Night Moves : Dream Man/After the Night

  “That’s what I thought,” Andrea said, turning to him, and for a moment the expression in her eyes was unguarded. Faith quickly looked down. From what she had just seen, she very much doubted that Andrea had ever been involved with Guy, because she was very much in love with her boss. She wondered if Mr. Chelette knew, and just as quickly decided that he didn’t. There was no hint of awareness on his part.

  “Come in,” he invited, ushering Faith into his office ahead of him, and closing the door. “I know we must seem rude, discussing you that way. I’m sorry. It’s just that the resemblance is so pronounced, and yet, on second glance, the differences are obvious.”

  “Everyone seems to have that reaction when they see me for the first time,” she admitted, and smiled at him. It was very easy to smile at Alex Chelette. He was the type of man whom age refined; always slim, he would pare down even more with the passing years. His dark hair had grayed at the sides, and there were lines at the corners of his gray eyes, but he easily looked to be in his mid-forties, rather than his fifties. His scent was light green, as fresh as newly cut grass.

  “Sit down, please,” he said, and settled into his own chair. “What can I do for you today?”

  Faith seated herself on the leather sofa. “Actually, I came on personal reasons, and I realize now I shouldn’t have taken up your work time—”

  He shook his head, smiling. “It’s my pleasure. Now, tell me what’s bothering you. Is it Gray? I tried to get him to leave you alone, but he’s very protective of his mother and sister, and he doesn’t want them upset.”

  “I understand Gray’s position very well,” Faith said dryly. “That isn’t why I’m here.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about Guy Rouillard. You were his best friend, weren’t you?”

  He gave her a faint smile. “I thought so. We grew up together.”

  Should she tell him that Guy hadn’t, after all, left with Renee? She toyed with the idea, then discarded it. As friendly as he seemed, she couldn’t forget that he was an old family friend of the Rouillards. She had to assume that anything she told him would go straight to Gray.

  “I’m curious about him,” she finally said. “That night wrecked my family, just as it did Gray’s. What was he like? I know he wasn’t faithful to my mother any more than he was to his wife, so why would he all of a sudden walk away from everything, his family, his business, to be with her?”

  “I don’t think you really want me to answer that,” he replied wryly. “To put it as politely as I can, Renee was a fascinating woman, at least to men. Physically she was . . . well, Guy was very responsive to Renee’s sensuality.”

  “But he was already having an affair with her. There wasn’t any reason for them to leave.”

  Alex shrugged, a very Gallic gesture. “I’ve never understood it myself.”

  “Why didn’t he just get a divorce?”

  “Again, I don’t have an answer for that. Perhaps because of his religion; Guy wasn’t a regular at mass, but he felt more strongly about religion than you might have expected. Perhaps he thought it would be easier on Noelle if he didn’t divorce her, if he just handed everything over to Gray and left. I simply don’t know.”

  “Hand everything over to Gray?” Faith repeated. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I can’t divulge details of my clients’ business dealings.”

  “No, of course not.” Quickly she backtracked. “Do you remember anything else about that summer? Who else Guy was seeing?”

  He looked startled. “Why would you want to know?”

  “Like I said, I have an interest in the man. Because of him, I haven’t seen my mother since that day. Was he likeable? Did he have any honor, or was he just a tomcat?”

  He stared at her for a moment, and pain crept into his eyes. “Guy was the most likeable man in the world,” he finally said. “I loved him like a brother. He was always laughing, teasing, but if I needed him for anything, he was there like a shot. His marriage to Noelle was a disappointment to him, but still I was surprised when he left, because he was so close to Gray and Monica. He was a terrible husband, but a wonderful father.” He looked down at his hands. “It’s been twelve years,” he said softly. “And I still miss him.”

  “Did he ever call?” she asked. “Or get in touch with his family in any way?”

  He shook his head. “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Who else was he seeing that summer, besides Yolanda Foster?”

