A Little Bit Guilty

by Jenna Mills

  The change was immediate—in Evangeline, who let her voice trail off and her gaze lower, and in Rosemunde, who stopped laughing. Stopped smiling. Maybe even breathing.

  “Who?” Her voice was different, too; wooden almost. Scraped raw.

  Watchful, Gabe slid an arm around Evangeline as she explained. “Darci Falgoust.” Her smile was purposefully sad. “You do know her, don’t you? She said she was from here, talked about you and The Landing all the time.”

  It was a leap, but one they had to take. Gabe knew small towns. Deli-marts were gathering spots, their owners figures in everyone’s lives. Darci had even worked here; D’Ambrosia had confirmed that. It only served to reason that she and Rosemunde had shared a relationship.

  The older woman suddenly looked every year of her age. “You knew Darci Faye?” The words were no more than a broken whisper.

  “Worked with her in N’ Awlins,” Evangeline said, frowning. “She was always telling me I needed to come to Wild Berry and see for myself how a restaurant should be run.”

  Rosemunde’s eyes went disturbingly hard.

  “I still can’t believe she’s gone,” Evangeline continued when Rosemunde said nothing. She was good, convincing. If he hadn’t known better, he would have actually believed she’d known the young woman, had cared about her.

  But this time he did know better.

  “She was…” When her words trailed off, Gabe gathered Evangeline close and lifted a hand to her face.

  “You okay, darlin’?”

  Her eyes, deep and dark and touched by a sadness that looked oddly real, met his. “I will be.” The words were quiet, wistful. “But Darci won’t. And it’s just so wrong. I mean, why would Marcel want to hurt her? She loved him—and he loved her. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Gabe feathered a finger along her cheekbone as Rosemunde paled. Evangeline didn’t know the Lamberts. Gabe did, and he suspected the restaurant owner did, too.

  “Things don’t always make sense, child,” she said. “Sometimes it’s best just to accept that.” Then she turned and walked away.

  Gabe pulled Evangeline into his arms and held her, pretended to console her. “Let me watch.” He felt the tension in her body, even as she settled against his chest, the scent of powder and vanilla drifting from her hair.

  Because he wanted to bury his face, he forced himself to look away.

  “She’s at the bar,” he narrated quietly. “Talking with those two men.” He saw one of them tense, the second reach for his mobile phone. “Now she’s going back into the kitchen.”

  Evangeline started to lift her head, but he tangled a hand in her hair and eased her back against him, felt the rise and fall of her chest, the warmth of her breath against the open collar of his shirt. And when one of the men glanced their way, he lowered his face to Evangeline’s and pressed a soft kiss to her temple. “One of them’s watching,” he explained with another little kiss. This one slower. “Doesn’t look pleased.”

  Evangeline slid a hand to cup his face and pulled back, looked at him. The look in her eyes was softer than he’d seen in weeks. “Did you catch the way Rosemunde changed?”

  “Either she knows something or she’s scared,” he said, wiping the nonexistent tears from her face with a brush of his thumb.

  Evangeline’s eyes closed for a long, damning moment. “Or both.”

  “Or both,” he agreed as the jingle of the bell announced the arrival of two more men, not casually dressed like everyone else, but in dark sunglasses and gray suits. “We’ve got more friends,” he whispered, and Evangeline cut her gaze toward the small lobby, where one of the two veered toward the kitchen.

  “What is it they say about lawyers and rats?” Evangeline’s voice was dry, but the amusement leaked through.

  “Give them a crumb,” Gabe muttered.

  “Or a paycheck,” she added with a fleeting smile. “Who do you think they are?”

  “No telling. Could be local, or could be Marcel’s.” Standing guard and making sure no one blabbed. Which meant there was definitely something to blab.

  Realizing they’d fallen out of their guise, Gabe returned his hand to smooth Evangeline’s hair. “I’ll ask Jack.”

  He would have sworn she tilted into his touch. “Or they could work for someone else…someone who has something to hide.”

