7
Guy parked the Pontiac several houses away from Jilly’s. He said a small prayer, “Let her be reasonable,” and roused Goldilocks, who snored beside him.
The chicken was a joke. People didn’t really believe in all that voodoo hooey these days—they just liked to pretend so they could support Louisiana’s reputation.
“C’mon, dog, this is our fond farewell.” He couldn’t help wondering if the burnt offerings were Wazoo’s idea of being funny and she’d come outside for a good laugh at his expense.
If she’d done the chicken number she would have expected him to drive away as soon as he got in the car and not see or smell anything until he was on the road and his engine heated up. She couldn’t have known he’d hang around a bit too long.
Who else would go to so much trouble? He was darned if he knew.
Goldilocks climbed sleepily over his seat and jumped out. She leaned against his leg and yawned. It didn’t cost him anything to scratch her head. She wasn’t so old, maybe a year, and she still tired herself out.
“Now, do as I say,” he told her, walking in the shadow of a tall hedge and holding the scruff of the animal’s neck.
Up the driveway to Jilly’s front door they went, and Guy knocked softly.
The house was in darkness.
He knocked harder. She’d never hear otherwise.
Goldilocks whined and Guy gripped her muzzle in one hand while he whispered in her ear, “It’s real important you don’t get on the wrong side of Jilly, so be very quiet.” As soon as he let go, Goldilocks whined again.
This time Guy rang the bell—three times—and stepped back. He heard the slightest scrape and looked up to see a curtain blow where a window had been opened an inch. The window hadn’t been open when he arrived. He’d checked.
He stood beneath the window. “Jilly,” he said hoarsely, trying to project a whisper. “Jilly, it’s Guy. I need to talk to you.”
He waited and watched. Nothing moved and there wasn’t another sound. The curling in the pit of his stomach was too familiar. He was getting frustrated and that wouldn’t help a thing.
“Please, Jilly.” He glanced around to make sure no one else saw him grovel. On his cell phone, he dialed her number and heard the phone ring five times inside the house, then fall silent. No answering machine came on.
“Okay, I don’t want to do it, but I’m gonna have to get tough.”
Kneeling beside the dog, he said, “Bark. Go on, just bark.”
Guy’s ear got a thorough cleaning but not one peep did Goldilocks make.
He put an arm around her and made what he hoped were good imitations of low barks, then he growled for good measure.
The only thing his attempts bought him was a passionate face washing.
Guy filled his palm with pieces of gravel, stood up and shied one gently against the open window. After a few seconds he tossed another and another.
“Sheesh,” he muttered, “why can’t women be sensible—like men?”
After what felt like minutes he said, louder, “I’ve got that mutt here and I’m not taking her with me when I leave. Come on down and get her. Unless you just want her to wander off and get…lost.” You had to be careful with Jilly over some things. Most things.
He lobbed more pieces of gravel, being careful to make sure they barely touched the glass. She’d have to hear them.
The next one he tossed a little harder—and he winced. The pane cracked. He blew up his cheeks and stared upward. What kind of luck was that, dammit? A piece of gravel thrown underhand and gently shouldn’t break a window.
Aw hell, he had broken her window. And he was a bit old to run away.
He kept on looking up but there was no sign of Jilly. She was in, he’d stake his life on it. Admittedly her car wasn’t around to prove it, but that didn’t mean a thing since the Beetle was in the shop.
Kneeling beside the dog once more, he told her, “I give up. The woman is totally unreasonable. You stay here and bark whenever you feel like it. If you leave it could be curtains—for both of us. But she’ll show eventually and take you in—she’s too soft to turn you away.” He lifted one ear flap and growled softly. “Do that. It works every time.”
Jilly had opened the front door a couple of inches while Guy had been throwing rocks at her bedroom window. She couldn’t believe a grown man would kneel there in the dirt giving a dog instructions as if the poor animal understood and would do as she was told.
“Only you would try to frighten a sweet dog like that,” she said.
He started and looked at her over his shoulder, and she did believe that if there were any light she’d see he was blushing.
“Why didn’t you let me in?” he demanded.
“Before you broke my window, you mean?”
“There must be something wrong with the glass for it to break like that. It’s your own fault, anyway. I need to talk to you and you wouldn’t let me in.”
“I’m letting you in now. Get up and move before I call the sheriff and have you hauled off to jail.”
Guy could see the glitter in her eyes but very little else. “You can be so annoying,” he said.
“Thanks—maybe you don’t need to come in after all.”
“I thought you were upset. Crying.”
She swallowed. “Why would I be? If you’re coming in, come, and don’t leave her outside or you’ll be back with her before you can check your fly,” Jilly finished with her mouth open. She never, ever said things like that.
Guy decided against suggesting she had a fly fixation. He stood and went inside. Neither of them needed to worry about whether Goldilocks would join them.
“Do you always break people’s windows if they don’t answer the door?” Jilly said. “Do you have any idea how bizarre that is?” She led him into her small sitting room and turned on the lamps.
Ignoring her, he went directly to the windows and drew the drapes.
“You,” she said while her insides shook. “You don’t get to come in here and do as you please.”
