by Ann Major
Irony of ironies, here Noelle was in Texas. Too near Louisiana. Too near Garret and...his son, Louis.
Her family still hated Garret. She tried to tell herself she hated him, too. Not that he could ever forgive any of them. And there was Louis, his darling golden-haired boy whom she loved as her own. Noelle closed her eyes, her dark lashes fluttering with pain, as she thought of never seeing him again.
Jess threw the bouquet.
Squeals of excitement from the other women rang in the foyer.
When Noelle opened her eyes, the bouquet was dancing toward her like a kite with silken streamers. “No...”
Noelle grabbed the newel post and glanced frantically upstairs.
From the landing, Tad Jackson glared down at her like an ominous giant. His great male body blocked any chance of escape to the deserted upper regions of the ranch house.
With horror Noelle watched the bouquet hover above her, as if in slow motion, before it fell.
White blossoms and purple ribbons grazed her arm, her gown; the bouquet bounced off her hand and fell to the ground. A fragile cloud of sweet perfume from the flowers enveloped her.
Everyone in the room was staring at her.
Then a purple dynamo of satin skirts and frilled petticoats dived toward Noelle and pounced on the bouquet. It was Lizzie, Tad’s little girl. She was bright and sparkling—as loving by nature as Garret’s darling Louis. Lizzie’s hair ribbons had come loose and hung crazily over her brow as she beamed up at Noelle.
“Why didn’t you catch it?” Lizzie lifted the flowers to Noelle. “It’s yours, Noelle!”
Noelle, who’d always loved children, wanted to shrink from the eager face, from the tiny outstretched hands filled with blossoms.
The flowers made Noelle feel vaguely ill and strange, as if they were funereal blossoms instead of softly scented wedding flowers.
“No... Give it to someone else. Anyone else…”
The other girls were pressing close, clamoring for Lizzie to throw the bouquet again. Then, as always, Jess seized command, calmed the women, gently took the bouquet from Lizzie and placed it into Noelle’s cold, shaking hands. “They struck your hand. Take them, darling,” she whispered.
Noelle smiled stiffly. “You shouldn’t have...”
In a louder tone that floated to every corner in the room, Jess said, “Seek your destiny.” Then she kissed Noelle’s temple.
Noelle felt trapped. She could do nothing but stay where she was. She could do nothing but watch Jess rush up the stairs to the man she loved.
As they embraced, Noelle had never felt more alone or more lost.
She looked helplessly at the white flowers. What she wanted was to have what Jess had—to become the bride of the man she loved and the mother of his sweet child.
Noelle no longer saw the flowers. They were blurred. For her such a marriage would never be possible.
She tried to imagine Beaumont’s face.
Instead she saw Garret’s.
In her mind’s eye she saw her purple satin gown discarded in a heap upon the soft ground beside a brown bayou. Her sparkling amethyst clips lay on top of that crumpled gown. She was wild and gloriously free, running along secret, never-forgotten paths. Garret was racing after her, but she didn’t let him catch her until she had reached their secret place.
She caught her breath.
Mon Dieu.
She could never go back. Not when it was impossible for her to be indifferent to Garret.
And yet Papa said Grand-mère was not well, that she had never completely recovered from her stroke and seemed to be failing gradually.
“It’s you she misses, chere,” Mama had said as well. “You kept her young. For so many years we thought she was invincible. But she’s not. She’s dying of a broken heart.”
How well Noelle knew that feeling.
Chapter One
A bullet ricocheted against the second story of the brick building. There were screams from the crowd. A pregnant woman fainted. Everyone else scrambled for cover.
“Man, this is better than Mardi Gras!” a bystander shouted before a patrolman ordered him on his way.
Another bullet splintered a brick.
“He ain’t much of a shot, no.”
“Do you think he’ll kill her?”
“Maybe.” The single word held exhilaration. “He ain’t no soft-shell crab, him! He’s a hard man, yes. He robbed a bank on Canal Street.”
“And now he’s holed up in that shop. The owner, Noelle Martin, is his hostage. He’s been shooting out of that window up there.”
