drill up more of the wilderness we both used to love, digging your canals to get to your well heads and thus destroying the natural water flow, your machines throwing so much mud up on the banks, you smother all the vegetation and habitat for good.”
His eyes climbed from her breasts up her throat to her face with such searing intensity she blushed. When he suddenly smiled, she wondered if it had anything to do with her crazy hairdo.
“Cici, why did you come home? What do you want? Why are you hanging out with my grandfather and pestering
me?”
“I could argue as to who’s pestering who. This is my home, too, you know.”
“Is it? Did your uncle ever really want you?”
She took a deep, painful breath. “That tack won’t win you any points. And as for Pierre, I like him. Ours is a friendship born of mutual need.”
“I thought you ran away to get away from all this. This place must seem pretty tame to a woman who’s lived like you have.”
“No, I ran away from you. From how you made me feel, which was cheap and horrible, if that gives you any satisfaction. Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It didn’t take me long to discover there are worse monsters than you. And by the way, you don’t know anything about how I lived…although I imagine you think I lived wild and loose.”
“What’ll it take for you to go away again?”
“Maybe it’s time you learned that I have as much right to be here as you do.”
“Your uncle doesn’t want you any more than he ever did. I don’t see him opening his damn door. Not even for Noonoon’s gumbo.”
“He will. He’s just being stubborn.” Her lips curved. “Like a lot of other people…you,” she taunted.
“He and I are nothing alike.”
“You say you don’t want me. I don’t think you mean that any more than he does. I think I’m messing things up for you, maybe…maybe because you don’t feel like you pretend—indifferent to me.”
Logan’s head jerked back as if she’d slapped him. “Shut up,” he whispered even as he stepped thrillingly closer.
“Okay. Then why did you kiss me? And why are you looking at my lips like you want to do it again?”
“Stop it.”
“No. Because maybe I can’t stop what I feel any more than you can.”
“I can stop it, all right.”
“Right.” She laughed. “You’re the guy with all the willpower. You probably skip lunch to jog. So, why’d you leave your fancy office and track me here?”
“I came here to work out a compromise.”
“No. You didn’t. You want what you want. The problem is maybe so do I. And maybe I’ve finally learned to go after what I want.”