by Nora Roberts
“What was it?”
She lifted her shoulders. “A very satisfying interlude, for both of us. Why don’t we leave it at that and be friends again?”
“We could. Or, we could try it this way.”
He yanked her to him, dragged her up to her toes. And plundered her mouth. No patience this time, no reason, no dreamy mating of lips. It was a branding, and they both knew it.
Rufus gave a warning growl as she struggled. Even when the growl turned to a snarl, Declan ignored it. He fisted a hand in her hair, pulled her head back, and took them both deeper. Temper, hurt and hunger all stormed inside him and flavored the kiss.
She couldn’t resist it. Not when the punch of emotions slammed into her system, liberating needs she’d hoped to lock down. On a muffled oath, she wrapped her arms around his neck and met the ferocity of the kiss.
With a whine, Rufus settled down to chew at the ball.
“We’re not done with each other.” Declan ran proprietary hands down her arms.
“Maybe not.”
“I’ll come in tonight, take you home after you close. Wednesday, after things quiet down, I’d like you to come out here. We’ll have dinner.”
She managed to smile. “You cooking?”
He grinned, touched his lips to her brow. “I’ll surprise you.”
“You usually do,” she retorted when he walked away.
She was irritated with herself. Not just for losing a battle, but for cowardice. It was cowardice that had pushed her to start the fight in the first place.
She trudged through the marsh while Rufus raced into the trees, through the thick green undergrowth in hopes of scaring up a rabbit or a squirrel.
She stopped at the curve of what had been known as far back as memory stretched as Bayou Rouse. This mysterious place with its slow-moving, shadowy water, its cypress bones and thick scents, was as much her world as the crooked streets and lively pace of the Quarter.
She’d run in this world as a child, learned the difference between a wren and a sparrow, how to avoid a copperhead nest by its cucumber whiff, how to drop a line and pull up a catfish for supper.
It was the home of her blood, as the Quarter had become the home of her ambition. She didn’t come back to it only when her grandmother was feeling blue, but when she herself was.
She caught a glimpse of the knobby snout of an alligator sliding by. It was, she thought, what was under the surface that could take you down, one quick, ugly snap, if you weren’t alert and didn’t keep your wits about you.
There was a great deal under the surface of Declan Fitzgerald. She’d have preferred if he’d been some spoiled, rich trust-fund baby out on a lark. She could’ve enjoyed him, and dismissed him when they were both bored.
It was a great deal more difficult to dismiss what you respected. She admired his strength, his purpose, his humor. As a friend, he would give her a great deal of pleasure.
As a lover, he worried the hell out of her.
He wanted too much. She could already feel him sucking her in. And it scared her, scared her that she didn’t seem able to stop the process.
Toying with the key around her neck, she started back toward the bayou house. It would run its course, she told herself. Things always did.
She pasted on a smile as she neared the house and saw her grandmother, shaded by an old straw hat, fussing in her kitchen garden.
“I smell bread baking,” Lena called out.
“Brown bread. Got a loaf in there you can take home with you.”
Odette straightened, pressed a hand lightly to the small of her back. “Got an extra you could take on by the Hall for that boy. He doesn’t eat right.”
“He’s healthy enough.”
“Healthy enough to want a bite outta you.” She bent back to her work, her sturdy work boots planted firm. “He try to take one this morning? You’ve got that look about you.”
Lena walked over, dropped down on the step beside the garden patch. “What look is that?”
“The look a woman gets when a man’s had his hands on her and didn’t finish the job.”
“I know how to finish the job myself, if that’s the only problem.”
With a snorting laugh, Odette broke off a sprig of rosemary. She pinched at its needle leaves, waved it under her nose for the simple pleasure of its scent. “Why scratch an itch if someone’ll scratch it for you? I may be close to looking seventy in the eye, but I know when I see a man who’s willing and able.”
“Sex doesn’t run my life, Grandmama.”
“No, but it sure would make it more enjoyable.” She straightened again. “You’re not Lilibeth, ’t poulette.”
The use of the childhood endearment—little chicken—made Lena smile. “I know it.”
“Not being her doesn’t mean you have to be alone if you find somebody who lights the right spark in you.”
She took the rosemary Odette offered, brushed it against her cheek. “I don’t think he’s looking for a spark. I think he’s looking for a whole damn bonfire.” She leaned back on her elbows, shook back her hair. “I’ve lived this long without getting burned, and I’m going to keep right on.”
