Greeley reached over and tucked her hair behind her ear.
“I don’t think you have to take an exam to give free advice,” he said.
Which was how, the next day, she found herself sitting down in one of the clubhouse’s offices, talking with a few of the brothers about their pending cases on various criminal charges. Away from the pressure cooker of the New York legal scene, and outside of Antony’s control for the first time since she’d left Columbia, she was surprised to find that she loved the law as much as she had in the abstract in law school. She liked the puzzle of it. The assembly of case law, precedent, notes, and instinct to mount a good defense. And she liked that it was a calling, not merely a job. Because that was what it had always been to her. It wasn’t saving lives the way her father had, but it was still the attempt to save lives in a different way, one innocent until proven guilty client after another, and she still loved it.
It warmed something deep inside of her that while Antony had taken so much from her, he hadn’t taken that.
“Why don’t you have a lawyer already?” she asked Greeley that night when they were back in his house, eating a simple dinner he’d thrown together. He wasn’t a cook, necessarily, but he could make a few things and he liked feeding her. Not the food he thought she should eat. Food he thought she’d like. It was astonishing how much that moved her.
“You think I need a lawyer?” he asked, sounding amused. “I haven’t been caught breaking the law in a long time, darlin’.”
They were sitting out on his porch with the bayou right there at their feet, the burnt oranges and deep golds of the sunset still lingering in the warm sky above them, making the cypress trees look like they were haunting themselves in the twilight.
She noted that he didn’t say he hadn’t broken any laws. Only that he hadn’t been caught. But what did she expect? And more—why didn’t that bother her the way it should have? The way she was sure it once had, back when?
“Not you personally, the club,” she said. “I’m surprised you don’t retain your own law firm.”
“We do.” His hard mouth went grim. “His name is Ward Thayer. I don’t like him. He’s an old, fat southern prick who plays golf with the mayor.”
She made a face. “Anyone who voluntarily spends time with the mayor is obviously shady. Assuming the mayor is still Benny Chambless.”
“The mayor has been Benny Chambless for years because Benny used to know his place.” Greeley let out a low laugh. “Something he’s apparently forgotten these days.”
Merritt had only seen the mayor from afar since she’d been back, glad-handing his way through the crowd in the diner next to the country store in town, as oily and repellant as ever while she and Lanie had been trying to enjoy a proper Cajun breakfast of hot boudin and cracklins.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who thought more highly of himself than Benny Chambless,” she said now. “And I say this as someone who went to a couple of Ivy League schools and then worked in a New York City law firm.”
“The new sheriff of St. Germain Parish has a hard-on for Lagrange,” Greeley said, more to the bayou than to her. “He’s a shiny fucking boy scout with a mission. He can’t touch the club, but a few crooked officials too dumb or full of themselves to cover their tracks? He’s going for their blood. Benny’s too arrogant to see it coming, and too much of an asshole to realize the club isn’t going to do shit for him when it does.”
And it occurred to Merritt that this was actually some of the club business he’d always claimed he couldn’t discuss. That a man might talk about his life to a woman he considered his in a way he wouldn’t if she was just another random piece of ass—or a college girl who had always been planning to leave at the end of the summer.
Something bright washed through her, several degrees warmer than the spring night.
“That’s just one more reason why I think the club needs a better lawyer,” Merritt said softly.
Greeley looked back to her, his gray eyes gleaming silver as the last of the daylight disappeared into the shifting water of the bayou.
“You trying to protect the club, baby?” he asked, like he thought it was cute.
But when he reached over and plucked her from her chair to pull her into his lap, cute had nothing to do with what he did with his hand, sneaking up beneath the skirt she wore and plunging into her pussy with such certainty and absolute mastery of her body that she was coming against him almost before she knew what was happening.
And he was grinning against her mouth when she could finally breathe again.
“Finish your food,” he murmured. “I got plans.”
She was thinking about law and crooked local officials and the club the next evening while she was driving back into town from Lanie’s the way she always did. She was later than usual because Lanie was taking the closing shift behind the bar tonight. The cases she’d looked at so far for the club pricked at her, and maybe she really was protecting the club. After all, Greeley thought he was protecting her from the inevitable Antony fallout. It was the least she could do in return.
As far as she could tell, the club’s previous lawyer hadn’t done shit to help any of the brothers facing charges. Two of the Lagrange charter’s members were in prison right now, serving out harsh sentences—one of them in Angola, the harshest maximum security prison in Louisiana. Maybe in the whole country. And nothing in the files suggested the club’s lawyer had done any of the things Merritt thought a competent defense attorney should have done to fight it.
It was hard not to wonder if maybe some of the local officials who the club thought had their backs really didn’t. No lawyer on the club’s payroll would do anything obvious, of course. That would be suicide. But criminal cases were lost all the time. You couldn’t blame a lawyer for losing a case when the defendant was a known thug. Or anyway, that appeared to be the position the mayor’s golfing buddy had taken when he’d lost pretty much every case that he’d handled in the past ten years.
