by Jenna Mills
Jenna Mills
A LITTLE BIT GUILTY
This one’s for Simon, the most amazing companion ever.
This was our last book together, and whenever I think of
Gabe’s story, I’ll think of all the sunny afternoons you
stretched out alongside my computer and purred while
I wrote. I miss you, big guy; thanks for four beautiful
years. I wish there could have been more,
but love never dies.
And as always, for my husband and my daughter—
for the smiles, the patience, the inspiration and,
most of all, the love.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Chapter 1
A ssistant District Attorney Gabriel Fontenot did his best work in the dark.
Standing silently in an old warehouse that had been submerged during hurricane Katrina, he refused to let himself move, barely let himself breathe. Much of New Orleans had recovered. Homes were being rebuilt. Stores had restocked their shelves. Music again pulsed through the city, a touch of Hispanic added to the blues. Even tourists once more swarmed the French Quarter.
The city who charmed by day and seduced by night was on her way back.
But here on the fringes, squalor remained.
The night bled in, thick and suffocating despite the early-March breeze swirling outside. Away from the city, moonlight seeped in through the windows, but the smear of mud and grime revealed little more than shapes and shadows.
A metal wall guarded Gabe’s back, stacks of empty crates took care of the rest. No one would find him unless he wanted them to. But Gabe did not allow himself to relax. Either a man learned from his mistakes, or he lost.
Gabe had no intention of losing.
The emaciated dogs had run off, leaving silence to throb through the warehouse, broken only by the occasional horn of a tugboat. There was no trace of the waitress who’d insisted they meet privately. Fear had flared in her eyes when she’d realized who he was and what he wanted. She’d paled, panicked.
And inside, for the first time in weeks, Gabe had smiled.
She knew something. A name, a place, any little detail that could link the senseless murder of a fellow waitress to the high-profile restaurateur who’d written both their paychecks. That was all Gabe wanted. A scrap, a crumb.
He could take it from there.
Young and scared, she’d refused to speak to him in the French Quarter restaurant where she continued to wait tables despite the murder of her coworker. Unwilling to so much as take his drink order, she’d gone on a sudden break—but not before slipping him a cocktail napkin with detailed instructions about where she would talk to him.
Restless, Gabe moved away from the crates. His watch showed that almost thirty minutes had passed. If the waitress was going to show, she would have done so by now.
And if she was going to approach him, she wouldn’t stop moving every time he did.
Through the darkness he heard the muffled movement behind him. And when he stopped, it stopped. And, damn it, he was so freaking tired of running in circles and chasing phantoms. Him. Gabriel Fontenot. The man who could bluff an opponent into folding, even when Gabe had nothing but a handful of trash.
It had been a long time since he’d held anything else.
Jaw clenched, he retraced his steps, confident the maze of crates would conceal him until it was too late for his pursuer to realize that the hunter had become the hunted.
He was a lawyer by training, a man of tailored suits, leather briefcases and expensive loafers. It was his cousin who was the cop. But Cain had taught him well.
Against the trickle of moonlight, the silhouette stood without moving. Except for the breathing. Gabe heard each rasp, felt them ricochet through his body. Fear had a taste and feel unto itself and, despite the darkness, he knew his target realized the tables had turned. Tall, he noted. Far too tall to be the petite waitress he’d met earlier that evening.
Quietly he lunged—and the shadow bolted.
Gabe gave chase, grabbing the high-powered flashlight from his pocket and flicking it on. The shadow boxer-danced around a shopping cart and sent it careening toward Gabe. Shoving against it, he sent it crashing to its side as he veered around an old piano just as the figure darted behind more crates. Gabe charged, sending the stack crashing down.
The distorted grunt told him they’d found their target.
Rounding the pile, he saw the man scrambling to his feet. “Freeze,” he called. “I have a gun.” He didn’t, but the punk didn’t know that.
The beam of Gabe’s flashlight caught the man who’d been following him, revealing dark jeans and a bulky field jacket with a fleur-de-lis across the back, a baseball cap pulled low.
“Raise your hands and turn around,” Gabe instructed. “Nice and slow.”
From somewhere in the warehouse, the dogs were barking, but Gabe ignored them and focused on his man. Two weeks before, the intruder trying to break into his house had gotten away. He had no intention of history repeating itself.
“Now,” he said, directing his light to the man’s hands, where he saw gloves, but no gun, “don’t make me ask again.”
The man didn’t. He called Gabe’s bluff and ran.
On a low roar Gabe lunged after him, keeping the fleur-de-lis locked in the beam of his flashlight. The front door was less than ten feet away. If the idiot got outside—
With a burst of speed Gabe launched himself like a veteran linebacker driving a rookie receiver into the turf.
The impact of body against body jolted through him. He felt more than heard the other man’s breath leave his body as they slammed into the concrete. But he didn’t relax, didn’t pull back, instead used his weight to pin the fool to the ground. “You have exactly five seconds to start talking.”