  Once again, her question startled him. His eyebrows rose, and rebuke was in his voice when he spoke. “None of that matters. As I keep telling Gray, it’s in the past; let it go. There was a lot of pain that summer, and keeping it alive doesn’t do anyone any good.”

  “I can’t let it go, when no one else in the parish will. No matter how successful I am, or respectable, some people here still think of me as trash.” Her voice trembled a little on the last word. She hadn’t meant to let her control waver, and she was both embarrassed and irritated that it had. Sometimes, though, the pain leaked through.

  Alex must have heard it, because his expression changed, and suddenly he left his chair to come sit beside her and take one of her hands in both of his. “I know it’s been difficult for you,” he said gently. “They’ll change their minds, when they get to know you better. And Gray will eventually relent. As I said, he reacted the way he did because he’s so protective of his family, but basically he’s a very fair man.”

  “And ruthless,” Faith added.

  A rueful smile touched his face. “That, too. But not unkind. Take my word for it. If there’s anything I can do to change his mind, I promise you I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you,” Faith said. That wasn’t why she’d come to see him, but he was too conscientious to divulge personal details about his clients and friends. The visit wasn’t a total waste, however, she felt she could safely mark Andrea Wallice off her list.

  She took her leave, and drove home pondering the scraps of information she’d gotten that day. If Guy had been murdered, Lowell or Yolanda Foster seemed to be the most likely suspects. She wondered how she could contrive a meeting with either of them. And she wondered where Mr. Pleasant was, and if he was all right.

  • • •

  “I met Faith today,” Alex said that night as he and Gray were going over some papers. He picked up his brandy and keenly eyed the younger man over the rim of the glass. “The resemblance is eerie, at first glance, but by the second look there’s no way of mistaking her for Renee. Odd, isn’t it, the way Renee was more beautiful, but Faith is more attractive?”

  Gray glanced up, wry awareness in his dark eyes as he caught the expression in Alex’s gray ones. “Yes, I’ve noticed how attractive she is, if that’s what you’re asking. Where did you meet her?” He picked up his own glass, filled with his favorite Scotch, and savored the smoky bite of it on his tongue.

  “At my office. She came to ask me about Guy.”

  Gray almost choked. He set his glass down with a force that made the whisky slosh dangerously close to the rim. “She what? What in hell did she want to know about Dad?” The thought of Faith asking anything about his father made him bitterly angry. It was a knee-jerk reaction; for a moment she wasn’t Faith, the person, but a Devlin, with all the connotations elicited by the name. He himself wanted her with a fierce need that both alarmed and disgusted him, even though he knew he was going to ease that need if possible, but he didn’t want anything about her touching his family. He didn’t want Monica or Noelle exposed to her, and he sure as hell didn’t want her asking about his father. Guy was gone. His absence, his betrayal, was a wound that remained perilously close to the surface, and bled at the slightest scratch.

  “She wanted to know what he was like, had he ever gotten in touch, if he’d been seeing anyone else that summer.”

  Furious, Gray half rose from his chair, intending to go to her house right now and have it out with her
. Alex stopped him with a hand on his arm. “She has a right to know,” he said mildly. “Or at least to be curious.”

  “I’ll be goddamned if she does!” Gray snapped.

  “She hasn’t seen her mother since then, either.”

  Gray froze, then sank back into the chair. Alex was right, damn it. It rankled, but he had to admit the truth. At least he’d been a grown man, if inexperienced in business, when his father had left; Faith had been only fourteen, as helpless and vulnerable as a child. He didn’t know anything about her life between then and now, except that she was a widow and now owned a successful travel agency, but he’d bet his last red cent it hadn’t been pleasant. Living with Amos Devlin and those two hoodlum boys, as well as her slut of a sister, couldn’t have been easy. It wouldn’t have been easy before, but at least Renee had been there.

  “Let up on her, Gray,” Alex said softly. “She deserves better than the reception she’s getting from some people, and part of it’s your fault.”

