by Nancy Gideon
Afraid of what that might mean, he stayed silent.
“They moved Mary Kate to that center in California this afternoon. I haven’t thanked you for that.” She took a big, shaky breath. “I miss her so much. I wish she were here to talk to.”
“You can talk to me.” When she didn’t respond, his smile tightened. “Oh. I see. I’m the problem.”
“I’m sorry, Max.”
He’d known something was wrong. He’d been stuck in business dealings all afternoon, handling matters that demanded his presence and attention. But even as he was seeing to Jimmy Legere’s interests, marveling over the sudden realization that they were now his interests, part of him refused to heel. The part of him held by Charlotte Caissie. While he talked and negotiated and smiled, he was watching the clock, anticipation simmering beneath his cool surface. Because he could not wait to be with her again.
I love you, Max.
The newness of it had him excited and trembling. His only regret was his inability to share all the spectacular events of his day with her, because he wanted to impress her. He wanted her input and advice and mourned the fact that he could never ask for it. Because they toed different sides of the narrow line of the law.
As he sat in the club waiting for her, chafing with eagerness, flushed with a foreign sense of personal accomplishment, with a happiness he still couldn’t quite comprehend, worry had begun to build.
She was late. He’d given no thought to how his schemes might affect her career. He’d only been thinking of her safety—and his future. She was so capable, so confident, it never occurred to him to try to protect the other aspects of her life, aspects that would be damaged by her association with him. And then he could think of nothing else. When he sensed her right outside, every minute that passed twisted his panic tighter.
And then she drove away without him. Without even talking to him.
“Tell me what I did wrong and how I can make it right again.”
She scrubbed her hands over her face, her answer steeped in misery. “You can’t make it right. You can’t change who you are. Who I am.”
“Oh.” He swallowed hard. “I could sell shoes,” he offered quietly. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it back with an anguish sound.
“It’s too late for that. We can’t go back. We can’t pretend everything hasn’t changed.”
“What’s changed?”
Cornered, she attacked. “You’re so smart, so damned smart—taking me with you, marching me up in front of all those mobsters like I was on your leash, letting them think you’d pulled my teeth, that I was with you.”
“You are with me,” he growled softly.
“Not like that,” she snapped. “You used me. You made it business, making them think I was part of yours, that you had that extra leverage. Dammit, Max, how could you do that to me?”
She gave him time to deny it, to convince her that she was wrong, that it was never his intention to take advantage of what they had together. If he did, then maybe, just maybe, there was chance . . .
He stared at her unblinkingly. She watched the angles of his face harden and she saw the truth there.
“I love you, Charlotte. I want to keep you safe. I wanted them to know you were under my protection.”
“By letting them think I’m under your thumb?”
“I’m sorry,” he told her flatly. She could tell by his lack of expression that he wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, only that it upset her. “I haven’t changed. What we have hasn’t changed.”
“You’re not my Max anymore. You’re their Mr. Savoie.”
“I’m still just Max when I’m with you. Don’t do this, Charlotte. Please.”
“It’s my fault,” she went on in a dull voice, anger ebbing into helplessness. “I just didn’t see how impossible it was going to be. I was so caught up in looking at you, I forgot to look around. I didn’t want to see it until today, when it hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I can’t be with you, Max.”
“Don’t make any decisions yet. Just think about it for a while. I won’t push you. I’ll give you all the space you need.” He snatched her hand, gripping it hard, bringing it up so he could press kisses on her palm, on her fingertips, so he could hold it to his cheek as his eyes searched hers, hoping to find something other than sadness and finality there.
“Time and space won’t make any difference. It won’t change who we are.”
“Who do you want me to be? Tell me.”
“Oh, Max, I don’t want to change anything about you. I wouldn’t love you so much if you were any different.” She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder.
“I don’t understand. If you love me for who I am . . .” He broke off abruptly as an unwelcome revelation slashed through the heart of him. He pushed her back to stare into her eyes, his own astonished. “You’re ashamed of me.”
She opened her mouth to deny it, but no words formed.
He drew a quick breath, and just as quickly drew back behind a tightly shuttered blankness. His voice was deathly quiet. “I see. I guess that’s it, then.”
He backed out of the pew, stumbling slightly as Charlotte reached out for him.
“Max—” He evaded her. “Max, I am so sorry.”
He stood staring down at her, panting slightly. Then his expression softened and somehow strengthened at the same time. He framed her tear-stained face with his hands and, as hers covered them in a frantic grip, he said, “I’m not sorry, Charlotte. I will always love you.”
He bent down to press a whisper of a kiss on her brow. By the time her eyes opened, he was gone.
Twenty
FOR THREE WEEKS, Charlotte tried to pretend she wasn’t in hell. She didn’t suffer from fiery torments or self-recriminations; that would require feeling. And emotionally, she was dead inside. It was the hell Mary Kate had warned her of, one of her own making. Isolation.
She’d left the church with a calm sense of closure, knowing she’d made the right decision. But as the minutes, hours, and days went by, that calm iced over into a cold, deep numbness not even brutal sixteen-hour shifts on a new high-priority case could crack.
