He didn’t want to dwell on his mistakes, especially not on his brutal handling of Cici the first time around or his nine-year estrangement from his twin. His thoughts on damage control and what was best for his grandfather, Logan had rushed down here today despite his heavy schedule. He was determined to deal with Cici before she got creative and made his grandfather believe he could have the impossible.
He remembered how small and lost Cici had looked standing on the dock after he’d told her he didn’t love her. He’d lied to protect her and him. Strangely, his lie had made him feel equally sad.
Don’t think about the past. Or how you felt. Just deal with Cici now.
Despite his best intentions not to revisit the past, he remembered young, vivacious Cici trying to pretend she was strong and tough and as good as the rich and powerful Claibornes. He’d hurt her. Hurt Jake. Hurt everybody, including himself. And told himself it was collateral damage because the family was richer and stronger than ever.
After locking the car, Logan turned and strode up the gravel drive toward the softly glowing house. But at the base of the stairs that led to the lower gallery and massive front door, he paused.
Slowly his gaze drifted over the mansion and lawn. A newly built wooden wheelchair ramp that avoided the stairs snaked back and forth from the ground to the front door.
Logan’s eyes roved over the familiar grounds, out to the garçonnière where he and Jake had lived as teenagers before their quarrel over Cici, and he wondered who owned the two-seater Miata parked at such a jaunty angle beside the building.
Frowning, he made for the stairs, but just as he was about to turn the knob and push at the front door, it was opened by someone inside the house.
“Why, hello there, Mister Logan,” said the soft, familiar, French-accented voice of his childhood nanny.
Noonoon, his grandfather’s housekeeper now, stood just inside the big door. At the sight of him, her dark face lit up as brightly as a birthday cake.
An answering warmth filled him. This generous-hearted woman had always loved him, loved Jake, too. Ever since their mother’s death, she’d practically run Belle Rose single-handedly.
“Lordy, it shore is a hot day.”
He nodded, gave her a quick hug, then released her.
“Come on in out of the heat before you melt. If it’s this hot now, what’ll it be like in August?”
“Don’t get me started about August.” Because of the gulf heating up in the summer, August was a prime month for hurricanes.
“Can I fix you something? A drink maybe? Iced tea with a sprig of mint?”
He shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“You shore are. At thirty-five, you’re as tall and handsome as ever.”
“Why do you remind me of my age every chance you get?”
“Maybe because it’s time you stopped grieving so hard for your pretty Miss Noelle.”
He tensed.
She stopped, realizing he wasn’t the sort to encourage sympathy. “Life is short,” she said.
“I have someone new in my life.” He stepped into the welcoming cool of the wide central hall. “Her name’s Alicia Butler. You’ll meet her soon. She’s a real lady. Someone the family will be proud of.”
Noonoon shut the door behind him. “I’m real glad. So, what brings you all the way down here from New Orleans?”
“My grandfather. He’s so deaf he’s hard to talk to over the phone. I thought we had things settled, but this morning he was saying he was better and wanted to stay here on his own.” Deliberately Logan refrained from mentioning Cici.
“Mr. Pierre, he be napping upstairs. But he’ll be mighty pleased, he will…that you’re here…since we don’t see much of you these days, you bein’ such a busy, important man and all and living in New Orleans.”
“Napping? Where is she, then?” Logan asked.
“Miss Cici?” Noonoon inquired a little too innocently.
Logan nodded. “Who else?”
“I knew it wouldn’t take you long…as soon as you heard about Miss Cici. There shore isn’t nothing like a rich older man taking an interest in a beautiful, younger woman for getting the rest of his family’s hackles up, now is there?”
“That’s not why…”
Her intelligent, black eyes regarding him intently, Noonoon placed her hands on her wide hips. So, Cici had already won Noonoon over.
“When you heard about Miss Cici, you come down here faster than that lazy hare sprinting at the last second to catch that tortoise in that story I used to read to you two boys. Why, I’ll never forget that last summer she was here. Miss Cici, I mean. She was eighteen and just the prettiest little thing I ever saw.”