“We’d rather not be seen,” he said. Bareheaded for once, he’d found the time to change into clean jeans and a white shirt.
“You’re right,” she told him. He looked good—much too good.
Now that he couldn’t give her the manly, calming hug he’d practiced in his mind, Guy scrambled for a way to make conversation. “Someone put a dead chicken on my engine block.” Great. He could have said anything but that.
She narrowed her eyes. “When?” The thermal cotton pajamas she wore wouldn’t have been so appealing on any other woman.
Guy’s throat dried out. “Not long ago. I was getting ready to come here and left the engine running a bit. The smoke and smell were my first clues.”
Suddenly, she dropped into the corner of an orange suede couch and he realized she had turned pale. “That’s something to do with voodoo,” she said, pulling up her knees. “You’re making it up, of course you are. People don’t do those things anymore.”
“Right,” he said. “I’m makin’ it up. Get dressed and I’ll take you to see the mess it made. I’m goin’ to be smelling burned barbecue for weeks.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That could have been a warning.”
“What kind of warning?”
“Not to do something you’re doing. To keep your nose out of people’s business, maybe.”
“Did you put it there?” Sometimes the devil made your tongue loose.
Jilly gathered her voluminous hair behind her head and gave him the kind of steady, sharp hazel stare intended to make him back off.
“No, of course you didn’t. I’ll have to follow it up, because unless it was put in my car by mistake, someone’s following me around and looking for opportunities to be a pain in the neck.” He smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.
Time for a new angle. “Jilly, Cyrus told me you were real upset. He’s worried about you.”
Jilly couldn’t stand thinking she’d tr
oubled Cyrus. “I don’t know why you thought coming here would make a difference.”
“Because,” he said, standing over her, “Cyrus told me it’s my fault if you’re unhappy. He said I don’t treat you well. In fact, he said I treat you badly.”
“Sit down,” she said. “My neck’s starting to hurt.”
Rather than retreat to either a dark blue chair, or a love seat, he sat down right where he was, on the couch beside Jilly with his hip touching her drawn-up bare feet.
Goldilocks jumped up at his other side, but before she could make herself comfortable, he ordered her down. “Dogs need a lot of attention,” he said. “They need a home where there’s more than one person to make sure they do what they’re supposed to.”
“Millions of people on their own have dogs.”
Silence lengthened. He slid his hands behind his neck and squinted at the ceiling. Let her be the one to start talking.
Finally he glanced at her—and found she’d closed her eyes.
Well, hell. “Do you keep the kitchens and the back gate locked at the café?”
Her eyes popped open and she frowned. “Of course not. People are coming and going all the time. And the garbage is out there. D’you like chocolate?”
She was changing the subject. “Yeah.” He thought about the next thing he needed to say.
Jilly scooted to her knees and bent over the side of the couch. Her bottom stuck up in the air and he heard her open a drawer in a cabinet. She puffed and struggled and slowly pulled and pushed herself back where she’d started from.
She took the top off a box of pralines and held them out.
Guy looked into the box but his vision glazed. He still saw Jilly’s bottom, tidy, round, curvy as a bottom should be curvy, and the way she crossed her feet to get more purchase while she all but stood on her head.
“Take one,” she said, sounding irritable.
“I thought you said chocolate.” He felt a little disoriented and the idea of the lady’s nether regions had awakened other parts of him.
“That was just a question,” Jilly told him. “I was thinking about the pralines all along.”
He took one and put the whole thing in his mouth.
“You’re supposed to bite off a piece,” Jilly said.
Guy couldn’t speak so he savored the sweet maple-nut-sugar explosion in his mouth.
“I bet your mother would be pleased with manners like that.”
He finished but continued sliding his tongue over his teeth. “My mother,” he said, “would laugh, just like she always did. And she’d eat one the same way and the whole thing would be a private joke.”
Jilly saw the smile of remembrance on his lips and dropped the subject. Finally she knew one more little thing about him that she hadn’t known before. His mother was dead and he’d had a close relationship with her. Good.
Eyeing the box of pralines, he reached for another, then changed his mind and looked at her instead. “Please do something for me. I know it’ll be a hassle, but lock the kitchen door at All Tarted Up, and the back gate. It’s important or I wouldn’t ask.”
She rubbed the side of her face and he saw uncertainty flood her. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you exactly why, only that it could be real important, Jilly. To your safety and to Missy Durand’s.” Had he thought she would meekly do as he asked without wanting an explanation? He shrugged his shoulders and prepared to be grilled.
“You have proof that someone intends to come in through the back way and kill us?”
“You do beat about the bush, Jilly. One day you’ll learn to come to the point. It saves time.”
She poked a sharp finger into the hard flesh beneath his thigh.
A little thing like that shouldn’t bring a man so much pleasure.
“Most of the time you don’t say enough and when you do speak, you’re a smart-ass.” Her mouth turned down. “Sorry, but it’s true.”
A few hours earlier they had come together in a field of sunburned grass, violently, passionately. Yet they sat here sparring and avoiding the topic.
“Someone died in the Quarter. Shot three times. There’s the vaguest chance there’s a connection between that killing and Toussaint. Only I don’t know what it is yet.”
