by Jean Thomas
Shoving the cell phone back into his pocket, he filled her in on his conversation. “I got what I wanted. That was my grandmother. She raised me, the only family I have. Lorelei—that’s my hometown in Tennessee—is a pretty small place and Gran the only Griggs in the phone directory.”
Clare understood. “Meaning Malcolm Boerner would have had no difficulty getting her number.”
“Yeah, and learning just what he needed to know. Seems Boerner passed himself off as an old army buddy of mine who’d lost contact with me, and could Gran tell him where he could reach me?”
“And she told him.”
Mark shrugged. “Gran is a simple, country woman. She wouldn’t have questioned his identity or his motive. She was happy to let him know I was on a fishing holiday in Louisiana and staying at the Pelican Hotel on Pelican Island.”
“All your questions answered.”
“Not everything.” He patted the area of the amulet hanging out of sight under his shirt. “I still don’t know how Boerner learned I had what he wanted.”
“Does it matter now that he’s dead?”
“It could, if Boerner’s killer somehow learned from him that I have the amulet. Not that I’m convinced this thing, or its mate if there was one, is a motive for murder.”
“But it could be, and that puts you at risk. Mark, listen to me. You’ve got no reason to hang around New Orleans any longer. You should go, get as far away from here as possible.”
“Because I’m at risk and you’re not, huh?”
“I’m not the one who has the amulet. You do.”
“And maybe the killer doesn’t know that. If Boerner told him he sent you after my amulet, he could just as easily think you have it and not me. Puts a different spin on it, doesn’t it, teacher?”
“But I’m home now.”
“And that makes you safe?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“How? By going to the police, which you can’t do until Boerner’s death goes public? And who knows when that will be. Even then, they wouldn’t offer you protection, not when they learn you’re mixed up in two murders, as they’ll be sure to do. All you’ll be to them is what is politely termed ‘a person of interest.’”
“What’s your alternative, Lieutenant?”
“Me.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“You need someone, and what better than an army ranger? Protection is what we’re all about, Clare.”
“I don’t want someone offering himself as a target on my behalf.”
“Don’t make it more than it is. I’ve got my own reason for wanting to stick close to you.”
“The explanation for how Malcolm Boerner learned you had the amulet. That’s what you still want, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like loose ends.”
Okay, that was true, but he was letting her think it was just as important as being there to protect her. And it wasn’t. The only thing that really mattered to him was keeping her safe.
What’s wrong with you, Griggs? You’re being as gullible as your grandmother.
Was he? Yeah, he was. How else could he define it, when he had yet to believe everything she had told him earlier this morning without a lingering doubt? Had yet to fully trust her?
But, damn it, he wanted her. It was just as plain as that. He wanted her with the same raw need as he’d wanted her last night before she had pinned him to that headboard and walked away with his amulet.
It was only then that Mark realized he had reversed their positions without being conscious of it. That their argument had somehow resulted in his backing her away until she was now caught against the railing that bordered the levee. Was trapped there as she had trapped him last night.
A situation he could take advantage of?
It was a possibility all right. Providing she didn’t slip away from him. Nothing to prevent her from doing just that. Like handcuffs. And he wouldn’t try to stop her. But she wasn’t moving away from him. She simply stood there, gazing up at him with those sweet blue eyes and a parted mouth that was all breathy with anticipation. At least that’s how he was prepared to read it. An invitation he was unable to resist.
“Mark?” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“What are we doing here?”
“Don’t know,” he said, unable to keep the gruffness from his voice. “Why don’t we find out?”
He leaned into her, his hands framing her face. He could feel her trembling as he lowered his head. No objections, though. A good sign. His angled mouth closed over hers.
There was nothing urgent about his kiss. Not at first. He was careful about that, his lips playing softly with hers, nibbling, tasting. It wasn’t enough. He needed what that mouth opening slowly under his signified. A welcome.
He answered it by sliding his tongue between her teeth, probing, inhaling the flavor of her along with a fragrance that he could swear was a lingering scent from last night’s seductive perfume. It made him as wild now as it had then, commanding his tongue to sweep the interior of her hot, wet mouth.
His arms went around her, drawing her tightly against him as he deepened their kiss. Was he hearing her moans or his own groans rumbling up from his chest? Maybe both.
All he knew for certain was that, if he didn’t exercise self-control, this was going to end in the two of them making a public spectacle of themselves right here on the levee.
It was with a considerable amount of effort that Mark lifted his mouth from hers, his arms dropping reluctantly away from her. Oh, hell, he wanted a lot more than just a kiss. But he guessed that would have to wait.
So, okay, he had managed to restrain himself. But he wasn’t ready to surrender all contact with her, which was why he rested his forehead against hers.
