KILLING ME SOFTLY

by Jenna Mills

  Renee Fox was a beautiful woman, but there was something about her, an air, an aura, that had assaulted Saura the moment she laid her eyes on her. Cain felt it, too. Saura knew that, could see it in his eyes when he looked at the woman. But she also knew he thought it was purely sexual, a base primal attraction.

  But Saura was a woman, and she felt it, too. And while she'd tried many things in her life, she'd never been sexually attracted to another woman. So she knew whatever odd, disturbing energy swirled around Renee Fox came from somewhere else.

  Saura wouldn't rest until she found out where.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The columns rose up from the early-morning mist, solitary remnants of one man's great love for his wife. Where a plantation had once stood, weeds and gnarled shrubbery now fought back the encroaching swamp. Grand-père Robichaud had claimed the wind still carried Samuel's agonized pleas for his wife to come back to him.

  Revenez à moi, ma petite. Notre amour ne va jamais mourir. Come back to me, little one. Our love will never die.

  Going down on one knee, Cain lifted his 35 mm and zoomed in on the truncated staircase, shrouded in wild ivy. Clouds had rolled in after midnight, and now they fought with the struggling rays of the morning sun, granting him the haze he favored.

  Cain snapped the picture, felt the immediate kiss of satisfaction. As a young boy he'd been intrigued with nature—doodle bugs and lizards and crawdads, love bugs, but most especially, butterflies. Their fragility had fascinated him, their beauty had seduced. When he was seven he'd coaxed a showy black-and-yellow monarch onto his hand, then secured it in a mason jar for safekeeping.

  The next morning he'd been devastated to find it dead.

  That's why he switched to the camera. On film, he could capture and preserve, tucking away the images for his enjoyment without the risk of his trophies dying on him.

  Or so he thought.

  Frowning, he pulled out the picture of Renee he'd developed a couple of hours earlier, taken without her knowledge the day he'd found her by the cottage. Her tailored suit struck a stark contrast against the overgrown clearing, but it was her eyes that grabbed his attention, her eyes that haunted. They were as shrouded as his heart. Secrets, he remembered thinking. They festered in her soul.

  It was the same way she'd looked last night, stoic, wounded, that had made it impossible for him to sleep. She'd stood there in those damn gold pajamas, the ones he'd burned to tear off her body, dark hair tangled and mouth swollen. Like a fallen goddess, he remembered thinking, drenched in moonlight and atonement and … pain. Someone had hurt her—Cain wanted to know who. And why.

  And then, he wanted to punish.

  The protective instincts staggered him. Fighting it, denying what the dangerous urges meant, he stomped across the clearing toward the ruins. But in his mind he saw her there, weaving with the mist among the columns.

  Clenching his jaw, he blinked, and the image transformed, and it was no longer Renee taunting him, but Savannah. He could see her, just as she'd been the day a few weeks before she vanished, when he'd brought her here. He'd wanted to see her here, had known instinctively that somehow, she belonged.

  He'd never been a man for self-torture, but he pulled out his wallet anyway, flipped it open and shoved his finger into a slot he'd not touched in eighteen months, and pulled out the picture.

  His gut tightened. There she was, just as beautiful as he remembered, with her blond hair and daring blue eyes, dressed in a white poet's shirt, faded jeans and leather sandals, embracing one of the columns like a long-lost pagan lover. Her smile—

  The sound of a twig snapping had him spinning, half expecting to see her emerging from the woods. At the sight of his sister, he didn't know whether to curse perdition, or laugh out loud.

  With her hair pulled into a ponytail, she sauntered toward him as though out for a morning stroll, which Cain knew was ridiculous. Saura was neither a morning person, nor did she stroll. She walked with the catlike grace she'd perfected around the time she turned thirteen. The black top and tight-fighting jeans added to the image.

  "What do you think they would say?" she asked as she approached.

  Cain zeroed in on the envelope in her hand. "Who?"

  "The columns. Just think of the stories they could tell."

