Читать книгу Cole Dempsey's Back In Town - Suzanne Mcminn - Страница 9

Something crashed on the floor of the front hall mere feet away, and there was another screeching sound. Bryn’s stomach dipped crazily. She froze for just an instant, her brain computing facts. That sound was a car, and that crash was something thrown through the window. She pushed past the hard shadow of Cole. Her bare feet raced across the wood floor and she flung open the door even as she registered the stab of something sharp and ice-hot.

“Wait, Bryn!” Cole came up behind her, grabbed her as she would have torn outside onto the portico. The half moon that had lit the grounds earlier in the evening hid behind clouds, and beyond the splash of the porch lantern, she could see nothing but impermeable dark.

“Let go of me,” she demanded, fighting Cole’s too-intimate arms plastering her to his too-hard body.

“They’re gone.” He relaxed his hold.

Bryn hit the switch in the entry hall. The overhead chandelier spilled blinding light down on the room. Her breath jammed her throat.

Glass lay everywhere. A rust-red brick sat innocently amongst the shards. It took a beat for her to register the fact that something was tied to it.

She took a step toward it and cried out in pain.

“Bryn!” Cole reached out to her again. As his arms went around her, he felt her trembling.

He knew the last thing she wanted was his help. “I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re hurt.”

“There’s a note.” She started to hobble her way across the glass-littered pine floor, but Cole—wearing shoes—crunched straight for the brick and reached it before her. He knelt and picked it up. A small sheet of white paper was tied to it with a strand of twine.

He ripped it off and opened it. The block-lettered words burned up at him.

The son of a murderer isn’t welcome in St. Salome Parish.

The old bitter fury washed through him, thick and greasy and nauseating.

“What does it say?”

He stood, turned. Bryn’s face was pale, anxious. She was good and freaked-out by what had just happened, and he tamped down his own rage against the past and this town and the injustice he’d waited fifteen years to make right. He handed her the note.

She read it and lifted huge, haunted eyes to him. The small piece of paper shook in her slender fingers. “We have to call the police,” she said hoarsely.

“Right. That’ll help.” He couldn’t stop the sarcasm that laced his words. The police in St. Salome Parish hadn’t given a rat’s ass about the Dempseys fifteen years ago and he wouldn’t be surprised if that hadn’t changed. The Dempseys’ nomadic lifestyle, moving from sugarcane plantation to sugarcane plantation every time Wade Dempsey had got drunk and in trouble, had seemed to end here. No more alcoholic binging, no more fighting and no more of the philandering that Mary Dempsey had borne with a stoic determination to keep her family together.

They’d had three good years in Azalea Bend. Three years of putting down roots, thinking they’d found home. It was their family’s new start. With Wade on the wagon, his genuine passion for the sugarcane fields had landed him the position of plantation manager by that third year. God, Cole had been proud. And maybe, just maybe, he’d hoped even he, once merely the son of a hired hand, would be good enough for the daughter of Maurice Louvel….

But it had been no bright new beginning. Rather, it had been an all-too-lurid end. And when Aimee had died, it had also been all too clear that their acceptance into St. Salome Parish had been the worst kind of mirage.

They were outsiders.

Even Bryn had turned her back on them.

“I’m calling the police,” Bryn insisted. “Someone threw a brick through my window. This note is a threat. Maybe they can get fingerprints or analyze it or something.”

She sounded so desperate and scared.

“Fine, call the police. But the two of us have already handled the note.” Which probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, but neither of them had been thinking.

“Oh, God.” She dropped the note and took a step back. A smear of blood stained the pine floor where she’d stepped.

Reaching out to her without thinking, he picked her up into his arms. The fit of her sexily curvaceous body, the scent of her orange jessamine soap, the feel of her blunt-cut shoulder-length gold hair brushing his cheek, mingled with the magnolia air sweeping in from the broken window, dreamy and nightmarish all at once. How had he teased himself into believing that he could feel nothing for Bryn Louvel? She evoked a beat inside him as distinctive as a Zydeco rhythm.