That contact lasted until she challenged him with a breathless “That kiss. Was it meant to convince me to accept your protection?”
“Could be,” he lied, putting a few inches between them. “Did it work?”
“Something definitely did,” she admitted, “but it wasn’t that.”
“Stubborn, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been accused of it.”
“How about being naive?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that if you were reckless enough to come after me last night, a man you knew nothing about or what he might be capable of doing, then, sweetheart, you need protection.”
“Uh-huh, and if you were dumb enough to fall for my line, what does that make you?”
She smiled up at him.
He grinned back.
“All right,” he conceded, “you have a point.”
“Look,” she said, “why don’t we just agree to look out for each other? A question, though. What happens now?”
He figured she meant it strictly in terms of where they were to go from here and not, worst luck, in any further amorous explorations. Scratching the side of his head, he considered her query.
“Well, we don’t go to the cops. Not until we’ve armed ourselves with enough information to convince them to listen to us seriously.”
“And how do we get this information?”
Mark had an idea about that. Squinting up at the sun, then glancing down at his watch, he made a decision for them. “It’s just short of noon. We have the whole afternoon left to us. Any reason we can’t pay a visit to your sister?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Terry? You want to see Terry? Whatever for?”
“Answers.”
“Mark, she told me everything she knows, and I’ve shared it all with you. What more could you expect to learn?”
“Think about it, Clare. Boerner and your brother-in-law had that connection.”
“Mercenaries, yes. But Joe wouldn’t talk to her about it, remember?”
“Even so, she was his wife. In all the years they were married, she must have learned something about his past. Maybe just bits of knowledge she doesn’t think matter. But they could matter. Enough, anyway, to piece together some explanations.”
“I suppose it’s possible.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a long shot. But it’s all we have. You in?”
“I’m in.”
“Then let’s go for it.”
Chapter 6
Not until Clare had directed him across the Huey P. Long Bridge to the other side of the Mississippi, and through the maze of arteries that finally put them on the River Road headed north, was she able to relax sufficiently enough to think about her situation. Or, to be more precise about it, the man at her side.
How had she landed herself in the company of this enigma behind a pair of aviator-style sunglasses? Because that’s what Mark Griggs was, a challenging puzzle who in one minute was irritating her with his take-charge attitude and in the next...
Well, there was no forgetting that episode on the bench in Jackson Square when he had so unexpectedly revealed another facet of himself under that tough exterior. There was only one name she could give it. A tender warrior.
As for what had happened up on the levee...that, too, was unforgettable. How could it be otherwise when her mouth still stung from that kiss of his that had rocked her senses at every level? A kiss every bit as steamy as New Orleans in mid-July.
He thinks you’re in danger, Clare. And you are. Of him.
It wasn’t any good, their linking up with each other like this. Not when it offered too many opportunities for other intimate sessions. And after Alan she couldn’t afford that.
Why did everything have to be so difficult? Why did Mark Griggs himself have to be so difficult in too many respects? And why, oh why, did he have to be so tempting?
Much to her relief, he misread her sober silence. “Don’t worry about it, Clare,” he reassured her in that smoky voice that did things to her insides. “There has to be an explanation. There’s always an explanation, and we’re going to learn it and save both you and your sister.”
He was talking about their reason for this visit to Terry. He thought she was concerned about nothing but its outcome. Not that she, herself, needed saving. Except maybe from him.
“I hope so,” she said, and went on to thank him for caring.
They were quiet after that. He concentrated his attention on the narrow, winding highway that followed the levee on the west bank of the river. This was plantation country, permitting them at periodic intervals to catch glimpses of antebellum homes situated in groves of live oak trees as majestic as the Greek Revival mansions they sheltered.
They must have been a half hour or more on the road when Mark announced suddenly, “I’m hungry.”
“There’s a village up ahead. It has a café converted from an old sugar mill. We can stop there.”
She noticed that Mark wasn’t much interested in the quaintness of the structure itself when they reached it. His attention, after they had been seated, was far more occupied with the menu that specialized in Cajun fare.
Clare was content with a chef’s salad, but Mark ordered blackened grouper with all the trimmings.
“When you’ve been stationed in war zones as often I’ve been,” he explained after the waitress had departed to the kitchen, “with sometimes nothing to eat but field rations, you make up for it when you get home.”
Since it was past the busy lunch hour, they had the place nearly to themselves, making Mark noticeably grateful when their orders were delivered to their table without delay.
It wasn’t until he’d taken the first edges off his appetite that he was ready to talk.
“I guess you and your sister are pretty tight with each other, huh?”
“We’re very close, yes. Or as close as we can be living an hour’s drive apart as we do.”