  Gray picked up the glass and swirled the whiskey, looking down into the amber depths. “I can’t,” he said gruffly. He got up and carried his drink to the window, where he stood staring at his reflection in the glass, and the darkness beyond. He took another sip of fortification. “She has to go, before I do something that really hurts Monica and Mother.”

  “Such as?” Alex asked, puzzled.

  “Let’s just say that, where Faith is concerned, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is my family, and the hard place—” he looked around with a sort of angry amusement in his eyes “—is in my pants.”

  Appalled, Alex stared at him. “My God.”

  “It must be genetic.” That was the only explanation for it, he thought grimly. He had inherited his father’s cock. Put a Devlin woman in front of it, and it got hard. No, not just any Devlin woman; two of them had left him cold. But Faith . . . Nothing about him was cold if she was anywhere within a country mile.

  “You can’t do that to your mother,” Alex whispered. “The humiliation would kill her.”

  “Hell, I know that! That’s why I want Faith to leave, before I do something stupid.” He turned to face Alex, that angry amusement still burning in his eyes. “The attraction isn’t all on my side, damn it. It’d be easier if it was. I went to her house the other night to put a proposition to her: If she didn’t want to leave the area, I’d buy a house for her in any town close by, as long as it wasn’t in this parish. That way we could see each other without hurting anyone. There was an old man there, having dinner with her, and I was so jealous, I accused her of having a sugar daddy.” He shook his head, and laughed softly at himself. “Can you believe it? The old guy looked as frail as a toothpick, but he was all dressed up like something out of the fifties, and all I could think was that he was trying to get her in bed.”

  “What old guy?” Alex asked, plainly curious. “Anyone I know?”

  “He was from New Orleans. His last name was Pleasant. I was so mad, I don’t remember if she told me his first name. He said he was a business associate.”

  “Was he?”

  Gray shrugged. “Probably. Faith owns a travel agency, and she has a branch in New Orleans.”

  “She owns it?”

  “She’s done pretty good for herself, hasn’t she?” There it was again, that damn little twinge of pride. “She started out in Dallas. I don’t know how many branch offices she has, but I have someone gathering information on her. I expect to have a report any day.”

  “Are you going to try to ruin her business if she doesn’t leave?” Alex asked, but less sharply than Gray had expected.

  “No. For one thing, I’m not that big of a bastard. For another, if I did, I could kiss my chances with her goodbye.” His mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Decide for yourself which reason is the most important.”

  Alex didn’t smile in return. “This is a hell of a situation. If you’re bound and determined to have her—”

  “I am,” Gray said, and tossed back the last of the whiskey.

  “—then she can’t live here. Noelle would be devastated.”

  “I’m worried more about Monica than I am Mother.”

  Alex blinked, as if he hadn’t considered Monica. He probably hadn’t; all of his attention was focused on Noelle. He knew about Monica’s suicide attempt, of course; it hadn’t been possible to keep it quiet, not with all the commotion at Dr. Bogarde’s office. Monica didn’t try to hide the scars, anyway. She was too proud to let herself take the cowardly route of long sleeves or wide bracelets.

  “Monica is a lot stronger than she was then,” Alex finally said. “But Noelle doesn’t have anything to fall back on. I thought at the beginning, and still do, that she should face up to facts and get on with her life, but if she found out you were having an affair with Faith—no. She couldn’t stand it. She might try suicide herself.”

  Gray shook his head, amazed that Alex could have known Noelle all these years and still not realized that she was too self-centered to harm herself. The myopia of love allowed him to see only her cool, perfect, unattainable beauty. It was that romantic streak in him, a strange characteristic for a lawyer.

  “She has to go,” Alex said regretfully.

  Twelve

  The fax machine was humming, so Faith didn’t hear the car turn in to the driveway. When the knock rattled the front door, she leaned over to look out the window. She couldn’t see who was standing on the porch, but she could see the gray Jaguar parked behind her car, and she sighed as she went, coffee cup in hand, into the living room to answer the door. It was barely eight-thirty, too early to have to deal with Gray Rouillard.

