She tilted her head to the side, away from his touch. “Who are you?”
“This is my house,” was all he said, moving his gaze to the shoulder that hurt like the worst Brazilian wax.
“You don’t live here.” It was an obvious statement, but she didn’t know what else to say.
She was the one who had no rights here, the one who had broken into a house she’d thought abandoned, looking for safety and shelter while she figured out what to do. She didn’t have a lot of experience with people wanting to kill her. She’d been skewered in the press, flayed on gossip TV, skinned raw by paparazzi who had no qualms about making her bleed.
But to be chased down a dark road while in an unfamiliar car with no clue as to where she was going…Dear God, when that truck had rammed her…when she’d seen the reflection of her headlights on the bayou below…the water rushing up at her…
Her skin grew clammy, and her heart rate, which had finally begun to slow, started up again, hammering harder than before. And now, again, here came her life flashing.
“No, I don’t live here,” he said, his voice distracting her, though she could
still
see the glare of the lights, the ripple of water. “This place isn’t good for much but camping out, though you’ve probably figured that out on your own.”
She nodded, repeated, “Who are you? And how do you know who I am?”
He sat back on his heels, and she noticed for the first time that his hair was pulled back into a low tail at his nape. She reached up to remove the cap she wore from her head. It had kept her hair out of her eyes while she’d scrubbed the bayou’s mud out of her clothes.
But now it only made her feel ugly, out of her element. Oh, hell. Who was she kidding?
She wore no makeup, and nothing but the waders she’d found and her bra. Even her panties were hanging with the rest of her things on lawn chairs she’d placed to catch the breeze from upstairs windows missing their glass.
The chairs were far enough inside the rooms not to be visible to anyone outside looking up, and the broken windows wouldn’t draw attention the way open ones would. Oh, good. She was thinking like a woman on the lam—a far cry from embracing the limelight.
And look where that had got her, she mused, then shuddered, wrapped her arms over her middle, the movement tugging at the tape serving as a bandage on her arm; she sucked back a breath in response.
“My name is Simon Baptiste. I know who you are because your face is on a billboard I can see from my patio.” He took hold of her forearm and peeled the tape back, watched her face as she grimaced. “And if you don’t get this stitched up, you’re going to have a battle scar to put my dozen to shame.”
“You have battle scars?” she asked, knowing he was right, knowing, too, that at this moment in time a scar was the least of her worries. That’s why they made long sleeves.
“More than a few.” He pushed up to his feet, offered her his hand, and helped her up. The waders squeaked and crinkled as she moved. “What happened to your clothes?”
“I washed them out. They were full of leaves and mud and squirmy things.”
He offered her a kind smile. “I’m guessing you don’t have others.”
“I do. In the trunk of my car.” Where they weren’t doing anyone but the fish any good.
“Let me grab my gear. I’ve got soap and towels, and a pair of boxers I can donate to the cause.”
“How about a T-shirt to go with the shorts?” The bra covered her, but it was still a bra
—and the one thing she still needed to wash. “At least until my shirt dries.”
“That I can do,” he said, heading for the door.
“And coffee? I know it’s asking a lot, but I am beyond exhausted.”
“I hear sleep’s good for that.” His eyes flashed, but not with his smile as much as with the fire to right a grave wrong.
“You try closing your eyes when you see nothing but water ready to swallow you whole like some big gulping mouth.” Not to mention headlights flying at you like bullets, or the grille of the truck they belong to grinning like the devil rising from hell. Even worse was seeing it all with her eyes wide open, and feeling the impact in every one of her bones hours later. She’d lived a life of luxury, and Pilates or not, had no idea she could hurt this bad.
“I brought food for a week—”
“Food for one. I only need coffee.” Even that was imposing, but she honestly couldn’t find it in her to care. As long as he was one of the good guys and could get her out of this nightmare and back to New York…
“For one, yeah. But there are groceries to be had down here in the bayou, chère.”
He pull
ed open the door. “Let me unload the goods, get the generator going, and then you can tell me how the heiress to the Ferrer fortune wound up ass over end in the swamp.”
Nine
B y the time his guest returned, freshly showered and shampooed and dressed in his things, Simon had thrown together a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee, and toast. He didn’t immediately turn around and greet her but focused on piling the food on paper plates, digging into his box of grub for sugar and powdered cream. Concentrating on what was simple kept him from facing the complications that came attached like baggage to Michelina Ferrer. It was a different sort of baggage than what he’d been dealing with the last few weeks, but her being here was still going to weigh heavy on his mind.
Dealing with Bear and Lorna and the property would be enough to try any saint. Add King to the mix, and, well, Simon’s patience wouldn’t pass the first test. And now he had a mystery on his hands, a crime that needed more explanation before it would begin to make sense.
That was the only reason he finally turned around, the only reason he lifted his gaze from the food he carried to the woman standing in the frame of the kitchen doorway toweling dry her dark hair.
Her face was the same one he’d seen on “Page Six,” on magazine covers, on TV. The same one from his billboard. The same one…but not.
Her skin was scrubbed clean. She wore nothing glossy on her lips, nothing colored and glittery on her eyes, nothing to smooth out her cool ivory skin. She had freckles on her nose, two smal
l
red zits on her chin.
And her eyes were sad and scared, not sassy or sultry or seductive. A big problem, her eyes. An equally big one, her unbound breasts beneath his gray T-shirt, the curve of her hips and thighs in his long-legged briefs.
