by Jenna Mills
Cain looked up at his friend and pierced him with the same look he'd given the airline pilot he'd busted trying to ferry dirty money out of the country. "She can try."
D'Ambrosia understood what he didn't say. "And you'll enjoy every minute of it?"
The woman was thirty-five miles away, tucked safe and sound in the big poster bed of her hotel room, under surveillance, and yet the heat of anticipation rushed through him.
"Funny thing about playing games." With a dark smile, he tossed his cue stick onto the table. "A smart man only falls into the same trap once."
Twenty minutes later, Cain maneuvered his car into a tight spot along St. Charles Avenue
. During the day, the street was lined with tourists and locals, out for sight-seeing or a walk, catching a ride on one of the streetcars that rumbled through a tunnel of oaks stretching from Audubon Park to the Quarter.
But at this time of night, most of the activity had died down, leaving only the occasional college kids crowding into a late night café or drunks looking for the mansion that belonged to the vampire writer.
Cain took it all in as he strolled up a sidewalk, lined by bloodred mums, to a welcoming front porch dripping with colorful bougainvillea even in November.
A single light burned beside the screen door.
He didn't have to knock. The door swung open and the woman stepped into the night. The white silk robe he'd picked out for her shimmered in the darkness as she opened her arms. "You're late."
CHAPTER EIGHT
"You can call me angel."
Frowning, Renee studied the woman who'd called her the night before. Actually, woman was a stretch. The thin blonde seemed more like a girl. Early twenties, tops. Long blond hair framed a delicately featured face, and for a fractured moment Renee felt as though she were looking at herself in a mirror.
Then reality slashed in, reminding her that she no longer wore her hair blond. Among other things.
They sat at a small table across from the cathedral in Jackson Square
, normally occupied by a palm reader named Magdalene—the perfect cover for a chance meeting that would not arouse suspicion.
In the mornings, while the rest of the Vieux Carré slept off the excesses of the night before, the pedestrian mall bustled with tourists and locals, merchants and street artists. The rich scent of coffee drifted in from across Decatur. Even the horn player already stood in place, loitering outside Café du Monde and playing "When The Saints Come Marching In," despite the frigid wind blowing across the river.
"Angel?" Renee asked.
"That's what he calls me."
"He?"
"Cain," the girl said, the one who looked so very much like Renee had. Once.
Renee braced herself. "I take it you know him."
"I do," Angel said, but her smile, an unsettling combination of fascination and bone-chilling fear, said so much more. It was a contrast Renee knew well, the way a recovering alcoholic gazes at a glass of scotch just before he falls off the wagon.
"You know him, too," Angel said. Understanding stripped away pretenses and heaved the truth between them. "But I bet you never took his money."
It took every ounce of willpower Renee had not to jerk back from the table—and the images trying to form in her mind.
"They think that just because they got more money than God, they can buy whatever they want. Women. A good time. Fast cars or judges or juries. Doesn't matter. They own it all."
"You're saying the Robichauds bought Cain's acquittal?"
"His cousin is with the D.A.'s office. You do the math."
Renee already had. "Gabe removed himself from the case."
"So they say," Angel said, lifting a hand to fiddle with the small gold hoop at her eyebrow. "Whether you believe them or not is another story. People like them say what they want to, when they want to. If someone gets hurt in the process, too flipping bad, right?"
Renee stilled. "Did someone hurt you, honey? Cain? Is that what this is about?"
Angel shook her head, sending stringy hair flinging into her face. "He never hurt me, not physically, anyway."
"Then how?"
Blue eyes closed, opened a heartbeat later. "You got any idea what it feels like to go to bed with a man but wake up with a stack of hundred-dollar bills?"
Something dark and cold tightened through Renee. "Cain Robichaud paid you for sex?"
The girl looked down, said nothing.
"Angel." Renee squeezed the palm she still held in her hand. "Talk to me."
Angel brought her index finger to her palm, where she slowly traced the curve of her lifeline. "Let's just say when Cain was a cop, he had a fondness for mixing business and pleasure. I … obliged him on both fronts."
Everything inside Renee went brutally still. She sat there staring at the girl she now realized was a prostitute, but saw only a tall man in a dark jacket, a pair of dark hypnotic eyes and an insolent smile.
Just mixin' business and pleasure, belle amie. Nothing wrong with that.
Depends upon how you do the mixing.
I think you'll like it … like it a lot.
She had. But now she shoved hard against the unwanted memory. There had never been any commitment between her and Cain, no promises, but hearing a hooker parrot Cain's words shredded her in ways she'd never imagined possible.
"And just how did you oblige him?" she forced herself to ask. She'd come here for information, after all. The truth.
No matter how badly it hurt.
Angel looked up, startled. "You want details?"
The image formed all by itself, of Cain and this girl, together, hot and naked and sweaty, rolling and twisting, thrashing, bringing each other to the brink and back.
Clenching her jaw, she pretended to study Angel's fate line. "Facts."
"I gave him what he wanted," Angel said. "He made it worth my while to watch that casino owner who was carrying on with his sister. Adrian Trahan. There was bad blood between those two."