“It always was right or left for you. Couldn’t drive you to middle ground with a whip. You’re my baby, even if you are a grown woman, so I’ll say this: Nothing wrong with a woman walking alone, as long as it’s for the right reasons. Being afraid she might trip, that’s a wrong one.”
“What happens if I let myself fall for him?” Lena demanded. “Then he has enough of swamp water and trots on back to Boston? Or he just has his fill of dancing with me and finds himself another partner?”
Odette pushed her hat back on the crown of her head, and her face was alive with exasperation. “What happens if it rains a flood and washes us into the Mississippi? Pity sakes, Lena, you can’t think that way. It’ll dry you up.”
“I was doing fine before he came along, and I’ll do fine after he goes.” Feeling sulky, she reached down to pet Rufus when he butted his head against her knee. “That house over there, Grandmama, that house he’s so set on bringing back, it’s a symbol of what happens when two people don’t belong in the same place. I’m her blood, and I know.”
“You don’t know.” Odette tipped back Lena’s chin. “If they hadn’t loved, if Abby Rouse and Lucian Manet hadn’t loved and made a child together, you and I wouldn’t be here.”
“If they’d been meant, she wouldn’t have died the way she did. She wouldn’t be a ghost in that house.”
“Oh chère.” Both the exasperation and all the affection colored Odette’s voice. “It isn’t Abby Rouse who haunts that place.”
“Who, then?”
“I expect that’s what that boy’s there to find out. Might be you’re here to help him.”
She gave a sniff of the air. “Bread’s done,” she said an instant before the oven buzzer sounded. “You want to take a loaf over to the Hall?”
Lena set her jaw. “No.”
“All right, then.” Odette walked up the steps, opened the back door. “Maybe I’ll take him one myself.” Her eyes were dancing when she glanced over her shoulder. “And could be I’ll steal him right out from under your nose.”
Declan had every door and window on the first level open. Ry Cooder blasted out of his stereo with his lunging rhythm and blues. Working to the beat, Declan spread the first thin coat of varnish on the newly sanded floor of the parlor.
Everything ached. Every muscle and bone in his body sang with the same ferocity as Ry Cooder. He’d thought the sheer physical strain of the sanding would have worked off his temper. Now he was hoping the necessary focus and strain of the varnishing would do the job.
The rosy dawn hadn’t lived up to its promise.
The woman pushed his buttons, he thought. And she knew it. One night she’d wrapped herself all over him in bed, and the next she won’t give him more than some conversation on the phone.
Snaps out in temper one minute, melts d
own to sexy teasing the next. Trying to turn the night they’d spent together into the classic one-night stand.
Fuck that.
“Aw, cher, what you wanna get all het up about?” he muttered. “You haven’t seen het up, baby. But you’re going to before this is done.”
“You look to be in the middle of a mad.”
He spun around, slopping varnish. Then nearly went down to his knees when he saw Odette smiling at him from the doorway.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Not surprising.” With the privilege of age, she leaned down and turned down the volume on his portable stereo as Cooder switched pace, lamenting falling teardrops. “Like Cooder myself, but not that loud. Brought you by a loaf of the brown bread I baked this morning. You go on and finish what you’re doing. I’ll put it back in the kitchen for you.”
“Just give me a minute.”
“You don’t have to stop on my account, cher.”
“No. Please. Five minutes. There’s . . . something, I forget what, to drink in the fridge. Why don’t you go on back, help yourself?”
“I believe I will. It’s a bit close out already, and not even March. You take your time.”
When he’d finished up enough to join her, Odette was standing in front of his kitchen display cabinet, studying the contents.
“My mama had an old waffle iron just like this. And I still got a cherry seeder like the one you got in here. What do they call these dishes here? I can’t remember.”
“Fiestaware.”
“That’s it. Always sounds like a party. You pay money for these old Mason jars, cher?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She clucked her tongue at the wonder of it. “There’s no accounting for things. Damn if they don’t look pretty, though. You come look through my shed sometime, see if there’s anything in there you want.” She turned now, nodded at the room. “This is fine, Declan. You did fine.”
“It’ll come together when the counters are in and I finish the panels for the appliances.”
“It’s fine,” she said again. “And the parlor where you’re working, it’s as lovely as it can be.”
“I’ve already bought some of the furniture for it. A little ahead of myself. Would you like to sit down, Miss Odette?”
“For a minute or two. I’ve got something from the house you might like to have, maybe put on the mantel in the parlor or one of the other rooms.”
