by Jenna Mills
She should have been angry. And maybe she was. But something else whispered through her, something warm and fragile and so completely wrong….
“It could result in a mistrial.” She had to force the words out, even though they were true. “Lambert’s attorneys could use that little kiss at just the right moment, paint me to be every bit as biased as you are.”
Unless the D.A. removed her from the case.
Gabe’s eyes took on a lethal glow. “There’s no such thing as bias when it comes to murder.”
“But there is when it comes to the judicial system,” she threw back. “I get it, Gabe. Okay? I get it. I know you want Lambert. I know you want to make him pay, see him fall. But playing games with me isn’t the way.”
“You sure about that?” He stroked a finger along her cheekbone. “Is that why you came here in the middle of the night, Evangeline? To teach me Law 101?”
Push away. She knew that’s what she should do. She knew that, just as she knew so much else. But that dark rhythm wouldn’t stop singing through her. “I came to tell you to back off.”
He claimed to want nothing to do with her, but he kept right on touching her, sliding his finger down to her jawbone. “Did you now?”
She knew she had to breathe, but with each breath, all she did was draw the scent of him—of soap and coffee and man—deep inside. “Arceneaux wants answers. He wants to know what happened last night—”
“And what did you tell him?” The question was soft, the way he spoke to a defendant just before he broke them into a thousand pieces. “That you were asleep? That you woke up and found me gone? That within seconds the whole place went up—”
And it all would have been true. “It would be your word against mine, wouldn’t it?” she pointed out, refusing to be backed into a corner, even if somehow she had let him box her in.
“You didn’t tell him anything.”
Her heart kicked hard. With a determination that came from all those years she’d pursued a single goal, she grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand from her face, twisted from his arms. “Not yet.”
And again, the light in Gabe’s eyes dimmed. “Go home, Evangeline. It’s late—”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she said, backing deeper into his house. “You’d like me to roll over and play dead, so you can keep bulldozing your way through this case. Don’t you get it?” she asked, trying to ignore the play of shadows against the lines of his face and the stupid white towel draped around his neck, the swirl of dark hair trailing down from his navel.
“You can’t just make up the rules as you go along—” Even if that’s exactly what she’d done.
She broke toward the table before he could stop her, looking for the proof she needed—the proof she had no doubt she would find.
Yearbooks, she recognized instantly. Three of them in a neat little stack, the one on top open to a page with rows of class pictures.
But it was the open folder that stopped her, the meticulous drawing of an orgy of angels and demons, a stack of handwritten notes…and an old black-and-white photograph. “My God,” she whispered, reaching for the worn image. “Lambert…”
She felt Gabe move, felt him crowd in behind her.
“I thought they were just rumors,” she said. “People with nothing better to talk about…” But now she saw, and she knew. The picture was old and torn and faded—of four young men, happy and relaxed, on what looked to be a fishing trip somewhere in a marsh. Marcel Lambert had changed little in what had to be at least twenty-five years, nor had his brother, Nathan, who’d been killed only a month before. The third man was cut off, only his legs visible. But the fourth…
She twisted toward Gabe, her chest aching at the realization that every morning when he looked in the mirror, it was his father he saw staring back at him.
All her life she’d heard about the stained glass smuggled out of France during the Revolution. She’d heard of its mysterious healing powers and the bloodshed that followed in its wake. She’d heard about the Yankee soldiers during the Civil War who’d sought to capture it—and the young woman who’d buried it somewhere in the swamp before she’d been apprehended. She’d committed suicide while in captivity….
But the stories weren’t just confined to her childhood. She’d heard the whispers tonight, at the fund-raiser. She’d heard the idle talk that the stained glass had been found….
The pieces all fell together, not just from tonight but across months and years, creating a truth that sobered. She twisted toward Gabe, found the oddest expression on his face. “You’re laying a trap, aren’t you?” Technically it was a question. But she didn’t need the answer.
That’s why he was so calm. That’s why he was so controlled. He knew exactly what he was doing. That’s why he watched her through those narrow, assessing eyes.
He removed the photograph from her hands. “You should go, Evangeline.”
Her mind worked fast, knitting the evidence together. “So what…you make Marcel think you found what he and your father were looking for? Then what, Gabe? Then what? You set yourself up as bait?” The thought sickened. “You wait and see if he tries to kill you for it?”
The way he’d killed Gabe’s father.
Gabe didn’t so much as flinch. “If that’s what it takes.”
“No.” It was more a horrified breath than a word. “I’m not going to let you do that.”
But his eyes only hardened. “You can’t stop me.”
Reckless adrenaline crashed through her.
Gabe was wrong. She could stop him. With those few words to the D.A. They would be a lie, but they would keep Gabe alive. He would hate her…but he was going to hate her, anyway.
There was nothing else to say, not between them. Only a phone call to make. It was what she’d wanted all along, to see Gabe fall. But not like this. And not anymore.
“I was wrong in coming here,” she said, carefully measuring her words. Gabe was an excellent game player, a master of the bluff. That he’d let her see his notes could be no accident. She turned to leave, but his hand caught her wrist before she could take so much as a step.
