For now.
Nine
Faith was dripping wet and shaking with both cold and reaction when she reached her car. Her hands trembled as she tried to fit the key into the lock, and it took her several tries before she succeeded. Crawling in, she collapsed against the steering wheel, pressing her forehead hard against the cold vinyl. Idiot! she thought violently. Fool!
She had to have been insane to give in to the craving to kiss him. Now he knew; she couldn’t hide it from him any longer. For the sake of a few moments of pleasure, she had let him see her weakness, and now he knew that she wanted him. Humiliation burned in her face, ate like acid at her insides. She knew his nature very well, having firsthand experience of his ruthlessness. He was a predator, and the first hint of weakness would draw him straight in for the kill.
He wouldn’t rest now until he’d had her; the occasional suggestive remark would become full-fledged attempts at seduction, and what had just happened proved that she couldn’t trust her common sense to resist him. Where he was concerned, she didn’t have any common sense. Horror filled her at the thought of being casually used and discarded, as if she were a sexual Kleenex. He thought of her as her mother’s clone, a slut willing to spread her legs for anyone who had the equipment—and from what she’d felt, he had more than his share—while she ached for him, her childhood infatuation having changed into a very adult yearning. She wanted nothing more than to be loved by him, to be free to open the floodgates on her own dammed-up reservoir of love; he would turn that dream into a bitter nightmare, using her weakness for him as a means to hurt her, reduce her to being, after all, another Devlin whore for a Rouillard to use.
As much as she wanted to stay in Prescott, she would rather leave than live with that humiliation, to see contempt in his eyes when he looked at her, as she had seen it once before. His words echoed in her mind, a refrain that she had heard many times over the years: You’re trash. The phrase was branded on her subconscious, surfacing every so often to taunt her.
No. She couldn’t live through that again.
But for a few minutes, she had been in heaven. His arms had been around her and she had been free to touch him, to stroke his shoulders, thrust her fingers into the thick, silky tail of hair gathered at the nape of his neck. What would he look like with his hair loose, hanging to his shoulders? Or damp with sweat, and swinging forward as he bent over her, his face tight with passion—
She moaned, aching with a sweet pain that only he could ease. She had never been promiscuous; she had been a virgin when she’d married Kyle, and he was the only man with whom she’d ever made love. Her chastity, however, reflected her horror of being like Renee, with all the ugly association of being the town whore, rather than a lack of interest in the act itself. She loved making love, loved the feel of a man inside her, loved the scents and sounds, the tangled sweatiness. As her grief at Kyle’s death had eased, her hunger for sexual contact had grown, intensified by her own restraint. She simply couldn’t bring herself to have sex purely for the physical release, and after Kyle’s death she hadn’t wanted emotional involvement, either. She had gone four years without being held, without being kissed, until Gray had taken her in his arms and briefly opened the door to paradise.
There was a hot earthiness in him that fanned the banked coals of her own sexual fire. He had been as hard as a rock, and blatant about it. He had wanted her to feel him, had deliberately pulled her into him, lifted her to push the hard ridge of his erection against her mound. They had been on a public street, in daylight, but that hadn’t stopped him. Even though this was New Orleans, where such things might not be all that unusual, she had never before done anything like that. She had always gone out of her way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Respectability, responsibility, were too important to her for her to allow herself to be publicly fondled, yet that was exactly what she had done.
When he touched her, she forgot everything else but the hot joy of being in his arms. Despairing, she wondered if she would have stopped him even if he had done more, or if she would have let herself be taken there in the street like the lowest of whores, oblivious to decency, modesty, even legality. Her face burned at the thought of being arrested for public lewdness, or whatever it was called. Acute stupidity would be a better term.
It would never have happened with anyone but Gray. With no one else would she have lost herself so completely.
She sat motionless in the car, watching the rain beat down in sheets beyond the concrete pillars of the public parking garage, and let appalled realization seep into her mind. Perhaps she had always sensed the truth, but pushed it away. She couldn’t hide from the full reach of reality any longer.
She had loved Kyle, enjoyed sleeping with him, but it was as if only half of her had been involved. There had always been this other part of herself that was set aside, and belonged, irrevocably, to Gray. She had cheated Kyle; perhaps he had never known, and granted, their marriage had been in trouble because of his drinking, but still she should never have married him without loving him wholeheartedly. In the back of her mind had always been the thought that she would remarry someday, but now she knew that she couldn’t; she couldn’t cheat another man. There was only one man whom she could love completely, heart and soul and body, nothing held back, and that was Gray Rouillard. And he was the one man to whom she didn’t dare give herself, because he would destroy her.
• • •
When the rain stopped, Gray walked back to his hotel and went up to his suite, where he made one phone call, to Dallas. “Truman, look something up for me. You have a city directory, don’t you? See if there’s a Faith Hardy listed in it.”
He crossed his legs at the ankle, his feet propped on the coffee table, and waited while his friend and business associate thumbed through the massive volume. A moment later the Texas accent twanged in his ear. “I got two Faith Hardys, and about ten other Hardys with the first initial F.”