She took a seat at the table he’d moved in, and pulled an old brown leather frame from a bag. “It’s a photograph, a portrait, of Abigail Rouse.”
Declan took it and gazed down on the woman who haunted his dreams. It might have been Lena, he thought, but there was too much softness, too much yet unformed in this face. Her cheeks were rounder, her long-lidded eyes too gullible, and far too shy.
So young, he mused. And innocent despite the grown-up walking dress with its high, fur-trimmed collar, despite the jaunty angle of the velvet toque with its saucy feathers.
This was a girl, he reflected, where Lena was a woman.
“She was lovely,” Declan said. “Lovely and young. It breaks your heart.”
“My grandmama thought she was ’round about eighteen when this was taken. Couldn’t’ve been more, as she never saw her nineteenth birthday.”
As she spoke, a door slammed upstairs, as if in temper. Odette merely glanced toward the ceiling. “Sounds like your ghost’s got mad on, too.”
“That just started happening today. Plumber’s kid shot out of here like a bullet a couple hours ago.”
“You don’t look like you’re going anywhere.”
“No.” He sat across from her as another door slammed, and looked back down at Abigail Rouse Manet’s shy, hopeful smile. “I’m not going anywhere.”
11
There was a madness about Mardi Gras. The music, the masks, the mayhem all crashing together into a desperate sort of celebration managed to create a tone that was both gleefully innocent and rawly sexual. He doubted the majority of the tourists who flocked here for the event understood or cared about the purpose of it. That rush to gorge on pleasures before the forty days of fasting.
Wanting a taste of it himself, Declan opted to wander through the crowds, even snagged some beads when they were tossed in a glitter of cheap gold from one of the galleries. His ears rang with the blare of brass, the wild laughter.
He decided the sight of naked breasts, which a couple of coeds flashed as they followed tradition and jerked up their shirts, would be less alarming after a couple of drinks.
As would being grabbed by a total stranger and being treated to a tonsil-diving kiss. The tongue currently invading his mouth transferred the silly sweetness of many hurricanes and happily drunken lust onto his.
“Thanks,” he managed when he freed himself.
“Come on back here,” the masked female shouted. “Laizzez les bon temps rouler!”
He didn’t want to let the good times roll when it involved strange tongues plunged into his mouth, and escaped into the teeming crowds.
Maybe he was getting old, he thought—or maybe it was just the Boston bedrock—but he wanted to get someplace where he could sit back and observe the party rather than being mobbed by it.
The doors to Et Trois were flung open, so the noise from within poured out and tangled with the noise of the streets. He had to weave his way through the revelers on the sidewalk, those packed inside, and squeeze his way to a standing spot at the bar.
The place was full of smoke, music and the slap of feet on wood as dancers shoehorned together on the dance floor. Onstage, a fiddler streamed out such hot licks, Declan wouldn’t have been surprised to see the bow burst into flame.
Lena was pulling a draft with one hand, pouring a shot of bourbon with the other. The two other bartenders were equally busy, and from what he could see, she had four waitresses working the tables.
He spotted his crawfish grinning from their spot on the shelf behind the bar and was ridiculously pleased.
“Beer and a bump,” she said and slid the glasses into waiting hands. When she spotted Declan, she held up a finger, then served three more customers as she worked her way down to him.
“What’s your pleasure, handsome?”
“You are. You’re packed,” he added. “In here and out on the sidewalk.”
“Banquette,” she corrected. “We call them banquettes ’round here.” She’d pulled her hair back, wound purple and gold beads through it. The little silver key dangled against skin dewed with perspiration. “I can give you a drink, cher, but I don’t have time to talk right now.”
“Can I give you a hand?”
She pushed at her hair. “With what?”
“Whatever.”
Someone elbowed in, shouted out a request for a tequila sunrise and a Dixie draft.
Lena reached back for the bottle, shifted to pull the draft. “You know how to bus tables, college boy?”
“I can figure it out.”
“Redheaded waitress? She’s Marcella.” She nodded in the general direction of mayhem. “Tell her you’re hired. She’ll show you what to do.”
By midnight, he figured he’d carted about a half a ton of empties into the kitchen, and dumped the equivalent of Mount Rainier in cigarette butts.
He’d had his ass pinched, rubbed, ogled. What was it with women and the male behind? Someone ought to do a study on it.
He’d lost track of the propositions, and didn’t care to think about the enormous woman who’d hauled him into her lap.
It had been like being smothered by a three-hundred-pound pillow soaked in whiskey.