And as hard to forget.

“I can walk—” she started.

He knew where the kitchen was located, and even as they left the fulgent glare of the chandelier-lit entry hall, he paced toward it, giving her no time for further protest. Bryn’s body felt light, though she’d noticeably filled out since she’d been sweet sixteen.

And filled out in all the right places.

She was tall, slender but toned and far too fascinating with her big, wary eyes and full, kissable lips. She pulled at his heart even as his head told him she was dangerous.

Holding her like this made him remember all too well that there had been tender moments between them. But that had been before their world had spun apart, leaving nothing but bitterness and regret.

Pushing through the swinging door that led into the humongous Bellefleur kitchen, he saw that a light had been left on over the sink. In its ghostly spill, he set Bryn down by the round fruitwood table. She grabbed hold of one of the cane-back carved chairs, putting her weight on the uninjured foot. He pulled back another chair.

“Sit.” He headed for the sink.

“Do I need to remind you this is my house?” The chair scraped against the floor as she settled into it. “Who the hell do you think you are? If you hadn’t stopped me, I might have gotten a look at that car—”

Cole grabbed a towel by the sink and turned on the water. He looked back at her.

“No, you wouldn’t have gotten a look at that car. They didn’t have their lights on and they were driving off way too fast. And if they hadn’t been and you had seen them, who knows what they would have done next. Someone who throws a brick through your window isn’t stopping by for a social call. You could have been hurt, Bryn. You were hurt.”

And he shouldn’t care that she was hurt. She’d trampled his heart fifteen years ago. Yet dark and unnervingly deep, he knew he did care and he fought inside himself to keep it under control. He was here for a reason, and opening his heart to Bryn again wasn’t part of it.

He wrung out the wet towel and headed back across the room.

“It’s just glass,” she said, leaning over to inspect the foot she’d elevated on the next chair. “I’m more worried about the window. And who did it. I’ve got a phone in the office—”

“Let me take a look. You might need stitches. The brick’s not going anywhere. You can call in a minute.”

She looked up at him, her face half-hidden in the brooding shadows of the room. Her soft lips were pressed in an unpliable line—whether from pain or stubbornness, he wasn’t sure. He flicked the switch on the wall, illuminating the table with the lantern-style chandelier. The room was a rustic, aristocratic melody, from the intricately cast arms of the lighting fixture with its delicate leaf-and-beading details to the collection of colorful plates and jugs crowding the overmantel of the old fireplace. Despite the museum-quality antiques filling the room, it had the lived-in feel of generations of Louvels.

He pulled out another chair and drew it close enough to pick up her foot in his hands, rest it on his lap. The night was warm, but her skin felt cold. He could feel the tension in her body. The pieces of glass in her foot were small, thankfully, but when he pulled the sharp bits out, the blood flow increased. He placed the shards on the scarred, antiqued tabletop and wrapped her foot in the towel.

“Do you have some bandages around here somewhere?” He settled her foot back on the other chair.

“There’s a first-aid box in the cabinet by the sink,” she told him.

He found a white plastic box with a red cross stamped on the top. He pulled out the gauze. She unwrapped the towel. The bleeding had slowed. She took the gauze and tape from him, clearly preferring to tend to herself.

His gaze followed the line of her slender foot to the delectably curved calf, and higher. She wore lightweight cotton shorts and a slim-fitting boat-neck T-shirt that hugged the supple rounding of her breasts.

He felt again a very sexual and all-too-familiar tug of awareness, and knew he was going to have to accept it. He’d been attracted to Bryn since he was seventeen years old. He couldn’t expect that to change just because he was older. His heart might be dead and ruined but his body was in full working order.

But he didn’t have to act on that attraction…and couldn’t, because too much else had changed.

His gaze continued to rise till he found himself meeting her water-hyacinth eyes, as deep a purple as the wild blossoms covering every bayou and swamp in Louisiana. And just as capable of robbing everything they touched of oxygen. For just a second, he thought he saw the same raw hunger that had so unexpectedly seized him.