“Except I ought to lock my back door?”
“Sounds strange, but yes. A lot of people in town should probably lock their back doors. I just don’t have enough to go on to make a broad suggestion like that. Would you do it for me—because you’d make me a happier man?”
He would say that to anyone, Jilly thought. A kid who wouldn’t give up an Uzi, someone he was persuading not to jump off a bridge. She didn’t need to make anything personal out of it.
It was personal. “Why would it make you happier?” You know you don’t dig for sweet talk, not from Guy Gautreaux.
“Your safety is important to me. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
No, but she enjoyed hearing every word. “I’ll make sure it’s done. Thanks.”
“First thing in the morning?”
He was serious about this. “Yes.”
She nodded and her face puckered into a deep frown. He wouldn’t be surprised if her mind had already moved on—way on.
“We can’t avoid the subject forever,” she told him, and her throat moved sharply. She bit into her bottom lip and he didn’t like the sheen in her eyes.
When he didn’t react to her opener, she said, “I shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong and I don’t understand what came over me.”
“What exactly are you talking about?” Dumb response. Quickly, he added, “I know you’re talking about this afternoon. Forget it.”
Jilly blinked. She wouldn’t allow him to make her cry. “I intend to. But not without admitting I jumped the gun.”
He grinned, actually grinned. She felt like slapping him.
“Interesting choice of clichés,” he said. The grin gradually slipped.
“You can be so mean, Guy. And you think you always win discussions, but this time I’m going to come out on top.”
“You already did.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.
Think longer, speak slower. “I’m ignoring that,” Jilly said. “I’m a big-enough person to face up to my shortcomings. You didn’t do a thing toward what happened today. I forced you.”
His grin returned. “Don’t beat yourself up. It wasn’t so bad.”
Now he’d done it, Guy thought. Jilly’s very shiny, damp-lashed eyes had narrowed to slits.
Guy rotated his shoulders and turned his grin into a warm smile. “Those pajamas look hot.” He was in a minefield. “I mean they look as if they make you hot.”
She put a hand over her mouth. “I’m not suggesting you should take ’em off.”
Jilly put a single finger to her mouth, shushing him.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Gimme a break. I’m a challenged man. Whenever things get serious I say something that’s supposed to be funny. It’s usually inappropriate.”
“Nothing’s getting serious here,” Jilly said.
Guy moved even closer to her. She saw something new in his eyes, need—and uncertainty. He kept on coming and she gasped when his lips met hers. His mouth was firm but gentle, for the first few seconds before it turned hard and he showed the things he could do with his tongue. She crossed her arms and kept them there, tightly. This time he had to make the moves.
He kissed her for a long time and there was no doubt the man had kissed at least one woman before. His hands settled around her neck with his thumbs pushing her chin up. She fought to breathe evenly—and failed. From her lips to her closed eyes, he moved. There was no way he wouldn’t feel and taste the tears.
His mouth stilled and she knew he had discovered she was crying. Her brain told her it could not be a good idea to show any vulnerability around him, but her heart wouldn’t cooperate.
“Jilly,” he said quietly, “we’d better make sure no one gets permanently damage
d here. You’ll have to help me figure out how to do that.” His lips touched her cheek and she felt him lick away a tear with the tip of his tongue. He rested his face against hers.
She sniffed and didn’t dare open her eyes. “You’re right. We wouldn’t want anything to get messy.” Jilly opened her mouth on his skin. Her breathing turned shallow. “I blame myself for this, but I’ve already done the mea culpa routine.”
“If anyone should be blamed, it’s me,” he said, barely above a whisper. “How are you supposed to know what I’m thinkin’ if I don’t tell you?”
What are you thinking? That was a question she wouldn’t ask.
She didn’t put distance between them, but she did sit up straight, with her feet on the floor. The top of her head didn’t reach his chin and he felt clumsy all over again.
What the hell. The way she makes you feel is too good to lose. See if you can get this back on track. Waiting for her to push him away, he slipped an arm around her shoulders. Jilly stiffened but she stayed put. “We can’t turn the clock back,” he told her. “What happened, happened, and I’d be a liar if I said I regretted it.”
She held her tongue.
He eased her face back toward him. “I care about you.”
And that would have to be enough. “Thank you. I care about you, too.” It was more than she’d had up till now.
His free hand settled over one of hers, a large, warm, work-roughened hand. When he threaded his fingers through hers he seemed unsure of himself for a moment, but then he raised the back of her hand to his lips. He kissed her there, lightly, and again on one knuckle after the other, before he rested his beard-stubbled cheek in her palm and shut his eyes.
God help her, he mattered so deeply to her, yet she didn’t have a clue whether there was any chance of a future together for them.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he said, and Jilly longed to hold him so badly it hurt. “We don’t know… Who does know what’s likely to happen next year, or tomorrow? Don’t ever quit bein’ my friend, okay?”
She said, “Okay,” and dared to hope he really meant what he said.
“Even when I’m an ass, try to be kind. Kick me if it makes you feel better, but be there for me.” He felt like a drowning man, but the feeling wasn’t all bad.
A Grave Mistake Page 7