What did that say about her real feelings for him? She didn’t want to know. It was more than she could handle.
He’d taken away the pain, the grief, the awful aching emptiness, that had to be all it was. And she couldn’t blame him for anything. It had been her, all her, who had made it happen. A result of all the high emotions that had been tearing her apart. And it had been all too easy to forget herself in Cole’s arms.
She couldn’t let it happen again.
“Don’t run away from this, Bryn.” His voice came low and harsh as she reached the door. And close. Too close.
His hand clamped down on hers as she reached for the doorknob.
Cole had pulled on his pants, but that was all. In the lamplight, he looked gorgeous in that brooding way of his.
“I’m not running,” she lied desperately.
His eyes were hot on hers. “Looks like running to me.”
“I have to go. I have to let my guests in.”
“We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.” Somehow, her voice actually sounded normal.
“What just happened here then?” His voice, however, didn’t sound normal. It sounded hard, and maybe even hurt. But surely she was imagining that.
“Stress relief,” she said coolly despite the tightening in her throat. “Or a trip down memory lane. Call it whatever you want.” It was incredibly complicated. “Let’s not make a big deal out of this.”
The doorbell chimed again.
“Please, I have to go.” She pulled away from him and this time he didn’t stop her. She ran down the stairs to the bright-lit foyer and faced her returning guests who were full of questions about things to do and see the next day around St. Salome Parish. When they went finally up to bed, she saw that Cole’s door was shut. Thank God. She was alone again, and she would deal with this stupid thing she’d done. She would be fine. She took a shower and put on a long T-shirt for bed.
In the French-carved frame of her gilded mirror, she took in the haunted darkness of her eyes against her pale complexion. Despite the shower, she could still feel and taste and smell Cole, as if he were somehow imbued into her skin. She reached for one of the perfume bottles that marched across the dresser top and spritzed her neck. She picked up the hairbrush that lay in front of a canning jar filled with wildflowers and tore it through her still-damp hair as if that would remove the memory of Cole’s fingers tangling there.
Hopeless, all of it.
She returned to her bed, flipped off the lamp that fought for space with a towering pile of favorite books. In the enfolding gloam of her lonely room, her body craved him. Her nipples throbbed, her mouth dried, her arms felt empty and yearning. She still wasn’t fine—far from it—and she didn’t know if she’d ever be fine again.
The ring of the telephone broke the fullness of the quiet night. Stumbling from bed, she made her to way to the desk in the office of her suite.
“Hello?”
“Bryn, it’s me. I hope I’m not calling too late. I just got in from dinner.”
Drake. Her chest constricted. “I’m still awake.” She sat down behind the desk.
“I wanted to check on you. Make sure you’re all right.”
She knew what he was really worried about. Cole. Drake of all people knew how hard this investigation into Aimee’s death would be for her. And even though she’d told him there could be nothing but friendship between them, he’d still called. He still cared.
“I’m all right,” she said softly.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Drake said, and he didn’t have to define it. “I know you agreed to help him. I know that you can’t bear the idea that someone could still be walking free who killed Aimee, but you know it’s not true. I called that Blue Water Shores place in Tampa. They’ve never heard of Randol Ormond.”
Bryn blinked. “What? That’s impossible. Cole—”
“Exactly. This whole thing is impossible, Bryn. Cole’s lying. He’s not here for the truth. He’s here for revenge.”
“Maybe there was a mistake.”
“Or maybe he’s a liar.”
She swallowed thickly. Her mind swam with disbelief. “I’ll talk to Cole about it in the morning. Maybe he has an explanation.”
Drake was silent for a beat. “Bryn, I don’t want you there with him. Come to Baton Rouge. You can stay in my apartment.”
“You know I can’t do that. There’s Bellefleur. I have guests tonight. This is Zydeco weekend—”
“Damn Bellefleur.” His voice heated. “That place is killing you, Bryn. Marry me. Forget Bellefleur. Forget the bed and breakfast. I need you here. I want you to be my wife.”
A band of sadness seized her heart.
“I told you I can’t marry you,” she whispered into the phone.
“Bryn—” There was pain in his voice. “I’m sorry. I blew my cool for a second.” She could feel him through the phone, across the miles, regaining his control. “I’m sorry. If you need more time, take it. I’m just worried about you.”
“More time won’t change anything,” she told him shakily.
“I don’t want to lose you, Bryn.”
“I’m sorry.” The catch in her voice made it hard to go on. “You’ve always been there for me and I love you for that, but I can’t marry you. It wouldn’t be right. I don’t feel for you the way I should feel for someone…Someone I could marry.” The starkness of the admission made her stomach sick. She didn’t want to hurt Drake. She wanted them still to be friends, but maybe that was a pipe dream. His feelings were even stronger than she’d realized. “Time isn’t going to change how I feel.”
“Is this about Cole?”
She squeezed her eyes shut for a painful beat. “It’s about me, Drake.” She apologized again, but this time he didn’t say anything. “I’ll call you if I find out anything about Randol Ormond.”