Bad blood was an understatement. Cain and her brother hated each other. Renee didn't want to ask the question but had to. "You think he killed him?"
Angel's hand twitched. "Can't say for sure but when he came to me the night they found Trahan's body, he was … different. I mean, he was never a man for chitchat or foreplay, but that night he was all over me the second I opened the door. Before he left he told me he didn't need me to watch Trahan anymore. Things had taken a different … direction."
Renee sat back. "He came to you the night they found the body?" That, she knew, was a bald-faced lie.
"Not really the night, it was more like the morning. It was just starting to get light when Cain showed up."
The coldness spread deeper. Renee wanted to deny the girl's words but couldn't. The simple truth was she had no idea where Cain had gone after he left her town house just before dawn.
The feeling of devastation came back to her, wound like a silk scarf around her neck.
Angel stuck her left arm across the table. "You want to see my other hand—it can't look like we're just chitchatting."
Renee stared at the girl's hand, her pale flesh and long, elegant fingers full of silver rings. She wanted to hate her, this deceptively fey prostitute with the huge lost eyes and the compromised soul. But all she felt was pity … and the sobering realization that the two of them weren't that different.
Cain hadn't paid Savannah with money, but with the currency of illusion and hope, dreams she'd wanted desperately to believe could come true.
Swallowing, she watched a tattered maple leaf fluttering around on the breeze. "How often did Cain come to you?"
Angel shrugged. "Three or four times a week … most every night he wasn't with that reporter."
Renee leaned closer over Angel's palm, focusing on her heart line. "Savannah Trahan."
"Poor woman had no idea she was sleeping with the man she was trying to nail. It was hardly a surprise what happened to her."
"Why not?"
<
br /> "Cain's thorough," Angel said, watching the maple leaf settle next to her hand. "Once he realized he'd never get that woman to quit snooping around by sleeping with her, he had no choice but to silence her."
Cain twisted against the sheets and cracked open an eye, cursed the quiet trill of his mobile phone. He didn't want to be interrupted, didn't want to leave her hot and flushed and eager for more. It had been so damn long— The phone kept ringing.
Swearing, he reached for the damn thing and stabbed the talk button. Then he swore more creatively.
"What do you mean not there?" he demanded, and just like that the last vestiges of the dream shattered, leaving him tangled in the sheets, ready and naked, but alone. "Where the hell is she?"
Millie's explanation didn't come close to satisfying him.
"What about her suitcases? Are they in her room?"
His chest tightened when the hotel manager said no. "Did you hear anything?" Images formed before he could stop them, a disturbing sense of dread that made no sense. He wanted her gone, after all. He wanted her out of his town and his parish.
But he didn't want her to end up like Savannah.
He slammed his feet against the soft Oriental rug and stood, welcomed the slap of cool air against flesh still hot from the dream. "Was there any sign of a struggle?"
The need to get back to Bayou de Foi ground through him, but before he could pull on his jeans, his uncle's voice came across the phone. "Looks like she took your advice after all, son. There's nothing out of place here, no sign of forced entry or anything untoward. Hell, the bed is even made."
"Looks like Ms. Fox just packed up and left in the middle of the night, ran out on her bill."
"I don't like it." It was one thing having Renee Fox around and knowing where she was. But having her unaccounted for disturbed him in ways he understood only too well. "Let me know the second something changes. If anyone sees her, hears from her—"
"Don't you worry about Bayou de Foi. I've got everything covered. You just take care of finding Alec."
Cain wound down the call and took a quick shower, dressed and picked up his Glock, headed out the door. To find Alec. Before whatever game he was playing backfired on them both.
No one had talked to his former partner in almost three months, not even the wife he'd supposedly adored. He'd turned in his badge and dropped his wedding ring on the bathroom counter, walked out the door and into the shadows. Since then the rumor mill had been in overdrive, implicating Alec for everything from obstruction of justice, extortion to selling information to the highest bidder, scare tactics, excessive force—and murder.
Of Savannah.
Slamming the door behind him, Cain took the stairs two at a time. Rumor had it that Alec would be at the race track in less than an hour. That something big was going down.
His former partner would be there to greet him. Guilty or innocent. One way or another, Cain would find out for sure.
Revulsion swept through Renee, but she refused to let it show. Angel's revelation was consistent with police speculation, a sordid claim that had run in all the local papers and a few of the cable networks. It was what her own brother had believed.
Despite all of that—the warnings and the evidence, the cold hard logic—there was still a place deep inside Renee that rebelled at the allegation.
How did a woman accept that the man she'd been falling in love with was a pathological liar?
"You think their relationship was just a tactic?" she asked with a detached calm she didn't come close to feeling.
Angel flicked away the maple leaf. "What man in love leaves his woman's bed to come to mine?" Her mouth curved into a cynical smile. "Not a satisfied one, that's for sure."
Despite the fair skin and blond hair she'd been born with, Cajun blood ran through Renee's veins. Her father's mother and mother's father were both full-blooded. She'd grown up adoring them, enchanted by the rich cadence of their voices and the hot passion that guided their actions. As a child, she hadn't known the flashes of temper and bursts of happiness were passion, she'd just known her grandparents were bright, vibrant people.