She tried to hide the wince. She tried to keep her expression blank. But the pain seared clear to the bone. She stopped and drew into herself, recovered quickly.
But Gabe had already seen.
Gabe knew violence. He’d seen it and witnessed it—the sheet covering his father’s body, the ugly yellow tape streaking across the study, the lingering scent of cleaning chemicals. He’d been there when Val had died. And the girl in Florida. He’d read the police report. He knew the details.
He knew violence. He’d prosecuted violence. He’d convicted violence. It was nothing new to him.
But the greenish smears circling Evangeline’s wrists stopped him.
“Who did this to you?” he asked with brutal stillness, because if he let go, for even one little breath…
He didn’t know. Didn’t know what would happen if he let go.
She tried to jerk her arm out of his grip. “Let go of me!”
He loosened his grip, but didn’t release her. Didn’t release himself. “Who did this to you, damn it?”
Evangeline glared at him, and, for the first time since she’d arrived, he saw it in her eyes, the stark, dark glow. The fear. “It was crowded at the benefit—” she tried, but the tightness just kept right on twisting.
“Don’t lie to me!” Someone had done this to her. While he’d been so blinded by his need to test, to punish, someone had hurt her. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Why she hadn’t returned to the aquarium after he’d let anger drive him, after he’d pulled her into his arms and used her just as she’d used him.
“That’s why you’re threatening me to back off,” he realized, just as he realized an equally sobering truth. Evangeline hadn’t known Gabe when she set him up…but he had known her. Known and wanted.
But he’d hung her out to dry, anyway. Had even let her s
ee his file on Marcel Lambert, just to gauge what she already knew—and what she’d do with any new information. “Someone threatened you—”
The dark hair falling into her face was no longer glossy as it had been at the aquarium. He should have noticed that, damn it, when he’d first opened the door, expecting Saura, but finding her. He should have noticed that and so many other little telltale signs.
But he’d been too busy seeing her through his own distorted lens.
“No,” she said with a firmness that ground through him.
“Yes.” Because of him. Because he’d dragged her into his game. “Someone threatened you,” he said again. “Someone scared you.”
The light in her eyes deepened. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Tell me, then,” he said, but couldn’t stop touching her. Wasn’t about to let her go. “Tell me what you’re doing.”
She swiped the hair from her face, drawing his attention to the dryness of her lips. “I’m trying to protect an innocent man.”
“By letting a guilty man go free?” The question was quiet. The roar inside was not.
This time when she tugged, he let go, and she stepped back. “Is that what you think of me? That I would sell out like that?”
What kind of man do you think I am?
The question, the memory, scraped.
“I was scared, Gabe,” she said, and her voice broke. “Is that what you want to hear?” She brought her hand to her wrist and gently covered the bruises. “I was on the patio after you and Marcel left. I…never heard him approach.”
Something hard and dark twisted through Gabe. “You weren’t there when I went back.”
The quick flare of her eyes, the surprise and the hope and the devastation, punished. But she shook her head as if to send it away, to deny. “He put a bag over my head,” she said, and the sickness spread deeper. “We drove…for a long time.”
While Gabe had been savoring the trap he’d laid.
“There was some kind of voice,” she said, and, at last, the edges of the gutsy attorney frayed, giving him a glimpse of the woman inside, the woman who’d been terrorized and threatened, but who’d refused to break, to crumble. Who’d come to him…
“And then he stopped,” she said. “And everything got quiet. It was a few minutes before I realized he was gone and not coming back…before I realized where I was.”
Gabe didn’t let himself move, because with brutal certainty he finally knew. He knew what would happen if he let go. He would drag her into his arms and hold her, hold her tight…the way she refused to admit that she needed. “Where were you?”
Something about her changed. Her expression, maybe. Her body language. It all seemed to soften and, when she lifted her eyes, the rip of awareness cut clean through him. “Here.”
It was not the answer he’d expected. “The person who attacked you drove you here?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her standing there, the odd light in her eyes and the tangled hair falling against the fading bruise. In the courtroom she looked tough and invincible. But here, now, she looked small and vulnerable in ways he’d never expected.
“So you could come inside and do his bidding…” he realized. Just as she’d done.
Again she lifted a hand to swipe the hair from her face. But this time she stepped toward him, rather than away. “That’s not why I came to you.”
He didn’t trust himself to move. Because then he might touch. And if he touched—“No?”
“No.” Then the gutsy attorney was back and she did what he’d refused to do, destroyed the distance between them and pushed up on her toes. “This is why,” she whispered, and her mouth brushed his.
Earlier he’d simply stood still. Earlier, when she’d first arrived, he’d stood like a complete ass, blinded by the need for revenge that had driven him for years, never realizing it had distorted everything. For so long there’d been only the black and the white. He’d never realized that when they collided, there would be gray.
“The whole time we drove around,” she murmured against his mouth, “all I could think was Gabe…God, Gabe…”
He didn’t let himself move.