He set the food on the table, cleared his throat, went back for the Styrofoam cups filled with coffee and for plastic-ware. He didn’t turn back toward her until he heard her sit, the chair legs scraping across the worn linoleum, the creak of the wood beneath her weight. The table hid most of her body. He could still make out the shape of her breasts, the fullness, the upper slope that made him wonder about the weight he’d feel beneath. But there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to avoid her face, so bare and exposed, or her eyes. He had to look at her to get her story. He had to watch her expression, see the truth, her fear, find out how much she knew or had guessed or thought about what had happened. This is what he did—gathered information, ferreted out intel, zoned in on the pertinent details, used it all to come up with a plan of action. He needed one. Desperately. One that had nothing to do with her body being naked under his clothes, one that addressed the fact that she was Michelina Ferrer. And she was miserable, frightened, and lost.
He couldn’t help it. He feared that juxtaposition—what he knew about the celebrity versus what he sensed about this woman with her armor washed away and fearing for her life—was going to make it hard to keep this job from turning personal.
“Let’s start at the beginning.” He stopped, scooped up a bite of eggs. “You are Michelina Ferrer.”
“Micky. Michelina is what my father calls me to make sure I know I’m in trouble.”
“How old are you?”
She arched one of those famous dark brows. “My age is relevant how?”
“I wasn’t sure if the being-in-trouble-with-your-father thing was past tense or present.”
Then again, he’d seen her antics reported in the press. The parties. The other women. The drinking. The men.
She looked down at her plate, piled eggs onto her toast as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks.
“I’ll no doubt be in trouble with my father over something until one of us buries the other.”
She said it matter-of-factly, and he wondered what her father would think about the trouble she was in now. If he would worry more about the reputation of Ferrer Fragrances or his daughter’s safety should news get out about the danger she’d stumbled into.
“Micky, then. What could possibly bring you to Bayou Allain?” If he knew why she was here, he might be able to figure out why someone would run her off the road. Then he wondered if whoever it was had fled once the car hit the water, or if they’d stuck around to see if she climbed free of the wreckage and followed her here. His stomach knotted around the bitter coffee and overcooked eggs. She sighed, sat back in the chair, pul ed her heels up into the seat, covering her legs with his shirt as she did so, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I came to visit a friend. It was a spur-of-the-moment trip, and I didn’t let her know I was coming. I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Something in her expression, in the way she’d physically curled in on herself, made him wonder what had happened right before that spur of the moment, and if she’d headed south to avoid having her father call her Michelina.
“Who’s the friend?”
“Lisa Weston.” She shook her head. “Lisa Landry. We went to school together,” she was saying when Simon interrupted.
“Landry? As in Terrill?” Whoa.
She nodded. “She’s married to a deputy. Her father-in-law was a judge here, but then you probably know that, this being your house.”
Simon was mulling over her connection to the Landrys and the odds of tying it to her accident when she added, “And neither one of them knows where she is.”
His head came up and he frowned, watching as she reached for her toast, now sagging underneath the weight of the egg mountain she’d made. “What do you mean, they don’t know where she is?”
She shrugged as she chewed and swallowed, then reached for her coffee and drank.
“Just what I said. They haven’t seen her since Monday.”
Today was Thursday. Double whoa. “Has she officially been listed as a missing person?”
“Her husband’s law enforcement. I’m assuming he’s got that covered.”
True enough. “What did he tell you?”
She continued to cradle her cup. “I haven’t seen him to talk to. I only talked to the judge, if you can call what went on talking.”
“What did go on?” He knew how Bear Landry operated, how intimidation was as natural to him as the tumbler of scotch in his hand.
She took on a look of disbelief. “I don’t remember ever being bullied minutes after meeting any man. Or letting anyone I don’t know so thoroughly provoke me that I say things I’m afraid I’l
l
regret.”
Eh, yeah. She’d definitely met the judge. “From what I’ve read about you, that’s not so unusual. That regretting business.”
She narrowed her eyes, the glare not one of denial, just one letting him know she didn’t care for the reminder, even if he wasn’t too far off the mark.
“This was different. I’ve never been run down for speaking my mind. By the press, sure. Not by a truck the size of a small building.”
“Tell me about the truck.”
“It was big.”
Uh, not helpful. “Color? Make or model?”
“I know taxis. I don’t know trucks.”
“A pickup with a bed? An SUV?”
“It was behind me. All I saw were the lights. And eventually the gril e.”
“No emblem in the center? Stickers on the bumper? More than one person inside?”
She shook her head, kept shaking it.
“What about a horn? Did the driver honk at you?”
She frowned, concentrating. “He might have.”
“What did it sound like?” he asked, and when she looked at him as if she didn’t understand, added, “The truck’s horn. The sound.”
“Like a horn. I don’t know. Loud. That’s all I remember, and I might even be imagining that. Maybe it was the sound of the impact, or the sound of hitting the water.” She shoved away from the table, surged to her feet, was across the room and in front of the window before he could react.
Probably a good thing, her leaving the table, since he didn’t know what his reaction would be. She was smart. She had snap. Even after what she’d been through, she hadn’t been cowed.
But she was frustrating him all to hell, and he didn’t know if that was because she couldn’t answer his questions, or if it had to do with seeing her wearing his clothes. He glanced over, saw her start to lean forward, her hands on the lip of the sink, then jump away, pressing her back to the side of the refrigerator. Her face was pale, her brown eyes even darker with the surrounding skin gone white.
“Does anyone know that you’re here?”
That he was coming? Yes. That he was already here? On his feet, Simon strode to the window. A dusty white pickup had just appeared at the head of his drive. “I’ll see who it is. You bag up your trash and haul ass upstairs. Take it with you. Breakfast for one I can explain.”