The window was darkly shuttered and laced with black grill.
“Okay, people! Move it. Before somebody gets hurt!” shouted a fat cop in blue.
It was a cold November afternoon—bleak and misty. Royal Street was jammed with a dozen police cars, their lights blinking like fiery diadems, their radios squawking with static and calls. The sidewalks that ran beside the expensive antique shops kept filling with gawkers despite police efforts to keep them clear.
On the edge of the craziness, away from the other policemen, Detective Garret Cagan stood apart, a tense and solitary figure. He was lean and tall, well over six feet. Although his leather jacket protected his broad shoulders, his black head was hatless in the drizzle. His dark face was grim as he speculated on the pattern of the bullet holes high above his head in the brick wall.
Something was wrong about those holes; something was wrong about the entire setup. He could feel it in his bones. And he blamed Noelle.
He thought that if it hadn’t been for her, he would be miles from the French Quarter, miles from her exclusive antique shop, on his way home now. Out in his pirogue maybe—alone on his slow, snake-dark bayou. Instead he was standing on city pavement in the rain with his stomach knotting in fear.
Redheads! They were a different breed!
Especially rich ones who thought they owned the world. Especially Noelle Martin. She was impossible, fickle, spoiled, unpredictable. She was the most supremely maddening woman Garret had ever encountered. And he’d known her for most of his life. He’d been five years old when she’d crawled out of her cradle and stormed into the center of his life. From that moment, she’d done nothing except cause turmoil and grief for him.
Once. No, twice, he’d made the worst mistake of his life by falling in love with her. Or perhaps he’d always loved her. She’d broken his heart, nearly broken him. He was still paying a bitter price for that emotion. She was the one woman he was determined to avoid.
And yet... Ever since they’d been kids growing up in the lush bayou country an hour outside of New Orleans, every time she got into trouble, he’d always wound up saving her. He’d saved her when she was three and had tried to pet that gator and had lost her balance and fallen into the bayou with him. When she was five she’d been playing with matches in her playhouse and set it on fire. Garret had barely gotten her out in time, and then the Martins had blamed him for setting the fire that had devoured not only the playhouse, but also a live oak and nearly Martin House itself. When she was eight she’d climbed a trellis to peep through the shutters of her parents’ bedroom while they’d been indulging in an amorous nap. The trellis had come loose, and Garret had caught her when wood splintered and she and the jasmine came tumbling down on top of him. Noelle had run off. Senator Wade Martin had stumbled outside, wrapped in a towel, his face purple with rage and discovered Garret in the coils of jasmine. Garret had taken the rap for that, too.
Even on that last terrible night two years ago, Garret had tried everything he knew to save her. To save their baby. His baby. The child she hadn’t wanted.
Garret shifted his gaze from its intense scrutiny of the puzzling bullet holes to the window from which the shots had been fired.
For a frozen half second he saw her beautiful white face, her mass of red hair, her immense eyes, wide with terror. He’d seen that look before—too many times—and it was her face, not his dead wife’s, that
he’d dreamed of every night for the past two years.
Noelle—vital, alive, incorrigible. The same Noelle who’d followed him everywhere in the bayou until she’d come to know it almost as well as he had.
Only now she was even lovelier than he remembered. Seeing her, he felt a sudden overwhelming sensation in his gut. It was like an impact, like receiving a blow. First he was cold. Then his skin seemed seared by flame. Something hard and unbreakable was flying to pieces inside him. He had fought to forget her, but in that moment he knew he never would.
When Noelle jumped back from the glass, or was yanked back, he knew she’d seen him and been equally upset by his presence.
As quickly as it had happened, the moment was over, but it made his stomach coil in a fresh spasm of terror. His palms were damp; his heart was thudding. The narrow walls of the street were closing in upon him like a trap. He had to do something. Noelle was up there, in danger, helpless, a prisoner at the mercy of some lunatic with a gun.
The wild desperation wouldn’t leave Garret.