The body beneath his stilled.
“Three seconds,” Gabe gritted out, pressing his hands against shoulders that felt surprisingly thin. That’s when he noticed the hair. Dislodged during the struggle, the baseball cap fell to the side, revealing a swingy fall of brown hair.
Soft. Silky.
“What the he—” he started, but the body beneath his twisted, and a pair of tilted gray eyes met his.
“Gabe.”
The sound of her voice, hoarser than usual, slammed into him. Then came the burn. It started low and sliced fast, obliterating everything but the sight of her sprawled beneath him. Her skin was flushed, her mouth slightly open, just as it had been—
He blocked the memory, focused only on her eyes, wide and dark and drenched with a wildness that fired his blood—and resurrected every fragmented image he’d tried to destroy. Every touch. Every kiss. Every lie.
Every betrayal.
“Well, well, well,” he drawled, because for the first time in months, he no longer held a hand of junk. He held her. “If it’s not lady justice in the flesh.”
The district attorney’s little darling. The media’s champion. The common man’s avenging angel. Evangeline Rousseau—the woman who’d reeled him in with the finesse of a pro, then hung him out to dry.
“You just can’t stay away from me, can you, catin?” The slow smile was the first to reach his mouth in a damn long time. “Even when you should.”
No.
The word scraped through her, but
Evangeline refused to give it voice, just as she refused to beg or apologize. Not to this man. He would see only what he wanted to see. Believe only what he wanted to believe.
Especially when it came to her.
Against the throb of pain at her temple she narrowed her eyes and tried to reconcile her last sight of him—clean-shaven in a devastatingly well-cut tuxedo—with the man who held her pinned to the concrete. The attorney with a taste for Armani wore a knit cap over his dark hair, with whiskers obscuring his jaw and violence glittering in his eyes.
It was a far cry from the way he’d looked at her once, when he’d found a way to touch her without lifting a hand.
The vertigo wobbled closer, no matter how hard she tried to ignore the cold soaking into her stomach and thighs. Once his touch had been one of friendship and warmth. Then heat. Now his hands curled around her upper arms, while his thighs sandwiched her lower back.
“This is a good look for you,” he said, and if she’d had any doubt about his state of mind, his deceptively quiet voice took care of that. It was the attorney’s voice, the signature gentle lull he used during opening statements to bond with the jury. Just before he went for the jugular. “If Judge Guidry had gotten a look at you like this, you might not have lost—”
And she wasn’t going to let him do it. Wasn’t going to let him attack, wasn’t going to let him pretend that he was the victim.
“Get off me—” She twisted against him…but the warehouse twisted with her, started to spin. “Th-this isn’t…what you think,” she managed, but the vertigo tilted harder.
Not much light broke the shadows, only that from the beam of his flashlight. But it was enough to reveal the slow smile curving his lips. “Oh, but I think it is.”
Maybe she should have been afraid. Most women would have been. He’d caught her red-handed—again. They were alone, and he’d been pushed too far. He knew too much, would try to cram pieces together until they fit, even if they had nothing to do with each other.
“We’re finally alone,” he drawled, “just like you wanted from the start. So tell me. What happens now?”
The quickening was as violent as it was automatic. She couldn’t remember the last day she’d awakened without thinking—
But that wasn’t true. She could remember. It had been summer.
She’d been eighteen years old.
“You have no idea what I wanted,” she said—she’d made very, very sure of that. But the words came out thicker than she wanted. The pain came next, stabbing with sharp streaks of blue and white. “I—I…can’t breathe,” she managed.
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you followed me into a dark warehouse,” he said, and though it was Gabe who spoke, it was not the man she’d met four months before who she heard. “No telling what could happen…who you might run into.” Some said that man no longer existed—too much whiskey, too many pills.
“Maybe even someone who doesn’t know when to stop,” he added quietly and, for the first time, she questioned the wisdom of following him into the shadows.
Shifting, he raised up on his knees and eased his weight from her body.
She seized the opportunity and tried to push from beneath him, realized her mistake too late.
Within seconds she was flat on her back, and he still straddled her body.
“Tell me something, catin. Was this part of your plan, too? Getting me on top of you?”
The French word for doll scraped. She wanted to shove against him, to push him off her body and—
That was just it. There was no and. She couldn’t go back and change what had already happened. She couldn’t erase the fact that he’d found her here, in this warehouse. Following him.
She could only pick up the pieces and move forward, the way she’d been doing since the night he’d frozen her out of his life three months before.
“What’s wrong? Last time wasn’t enough for you?” It was the attorney’s voice again, pressing, driving for a confession. “My trust…my respect…my job—you still want more?” Bracing his hands against the concrete, he leaned closer. “Who sent you here?” His voice was razor soft. “Whose puppet are you this time?”