“Any of them F. D. Hardy?”
“Ah . . . no. There’s an F. C. and an F. G., but not an F. D.”
“Occupations?”
“Let’s see. One’s a schoolteacher, one’s retired . . .” Truman ran down the list of occupations. None fit the meager facts Gray had on Faith. Dallas might not be the right city, after all, but it was more likely that Faith had declined to be listed in the city directory.
“Okay, that’s a dead end, I think. Look up Margot Stanley, M-a-r-g-o-t.”
Truman snorted. “Are you sure it isn’t M-a-r-g-a-u-x? Isn’t that the way the ‘in’ people spell it these days?”
“Look up both spellings.”
There was the sound of more pages being turned, and Truman humming. He paused. “There’s a shit pot full of Stanleys.”
“Any Margots, of either the American or ‘in’ variety?”
“Yeah, here’s an American-variety Margot.”
“Where does she work?”
“Holladay Travel. Spelled with two /’s and an a.”
“Cross-reference that, and see if it lists the owner.”
More humming. “Bingo,” Truman said. “The owner is F. D. Hardy.”
“Thanks,” Gray said, amused at how easy it had been, after all.
“Any time.”
Gray hung up the phone and considered what he had just discovered. Faith owned a travel agency. Good for her, he thought, inexplicably pleased. On a hunch, he dragged the New Orleans phone directory out of the desk and looked through the yellow pages. There it was, in a discreet, tasteful ad: “Holladay Travel—Put the Holiday Back in Your Vacation, and Leave the Worry to Us.”
So she had at least two offices, and probably more, which explained how she had been able to pay cash for her house. He grinned as he remembered the satisfied little smile on her face when she had thrown his offer to buy the house back in his face. But if she was this prosperous, why did she want to keep it such a secret? Why wasn’t she broadcasting it all over Prescott, to show everyone that a Devlin c
ould crawl out of the trash heap, after all? Why had she so obviously interrupted Margot and kept her from giving out any more information than she had already let slip?
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Faith was afraid he would do something to sabotage her business. Not only did he carry a lot of weight in Louisiana and beyond, but he had just told her that he owned a hotel, in a city that made its living from tourists. It would be easy for him to cause trouble for her agency, and she evidently expected him to do exactly that. Her opinion of him wasn’t very high, he thought wryly.
Hell, why should it be? On a steamy summer night, twelve years ago, he had ground her into the dirt. After that night, she probably thought of him as the devil incarnate.
Only an hour before, he had scared her by unceremoniously grabbing her from behind, though Little Red had seemed more furious than frightened; she had come out swinging, those green eyes narrowed and determined. Then he had all but mauled her on a public street, gripping her ass, lifting her up and grinding his cock against her mound. No wonder she had run from him, when he had finally turned her loose.
Except . . . she hadn’t protested. Instead she had been so hot and sweet that he felt dizzy remembering her in his arms, plastered against his body. She had been taut and trembling with desire, vibrating with it. Her response had broadsided him, knocked him so crazy that he still hadn’t recovered. For a moment he had been blind with lust, insensible to everything else but the driving need to be inside her. If that clap of thunder hadn’t startled him, he might have tried to take her right there, standing in the doorway, with people walking past no more than two feet away. He couldn’t remember ever before being so wild for a woman that nothing else mattered, but Faith had reduced him to that level with only a kiss.
Just a kiss, sweet and spicy at the same time, so hot it had seared him. Her tongue, curling against his in love play. The unreserved sensuality in the way she had sucked on his tongue. The press of her body, eager and instinctive. She wanted him, as fiercely as he wanted her.
Memory re-created the resilient fullness of her buttocks in his hands, and he clenched them into fists to contain the tingling of his palms. It was worse than he had thought, this gnawing lust to have her. He wasn’t accustomed to denying himself any of his sexual appetites, but the barriers between them were both solid and maddening. There was his mother, who had so totally withdrawn when faced with the humiliation of her husband leaving her for the town whore. Monica, her wrists slashed and her blood pooling at her feet; her white face was another image that never left him. There were his own feelings, the rage and pain at being abandoned by his father. The barriers weren’t all on his side, either; the memory of that night lay between him and Faith, a mental Berlin Wall, stark and shattering. Too much pain, too many reasons.
Their bodies didn’t give a damn.
That was it in a nutshell. He wasn’t a Don Juan, but it was a fact that getting sex had always been easy for him. Nothing in his considerable experience, however, had prepared him for this . . . fever. They couldn’t look at each other without feeling its heat. And when they touched, it was like an inferno.
Restlessly he paced the floor, trying to find some way around the barriers. She couldn’t stay in Prescott; that was asking too much of his family. No, he couldn’t let up on making life as miserable as possible for her there, not that he had been able, or willing, to do much anyway. He had inconvenienced her, period. He couldn’t bring himself to really persecute her. She didn’t deserve it; she had been a victim, too. She had worked hard to make something of her life, and had succeeded. If it weren’t for his family, hell, he’d welcome her with open arms. An open fly, too, he thought wryly, and felt the twinge of arousal in his groin.