His chest hurt, and although he wasn’t even touching her, he was more aware of her than ever.

She put the gauze on the table. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said in a brittle voice. Whatever she was thinking, feeling, it was under control now. If she’d felt that same crackle of awareness, she wasn’t going to let it rule her. “I know you were just trying to help. I don’t think I’m going to need stitches,” she added.

He nodded. “You’re going to be fine.”

“I was fine before you got here. I’m not fine now.” Her eyes accused him as much as her words. “Now you see why you can’t stay here, Cole.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Bryn heard the determination in Cole’s voice, and her chest tightened.

They fell into an uncomfortable silence. Around them, the big house creaked and settled.

“What do you really want from me, Cole?”

“I told you I didn’t come here to hurt you, Bryn,” Cole said. “And it’s true.” His eyes were deep, fathomless pools. “We need to talk about Aimee. I know it’s hard. I know you don’t want to even think about it, but we have to talk.”

He was right. There was no getting around it. Cole Dempsey had come back into her life and turned it upside down in a matter of hours. And he wasn’t going to leave without at least saying his piece. And after that— He still might not leave. But sticking her head in the sand wasn’t doing her any good.

“All right,” she said finally. “But I want to call the police first.”

Cole didn’t say anything as he followed her out of the kitchen. He took her arm as she struggled to walk on her bandaged foot. The pain was a dull ache compared to the dread licking at her stomach.

They reached the small anteroom off the entry hall she’d turned into a small but comfortable office. She’d colorwashed blue walls and added an eclectic mix of personal mementoes, artifacts and local crafts, yet there was nothing comfortable about it tonight. The silence lay turgid between them as she punched in the number for the police.

“An officer will be here as soon as possible,” she told him as she put the receiver back in its cradle a few minutes later.

He sat across the desk from her in a threadworn velvet wingback chair, and yet he was still far too close. He invaded her space by his mere presence at Bellefleur. An aura of immutable authority exuded from him. No matter what he wore, he would cut a powerful figure with his dark hair, perilous eyes and the solid breadth of his muscular body.

“You want to talk,” she said. “So, talk. You have till the police arrive.” Since he’d gotten here, he’d been acting as if he was in charge. She wanted to let him know that he wasn’t.

She caught the slight narrowing of his eyes, but he let her words pass unchallenged.

“Would you like a drink?” she offered, coolly hospitably. There was a bottle of brandy in the antique cabinet behind the desk. She needed a drink even if he didn’t.

The chair swiveled, and she took the bottle down, along with a couple of crystal glasses. She poured them each a glass, returned the bottle to the cabinet and raised the amber liquid to her lips. The brandy burned sweet and warm down her cold throat.

Cole didn’t touch the glass she pushed across the desk toward him.

“My mother became seriously ill a year ago,” he said in the still thick of the quiet office. “I buried her in Baton Rouge last month.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She truly hurt for him—but why was he telling her this? It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but she was hardly an old friend catching up on his life story since last they’d met. She’d never blamed Cole’s mother for what Wade Dempsey had done. If anything, Mary Dempsey was another of Wade’s victims. Still, she wasn’t sure what Mary’s death had to do with Cole’s return.

How long would it take for the police to arrive? The conversation had barely begun and already she wished it was over. She focused on the small bronzed bust of Alexandre Louvel, one of the first Louisianans to risk his resources turning Creole cane into sugar and thereby founding the Louvel fortune, standing sentry on a chipped and peeling painted column by the door. He’d found a way to profit on the lands he’d inherited, and Bryn often felt his vacant, heavy gaze as she sat behind this desk and tried to turn around Bellefleur’s future once again.

“I never thought I’d come back to Azalea Bend,” he said. “I worked my way through college, and on through law school. I never looked back, not once.”

He appeared to be in no hurry to get wherever he was going with this conversation, and that bothered her more than anything else. He was confident, composed, while she felt her own control slipping.