  Gabe worked hard not to frown.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd,” she added, “that all I did was mention Darci’s name, and everyone went on lockdown?”

  He let a finger graze her mouth. “We’d probably better start eating.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said as she picked up her fork.

  “I didn’t think I needed to.”

  The bell on the door announced the arrival of three older women. Early forties, Gabe guessed. One of them used crutches. Rosemunde met them and they all shot a quick glance toward Evangeline and Gabe before taking a table halfway across the restaurant.

  Gabe knew pressure. He knew intensity. He knew anticipation. He lived it every day in the courtroom, during voir dire, when attorneys from both sides underwent the pivotal process of selecting a jury. During opening arguments, when the courtroom would fall to a hush as the prosecutor and the defense laid out their arguments. During testimony, when the defendant took the stand. When a surprise witness made an appearance, or a piece of evidence backfired.

  He knew those moments, the waiting, when every second stretched like an eternity as an invisible cord wound tight, when the silence screamed. He knew and he craved.

  “You feel it, too,” Evangeline whispered, but he didn’t look at her, didn’t want to see her eyes. He heard enough in her voice, the quiet understanding, the subtle affirmation. Because he did feel it, everything, the taut veil of fear gripping The Landing, the hush and the waiting, the curiosity and the dread and the anticipation, but more than just the tension, he felt the craving, too. Deep inside. Here, in some stupid backwater diner, with her. Evangeline.

  And for the first time since he’d held Val in his arms as she took her last breath, something strong and vital and alive coiled through him. This, he knew. Finding the truth, chasing down justice. It wasn’t just what he was supposed to do. It was who he was.

  “One of the suits is coming,” Evangeline whispered as he lowered his mug. Slowly, with a casualness he didn’t come close to feeling, he twisted as the taller of the two approached. “Mornin’,” he drawled, “can I help you with something?”

  The man, with short dark hair and an expensively cut suit, slid off his sunglasses and looked past Gabe toward Evangeline. “You the gal who worked with Darci?”

  In an act of sheer brilliance, she put a protective hand to her stomach. “Yes.”

  The man’s lean face revealed a hollow beneath his sharp cheekbone. “That girl hurt a lot of people when she left town…even more when she got herself killed.”

  Instinctively Gabe urged Evangeline closer.

  “I can only imagine,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  His expression remained like granite. “If you’re looking to reminisce about your friend, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  The obvious scare tactic landed with the pure beauty of a hand of aces. This, Gabe knew, was why he’d insisted on coming. “Easy there,” he said, taking over. “We’re not looking for anything.”

  “Then perhaps you should be on your way,” the man said, reaching inside his suit coat.

  Three seconds, that’s all that could have passed. But in them the diner flashed away and Gabe remembered, the subtle movement and the gun, the split second between life and death. The explosion and the sound of gunfire, Val falling. It was something dark and primal that pushed him to his feet to shield Evangeline, even as the other man extracted a simple leather wallet.

  Everything inside of Gabe stilled.

  “Maybe this will help…” The man flipped open the wallet and thumbed out several bills. Hundreds. All of them crisp. New.
/>
  They landed next to Gabe’s coffee mug.

  “Oh, my,” Evangeline breathed in sheer perfection from behind him, and the sudden desire to pull her into his arms and kiss her hard rocked him.

  “We don’t need your money,” Gabe growled, but the man in the Armani suit was already striding toward Rosemunde. She glanced from him to Gabe and Evangeline, then back to the man and nodded. Then she made her way toward them, while the two men, who so clearly didn’t belong, watched.

  “I hear you’re ready for your check,” she said in an odd, whitewashed voice. But her eyes were dark, on edge.

  “Rosemunde.” Behind him, Gabe felt Evangeline move. She stood, pushed past him and made her way toward the older woman. “I—I’m so sorry…I didn’t mean to make trouble.” She reached for Rosemunde’s hand, just as she’d reached for Gabe’s that very first day. Except she didn’t shake. She clasped. “I just…I just wanted to come here, to feel close to Darci again.”