“Every. Fucking. Case,” Merritt muttered out loud as she turned down her old road.
Maybe Wade Thayer was just a shitty lawyer. But Merritt had discovered that he lived an awfully fancy life for an incompetent. A big, rambling plantation style house in a different part of the parish. A fleet of sweet cars and three spoiled rotten kids. That didn’t really strike her as the profile of an ineffectual lawyer, consistently in over his head on all these club-related cases. And he was tight with Benny Chambless, who Greeley seemed to think was heading for a major fall from the heights he currently enjoyed because he’d somehow forgotten what he owed the club. What if he wasn’t simply full of himself? What if Benny and his buddy had set out to hurt the Devil’s Keepers right under their noses?
Merritt pulled into her daddy’s old driveway as the sun started to make its final, lazy way toward the horizon. She drove around behind the house and sat for a minute in the cab of the pickup, shooting Greeley a text before she lost her train of thought.
What if Ward Thayer isn’t incompetent? she texted him. What if all that losing is a deliberate plan to undercut the club?
She tucked her phone in the pocket of her jeans as she slid out of the truck and slammed the door shut when she hit the ground. Greeley hadn’t packed up the toiletries she’d left out in the bathroom here when he’d picked up her stuff, which meant she’d been using his stuff for too long. A week and a half of Greeley’s Irish Spring soap and medicinal applications of Lanie’s moisturizer in the afternoons and she still felt like she was half-armadillo. Even in all the humidity. She needed her own things.
She ran up the back steps, pushing her way into the house that had never been locked as long as she’d lived here. This was Lagrange. There were bad men in town, sure, but they usually conducted their mayhem on the other side of the town’s borders. They were the reason the town stayed secure and almost entirely crime-free, something that wasn’t true of the other towns in the parish.
Merritt had grown up
safe, and maybe that was why she’d always felt so vulnerable everywhere else. There were no consequences for bad acts in places like New York. There was no blowback. In Lagrange, a club member or a club sympathizer was always watching. Always ready to get the Devil’s Keepers involved—and once they were, the problem got solved. Fast.
No one she’d known in New York had wanted to get involved in what was happening between her and Antony. No one in her firm had done a thing to help. They’d all pretended they didn’t see it, or that she was crazy, or they played along with him and then talked about “his toys” behind her back.
It hadn’t occurred to her until now how much she’d hated it. Them.
Someone could have warned her about Antony that first year in the firm. There had been a thousand opportunities. They hadn’t dated for months. All those snide paralegals who’d called her a toy had been there then. Any one of them could have taken her aside and shared a few home truths. She might not have listened to them. But what if she had? Could she have saved herself from all this? Yet none of them had thought to give her a single clue what she was getting herself into.
“Bastards,” she muttered out loud.
She didn’t turn on the lights as she moved through the house because she didn’t need them in the early evening gloom. She jogged up the stairs to the bathroom and gathered up her various bottles from the sink and the built-in hollows inside the glassed-in shower. Then she went into her bedroom to get her beloved moisturizer.
She found the little jar that had cost her entirely too much on the bedside table next to the tiny bed. The room was still too pink in the long shadows as the evening edged toward dark. Too pink and too much of a snapshot of someone she wasn’t sure she’d ever been. Had she really wanted to get out of Lagrange that badly? So badly she’d practically left skid marks on the way to the parish line? It made sense that summer five years ago. She’d wanted to stay with Greeley too much and she’d known it would have taken so very, very little to convince herself that was a good idea. But she’d been as desperate to leave when she was eighteen, too, with no Greeley in the picture. As if every second she stayed in town after her high school graduation was a step down a steep staircase straight into hell. When maybe the truth was that she’d liked the idea of herself as the kind of person who could and would go on to bigger and better things than a sleepy Louisiana biker town. She’d liked feeling that kind of special.
It was the only time she thought that maybe her father didn’t hate her. When she was inarguably smart and talented and destined for greatness in a series of Ivy League schools far away from here.
Louisiana will always be home, Daddy, she’d said her senior year while she’d been deciding between colleges, one of them Tulane in New Orleans. Maybe I want to stay here.
Here? he’d asked, sounding astonished. Not in a good way. You can do better than here, I think. My daughter isn’t meant to languish in the bayou. Not when you can shine somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Merritt had spent four years at Brown trying to live up to that. Trying to shine. And another five years in New York, in law school and out. And still, the brightest she’d ever been had been here. That summer. With Greeley.
How long was she going to pretend otherwise? When her father wasn’t even alive any longer to be disappointed in her?
Was that why she’d come back here? Because he was gone and that meant she could?
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she knew it was Greeley. He liked to know where she was, something she should have found hideously controlling. Sometimes she pretended she did.
I don’t need to be on a leash, she’d told him just the other night.
But I like it when you wear one, baby, he’d replied, with that killer grin of his that made her forget her own name. Just for me.
The truth was, she liked feeling that he was looking out for her. That he gave a shit if she was a little late somewhere, not because he wanted to control her movements but because he was impatient to see her. Hell, she liked knowing that he knew where she was supposed to be at any given time, because that meant that if something happened to her, he’d know.