  A hard sound broke from his throat. He had thought of those stories. There'd been a time when he'd thought of little else. Had Savannah's abductors brought her here? Had they hurt her here? Had they kill—

  He aborted the thought and turned to look at the row of columns standing like an eternal, forsaken doorway to all that Robichaud land had witnessed—love and loss, beauty and brutality, betrayal.

  "They'd say it's going to rain." He glanced up, noticed the clouds winning the battle with the sun. "And that there's a very good chance you're going to get wet."

  Saura shrugged. "I'm not worried about that."

  He knew that was true. Saura hadn't concerned herself with much of anything since Adrian died, especially not her appearance or well-being. "What are you worried about?" he asked. He saw it in her eyes, the forgotten swirl of apprehension and excitement.

  She lifted her chin, extended her hand. "This."

  The envelope was blank, no markings, no stamp, no writing. "What is it?"

  "Something you need to see."

  Renee heard the trilling as she stepped out of the shower. Wrapped in a towel, she hurried across the room and grabbed her mobile phone, listened to the apprehensive voice on the other end.

  "I can't keep quiet anymore," the librarian—Lena Mae Lamont—was saying. "Not after what happened to Travis."

  Renee swallowed. "What can't you keep quiet about?"

  "Not on the phone. No telling who could be listening."

  "Then I'll come into town." The library wouldn't open for another hour. "I can be there this morning." Just as soon as she found a way off Cain's property. "Ten o'clock, maybe?"

  Lena Mae hesitated. "The church," she finally said. "Our Lady of Prompt Succor down on Cypress. Make like you're going to confession. I—I'll take care of the rest."

  The shiver made no sense. Renee agreed anyway, and without another word, Lena Mae disconnected the call.

  Fifteen minutes later, dressed and packed, acutely aware that she no longer had a choice, Renee opened the bedroom door and headed for the grand staircase. The luxury of time and objectivity had dissipated the second she'd let Cain touch her. The circumstantial evidence heaped against him was disturbing, the words that had haunted her for the past eighteen months chilling, but beyond a shadow of a doubt she knew Cain was not the one who'd wanted her dead.

  In her heart, she'd known that all along.

  Now she had to prove it. With only two days left, she'd come to realize the key lay with Adrian—and the missing Goose.

  Downstairs she paused outside Cain's study, where the photograph of the old oak had illuminated a truth she'd never suspected. All this time she'd believed her brother and Cain had stood on opposite sides. That they'd distrusted each other. But now she knew she'd only seen what they'd wanted her to see. To protect her.

  Playing with the pieces in her mind like a giant jigsaw puzzle, she followed the scent of coffee to the kitchen, took a deep breath and stepped into the magazine-worthy gourmet retreat. With Adrian's help, Cain's sister had commissioned a remodeling, discarding the old white Formica counters in favor of granite, replacing the chipped tile with marble, throwing out black-and-white appliances in favor of stainless steel. The bushy herbs that had once dominated the windowsill were gone. Only one African violet remained, and it was more dead than alive.

  Biting down on her bottom lip, Renee glanced toward the intricately carved breakfast table Adrian had found in an old warehouse with a pedigree back to the 1850s, where Saura sat clicking away at her laptop.

  "He's waiting for you," she said without looking up. "Down by the old plantation ruins."

  Renee's heart surged at the words, but the smug und
ertone to Saura's voice gave her pause. "Why?"

  Saura kept right on clicking. "That's between the two of you."

  Renee opened the middle cabinet and reached for one of the Country Roses cups, felt a hot surge the second her fingers touched the china—china she should not automatically know where to find. She glanced at Saura, found her still glued to her computer.

  Renee closed the cabinet and tried to forget how badly she wanted coffee. "Is there a way to reach him? I've got an appointment in town and really can't—"

  Saura looked up. "Trust me, sweetie. Whatever's in town can wait. Cain can't."