After she’d said goodbye and hung up, she sat there for the longest time. Could her night get any worse? She’d made love with Cole, then she’d hurt the one person who’s supported her all these years and it was no comfort that it had been the right thing to do. She had to be firm. She couldn’t do anything to lead him on. But it still wounded her.
The phone rang again before she left the desk.
“Hello?”
A gravelly whisper crept through the phone line, “Is Aimee there?”
Chapter 11
She didn’t move, couldn’t move, for a horrible pulse-beat, then she slammed the receiver down. The telephone rang again immediately.
The line ached in awful silence when she picked it up.
“Is this Aimee?”
“Who is this?” Bryn demanded shakily. There was no answer. “Stop calling here!”
She slammed the phone down again. And it rang.
Bryn grabbed the cord out of the wall. She lay down in bed again, her skin crawling. From all the way downstairs, she could hear the distant ring of her phone in the office on the first floor.
It stopped. And then it started again.
Bryn dragged a drawer open, banging it onto the floor with the strength of her pull, and stepped into a pair of shorts. She burst out of her room, raced down the stairs, her heart in her throat all the way. The office light blinded her when she flipped it on. The phone rang and rang.
She reached across the desk and grabbed the receiver.
The harsh whisper filled her ear. “Aimee?”
She heard footsteps pounding through the thick claw of anger and fear as she yanked that line from the wall, too. She turned, found Cole in the doorway. The sharp angles of the light revealed unreadable eyes.
“I heard you run out of your room,” he said. “I just had to see if you were all right, after what happened last night.”
The brick. Now these phone calls. Were they pranks, kids from town who knew the old, scary ghost stories of murder and had heard Cole was back? Or people in town who didn’t like the revival of a horrific scandal, the mere whisper that someone e
lse might have been responsible, one of them?
Or was Cole right? Was there a murderer stalking free in Azalea Bend? Someone who didn’t like the fact that Cole was in town to find the truth about Aimee’s death?
And could she trust anything Cole had told her about Aimee’s murder? He stood there with his piercing, inscrutable eyes and she didn’t know the answers to any of her questions. She’d had sex with him and the stark truth was, she really didn’t know him.
Feeling overwhelmed, she struggled for a deep, steadying breath. For a sliver of sanity in her upside-down world.
All she really wanted to do was throw herself into Cole’s arms and let his warm, hard, dangerous body make her forget all this devastation and heartache again. But he was part of that devastation and heartache, and she couldn’t trust him.
“It’s just some prank phone calls,” she told him, amazed at how cool her voice sounded, as if she weren’t just about to crack. “Somebody asking for Aimee.”
Cole swore, and started to move toward her. She stepped back, unsure if it was because she was afraid of him or of herself.
He stopped abruptly, his expression tightening. “Do you have caller ID?”
A bitter breath came from her throat. “You’ve got to be kidding. I can’t afford extras, Cole.”
“Get it,” he said. “Tomorrow. It’s not an extra if you’re being harassed.” He sounded angry and protective. She’d love nothing more than to feel as if he could protect her, but she was beyond any ability to know how to feel about Cole.
The shivery reminder of the passion they’d shared throbbed low in her belly. Her body needled with an almost excruciating desire even as her rational mind knew his intentions were still circumspect.
“There’s no Randol Ormond at Blue Water Shores in Tampa,” she said sharply. “Drake called there. They told him they’d never heard of Randol Ormond.”
Cole’s jaw tensed. “That’s impossible. I went to Tampa and met with Randol Ormond in person, Bryn.”
“Did you? How do I know? Where’s Randol Ormond?”
Cole strode toward her and seized her shoulders with an insistent grip. “I don’t know, Bryn. Maybe he got scared. Maybe someone threatened him. My father didn’t kill Aimee—and that means someone else did. Maybe they went after Randol Ormond. You know I’m telling you the truth. You know it in your heart or you wouldn’t be helping me and you wouldn’t have—” He broke off, but he didn’t have to finish.
She wouldn’t have made love to him the way she had unless somewhere deep inside, she was starting to believe him. And she could be so wrong. She could be a complete fool.
“You don’t know what I think or how I feel about anything!” She tore away from his intolerably electric hold.
She moved behind the desk, to a position of safety. Away from Cole, with the broad, polished desk buffering her from the desperate nearness of him. When she was close to him, she couldn’t think or reason. She was more confused than ever about Aimee’s death, and she had to keep this whole thing from driving her mad. She had Bellefleur. She had guests upstairs right now, dammit, and she was lucky they hadn’t heard the commotion.
“I know one thing,” he said, and something hard and hurting in his voice nearly broke her. “You want the truth about Aimee as much as I do.”
She tipped her chin at Cole and mustered all the strength she had left in her. “The only thing I want right now is for you to leave me alone.”
Cole did his best to keep out of Bryn’s way for the remainder of the weekend. When he’d seen her the next morning, she’d looked pale and shaky, almost sick, and there had definitely been nothing welcoming about the look she’d given him. He knew she didn’t want to see him. Hell, she’d told him she didn’t want to see him. But in truth, that wasn’t the only reason to put some distance between them. He didn’t trust himself around her as far he could throw himself.