But he couldn’t make his family go away, couldn’t change the way they felt, so Faith had to go. Maybe not far. Maybe he could convince her to move to Baton Rouge, or even any of the small towns around Prescott. Just somewhere out of the parish, but close enough that they could see each other. She had made a strategic mistake in letting him see how much she wanted him, because he could use that as a means of convincing her to move. We can’t be together here. Move, and we’ll see each other as often as possible. She wouldn’t like it; she’d probably tell him to go to hell, at first. But the fever was there, burning in her the same way it was burning in him. If he used every opportunity to fan the flames, she would eventually see things his way, assuming they didn’t both go up in smoke in the meantime.
She could keep the house in Prescott, if selling it made her feel as if she was giving up too much. He’d buy her another house, anywhere she wanted.
He was faced with two facts. She had to leave Prescott, and he had to have her. Whatever it took, he had to have her.
• • •
“I agree with you,” Mr. Pleasant said, sipping from the glass of iced tea Faith had given him. “I think Guy Rouillard is dead, and has been for twelve years.”
He was dressed today in a pale blue seersucker suit; it would have been tacky if it hadn’t fit so well, if his white shirt hadn’t been so pristine, his tie so impeccable. On Mr. Pleasant, a seersucker suit looked natty. Some of the sadness was gone from his dark eyes, replaced by the sparkle of interest.
They sat in the air conditioned coolness of her living room. Faith had been surprised when he’d called her; it had been only two days since she had hired him. But here he was, with a notepad balanced on his knee.
“There’s been no trace of him since the night he vanished,” he said. “No credit card purchases, no bank withdrawals, no Social Security taxes paid in or tax return filed. Mr. Rouillard wasn’t a criminal, so there was no need for him to change his name or disappear so completely. Logically, then, he’s dead.”
Faith drew a deep breath. “That’s what I thought. I wanted to make certain, though, before I begin asking questions.”
“You do realize that, if he was murdered, your questions could make someone very anxious.” He took another sip of his tea. “The situation could be dangerous for you, my dear. Perhaps it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“I’ve thought of the possibility of danger,” she admitted. “But considering my mother’s involvement with him and the fact that everyone thinks they ran away together, no one would be surprised at my interest. My gall, maybe, but not my interest.”
He chuckled. “It depends on the nature of the questions, I suppose. If you came right out and said you thought Mr. Rouillard had been killed, that would attract a lot of attention.” He sobered, and his tone softened. “My advice is to forget about it. The murder, if there was one, is twelve years old. Time covers a lot of tracks, and you have no evidence to tell you where to begin looking. You aren’t likely to find anything, but you may put yourself in danger.”
“Not even try to find out what happened?” she asked softly. “Let a murderer go unpunished?”
“Ah. You’re thinking about justice. It’s a wonderful concept, if you have the means to accomplish it. Sometimes, though, justice has to be weighed against other considerations, and reality gets in the way. Probably Mr. Rouillard was murdered. Probably your mother is involved, in knowledge if not in deed. Could you handle that? What if his death was an accident, but she was brought up on murder charges? Gray Rouillard is a powerful man; do you think he’d let his father’s death go unpunished? The worst scenario, of course, is if his death wasn’t an accident. In that case, my dear, you would definitely be in danger yourself.”
She sighed. “My reasons for wanting to find out what happened to him aren’t entirely altruistic. In fact, they’re mostly selfish. I want to live here; this is home, this is where I grew up. But I won’t be accepted here as long as everyone thinks Guy ran away with my mother. The Rouillards don’t want me here; Gray is making things difficult for me. I can’t buy my groceries in Prescott, I can’t fill up my car. Unless I can prove Mama didn’t have anything to do with Guy’s disappearance, I’ll never have a friend here.”
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“And what if you prove she killed him?” Mr. Pleasant softly asked.
Faith bit her lip, and rolled the cold, damp glass between her hands. “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.” The words were low, almost inaudible. “I know that, if she’s guilty, I won’t be able to live here. But knowing what really happened, no matter how bad, won’t be as bad as not knowing. Maybe I won’t find out anything, but I’m going to try.”
He sighed. “I thought you’d say that. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few questions around town, just out of curiosity. Folks might tell me things that they wouldn’t tell you.”
That was true. Now that her identity was known, most people would clam up around her rather than defy Gray. Still, Mr. Pleasant had already completed the job for which she’d hired him. “I can’t afford any further investigation,” she said honestly.
He waved his hand in dismissal. “This is for my own curiosity. I’ve always loved a good mystery.”
She eyed him doubtfully. “Has that ever kept you from charging your regular fees?”
“Well, no,” he admitted, and laughed. “But I don’t need the money, and I’d like to know what happened to Mr. Rouillard. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work with my heart the way it is. Probably not long, so I’m only going to spend my time on cases that interest me. As for money . . . well, let’s just say I don’t have much need for it now.”
With his wife dead, he meant. He suddenly busied himself with flipping through his notes, and she knew he was once again fighting tears. She allowed him the dignity of pretense and asked if he would like more iced tea.