Time to cut to the chase and get this done. She turned her gaze from the bronze of Alexandre Louvel and squared it on Cole.

“I thought we were going to talk about Aimee.” Her hand shook as she lifted the crystal glass and took another sip. “Your father swore revenge, and he took it. Everyone at Bellefleur heard his threats. He went to town and got drunk—a dozen people saw him in the bar, talking crazy. The Louvels were going to pay. And he came back and killed Aimee…because she was the only Louvel he could find.” God, and how she blamed herself for that.

She’d been down by the river with Cole that night, both of them desperate and aching. Her sister had offered her comfort, even her help. Aimee had insisted that she could fix everything. But all Bryn had been able to think about was losing Cole. Wade would have to leave Azalea Bend to search for new work, and his family would go with him. She might never see Cole again, despite his promises to write and call. And if her parents found out she was trying to keep in touch with Wade Dempsey’s son…

She’d gone to Cole instead. And Aimee had waited for her. Bryn had come back to the house in time to hear her sister’s screams. She’d never known for sure where her parents had gone that night, but they’d been fighting and Patsy had driven off in the car. Her father had chased after her. Everything about that night had been awful.

They’d come home around the same time as Bryn. And then things had just gotten more awful.

“Those threats, they were empty words,” Cole replied. “He’d been unjustly fired and he went crazy. He got drunk. That doesn’t make him a murderer.”

“Are you going to tell me why you’re here, Cole?” She couldn’t take much more. Remembering that night…it always killed her a little more each time. “We had this conversation fifteen years ago, and I can’t see one good reason to have it again.”

Cole leaned forward, his forearms resting on the solid polished mahogany of the desk that had once belonged to her great-grandfather. His voice lowered, as if meant only for her even when the two of them were alone in the house anyway.

“My mother went to her death wanting to believe my father was innocent—but fearing somewhere inside herself that he was guilty.” His eyes bored hard into hers. Emotion lurked in those lithoid depths, but it was unreadable. “She was haunted by that question, Bryn.”

She didn’t know what to say. Her family had been haunted by that night, too. What was Cole getting at?

She knew he was getting at something.

“Before she died, she told me something she’d kept secret all my life. She was pregnant with another man’s child when she married Wade Dempsey. He married her and gave me a name, and that’s why she stayed with him all those years, even with his philandering. Wade was sterile, couldn’t have any children of his own, but he treated me like his flesh and blood and she loved him for that. But she wanted me to know that I wasn’t the flesh and blood of a killer. She was ashamed, Bryn, and she didn’t want me to be ashamed, too.”

“She must have been proud of your accomplishments,” she said carefully, shocked by his revelations. Sympathy she didn’t dare reveal tore at her heart. “You’ve made something of yourself. Why should you care what anyone thinks about anything in Azalea Bend now? It’s history, Cole. Let it go.”

When he continued, it was as if he hadn’t heard her. His voice remained oddly flat and expressionless. “I realized I’d let her down, and I’d let down the man who loved me enough to give me his name. The least I could do is try to clear his—not for my sake, but for my mother’s. I began to research Aimee’s case. Reading documents, police reports. The court transcripts of your father’s trial. I read everything I could get my hands on, and one question stood out in my mind.”

Bryn’s uneasiness increased. His sheer matter of factness continued to prickle alarm up her spine.

She waited.

“My father’s face was scratched as if he’d been in a life-or-death struggle that night,” Cole went on. “The forensic report was strangely silent on this fact. Scrapings from Aimee’s nails should have linked those scratches to my father. But no such evidence was ever presented in court.”

“Forensic science was not the same then as it is today,” Bryn countered. “This was fifteen years ago, in a small town. We don’t have murders in St. Salome Parish on a regular basis. This wasn’t a conspiracy, Cole. It was a small town grappling with a big-city crime. If scrapings weren’t taken from beneath Aimee’s nails—”

“But scrapings were taken.”

“You just said—”

“I said the evidence wasn’t presented in court. I didn’t say the evidence didn’t exist.”