Damn her. He couldn’t take another second of this. She always made him crazy—as crazy as she was. He had to get her out.
Garret glanced at the darkened shop. At the fire escape, the windows, the doors. She’d never been worth all that she’d cost him. Never.
The captain would can him for disobeying orders.
It didn’t matter.
Somehow he had to get inside. Before it got dark. Before she did something wild and it was too late.
Damn her for always doing this to him.
It never occurred to him to blame the bank robber for this chaos instead of Noelle. He knew her too well. She’d been the rich little girl with the penchant for trouble in the big plantation house, Martin House, which bordered his land. She’d been high and mighty—too good for him—until she got herself into some scrape. He’d been shy and unsure then, maybe because he was only the cook’s son who’d done odd jobs around the place. His brawn had been put to work toting fifty-pound fertilizer sacks, hefting chain saws to cut down dead trees. But he’d been dazzled by the little girl with the bright, corkscrew curls, whose idolatrous gaze followed him when nobody was looking, the same little girl who’d stolen his pirogue once and gotten herself lost in the swamp. Her family had been ill with anxiety until Garret had found her and brought her safely home. Then, as always, they’d blamed him, especially her grandmother—for having left his pirogue where Noelle could get it.
He knew how crazy Noelle could drive a person, how unpredictable she could be when some cockeyed notion got into her head. There’d been a score of people in that bank who’d minded their own business during the robbery. Not Noelle. He’d gotten the story straight from a dozen witnesses that she’d tackled the bank robber as he was running out, taken his money and bolted with it.
Only the guy had caught her. Now he was holed up with her in her shop.
The fat patrolman whispered something into Garret’s ear.
Garret’s black eyes grew even blacker. The line of his mouth narrowed as his hand touched the holster of the semiautomatic he wore concealed beneath his leather jacket.
“She what?” Normally Garret’s voice was a slurred Cajun drawl. The two-word question was an explosion.
“She said she won’t come out, Detective Cagan. The guy said he’d let her go half an hour ago, but she’s afraid we’ll shoot him.”
“Tell her—”
Another bullet zipped into the brick wall above Garret and sent bits of mortar and brick sprinkling down into his black hair.
“Dammit!”
Garret and the other officer dived for cover. Again Garret saw that the bullet was too high. Way too high. For the last half hour, the bullets had been high like that.
Suddenly, using the instincts of a cop who’d been on the street a long time, Garret knew.
He was almost sure. On the offhand chance he was wrong, he grabbed his shotgun out of his pickup and racked a shell into the chamber. “Forget trying to tell her anything, Johnson. I’m going in. Alone.”
“What about backup?”
“Alone.”
“But the captain said—”
“To hell with the captain. Give me five minutes. Ten max! If I don’t have her out by then, come after me.”
Garret’s rugged broad-shouldered form was loping lithely across the pools of water in the narrow street when a gray Mercedes braked to a stop behind the police cars. A tall blond man jumped out. He was elegant, not like the common rough-and-tumble crowd who kept pushing at the police barricades. Not like Garret.
The man’s smooth, patrician features were those of an aristocrat. His slicked-back hair was immaculate and perfect. When he spotted Garret, his pale blue eyes frosted with a layer of ice. He picked his way over the barricades, lifting his legs delicately. Then he hurried toward Garret, tiptoeing across dank puddles, barking orders and questions with the arrogance of a man who’d been born so rich he thought that it was his inalienable right to boss everyone.
“Cagan! What the hell are you doing here? If something happens to Noelle, I’ll personally guarantee you’ll never work in New Orleans again. I’ll close Mannie’s down. You won’t even be able to get a job on a garbage truck.”
Garret stopped and propped his shotgun on his shoulder. It was harder than hell to get Beaumont so mad he’d yell like a common street fighter. Garret knew because he’d tried often enough as a boy.
“Luckily, sanitation isn’t my line. Luckily, I no longer take orders from you. Nor from any Vincent.”
“Damn you, Cagan.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Beaumont. Missed you at the high-school reunion.”
“She’s my fiancée!”