Knowledge of passion had come later, when she'd discovered she'd inherited that same intensity. When things were good, she could ride the wave and savor every moment.
When things were bad… It was hard to explain to anyone who didn't share her blood, hard to make them understand urges that were dark and punishing, capable of frightening even herself.
And Cain. She could still see him at the plantation ruins, standing in the incessant drizzle, begging her to abandon her investigation into her brother's death.
Calm down, cher. You're scaring me.
A big bad police detective like you? Aren't you the one who told me fear wasn't in your vocabulary?
That was before, belle amie. Before I met you.
He'd kissed her then, hard, deep, and by the time he was done, she'd believed every word he told her.
Now, sitting in the French Quarter on a chilly fall morning, pretending to be a palm reader while listening to skanky details of her ex-lover's secret life, Renee's heart pounded so fast she could barely breathe. Her blood thrummed in perfect, erratic rhythm, just as it had that sticky night when the rookie cop had revealed her brother's dying words.
"Why should I believe you?" It took effort, but she feigned fascination with the young prostitute's palm, when all she really wanted to do was shove away from the table and get out of town as fast as she could, go back to Nova Scotia and never come back, start over again and forget about justice. "Do you have proof?"
Angel's hand twitched. "Nothing concrete."
Renee didn't know whether she felt disappointment—or relief. "Then why did you call me?"
Angel lifted her eyes. "Because history has a habit of repeating itself, over and over again."
Sunlight glinted through the tunnel of old oaks that lined St. Charles Avenue
. Renee sat in her rental car, across the street from the bed-and-breakfast whose address Angel had given her, watching and waiting. Even in the dredges of fall, the house looked vibrant, with red mums lining the walkway and bougainvillea dripping from the wrought-iron porch, huge baskets of bushy ferns swaying in the breeze.
Sipping on her coffee, Renee smiled when the streetcar rumbled by and momentarily obscured her view. When it was gone, Cain was there—holding another woman.
After what seemed like forever he pulled back and took her hand and kissed the back of it, a foolishly gallant gesture that unsettled Renee in ways she didn't want to analyze too closely.
Then he turned and walked away.
Renee watched him slip inside a black Mercedes convertible—the car he'd always talked about purchasing—and merge with traffic. She could feel the woman's sadness from across the boulevard, and though part of her wanted to cross the street and find answers to the questions twisting through her, she pulled into the stream of traffic.
Four cars ahead, at the next intersection, she saw the Mercedes turn right, and gunned her engine in pursuit.
The fabled Fair Grounds came into view twenty minutes later. In the springtime, the sprawling park hosted the world-renowned New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival, a raucous outdoor party featuring the best of both music and food. She and Cain had attended just weeks before their world came crashing down. Vividly she remembered how it had felt to stand in the curve of his arm as they listened to a New Orleans favorite sing the blues.
Now, she followed him into the half-full parking lot and maneuvered her car into a spot two rows from his.
During the winter months the Fair Grounds hosted a party of a different kind—horse racing. People from all over south Louisiana congregated on a daily basis to wager on the horses, eat, drink and escape. She doubted Cain had any of those pleasures in mind.
Sliding from the car, she sank deeper into her jacket and hurried against the wind, merging with a group of what looked to be college kids as she made her way toward the entrance.<
br />
Inside, the throng of racing fans swallowed her. She'd never understood how a man of Cain's height could blend in with a crowd, but it was a skill he'd honed through years of undercover work. She squeezed through the crowd and made her way toward the betting windows, but it was as though the man had simply vanished.
"Me, I'm thinking you look lost, little lady," came a heavily accented Cajun voice from behind her. Turning, she found an elderly man in a worn, rust-colored suit and tie smiling at her. "Can I help you?"
She smiled, gave him a quick nod. "Thanks, but I don't think so. I'm looking for someone."
"My loss," he said, then gestured toward a closed door. "If you smile purty enough, you might be able to get Rusty to make an announcement over the big system."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said, feigning interest in the door. "Thanks—" Out of the corner of her eye a movement caught her attention, and her heart thrummed hard in recognition. "I think I see him now," she said, then pivoted and worked her way toward the side of the concession stand.
Cain stood with his back to her, his tall, dark form looming like a specter against a dirty white wall. He had an arm lifted to his face, and as she approached, she saw the phone clenched in his hand. The drone of the crowd prevented her from making out words, but the tension in his body told her all she needed to know.
The red pinhole made her blink. It was just a small spot, a little red dot against his left shoulder blade.
But her heart flat out stopped.
She spun around but immediately realized the crowd was too thick. Then she found the stairwell and looked up.
Through a blur of movement she saw first the high-powered rifle, then the man. Recognition horrified.
She didn't stop to think. She didn't stop to plan. She simply reacted. On a violent rush of adrenaline she lunged forward and shouted Cain's name.
He turned as she neared him.
Vaguely she was aware of his arms reaching for her, but she kept right on going, launching herself at him and knocking him backward. Together, they slammed against the concrete wall, his big body absorbing the shock of impact.