  The first thing she noticed when she opened the door was that he was in a towering rage.

  The only other time she had seen him like this was the day he’d come to the shack to tell them Renee had left, and again that night, when he’d had them thrown out. As she looked up into the cold ruthlessness of those dark eyes, the memory of that night flashed in her mind, the stark images reducing her in an instant to the terrified girl she’d been then. Her blood chilled, and she fell back a step as he came inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  She jumped at the sound. Her eyes, green and unblinking, were fastened on his face as if she didn’t dare look away.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked very softly, the velvety sound as chilling as a sword sliding against another blade. He advanced another step, so that he loomed over her, and Faith retreated again. The coffee cup shook in her hand.

  For every step he took forward, she took one back, a slow dance that ended when she bumped into the wall, her shoulder blades pressing hard against the Sheetrock as if she could force her way through it. His arms shot out before she could slide sideways, his palms flattening against the wall on either side of her shoulders, imprisoning her within the cage of his arms and body. He leaned down slightly; the top two buttons of his white shirt were open, revealing a wedge of warm olive skin decorated with curly black hair. His pulse throbbed visibly in the hollow at the base of his strong throat, right in front of her eyes. Faith fastened her gaze on that rhythmic movement, desperately seeking to steady herself. She was not fourteen. He could not throw her out of her own house.

  “Well?” he asked, still in that dangerous, purring tone.

  His thick wrists were squeezing her shoulders, bared by her sleeveless blouse; his skin was hot against hers. His wide shoulders and broad chest were like a wall in front of her, and his rich, musky male scent made her nostrils flare in automatic delight. Still clasping the coffee cup, holding it like a shield between them, she swallowed and managed to say, “What are you talking about?”

  He leaned closer, so close that his stomach brushed against her fingers. “I’m talking about all those questions you’ve been asking. Alex told me last night you’d been to his office. Talking to Alex is one thing, he’ll keep his mouth shut, but guess who I saw this morning. Ed Morgan.” Despite the calmness
of his tone, she could see the cold fury flickering in his eyes. If he’d been having a roaring fit, she wouldn’t have been half as nervous. In this mood, he was capable of anything, but oddly enough, she didn’t fear him physically. No, if Gray harmed her, the damage would be to her emotions.

  “I’m only going to tell you once.” He said the words very precisely, leaning down even closer, until his nose was almost touching hers. “Don’t ask any more questions about my father. Your nosiness will only stir up gossip, and hurt my family again. If that happens, Faith, I will run you out of the parish again, by any means necessary. You can take that to the bank. So keep it in mind: I don’t want your pretty mouth even shaping my father’s name.”

  Wide green eyes stared into chilly dark ones, only a couple of inches apart. Her chin tilted upward, and her mouth, which he thought was pretty, parted as she deliberately tugged on the tiger’s tail, and uttered two words: “Guy Rouillard.”

  She saw his pupils widen in disbelief, then the chill in his eyes was swallowed by pure fire. Maybe it hadn’t been prudent to provoke him, but watching the result was fascinating. He seemed to expand with fury, dark color running into his face, and if his long hair hadn’t been pulled back and secured, she rather thought it would have lifted from his head.

  She had a split second in which to enjoy the entertainment. Then he moved with the blurring speed she had seen before, his hands leaving the wall to clasp hard around her upper arms, and he gave her a teeth-rattling shake. Her grip loosened on the forgotten cup in her hands, and she felt it slip. With a cry she tried to juggle it, but he was too close, and all she could do was knock the falling cup toward herself, rather than let the steaming liquid burn him. The coffee soaked into her thin skirt, plastering it to her right thigh, and splattered over their feet. She cried out again, this time in pain. The cup hit the floor with a crash, breaking off the handle but otherwise remaining intact. Gray jumped back, automatically releasing her, and frantically she pulled the wet fabric away from her stinging thigh.