  She found him exactly where Saura said he would be. For a moment she just stood at the edge of the clearing and watched him. Dressed in dark jeans and a soft gray pullover, he stood in the drizzle at the far end of the columns. The headwinds of the nearing storm swirled around him. Yellowed leaves fluttered and the tall grass rustled, but he didn't move. There was an absolute stillness to him, like the last mourner at a graveside service, unable to bring himself to leave.

  Her heart caught on the sight, and she couldn't help but wonder what he saw. What he remembered.

  She knew what she remembered. The only other time she'd been here. With Cain. Just weeks before the end. He'd told her the legend of the Robichauds and the mystical stained-glass window, then as the sun slipped beneath the treetops, they'd come together against the very column where he now stood, and made love.

  He turned to her then, and across the clearing, his eyes sought out hers.

  Run. That was her first thought. But as with so many other times since her return to Bayou de Foi, when logic told her to leave as fast as she could, she went straight for Cain.

  Like the first night they made love, he didn't meet her halfway. He tracked her movements with a predatory air. The broken man from the night before was gone. The man waiting for her was completely whole, and fully in charge.

  Adrenaline took over. She drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, but the technique did nothing to calm the uncertainty ricocheting through her like a swarm of trapped bees.

  And she couldn't stand it one second longer, not the stillness, not the silence. "Cain, Saura said—"

  "Shh," he murmured in that dark and drugging way of his. Apprehension tangled with excitement. Without another sound he took her wrist and led her through the thigh-high grass to the steps that led to a nonexistent verandah, then, releasing her arm, gestured for her to mount them.

  Almost hypnotically, she did.

  The drizzle kept falling right along with the temperature. Elevated a few feet off the ground, Renee tried not to shiver, but the damp chill seeped through her flesh and into her blood, and the wind granted no reprieve. Swallowing hard, she glanced at Cain and found him studying her with the intensity of a searchlight, and though she was dressed from head to toe, she'd never felt more naked in her life.

  The photographer, she realized. That's who was looking at her. Not the man, not the cop, but the talented artist, the one who erotically bridged the no-man's land between the living and the dead. He'd posed her on the truncated staircase against a world a thousand shades of gray, and with her long dark hair wet and plastered against her face, she knew once he snapped the shot, it would be impossible to tell if she was real, or imagined. Alive, or dead.

  Stepping back from her, he crossed himself. "Mon Dieu."

  Everything inside of her went ominously still. "Cain?"

  He lifted the camera and adjusted the aperture setting.

  Panic exploded through her. On blind instinct she turned from him and scrambled down the steps.

  "You think that will change anything?" he asked, and her heart slammed hard against her ribs. He moved toward her, lifted a hand to her face and touched with excruciating gentleness.

  She tried to turn from him, couldn't.

  Tried to deny.

  Couldn't.

  "Sweet Mary have mercy on my soul," he murmured, but the words sounded more curse than prayerful. "I never knew a dead woman could look so beautiful."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Nothing had prepared her. Nothing could have. Not the lies or the truth, the betrayal or the fidelity. Not the clock that had been steadily winding down since the moment she'd stepped back into her old life. Not the dreams that had been surging to life.

  In some barely functioning corner of her mind, Renee knew the drizzle still fell and the blackbirds still swarmed and cawed, knew the skeletal branches of the cypress trees still swayed against the cold gray sky, but shock dulled her senses. Nothing registered. Nothing touched her. Nothing seemed real. Except Cain, the hot sheen of condemnation in his eyes, and the horrible truth spilling between them like blood at a crime scene.

  She tried to breathe. Couldn't.

  Tried to move. Couldn't.

  Inevitability wound deeper, tighter. No lie lasted forever, she knew that. No truth stay buried. She'd known this moment would arrive, had forced herself to imagine it, to walk through every possibility and live every nuance—the hatred in Cain's eyes and the acid in his voice, the sting of disgust.