  The natural color had not returned to Rosemunde’s face, leaving two garish slashes of blush and lips the color of faded peaches. “Then, go.” With the whisper, she pulled her hand from Evangeline’s. “Please.” Turning to Gabe, she handed him the bill. “If you really were a friend of Darci’s, that’s what you’ll do. And you won’t come back.”

  Terror. It was an emotion Gabe recognized too easily—the corrosive force of it vibrated from every line of Rosemunde’s ample body. The woman wasn’t just scared, she was terrified.

  “This was a mistake,” Evangeline whispered, turning from Rosemunde to take the check from Gabe’s hands. She glanced at it, opened her purse and pulled out a twenty, slapped it down on the table next to the stack of one hundreds, then looked up at him. “I don’t like this place,” she said in the soft, sincere voice of Lilah Mae—the voice he’d sometimes heard at night when he closed his eyes. “We should never have come here.”

  Taking her cue, he slid his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “We shouldn’t have done a lot of things.” Then, while the silence echoed and everyone in the diner watched, Russell Rae pressed a tender kiss to the top of his wife’s head and led her out the door. Evangeline leaned into him and wrapped her arms around his middle, walking nothing at all like a fearless attorney taking the courtroom, but with the relaxation and contentment of a woman with the man she trusted.

  It was a hell of a powerful illusion.

  The beat-up white pickup he’d borrowed that morning waited outside—his new SUV, they’d agreed, would have been a dead giveaway. He opened the door and helped her in, then rounded the front, turning back toward the country grocery one last time. The two men in sunglasses stood outside the double doors, watching. He looked their way for a long, hard moment, then slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine, heard the crunch of gravel as they backed toward the two-lane highway.

  He wondered if Jack had any idea what the hell was going on in this allegedly no-account town on the far side of his parish.

  Cypress and oak crowded the side of the bumpy road, their canopies thinner than normal thanks to a drier-than-average winter, but still blotting out most of the sun.

  “Maybe it is Marcel,” Evangeline said as he accelerated into a sharp curve and passed a makeshift cross marking the spot where Jack’s wife had died. Glancing toward her, he fully expected to see the hard-nosed attorney sitting next to him, because that’s whose voice he heard: sharp and intelligent, suspicious. But it was Lilah he saw, the ponytail making her eyes look too big and too dark for her face, the lip gloss she’d reapplied and the wistful gypsy shirt. In her hand she held a crumpled piece of paper.

  “Or maybe it’s someone else,” she was saying. “But someone has put the fear of God into this town.”

  The substandard road, still scarred from Katrina’s battering and nine straight days of stagnant floodwater, wound deep into the heavily wooded area in the heart of Jack’s parish—and closer to memories Gabe had no desire to visit.

  “Murder will do that,” he muttered. “She was one of their own. That’s never easy.” The image flashed before he could stop it, Camille, her straight blond hair and grass-green eyes, the freckles over her nose.

  His sister had been right, damn it. She’d been right. About everything.

  Beside him, Evangeline reached for the beaded purse with fringe dangling from its edges—he would never have even guessed she owned such a thing.

  “There’s a phone number,” she said, pulling out her cell phone. “I’m going to call it.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the bill in her lap—the one Rosemunde had pressed into his hand—and the phone number scrawled on the back. Two words: Please. Call.

  “Let me,” he started, swerving to avoid a pothole. “Russell Rae wouldn’t want his wife—”

  The single gunshot killed the rest of his words.

  Chapter 4

  “H ang on!”

  The hard edge of Gabe’s voice ripped through Evangeline. She grabbed for the handle above her head and held on as trees rushed up to greet them. Gabe had one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching for her as the truck veered toward the canal.

  Everything accelerated. Blurred. The narrow shoulder and the muddy water, the mob of trees closing around them. Her heart kicked hard but she didn’t scream, couldn’t scream. Couldn’t do anything but stare at the vicious concentration in Gabe’s eyes, the way he kept his hand steady on the wheel as the truck slowed, until it stopped, half on, half off the road.