The silence that fell between the two men was pregnant with bitter memories. Garret fought to keep his cool. “Right.” Garret smiled. “Lucky lady.”
“She never wanted you!”
Garret laughed softly. “Right again. Noelle prefers you, a guy who keeps his pompous bottom glued to the seat of his chair behind a desk in his daddy’s bank, counting his daddy’s money. How fascinated would she be if you didn’t have your daddy’s money, Vincent?”
Beaumont’s pale face went even paler. “Why you bast— I want you off this case.”
“That’s too bad because I just put myself in charge.” Garret turned to the patrolman. “Johnson, I thought I ordered the street cleared.”
Two officers grabbed Beaumont whose outraged nasal yelps followed Garret. “Cagan, you always were white trash.”
Garret’s mouth thinned. He’d cut his teeth on that particular insult. The image of his beautiful, vital Noelle being tied to that white-faced wimp for the rest of her life nauseated Garret.
When he glimpsed Beaumont’s thin features reflected in the window of the antique shop, Garret jammed the butt of his shotgun viciously into the reflection, shattering the glass. Then he climbed inside, mindless of the last falling shards that sprinkled down on the back of his leather jacket.
The bottom floor of the elegant shop was empty. Garret threaded his way silently through the darkened aisles of opulent French salon furniture, pastries of gilt, whims in marble, and tapestries, all laid out as though they were items in a supermarket. Every object in the shop was special, rare, one-of-a-kind, like the woman who had carefully selected them.
Since the gun had been fired from the top floor, Garret decided to look for Noelle there. He raced past the elevator, taking the stairs instead. When he reached the top floor, he threw himself against the wall, panting to catch his breath. His cheek felt hot and sweaty against the cool bricks as he waited, listening to the silence.
Suddenly he kicked the door of the stairwell open, then jumped aside and took cover behind the wall again while the metal door clanged noisily.
Nothing. Not a sound other than the echoes of the door. Not a single bullet blasting the open doorway.
He was right.
Damn her. Only Noelle...
“Noelle!”
No answer.
“It’s me, Garret. I know I’m asking the impossible, but I’m coming in, so don’t do anything crazy.”
The wooden floor creaked as he moved across it.
“Go away!” Her voice came out of the darkness. It was hushed and faint with what sounded like fright. “He’ll kill me.”
Garret laughed low in his throat. She never gave up, even when she knew she was cornered.
“The hell he will, you little liar! I’ll kill you myself for pulling a stunt like this!”
Garret rushed inside. He pulled the door closed, started to go after her, then hesitated, remembering all he had was ten minutes. Maybe not that much. The guys down there were jumpy, ready for action, just as he’d been.
He turned, locked the door, crouching all the time, keeping his body hidden in the tangled confusion of ancient brass beds, gilt mirrors and porcelains.
He heard a panicked scuffle at the other end of the shop and raced for it. When he reached the far corner of the room, no one was there.
A gun glinted from a table beside a set of antique Venetian wineglasses. A black duffel bag, half-open, with loose green bills spilling out of it lay beside the gun. He grabbed the bag, accidentally smashing a glass.
A gasp of horror came from above him.
He looked up and saw slender shapely legs encased in dark hose disappearing up the ladder into the darkness. He caught a glimpse of sexy black lace underwear.
He threw his shotgun and the bag to the floor and sprang across the shop, climbing up the ladder with the quick grace of an athlete and then grabbed her by the ankle.
A black high-heeled shoe came off and struck him above the eye.
“Ouch!” he growled. “Damn you!”
She kicked wildly. Her other heel nicked him in the forehead. The blow made him madder at her than he’d ever been. Blood trickled down the side of his face.
He merely tightened his grip on her ankle. “Noelle, you’re kicking my face to pulp!” More softly, he added, “Chere, I know he’s gone! I know you deliberately let him get away! I came in here to help you get out of this scrape.” She tried to scramble free and accidentally kicked his cheek again, but despite the pain his grip remained iron hard. “I’ll book you if you kick me again.”