The warehouse started to spin. Slowly at first. Faster. “Did it ever occur to you,” she whispered, “that I’m here to help?”
His eyes gleamed. “And just how are you going to do that?”
“I—I got a phone call.” She chose her words carefully, even as they tried to scatter. “A little over an hour ago. From an informant.”
Through the shadows, Gabe’s expression gave away nothing.
“They said they had information for me. About—” the victim’s named slipped away “—the murdered girl—and Marcel Lambert.”
“Male or female?”
“Female.” She swallowed against the cottony dryness. “They gave me this address…Said I’d find something interesting.”
His smile was pure, classic Gabriel Fontenot on the hunt. “So you followed me.”
Just as she’d been doing for weeks. After the discovery that Gabe’s fiancée had been selling critical information about pending cases to the highest bidder, he’d been placed on leave. He was damaged goods, a liability. By no means was he supposed to be anywhere near the delicate case they were building against Marcel Lambert—it wasn’t every day one of New Orleans’s finest stood accused of murdering a prostitute. But Gabe had been poking around, anyway, asking questions, sifting through the debris of Darci Falgoust’s shattered life.
And Evangeline wanted to know why—and what he’d found.
“Not at first.” She hedged as the sound of something falling echoed through the warehouse. She glanced toward the old piano, wished she hadn’t. Everything shifted with her, spun.
“I…waited.” Through sheer grit she kept her voice steady. “I thought I’d…” The words rolled away.
She searched for them, tried to yank them back. Didn’t understand why her voice slurred. “Thought I’d see what was going on when you came out.” For twenty-three minutes she’d stood with her back to the warehouse, watching. Or, at least, she thought it had been twenty-three minutes. But like curtains in the breeze, her memory floated in and out of focus. “But you never came out.”
Eyes flat, he eased away and crossed his arms over his chest. “So you came in after me.”
“Yes.” She blinked hard, brought the smear of red against his knuckles into focus. “You should do something about that.”
He didn’t move. “Why did you run from me?”
“It was dark—I didn’t know it was you.” To make her point, she flicked her eyes toward the stocking cap that made him look more like a meth addict than the respected attorney he’d once been. “I—I’ve never seen you like this.”
But she’d heard the rumors….
“Nice story.” His tone was mild, as it always was when a defendant wrapped up his alibi. “Now let me tell you what I see.” He hesitated, the way he so often did in the courtroom, leaving only the scream of crickets to fill the silence. “It’s late. I’ve got a meeting. But instead of my informant I find you sneaking around—my so-called colleague, who fed me dirty information less than three months ago.”
He made it sound so reprehensible, when in reality, there’d been every reason to believe he was the one compromising case after case.
“It was an Internal Affairs investigation, Gabe.” One that ultimately had led them to his lover—and almost cost Gabe his life. But when the smoke cleared, it was Val who’d lain dead. “That hardly makes me guilty of some great heinous crime.”
The cobalt of his eyes glowed. “What’s the payoff?” He kept on with the bulldog focus that had always defined him. “You think you can manipulate me again? You think proving I’m not following the rules gives you some kind of leverage over me?”
The faint scent of whiskey disturbed in ways she refused to analyze. “You’ve been drinking…” She sidestepped his questions.
“I’
ve been doing a lot of things, sweetness—you want names and dates and places? Would that help you, Evang—” His eyes warmed, even as they chilled. “Or maybe I should just call you Eve.”
The warehouse took a hard tilt to the left.
“Sorry, catin,” he drawled again, this time with another slow smile. “But I’m not interested in another apple.”
Ten seconds. That was the difference between being caught and being free. If she hadn’t slammed into the edge of a big-screen TV, Gabe would never have caught her.
“Black-and-white.” She realized. “That’s all you see, isn’t it?” All he’d ever seen. “You really want to sit here and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”
His eyes met hers. “Make someone trust me so I can hang them out to dry? Hate to break it to you, catin, but you must not have done your homework, after all.”
Oh, but she had. “What do you want from me?” She hated the way her heart kept banging against her ribs. “For me to tell you I’m sorry? I’ve—” Again the words slipped away. And again she reached for them. “I’ve already done that.” On more than one occasion. “If I recall, it didn’t do much good.”
His finger came to rest against her cheekbone. “You sure you want to know what I want?”
Maybe it was the way he asked the question. Or maybe it was the way he looked at her, touched her, the way he still straddled her. But all those reasons she had to mistrust this man blurred. “Yes.”
His eyes were flat, giving neither mercy nor reprieve nor warning. She’d played poker with him once—without one full house, one four-of-a-kind, he’d walked away with five grand.
“How about the truth,” he said. “Once and for all. How far would you have taken your little game? I think about that sometimes…How far you would have gone? You let me touch you…kiss you. You let me believe—”