All he wanted every time he got near her was to pull her back into his arms and make mad, mindless love again. He wanted to rip her clothes off and claim her like a Neanderthal. He wanted her in his arms, in his bed, every night, and he wanted to make her admit that she wanted him, too.
But Bryn looked at him as if he was the embodiment of some new disease every time he saw her. There was no way she was going to talk about what had happened—much less let it happen again.
As promised, she’d dug out the sugarcane records as well as the names of the yard boys the summer Aimee died. Her guests stayed all weekend, plus she had a number of visitors for the mansion tour. It all made it so much easier for her to act as if he were dead. Cole had plenty to keep him busy, and he’d begun to realize what a huge job he’d set himself. He’d contacted Ken Bryant, one of the firm’s investigators in Baton Rouge, who was helping him track down some of the more elusive names on his list. He was also in the process of lining up an expert to examine the original forensic document. No way was he handing it over to any authorities in Azalea Bend without having it authenticated first by his own expert. St. Salome Parish had screwed this thing up fifteen years ago and he wasn’t about to trust them now.
In the meantime, he’d started asking the questions nobody had asked fifteen years ago. His experience in the courtroom—along with his gut instinct—told him that Aimee, like most murder victims, had been killed by someone close to her—and there had been a reason, a very personal reason, someone had wanted her out of the way.
He tracked down Emile Brouchard at work on the front drive Saturday morning. The day was muggy and warm, even beneath the sheltering magnolias. The older man pulled down the protective mask shielding his mouth and nose from the insecticide he’d been spraying on the trees when Cole approached. He nodded a wary greeting.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions about the summer Aimee Louvel died,” Cole started.
The older man’s eyes narrowed. “Miss Louvel doesn’t need any trouble.”
“I’m just asking questions. I’m not looking to cause trouble for Bryn.”
Emile looked as though he doubted that statement. “What do you want to know? I’ve got work to do.”
Cole showed him the list of yard boys he’d gotten from Bryn. “Did you ever see any of these boys with Aimee?”
“Mr. Louvel wouldn’t have been allowing that,” Emile said immediately.
Maurice Louvel wouldn’t have allowed Bryn to see him either, so that didn’t mean much to Cole, but if Aimee had been seeing any of the yard boys, apparently Mr. Brouchard hadn’t known about it.
He tried a different tack.
“Were they good workers? Were any of them trouble?”
Emile shrugged. “Well, there was that Navin boy.” He shot a thick, work-hardened finger at one of the names. “I remember him. He got in fights a lot. Sometimes he came to work beat up. Half the time he didn’t show up.”
“Did you see him the day after Aimee died?”
“Everybody was sent home from the Great House that day except the cook and Mathilde,” Emile said. “The family was in mourning.”
“What do you remember about the day of the murder?”
Brouchard scratched his head for a beat. Wind rustled through the magnolia leaves. “It was an unusually dry summer. We’d been fighting leaf scorch pretty bad. Lost a couple dogwoods, in fact. I remember talking about it to Mr. Louvel.”
Cole worked on his patience. “What about Aimee? Did she seem happy, distracted, worried about anything?”
“I don’t remember even seeing her that day.” Emile shook his head. “Might have seen her. Might not. It was a long time ago.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have had a motive to hurt Aimee Louvel?”
“Wade Dempsey.”
Cole’s chest twisted at the flat response.
Emile Brouchard pulled his mask back up, tugged the elastic band around his head again. He was done with the conversation. He picked up the sprayer. “You don’t want to be standing in line with the breeze when I’m spraying,” he sa
id through the mask, then turned back to his work.
The wagons were as tightly circled as ever around the Louvels.
Emile Brouchard and his sister Mathilde still lived in one of cottages on plantation property. It had been, Bryn had explained, granted to them for their lifetime by her father when he’d sold off most of the land, in appreciation for their family’s generations of service to the Louvels.
Mathilde was a tiny scrap of a woman with a trapped-doe look in her eyes. She opened the door to Cole with evident reluctance.
“I wasn’t at the Great House the day Aimee died,” she told him when asked. “It was my day off.” She sat on the cottage’s olive-drab sofa with her ankles crossed, looking like a wrinkled little girl with her curly brown hair that sat somewhat askew on her small head, like an ill-fitting wig. If she remembered anything about Aimee’s activities that summer, she wasn’t offering it up, no matter how many different ways Cole posed his questions.
“What about the next day? Did you see anyone who appeared to have been in a fight? Someone with their face scratched, maybe.”
Mathilde told him she couldn’t remember anything and showed him the door.
Nellie Brewer, the Louvel cook, lived in a Cracker-jack-box-sized house in one of the older sections of Azalea Bend. He remembered her as a six-foot-tall hulk of a woman who’d ruled the Louvel kitchen like her own personal military camp. She was still tall, if thinner and frailer, but just as protective of the Louvels as ever when he interviewed her.
“It was just a normal day,” the cook said.
The day Aimee died had apparently been the most ordinary day in Azalea Bend history. And Aimee Louvel had been the sweetest, purest angel who’d ever walked the earth. No one could have had a reason to kill her.
Cole Dempsey’s Back in Town Page 10