Logan wished to hell he couldn’t remember the way slanting sunlight had washed Cici’s breasts with light and shadow as she’d stood in her pirogue the first day he’d come home. When she’d seen him, she’d jumped out of the boat and had run into the woods, her long legs flying gracefully. When he’d followed her, she’d said hi and her dark eyes had sparkled with such joy, she’d bewitched him. After that, she’d been too shy to say more, and, hell, so had he.
Logan’s eyes narrowed, and Noonoon changed tack.
“She only be here a week, Miss Cici, and Mr. Pierre, he already plum crazy about her.”
“He told me,” Logan said coldly, imagining Cici preying on the vulnerable old man.
“He been doing real good. I know you wants him to move to New Orleans and all…”
“To a fabulous assisted living arrangement near my house that I can personally supervise.”
“But places like that aren’t home, and we all know how busy you be. How often could you get yourself over to see him? Mr. Pierre, he be happy here. Old people at those homes just sit and stare.”
“You can’t take care of him day and night. You have your own family.”
Since the house was open to the public, Noonoon’s main job was as a housekeeper, not a caregiver to his grandfather. She’d agreed to help with him temporarily.
“Well, now that Miss Cici is here…”
“She’s not staying.”
“Well, she sing and play the piano for him every day. She talk to him. Most nights they eat dinner together. She cooks. You remember how she loves to cook.”
“The way she runs around all over the world, she won’t be here that long.”
“You sure about that? She shore is settlin’ in. Says she’s tired of all that running, that she’s had enough pain to last her a lifetime. And she have her book to write.”
“Not another book. I hope she’s focusing on something that has nothing to do with me this time.”
“She hasn’t mentioned you.”
He wasn’t reassured. Cici’s book on the oil industry in Louisiana after Katrina had made Claiborne Energy look bad. Had she mentioned even once how many people had jobs because of Claiborne Oil? No, her book had been full of pictures of rusting pipelines and oil-covered wildlife and shots of boats on water that used to be land with captions blaming companies like Claiborne Energy for the state’s vanishing marshlands.
“And she wants to see about her uncle Bos and all,” Noonoon was saying. “He’s not too strong, you know, after his treatments. Stubborn cuss, though. She calls and calls him, but he still won’t speak to her. You’d think after all these years, he’d forgive her. All she ever did was be friends with you and Jake.”
Guilt made a muscle in his jaw pull. So, she was still estranged from her uncle. Just like he and Jake were estranged from each other…because of that summer. Not that most decent people in these parts thought Bos was worth knowing. Still, he was her uncle. He’d taken her in when she was orphaned.
Bos and Grandpre’s enmity had sharpened over the issue of Bos’s cockfighting. Once fighting cocks had become illegal, the two had had fewer issues to quarrel over.
“Cici said she wants to live somewhere quiet, and you of all people know the garçonnière is mighty quiet.”
“Y
ou gave her the garonnire? My old rooms?” He was shouting, and he never shouted. Not even when someone as hard as Mitchell Butler tried to screw Claiborne Energy for millions.
“Mr. Pierre, he be the one who rent it to her,” she defended herself softly.
Remembering the cute red Miata parked by the two-story octagonal building, Logan’s pulse began to thud. So, the dangerous, flashy sports car was hers. Why was that a surprise? Cici had a reckless streak. And no wonder…with that trapper cockfighting, swamp-rat of an uncle who’d raised her, mainly by neglecting her.
If his grandfather had been himself he would know that Cici couldn’t be dedicated to him in any real way. No, she probably had some secret agenda.
“Sorry I raised my voice,” Logan whispered, straining for control. “This isn’t your fault. Or hers. It’s mine—for not moving Grandpère sooner. I’ll deal with her now.”