“You have every right to hate me after what I did last fall,” she said, resting a hand against the side of his face. He couldn’t stop the wince, but she laid her palm there, anyway, kept her eyes on his. “To push me away. I lied to you. I pretended I was your friend, that you could trust me.”
The raw honesty shredded. “Damn it, Evie…”
“But I didn’t know.” She kept right on talking. “It doesn’t excuse anything, but I didn’t know you…didn’t know what kind of man you are. The evidence looked bad—”
“And evidence never lies.” He bit the words out. It was the ultimate irony for an attorney.
“But it does! I know that now. Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. Sometimes you have to dig deeper to see the truth.”
He looked down at her face, only a breath from his, and finally he saw. The truth. She’d showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, looking beautiful despite the shadows in her eyes. She’d risked everything to come to him, but like a coward, he’d just stood there while she stepped inside his house and put her mouth to his, despite the fact she’d been ordered to drive a knife into his back.
She’d risked everything…and he’d given nothing.
“You could have started that fire,” she said, still talking quietly, gently. And slowly she lifted her other arm, this time curving it around his rib cage, to feather her hand along his back. “But you didn’t,” she said, and the words fed that dark place inside him. Fed and destroyed. “I know that now…knew it last night,” she added. Abruptly, she pulled her hand from his face and grabbed for his hand, dragged it to her chest. “I knew that here,” she said, pressing his palm against her jacket.
He didn’t stop his fingers from flattening.
“But I was trying to think like an attorney,” she said. “Not a woman. I was trying to make myself consider all the possibilities and not be blinded by what I wanted—”
Through the soft denim, he felt the frenetic riff of her heart and knew he couldn’t just stand there much longer. “What do you want, Evangeline?”
The light in her eyes dimmed. But it was her soft smile that damn near sent him to his knees. “I’d heard about you before I came to New Orleans,” she said. “Gabriel Fontenot, son of the South. Invincible prosecutor. My professors talked about you. We studied your casework, your style. I knew about your family,” she added. “Your reputation, how well you could bluff. And maybe I built you up in my mind, turned you into some demigod who couldn’t be touched, didn’t want to be touched.”
Except now she was touching him. And God help him, he was touching her. Touching Evangeline. The way he’d wanted to do for so freaking long.
“You were with Val,” she whispered, looking away from him briefly, toward the nearly empty house. After Val’s death, he’d gotten rid of everything she’d brought into his life.
Everything but the shadows inside of him and the inability to trust. Not just others. But himself.
“Everyone said you’d been together forever,” Evangeline was saying, “that you would get married. And I respected that. But then the D.A. asked me to engage you on a personal level—”
“To feed me dirty information.” For the first time he allowed himself to see it through her eyes, the young new prosecutor being assigned to a special task force by her boss, the man many believed would be the next lieutenant governor. She hadn’t known Gabe, only the rumors.
And the rumors about the Robichaud family were anything but good. At the time many had believed his cousin Cain guilty of murder. And that Gabe had pulled strings to avoid an indictment. Further back than that, the scandal with his father’s alleged suicide…
“Yes. To feed you dirty information. But somewhere along the line everything blurred and I saw something in your eyes…and I—I didn’t w
ant it to be a game anymore.” She returned her hand to the side of his face, whisper soft. “The first time you kissed me—”
He’d thought his friend was dead. They’d buried him that day. The memory of the explosion had echoed in Gabe’s ears while Alec’s widow had tried to comfort him. Sweet God, Tara was the one who’d lost any chance of reconciling with her estranged husband, but she’d tried to comfort Gabe. But the devastation in her eyes—
He should have gone home to Val. That would have been the logical thing to do. But Gabe had gone to his office instead. It wasn’t until Evangeline had walked in that he understood why. He’d warned her to leave….
“It made me sick to feed you the false leads,” she said, exploring his face with her fingers. “After I did, I went into the ladies’ room and threw up.”
He closed his eyes, didn’t want to see.
“And then the truth came out…” She kept on, with her words and her fingers, the press of her body, the unforgiving scent of powder and vanilla. “When I heard about Val—” her voice broke “—the lie she’d been living, and I knew I was just one more knife in your back….”
It all closed in on him, the lies and the deception, the games, the truth, and he knew if he stayed there one second longer, with her hands on his body and her mouth only a breath away, the ironclad control he’d been holding in a death grip would crumble and she would be the only one in its path. He would take then, take what he’d wanted, needed, for too damn long.
Instead, he ripped away and strode from her, from the table full of lies and revenge and hatred. He stopped at the window, intending to look out into the darkness.
But saw only the soft glow of Evangeline’s reflection.
“Last night you asked me what kind of man I thought you were.”
The burn started low and spread fast. He refused to move, though, couldn’t look away. Not from her, from Evangeline, walking so steadily toward him. The window gave him every detail, the glow of vulnerability in her eyes and the stubborn set of her chin, the swing of her tangled hair and the denim jacket hanging open to reveal her little black dress.