  Now she looked up at Cain standing against an ashen sky and felt the twist deep in her heart. This was where he belonged, here at the ruins of the home his ancestors had built over a century before. It was fitting that everything would crash down around her here. She drank in the sight of him, his dark hair plastered to his face, the whiskers crowding his jaw, the uncompromising line of his mouth and the glitter in his eyes, and knew that no matter how much he hated her, she could not regret the choices she'd made, not when they'd brought her back to this man and the life they'd once planned. Even if it was fleeting. She couldn't call it closure, but in coming home she'd learned to listen to her heart. And in listening to her heart, she had the ability to free Cain from hell.

  "You know." Her throat closed on the words. Relief came anyway, sweet and burning and eighteen months too late.

  "From the first moment I saw you." The cop's voice, cold and clinical and detached. "Before then even. I felt you before I stepped from the clearing, someone on my land, someone who didn't belong." He yanked his hand from her face, stabbed it into the pocket of his jeans and pulled something out. "I should have run you off then and there."

  "But you didn't." And to her that said it all. He could have gotten rid of her if he'd wanted to. The Robichauds owned the parish. What they didn't own, they controlled. If a Robichaud wanted a person gone, that person would leave. Sometimes by their own will. Other times … other times help may be needed. But one way or another, what a Robichaud wanted, a Robichaud got.

  Cain had not wanted her gone. Because he'd known.

  Deep down inside he'd recognized the essence she'd been unable to scrub away, and he'd wanted. "You couldn't."

  A hard sound broke from his throat, and before he even spoke, Renee knew the hot emotions of the man were fighting with the detachment of the cop. "For eighteen months I didn't give a bloody damn. I walked through a perpetual glass tunnel, able to see, but never to touch or feel or want. And then there you were," he said, glaring down at his hands. "So goddamn beautiful."

  She didn't want to look. She didn't want to see what he held in his big hands, the ones as capable of violence as they were finesse. But she could no more have stopped herself from lowering her gaze than she could have prevented the collision of the past and the present.

  It was a picture. Of her. Taken in black and white that very first day in the clearing. The sight jarred her, the long dark hair that once had been shoulder-length and blond, the stark suit where she'd once worn snug-fitting tops and jeans, the faraway look on her face as she stared at the cabin where they'd loved and laughed and dreamed.

  Cain put his hand to the picture and dragged his index finger along the curve of her body, and she felt the shiver clear down to her bones.

  "So lost," he said, and though there was a reflective tone to his voice, it was more disgusted than contemplative, as though he was trying to fit the
pieces together. "I think that's what got me. I knew you were trouble and I knew you were lying, but I also knew there was something very wrong in your world." He dropped the picture, let it fall to the damp grass and stomped his boot over the image. Then he lifted his eyes to hers. "There was a desperation to you. A vulnerability you did a damn good job of hiding. But I saw it, and fool that I am, it sucked me in."

  He'd wanted to save her. Like he hadn't saved Savannah.

  She stepped back from him, from the truth, but everything inside kept right on shattering, and no matter how desperately she grabbed for the pieces, they slipped and slashed through her fingers like the porcelain swan her grandmother had given her for her tenth birthday, and smashed into something without form or substance. She'd stood for a long time staring at the shards of something that had once been beautiful, knowing that some things could never be glued back together.

  "What's the matter?" he asked, closing the distance she'd just opened between them. "Did it finally occur to you that you're alone in the swamp with an alleged killer? That virtually no one knows you're here, and those who do know don't care?"

  She took another step back. "You're not going to hurt me."

  "I'm not?" he asked, tracking her movements. "Are you sure?"

  Her heart pounded hard in her chest. "Yes," she said, angling her chin. But then he moved toward her again, and sheer blind instinct had her taking another step away—and straight into one of the columns.

  She realized it then, what he'd been doing, that he'd maneuvered her exactly where he wanted her. He towered over her now, using his height as he had during his days with the force, as one of his most potent weapons for intimidation.

  "Do you think she screamed?" he asked.

  Her legs almost went out from under her. "Wh-what?"

  "Savannah," he said, and his voice was cold and quiet and lethal. "Do you think she screamed?"