“Oh, Miss Cici, she don’t like anybody bothering her in the afternoon. Not unless it’s an emergency. You see, she writes when Mr. Pierre naps. Then at four she and Mr. Pierre, they give the last tour together. I reckon she be free to talk around five.”
“How can he manage walking so far in his condition?”
Noonoon’s sharp look made him wince as he remembered he hadn’t seen his grandfather in a month.
“Miss Cici got him off his walker. Gave him a cane and bought him a new, lightweight wheelchair. She hired Mr. Buzz to build ramps everywhere. She pushes Pierre when he be tired. With the ramps he can get up to all the slave cabins now.”
More ramps? Logan’s pulse in his temple had speeded up. He didn’t believe Cici had come home to care for his grandfather. She had never known how to take proper care of herself. No way could she take care of Pierre. Not for the long haul.
His grandfather needed dedicated nurses and the latest, modern, long-term care, and he was going to have them.
More to the point: his grandfather was his responsibility.
The sooner he dealt with Cici and sent her packing, the better.
Two
Cici turned off the hot water and sighed. For the first time in a long time, she felt good, surprisingly good. Almost at peace with herself.
Maybe taking a break from her cameras and all the death she’d seen in war zones and coming home had been the right decision after all.
She stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel from the rack and flung it on the floor. Planting her bare feet with their hot pink nails on the thick terry cloth, she sucked in a breath and savored the sensual feel of warm water rushing down her breasts and belly and thighs onto the towel.
Her toes curled into the soft terry in sheer delight. She, who’d lived for months in tents with no running water, appreciated a hot shower in a safe, familiar locale as the luxuries they truly were. Whipping a second towel free, she wound it around her curly, wet hair and began to rub.
The windows were open. The sweetness of the faint breeze that brought the scents of magnolia and crepe myrtle and pine through the second-story windows caused her to shiver.
Frogs sang. No, they roared in chorus right along with the bull alligators after the rain last night when she’d taken Pierre’s pirogue and had paddled it out into the brooding swamp to watch the herons and egrets and buzzards flying home to their nests.
She squeezed her eyes shut and listened. She could almost hear the stirring of moss in the cypress trees.
“Aah,” she murmured, sighing heavily and yet very happily. She knew she was procrastinating, that she should be at the computer writing, but she couldn’t resist taking a moment to appreciate fully the bliss of being home after years of exile.
Writers had so many excuses for not writing. Life versus work was a biggie. How could you write if you did not let yourself experience life?
Content to procrastinate, she took in a deep breath and then another. Until this particular, miraculous moment, for such moments of true awareness were small miracles, she’d never let herself admit how much she’d longed to come home and see Belle Rose again. For always, always Belle Rose, ever since she’d been orphaned at eight and brought to live in her Uncle Bos’s shack on marshy land that bordered the Claibornes’ superior property Belle Rose had stood like a vision of paradise in her imagination.
There was no place for her at Belle Rose, yet she’d always wanted to belong. The closest she’d ever come to that had been when Uncle Bos had worked briefly as a part-time gardener for the Claibornes, and she’d had free run of the place. That’s when she’d formed the habit of following Logan everywhere any time he was home.
“What the hell?” the deep, too-familiar voice of the present master of Belle Rose roared as lustily as any bull alligator.
For a second or two she felt the same rush of adrenaline in her stomach she’d known when that bullet in Afghanistan had whizzed by her face, missing her by mere inches.
You had to get close to death to film it.
She opened her eyes, and when they fastened on the tall, broad-shouldered man, who was in her bedroom, she screamed.
For nine years she’d imagined what clever thing she’d say or do if she ever saw Logan Claiborne again. She’d give him a piece of her mind, for one thing. But in this long, nightmarish moment, she just stood where she was like a dumbstruck idiot. Vaguely she noted that his eyes were as wide with conflicting emotions as hers probably were.
If he’d taken a single step toward her or said something clever and belittling, she would have screamed again. But since he was as paralyzed as she, she did nothing. Absolutely nothing.