Tourists in an airboat had found pieces of Vic Vantour out in the swamp, which had surfaced after a storm. The tentative truce on the waterfront threatened to buckle.
Max’s bold words as he claimed his criminal mantle haunted her, and she knew that every hour she put in on the case was most likely taking years of freedom from his future. The distance she’d put between them didn’t help, it just made it impossible for her to tell him . . . tell him what? That she wasn’t going to do her job? That because she’d let him walk away twice, she’d forever turn her back?
She’d known what he was when she fell in love with him. And she couldn’t protect him when he chose to break the law. He knew that. He knew what she did, what she’d have to do with the pieces he’d left for her to find: put them together into a case that would convict him.
Heartbroken, her spirit wounded, she went to St. Bart’s, where the battered but proud building was struggling to be reborn. Seeing workers yank down the burnt rafters into a pile of rubble was like watching dirt thrown on the graves of those she loved. In her heart, she knew Mary Kate would never return. So when Father Furness offered his broad, familiar shoulder, she poured out her soul in cautious generalities, putting no name to her misery.
“How can I find such decency in a man who’s done evil?” she asked woefully. “How can I love what I’ve sworn to destroy?”
“There’s nothing that walks on this earth that is all decent or all evil, child,” Father Furness soothed with the quiet confidence that had helped center the world of an angry young girl some twenty years ago. “Good and bad is done in the name of both things. Love knows the difference. Look to your heart.”
“But what possible good can come of what happened to Mary Kate and Benjamin? What good comes from punishing someone who stands up for the innocent? How can you judge a wr
ong that’s done for a right reason?”
“It’s not up to us to judge, Lottie. We can only accept.” He chuckled softly at her scowling expression. “That’s the best answer I have, and you never seem to think it’s enough.” He kissed her brow and bestowed the knowing smile that always aggravated her by its certainty. “You’ve lost too much not to appreciate what you have.”
Because she knew he was right, had always known he was right, her tone was sour. “You should write fortune cookies.”
He smiled. “Something to fall back on in my retirement.”
But Charlotte had nothing to fall back on except her job, and doing it as best she knew how. Worrying about how Max fit into the equation was screwing up the math.
She started up the little Nova, palming the knob of the shifter wistfully before shoving it into gear.
Legere, Vantour, and Benjamin Spratt. What was the link? How had the mild and meek Benjamin come by the mobster’s ring?
I didn’t kill him, in case you’re wondering.
Max had never lied to her. Omitted the truth, perhaps, but he never spoke words that were completely untrue.
With circumstantial evidence stacking up on her desk, she needed to be sure before she plowed in and ended up plowing him under.
She went to his new office on the waterfront. She’d been there several times before to question Francis Petitjohn, but not since Max had assumed power. She noticed the difference immediately. Everything tacky was gone, replaced with dark teak, black and taupe, with occasional glints of crimson. Rich, aggressive, sexy. Like the man behind the double doors of L.E. International. Max Savoie was coming into his own.
“Can I help you?”
Cee Cee laid her badge down on the reception center. “I’m here to see Mr. Savoie.”
The elegant black woman wearing a jacket and skirt in the same sumptuous red tones regarded her identification without a change in expression. “I’m afraid Mr. Savoie is unavailable this morning. If you’d like to leave your name.”
The doors to the left pulled open. “That’s all right, Marissa. I have a few minutes for Detective Caissie.”
“I won’t need that long.” Her voice was cool to counter the sudden heat flashing through her at the sight of him. Dark, sleek, and elegant in a suit that couldn’t quite tame the harsher elements growling behind that exquisite cut. “Just one question.”
He stepped aside, waving her in. “Ask it.”
Just walking past him made her break a sweat. He closed the door behind them, and suddenly she couldn’t remember how she’d ever found the strength to let him go.
“Your question, detective?”
He looked so relaxed, so indifferent to all the things tearing through her like a Category 5 hurricane. She moistened her lips and could taste him there.
“Did you kill Victor Vantour?”
“No.” Just that, flat and final.
She took a breath, hoping he couldn’t hear it shuddering in relief. “Did you dispose of him in the swamps for Jimmy Legere?”
A slow smile. “I don’t believe that was the question, detective.”
But she had her answer. “I’ll let you get back to work. That’s all I wanted.”
“Is it?”
He stood between her and the door. To get by him, she’d have to move him aside. Which would mean touching him, putting her hands on that long, hard frame, feeling his warmth, his strength. God, she was a mess.
“Yes,” she replied, her tone daring him to tell her differently. “What else would there be?”
He held her bulletlike stare for a heartbeat, then stepped out of her way. The minute her hand closed over the knob, his pressed above it to keep the door shut.
“Come back.”
“If I have any more questions—”
“Come back to me, Charlotte.”
Then there was nothing cool or remote about him.
He leaned in.
She let him.
The way he sniffed up her scent tickled along her throat. He eased behind her, settling like a hot iron on crumpled silk, pressing close, steaming his impression upon her. Long, firm legs, lean hips. Fierce erection pulsing against her spine in an erotic massage. Hard chest, broad shoulders. And the sudden sweet assault of his mouth beneath her ear, tasting, seducing. A low sound rumbled from him, part growl, part groan. Her hand went to the back of his head, black hair sliding through her clutching fingers.