  “Son of a bitch,” he growled, but then he was throwing the gear into Park and twisting toward her, lifting his hands to her body and running them along her blouse and jeans. “Christ God, are you okay?”

  She blinked, tried to breathe. “I’m fine,” she said, because she was. She hadn’t been shot—he hadn’t been shot. The truck seemed intact. “What just happened—”

  He was already pulling away and throwing open the door, climbing out. She did the same, found him staring at the back right tire. “A blowout,” she whispered.

  With hard eyes he turned back toward The Landing and swore under his breath.

  Maybe fictitious good ole boy Russell Rae would believe it was an accident, but Assistant District Attorney Gabriel Fontenot knew they’d just received their second warning.

  “Gabe…” Maybe she shouldn’t have touched him, but she wasn’t thinking about anything other than the moment, the cold fury in his eyes and the violence of his stance.

  “He won’t get away with this,” he said, pivoting to face her. “Russell Rae and Lilah were nobody. Nobody. No threat to him.” A surprisingly warm breeze for early March pushed at them, but even the elements seemed to know better than to touch Gabe. “But he would have killed them, anyway, for nothing more than the crime of mentioning Darci’s name.”

  Killed. Them. Killed Gabe—and killed Evangeline.

  The reality of it sliced through her, those horrible blind seconds when the world had started to slide, when Gabe had sworn and reached for her, holding out an arm to protect, even as he fought with the truck.

  He was right. They could have been killed, and no one would have known it was really murder. If Gabe hadn’t known how to compensate for the sudden loss of one tire. If he hadn’t stayed calm under pressure. If his reflexes had been slow.

  If he’d taken pills that morning.

  “The tire was tampered with,” she said.

  Gabe squatted next to the shredded remains. “Without a doubt.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  He twisted toward her, his mouth a hard, grim line. “That’s the thing with tampering, darlin’. If you know what you’re doing, there’s never any proof.”

  Somehow she kept standing there—and she was pretty sure the sunlight leaking through the trees hid the slow drain of color from her face. After only a heartbeat Gabe twisted back toward the tire. But his words kept right on weaving through her….

  That’s the thing with tampering…

  A
shiny black BMW raced by, but Evangeline barely saw, barely moved.

  If you know what you’re doing, there’s never any proof.

  That’s what she was afraid of—what she’d risked everything to prove. That Gabriel Fontenot knew exactly what he was doing. She forced her eyes from the road back to him, watched him push to his feet and stride to the passenger side of the truck, lean inside. Less than a minute later he came out with the spare.

  He also had the bill from the diner.

  “I’ll get this changed and call Jack, let him know what’s going on.”

  Somehow she nodded. Somehow she stepped back as he passed and made herself look away from him, from the sweat gathering on his brow and the moisture seeping through the back of his shirt, toward the murky waters of the canal.

  Behind her, Gabe muttered under his breath as he changed the tire. She’d known that he’d grown up in a rural community southwest of New Orleans, but she’d never imagined him this way, hot and sweaty and working on a car.

  But as much as the image intrigued, as much as part of her wondered what part of Russell Rae was really Gabriel Fontenot, one word kept drilling through her.

  Tampering.

  Frowning, she wiped the moisture from her face and made her way back to the open door.

  “Get me a water,” Gabe called.

  With a pretend smile she retrieved the bottle from the front seat and tossed it to him.

  She didn’t let herself linger on the smile he gave her in return. Reaching for her phone, she checked to make sure she had coverage, then placed the call.

  It took three times to get through—what few cell towers there were in this part of the state had been badly damaged by Katrina. Some of them—a few of them—had been repaired. Most had not.

  The soft voice answered on the first ring. “Dot’s Bakery.”

  Evangeline squinted against the sun cutting through a tangle of Spanish moss. “I must have the wrong number, I was trying to reach—”