She hadn’t had that in a long time. New York had swallowed her and kept her anonymous, especially after her only law school friends—both of them—had taken jobs in distant cities. She didn’t know her neighbors except in passing. She hadn’t meant to keep her distance from her coworkers, but that had happened naturally. She’d thought it was because she spent so much time immersed in Antony’s cases. Now, looking back, she wondered if they’d kept their distance from her the moment it had been clear he’d set his sights on her.
Whatever the reasons, she hadn’t had anyone waiting around to make sure she was okay. Maybe ever, given that her own father hadn’t seemed to care too much where she was as long as it didn’t mess up the bright and shining future he wanted for her. It made her feel warm and a little giddy inside that Greeley cared. That he gave a shit.
Merritt was turning back toward the bedroom door, about to reach for her phone and see what terse, gruff thing her scary ass biker had texted her that would invariably make her smile, when she heard something.
She froze instantly. Her heart rocketed against her ribs and her stomach dropped to the floor—but it didn’t make sense. She knew that sound. She might not have heard it in years, but she knew it well. That little squeak in the hall floorboards right outside her bedroom—but it couldn’t be because no one had come up the stairs. She would have heard them on the old, creaky steps that screamed bloody murder no matter what. There was no way to sneak up or down those stairs quietly—that was why, back in the day, the very few times she’d actually snuck out to meet Lanie somewhere she’d used her bedroom window, which was handily situated right above the porch.
There is no one in this house, she told herself sternly as she stood there, her feet glued to the floor, her heart performing desperate acrobatics in her chest. Her phone buzzed in her pocket again, but she made no move to answer it. It’s just you and your memories and a bunch of empty bedrooms filled with ancient, forgotten trinkets of somebody else’s life.
She had to be imagining things. She waited there, frozen still in the center of her faded candy cane bedroom, while her heart beat at her and she strained to listen to the rapidly darkening house all around her.
There was nothing. Of course there was nothing.
“You need to calm down,” she muttered, and she started moving again, because it might have been nothing, but the back of her neck was still prickling. She wanted to get out of here. Ghosts were ghosts. It wasn’t like anyone wanted to hang out with them, no matter how benign they were.
Until she’d returned to Lagrange, in fact, she’d preferred to keep hers whole states and half the country away.
But that was when he stepped into her bedroom from the hallway leading to her father’s room and the attic, and all the lies she’d been telling herself for two weeks now crumbled into so much dust. The way, deep down, she’d known they would.
She’d known.
“Hello, Merritt,” Antony said, sounding even more psychotic than he actually was because he kept his voice so friendly while his eyes were so flat and scary. “I’ve been so worried about you.”
Chapter 9
He was going to kill her.
Merritt couldn’t say she accepted that, necessarily, but acknowledging what she saw in Antony’s glittering gaze at that moment gave her a certain measure of peace. Or resignation, anyway. It allowed her to take a breath. Her heart didn’t stop its sickening drumming, but it didn’t knock her over. She even stood a little straighter as she faced him in the pink gloom of the bedroom.
The good news was she could stop dreading this. It was happening.
It was almost a relief.
“Oh, hey,” she said casually, gripping the strap of her bag and hoping he couldn’t see how white her knuckles were. Hoping he couldn’t hear the fear in her voice, because she’d learned the hard way back
in New York that he liked it. He fed off it.
“Who is he?” Antony asked, still standing in the doorway. Still in that same friendly tone that made the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck prickle into awareness.
He didn’t lunge toward her. Merritt told herself that was something. And he hadn’t grown fangs and horns or anything in the weeks since she’d last seen him, as she’d half-expected he might since he loomed so large and ugly and terrifying in her head. He looked the way he always looked. Pulled together. Rich. Attractive, maybe, if you didn’t know him. He was proud of the fact he had all his hair, dark brown and thick. His eyes were brown too, and if you couldn’t see the crazy in them, could be confused for sweet. He was wearing the same sort of suit he’d always worn in Manhattan, tailor-made for him and showing off the body he kept in lean, trim, running shape. The only difference was that today, he looked a little rumpled around the edges. He lacked his usual crispness. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. And if she wasn’t mistaken, he was sweating.
She wanted to take pleasure in that. It was the bayou kicking another unprepared Yankee’s ass, she was sure, the way it liked to do—but she couldn’t quite get to a place of amusement. Because maybe it wasn’t the thick weather. Maybe it was just that Antony was a fucking lunatic who was going off the rails right there in front of her.
“Who is who?” she asked. Politely, all things considered.
But then her phone buzzed again, loud as hell in the small room.
“Do me the favor of not acting like I’m the dumb whore you are, Merritt,” Antony said pleasantly, the sudden name-calling as shocking as it had always been because it seemed so particularly terrible in that tone, especially because he smiled a little bit as he said it. She gritted her teeth and ordered herself not to shake. He got off on that too much. “Who is he?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She made herself swallow in a vain attempt to get her throat less dry. “There’s no one else here.”