by Janet Dailey
She heard him mutter, "You bitch," and then the slam of the car door. She looked back and saw him hobbling after her, the light from an auditorium window glinting on the lens of his glasses—and on the metal barrel of a gun.
She ran blindly. There were cars on the street. Should she try to flag one down? Would it stop? Would they help—or speed away? If she tried, wouldn't that give Maitland a chance to catch up with her—to catch her? She looked back. He was still coming after her, still favoring his leg, still slowed by it, still carrying the gun. She had to get away.
The park, with its twisting, dimly lit paths, its thick shrubbery and quiet lagoons—she could hide there. She could lose him there.
She ran away from the streetlights, toward the gaping darkness of the park, sobbing with each breath. She plunged into its blanketing shadows, her heels immediately sinking in the grass. She stumbled and fell, her lungs, her side, her whole body on fire. For a brief moment she simply lay there, fighting for breath, not certain she could get back up. But she did, pausing long enough to slip off her high heels before pressing on, slower this time, hugging the shadows and holding her full skirt tightly around her to keep the taffeta from rustling so noisily.
Someone cursed long and low. Remy froze. It had sounded close. How close? Where? She searched the shadows and caught a movement. Someone was over there. There was a gap in the bushes behind her. She started to back into it, one quiet step at a time. Would he see her? Would he catch the faint shimmer of her sequined top in the darkness?
As a hand grabbed her from behind, she screamed and whirled around, striking out blindly to free herself. Both arms were seized.
"Stop it, Remy. Stop it," someone demanded, shaking her hard when she persisted in struggling. "Do you hear? Stop it."
Something penetrated—the sound of that voice, the sensation of the hands, the flashes of images in her mind. Remy paused to look at the man's face.
"You." She recoiled from the sight of her father. "You're the one who hit me. You're the one I was arguing with at the Espace Masséna." She moved her head slowly from side to side, not wanting to believe it, not wanting to remember. "Why?"
"I didn't mean to," he murmured. "But you wouldn't listen. You wouldn't understand. We would have lost everything. Wall Street . . . the real-estate deals that went sour in Texas . . . what money we had, we'd gambled on Maitland's offshore venture. When it failed too, he had to pay it back. That's all we did. Make sure he had the money to pay back what he owed. The extra was just . . . interest."
" 'We'? You and Gabe. . . ."Then she remembered. "No, it was Marc and Lance too. It was all of you."
"For God's sake, no one got hurt."
"Only Charlie and Cole," she taunted.
"Buchanan's a cat. He'll land on his feet. Charlie .. . he was your fault."
"Oh, God." She bowed her head, unable to look at him as she strained to get as far away from him as possible.
The leaves whispered a warning. "Frazier," a voice said. Her father started to turn, relaxing his hold on her arm, and Cole stepped out of the shadows, his right hand swinging out of the darkness to clip Frazier Jardin's jaw. As her father reeled sideways, Cole caught her arm, his gray eyes smiling briefly at her. "I've wanted to do that for a long time." Then his hand was sliding around her waist, coaxing her along. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
"Maitland's out there somewhere. He has a gun, Cole."
The information elicited a few choice obscenities from him.
From a nearby street came the scream of police sirens. "Cole—"
"I called them before I left." He drew her with him as he moved slowly along the hedges. "Unfortunately, they're going to the auditorium. Maybe we can fool Maitland by doubling—"
At that moment Maitland stepped out of the bushes directly in front of them, the small but deadly-looking barrel of his gun leveled at them. "Look what we have here," he murmured coolly. "What do you suppose happened? A lovers' quarrel, maybe. In the rage of rejection, he shoots her, then commits suicide. Sounds plausible, doesn't it?"
Cole stepped a little ahead of Remy, placing himself between her and Maitland. "It's plausible only if you come close enough to leave powder burns. Why don't you do that, Maitland?" He wagged his fingers, urging him to come closer.
"Carl, no," came her father's strangled cry as he plunged out of the shadows a few feet from them, a frightened and panicked look on his face. "My God, she's my daughter. You can't do this."
"I suppose you're going to stop me," Maitland jeered in contempt. "How, Frazier, when you couldn't even stop her? I should have remembered that Jardins are notorious for never having the guts to finish what they start. Well, I do."
There was a noisy thrashing in the brush to his right. Maitland swung toward the sound and Cole lunged for the gun, driving his arm high in the air. A stab of flame shot from the barrel, accompanied by a small, explosive pop as Cole struggled to wrest the gun from Maitland. Gabe charged out of the bushes, and at the same second, Remy saw the gun arc through the air.
"Get it, Remy!" Cole shouted.
It landed somewhere in the grass. She ran to the spot where she thought it had fallen and frantically groped through the short, clipped grass. Then she felt the cool smoothness of metal beneath her fingers and quickly snatched it up. When she turned with the gun, Gabe was standing in front of her.
He hesitated a second, then held out his hand. "Give me the gun, Remy."
She took an uncertain step backward and shook her head.
"Dammit, Remy, I wouldn't have let him hurt you. I was trying to stop him. Now give me the gun."
Suddenly Cole was beside her, breathing hard and taking the revolver from her hand. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the gleam of flashlights moving toward them: the police.
29
The cathedral rang the midnight hour, signaling the end of Mardi Gras and the beginning of the Lenten season, the time of fasting. Remy listened to it and shuddered faintly, staring heedlessly at the bare branches of a mimosa tree in the small brick-walled courtyard.
She heard a footsteps on the flagstones and half turned as Cole stepped through the French doors and joined her on the private patio off his apartment. He silently offered her a glass of brandy. She took it and sipped it, then turned back to her contemplation of the night.
"I was coming to you. I was going to leave Nice the next morning," she said dully, the memory of it all now very clear. "When you accused my family of instigating this fraud and we argued so bitterly, I didn't believe you—even though I was nagged by the memory of that night when I saw Gabe's red Porsche parked on the levee road and stopped to see what he was doing there. I wanted to believe that the fresh water was for bathing and cooking. But when I confronted him—all of them—with it in Nice, they. ..."
"I know," Cole said, studying the brandy in his own glass as he stood beside her.
"I listened to all their arguments—their justifications. The company was going to go bankrupt anyway, they said. And the way they looked at it, they had to get money out of it any way they could. They were destroying the Crescent Line—and they didn't care." She stopped in time to choke back a sob. "I thought I knew them, Cole. They're my family. To see them—to hear them . . . oh, God, it hurt."
"I know."
She breathed out a shaky sigh, realizing that it would never go away, that feeling of a faith betrayed—a trust, a love. "I. . .1 knew I had to stop them. You and I had to take over the company. It was the only way to save it." She paused. "It still is."
"It won't be easy, Remy."
"Easy" She laughed at the word. "It will be ugly. Very, very ugly. But it has to be done."
He watched her with a sidelong look, his gray eyes quiet and measuring. "Now you sound like a Donovan."
She smiled faintly. "Maybe I do."
"You know, you could work a deal with your family," he said. "In return for their signing over their proxies to you and resigning from the board, you could withdraw the
charges you filed against them tonight."
"I thought about that," she admitted. "But once you start compromising, where do you stop, Cole? And what justification would I use? Would I say it was to avoid a fight for control? Or to avoid a messy scandal and protect the Jardin name? Charlie died helping a woman he knew as Remy Cooper—not Remy Jardin. It's time the Jardin name stopped meaning so much."
"Or maybe it's time for it to mean more."
She looked at him and smiled. "Maybe it is."
He touched his brandy glass to hers, then lightly curved his arm around her and drew her into the crook of his shoulder.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Janet Dailey
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-1591-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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