She just stood there without a stitch on and let him gape at her. For the record, and she being a journalist kept minute records, a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings and visual images did storm through her. At first, they flew so fast and hard she couldn’t focus on any particular memory. Still, for a second or two she felt keenly in touch with her younger, more vulnerable self—that naive, innocent eighteen-year-old girl who’d loved him, trusted him and had been shattered by his callous treatment.
How could he have misused her so? They’d grown up together. She’d always had a crush on Jake, his wilder twin. Logan had been more like a brother to her, the brother who’d mainly ignored her but with whom she’d felt safe and comfortable around because no powerful childish crush got in the way and had made her shy around him.
He’d played in the swamp with her when she’d been a child. He’d taught her to tease alligators, collect egret feathers, trap crawfish. Then they’d grown up, and she’d given up her infatuation for Jake and had fallen in love with Logan. Hadn’t he really, always been her hero? Then he’d made his move, and soon after, her fantasy world had come crashing down around her.
In this very room, or at least the bedroom where he stood, she’d lain naked beneath Logan, warmed by his larger body, never guessing he’d made love to her to save his brother. For an instant those fleeting, pulsing moments of cherished togetherness after he’d taken her virginity became too vividly real, stinging her with raw pain and fresh heartbreak all over again. All through those long summer nights, he’d made love to her again and again.
Every night she’d waited for Bos to go to his bar. Then she’d run through the woods to the garçonnière. She’d felt so piercingly alive in Logan’s arms. And every night their passion had built.
She’d believed he’d loved her—until that last night when Jake had found them together and Logan had told her why he’d really slept with her—to save Jake from making a misalliance. Then Logan had walked out on her, and her fairy tale had ended.
For days she’d believed he’d come back and tell her he was sorry, tell her he loved her. How little she’d known back then of men.
When she’d called him two months later in the fall to talk, before she could tell him her news, he’d silenced her by coldly informing her he’d married Noelle.
She’d needed to talk to him. She’d felt so alone when she’d hung up the phone knowing she had to face a difficult situation by hers
elf. So abandoned. Because of him, for years she’d hated all men, especially him.
At some point, she’d quit blaming men in general for his crimes, but she’d clung to her intense dislike of him.
But the shock of seeing him like this, with his cold, blue, too-adult eyes burning every part of her body, from her pert nipples to the soft, damp brush of gold between her legs, was so powerful, even her hatred could not compare.
Finally, she regained enough presence of mind to remember her towel. Scowling at him, she leaned down to get it and wrapped it around her with jerky, big movements, making sure she covered the moon-shaped scar on her abdomen first.
Even so, when she looked up, guiltily, warily, she found his male eyes still blazing too hotly with the unwanted memory of her naked body, and his gaze made her own nerves buzz. But covering herself only seemed to intensify the raw, unwanted intimacy between them.
Blushing while fighting not to remember those hot summer nights they’d shared in this very bedroom, she swallowed and tried to make her voice fierce and defiant. “You should have knocked, damn you.”
“I did.”
“Then you should have waited until I answered.”
“Yes,” he agreed, finally having the decency to look away. His gaze drifted over her desk that was littered with papers and index cards and photographs, some of him. “I should have.”
A flush of dark color climbed his cheeks when he saw the newspaper clippings of his own ravaged face. The shot, which he couldn’t stop staring at, had been taken shortly after Noelle’s death.
Why, oh why did I leave that particular picture out?
“I didn’t think,” he said. “I never thought you’d be…”
“Nude?”
His angry blue gaze snapped back to her face. “Why didn’t you lock the door? And how could you just stand there…flaunting yourself, like you liked me seeing you.”
“Stop right there!” Heat engulfed her and not the good, soothing kind. This fire was a fury that devoured her.
“Damn you! This is not my fault! Nothing is my fault! You barged in here! And because you did, you found me stepping out of my shower, as I have every right to do…”
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