His broad shoulders lifted in a little shrug. “I wouldn’t know how that kind of thing works, seeing as how I don’t have any siblings of my own.”
“There’s no rule about it. There are sisters and brothers devoted to each other, and there are sisters and brothers who just plain don’t get along.”
This is a funny thing for him to be discussing, Clare thought. He’s got to know this himself, whether he has any siblings or not. So what’s happening here?
She had a fork loaded with salad halfway to her mouth before she understood what he was doing.
He’s testing me. He still isn’t entirely convinced that everything I’ve been telling him is the truth.
Those shadows of mistrust shouldn’t be mattering to her, but after what they had shared this morning they hurt. Reasonable, though, she supposed, after her performance last night.
She put her fork back down on her plate and met his gaze. “I’m not hiding anything from you, Mark.”
She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he hastily swallowed a mouthful of rice. “Hey, I wasn’t—”
“It’s all right. You’re entitled to hear everything you want to know. Yes, I’m willing to do whatever is necessary to prove Terry’s innocence. I would in any case, but there is an added reason besides sisterly affection.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. See, there’s this age difference between Terry and me, which made her eighteen and me just a little kid when we lost our parents in a car accident. She wasn’t in the car. I was.”
“Oh, hell,” he growled.
“It was hell. Not for me, not then. I was asleep in the back strapped into my car seat. The only injury I suffered was from flying glass. It left me with this.” She touched the crescent-shaped scar high on her cheek.
“I kind of noticed that.”
It was hardly the moment for her to wonder what his feelings, if any, were about his observation. But then didn’t just about everyone bear facial characteristics, acquired or natural, that made them interesting? He had one himself in the form of that slightly crooked nose. Not something that should be particularly appealing, but in his case...
“Not then, you said,” he prompted her.
“No, not then. I was too young to understand what it all meant. But for Terry...well, it had to be a hell for her that we were suddenly without a mother and a father. She could have terrified me with that. She didn’t, though. Instead, she explained to me very calmly that it was going to be all right, that I shouldn’t worry because she was going to care for me.”
“Couldn’t have been easy for her,” Mark guessed. “Not when she wasn’t much more than a girl herself.”
“It wasn’t, but she never complained.”
“So she raised you herself.”
“And I’ll never forget it, how she was always there for me. Now I have this chance to be there for her.”
“Yeah, I get it. Hell, I ought to when I was there myself.”
She was puzzled for a moment, until it struck her what he was saying. “You were orphaned yourself.”
“Not technically, but it amounted to the same thing. The guy who fathered me was a drifter. Blew into town long enough to knock up my mother and then disappeared. She wasn’t much better. After I was born she handed me over to her widowed mother and then moved on. Didn’t bother to come back, either. I haven’t a clue where she is today, or if she’s even alive, and I don’t much care.”
“Mark, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. If you’re going to be sorry for anyone, be sorry for my grandmother. Gran did her best to bring me up, but I was a handful. On the wild side by the time I got to high school. Barely graduated, and afterward...well, a small town in Tennessee doesn’t offer many opportunities.”
“But the army did,” she guessed.
“It was what I needed. As they say, if the army doesn’t break you, it’ll make you. It did just that. Enabled me to earn a college degree and join the rangers.”
And now the rangers own him, Clare thought. She wasn’t prepared to examine why that realization saddened her. It was better that she let the subject alone.
“Hey, we’re ignoring our food here,” he said.
They finished their meals in silence. Clare was careful to express no further sympathy for him. He was the kind of man whose pride wouldn’t have appreciated that. As it was, they had already gotten too personal with each other.
Hadn’t she already broken her promise to herself not to get mixed up with another soldier? What had happened back on the levee when she had permitted him to kiss her was a blatant evidence of that.
All right, so the histories of their pasts they had shared over lunch did seem to have eased the issues of trust between them. That was a good thing. The emotions they had stirred in her concerning this restless, intense man were not.
You can’t allow yourself to end up caring for him on some deeper level, Clare. You just can’t.
* * *
At Clare’s direction, Mark turned off the River Road not long after the café. Unlike the twisting River Road, the route here was a straight one passing through stretches of pecan orchards.
The rural highway was almost empty. It was the reason why Clare, glancing in the side-view mirror on her side of the SUV, noticed the dark blue sedan behind them.
Its presence wouldn’t have mattered to her except for two things. She remembered seeing the same car, or one exactly like it, somewhere between New Orleans and the village where they had stopped. Also, like then, the sedan never tried to pass them but slowed when they slowed, increasing its speed again only when they increased theirs. She watched it in the mirror for a moment before calling Mark’s attention to it.
“Mark, there’s this car behind us.”
“I know. I’ve been aware of it.”
“And?”
“Nothing. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be headed in the same direction.”