“Max, don’t,” she whispered as if words alone could keep her will from collapsing. The instant his tongue slipped into her ear, she surrendered a wild moan.
She turned, gripping him hard as their mouths met in a shock of desperate longing. A hot, greedy kiss that awakened each other’s need like a blow torch. The need to hold tight, to reclaim, to frantically mate as their tongues were doing.
Blood roared in her head, so loud she wasn’t sure her feet had actually left the floor until her butt met the edge of his desk. She had a fistful of his hair in one hand while the other snaked under his exquisite coat to roam up and down his back, hungry for his heat through the fine silk shirt. She wanted him naked. She just plain wanted him. Now.
Driven by the same mindless urgency, Max plumbed the sweet heat of her mouth while he palmed her breasts through her polo. It wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the chain reaction she’d started the second she got off the elevator and her perfume reached out to him. Her body arched against him, rubbing, offering everything and anything he desired. She was his all, his everything. Her hands groped fretfully as he stepped back to pull off the sexy little panties she was wearing and undo his slacks. Then he thrusted inside her so hard and deep, his blotter and all the papers on it went skidding off the desk. Almost instantly, she bowed in a taut spear of orgasm. But that wasn’t enough.
He wanted to hear her sigh and moan his name. He wanted to believe things would be all right between them again. For her to admit that she’d missed him with the same soul-crushing panic that he missed her. To hear her say she still loved him. He needed to hear it. Was dying to hear it.
But there was only the harsh rush of their breathing and the frenzied slap of flesh on flesh. He tried to hold out for it, sure she’d let the foolish barriers fall while lost to the magic between them. But she was sucking on his lower lip, licking his cheek, biting his earlobe until the sharp little jab of pain ignited all the compressed fuel of his emotions. Even as he felt her tense and shudder, he emptied in a glorious, mind-blanking rush.
He leaned into her, his knees weak, nuzzling her neck. Tell me you love me, Charlotte. Right my world.
Instead, he heard his own whisper. “Stay with me. Please, stay with me.”
“Mr. Savoie.” Marissa’s efficient voice was a shock back to reality. “Your eleven o’clock from the Port Authority is here.”
Before he could assemble his thoughts, Charlotte ducked under his arm and was gone, leaving him with empty arms braced upon his desk.
As he slowly straightened his clothing he saw her silky underwear, a scrap of bright pink against his carpet. He picked it up, tucking it into his inside jacket pocket where her scent could reach him like pure, revitalizing oxygen.
He rearranged his desktop, his actions smooth and steady, letting the hammering of his heart slow and his hopes cool. Finally he was able to press the intercom and say with professional calm, “Send Mr. Voissom in, Marissa.”
ALAIN BABINEAU’S GAZE rose when Cee Cee slipped into her desk chair, then held for a quick once-over. Her hair was damp from showering and, instead of the skirt and polo shirt she’d worn that morning, she was wearing jeans and baggy tee shirt. And no makeup. That alone was enough to alarm him.
She pretended not to notice him, plunging into a file so she wouldn’t have to meet his curious look.
“Fresh seafood for lunch?”
She glanced up, frowning and wary. “No. Why?”
“Looks like an octopus got a hold of the side of your neck.”
Her hand flew up to cover t
he love bites that were blossoming into bruises.
“Can I hope you found someone to replace Savoie?”
No one could ever do that. Tears glittered in her eyes as she growled, “End of conversation.”
Her partner sighed. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
But none of it was what she wanted. Father Furness’s words came back, bitter and strong: We can only accept. So she’d accept it, and life would go on without the one thing that made it worth living.
She stared for a long moment at the fat manila envelope sitting on the corner of her desk. It hadn’t come in with the mail. She studied the unmarked envelope, then gave it a nudge with her pen. Nothing suspicious rattled or ticked.
Using a tissue to hold one corner, she slid the blade of her knife under the flap and tipped the contents onto her blotter. Medical records. More specifically, psych records and two photos. One of a young Benjamin Spratt. And underneath . . .
“Holy shit!”
Babineau’s head shot up. “What?”
“Did you see who dropped this on my desk?”
Alerted by her breathless voice, he said, “No, sorry. I was taking a statement on the phone while you were gone. Why? Whatchu got there?”
“The answer to prayer.” She let out a shuddery breath, then was all business. “Get the print guys up here. I need this dusted. I want to know where it came from. Check with the desk. See if anyone saw who brought this in here; if anyone asked for me or where my desk was. Now, Babs.”
As he made the call, then scrambled out, she pushed the gruesome, graphic photo clear: A slice of horror preserved for twenty or more years. A horror she recognized all too personally. Mutilated throat. Empty chest cavity.
She began to read the reports. Then dialed.
“Savoie.”
For once, the sound of his low, rumbling voice didn’t send her heart stuttering. It was already pounding at a fierce, tribal pace.
“When you last . . . saw Vantour, was he wearing that big, vulgar ruby ring?”
“Why hello, detective. This is a pleasant surprise. Did you call to apologize for leaving without saying good-bye to me?”