The Perfect Stranger (11 page)

She’d thought the comparison silly, until she’d seen his eyes. Soulless, she remembered thinking. Damaged.

And now she’d just offered him a cup of hot cocoa, thoughtlessly claiming something as benign as chocolate and marshmallows would be good for his soul.

What he needed, what his soul needed, was far, far more than a candied drink.

“John—” she started, but before she could step toward him the moment passed, vanished actually, and he indicated a small, framed photograph.

“Cain and Gabe?” he asked.

The picture sat prominently on the old secretary. She’d placed it there on purpose. She passed it every day. But she almost never looked at the faded image from nearly a quarter of a century before. It sat there as a reminder, an albatross.

Now she made herself look at the picture, and saw what she usually tried to avoid. The past. The laughter and the innocence and the hope. Untainted, untarnished, unblemished.

“A long time ago,” she said, setting the two mugs on the coffee table. Throat tight, she crossed to John and took the frame in her hands, felt the echoes whisper through her.

“Who’s the girl?” John asked. “A friend?”

Now her hands wanted to shake, and now the echoes screamed. She forced herself to look anyway, to see. The girl. Five years younger than Saura with surprisingly blond hair and blue eyes. Just like her daddy, but not at all like the other Robichauds. Saura remembered the day she was born; it had been like getting her own living, breathing baby doll. “Camille,” she whispered, and the name hurt. She hadn’t spoken it aloud—

She didn’t know when she’d last spoken it aloud.

“Gabe’s little sister,” she said.

John crowded in behind her, looking over her shoulder. “I didn’t know Gabe
had
a little sister. Is she—”

“No,” Saura answered before he could say the word. She didn’t want to hear it, refused to consider that her cousin might be gone, and none of them had been there to say goodbye. “She…doesn’t live here.”

“Pretty,” John commented. “Where does she live?”

It was a simple question, casual, as close to small talk as she and John had come. But standing there looking down at her cousin’s faded smile, Saura closed her eyes against the hot surge of moisture, and wanted. So much. Her cousin to be okay. To come home. To know that her family loved her, didn’t think that she was crazy. To know that someone believed her, that her father’s memory had been restored. His murderer punished.

John put a hand to her arm. “Saura?”

She inhaled slowly, but the wanting didn’t go away. It deepened and spread, beyond the past and her cousin, to the present and the stranger. Who wasn’t a stranger. Who’d touched her when she’d been quite sure she could never be touched.

“No one knows,” she said, turning to look at him.

The reality of him standing so close, of his face being within inches of hers, made her heart pound. It would be easy to step into him, feel him against her.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, and for a moment wasn’t sure to what she referred. Since she’d felt, or since her cousin had vanished. “Thirteen years…she was just seventeen.”

John took Saura’s hands and squeezed. “Tell me.”

She looked up at him, at the green, green of his eyes, and felt something inside just…release. Felt it let go. He was a cop. A detective. He lived to solve puzzles. Forming theories was what he did. But he did none of that now, jumped to no conclusions, simply held her hands and asked her to tell him.

“She saw her father murdered,” Saura surprised herself by saying, and with the words, vertigo took over. She felt herself sway, felt John steady her, felt him take her hand and lead her to the sofa.

“When she was thirteen,” she said, easing down and folding her feet beneath her. But the room kept spinning.

Because of the past, she told herself, the image of Camille as she’d been found the morning after, wet and cold, in the hollow of a tree at the back of the Robichaud property. Jacques had burst out of the woods, holding her and shouting—

“But no one believed her,” Saura said, not wanting to return to that time, not wanting to feel or dwell. She’d run with them, had called the ambulance. Had stayed with Camille. Held her. “They said she was confused, mistaken. Scared. That Troy Fontenot took his own life. That no one else had been anywhere near.”

Against John’s face, the shadows deepened. “Gabe’s dad committed suicide?”

“No.” The word practically shot out of her. “Uncle Troy would never—” She broke off and stared at the picture, of Gabe and Camille and Cain, taken only a few days before the bullet shattered everything. “What kind of man would do that to his children? What kind of man would choose to leave them, to abandon them, to let them grow up alone, without a father to—”

John’s eyes went dark. He looked away from the picture, away from her, toward the window across the room. Against his knees, his hands curled into fists.

Saura felt the loss clear down to her soul. Without stopping to think, she put a hand to the denim covering his thigh. “John?”

For a long moment he did nothing, just kept looking into the night. The tightness of his jaw emphasized the shadow starting to set there, despite the fact he’d been clean-shaven earlier in the evening.

But it was his eyes that got her, his eyes that made her yearn. They were grim and…damaged.

“John?” She turned into him, but didn’t lift her hand to his face as she wanted to, realized that no matter how badly she wanted to touch, now was not the time to do so. “Did I say something?” she started to ask. But stopped when she realized that she had. Said something.

What kind of man,
she’d asked,
would do that to his children? What kind of man would choose to leave them, to abandon them, to let them grow up alone, without a father to—

The answer wound around her heart, and squeezed. John’s father, she knew. John’s father had done that.

He closed his eyes and opened them a heartbeat later, not to the man who’d led her to the sofa, and not to the boy who’d been abandoned by his father, but to the hard-edged detective who drove himself, who lived his life to make sure those who hurt others, paid the price of their sins.

And Saura couldn’t help but wonder who he was punishing. Himself? Or the father whose absence had shaped John into a man whose damaged eyes belied the tenderness that seeped into his hands.

“She vanished thirteen years ago? Four years after her father died?” Standing, he paced away and stopped at the photo. “And no one has heard from her since?”

Saura followed him. “For a while she sent cards, to me and Gabe and her mother, for our birthdays. And for Christmas.”

“Then there would be postmarks—”

“They never led anywhere.”

“Someone would have seen her—”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she asked, feeling the twist of it all over again. The hope—and the disappointment. The leads that led nowhere. The fruitless phone calls and e-mail messages. “That’s why I went to Little Rock and Naples and Muncie, to Normal.” After every card. Until they’d stopped. “To every post office. Every train and bus station…”

It took a moment to realize John had stopped staring at the picture, and now stared at her.
“You?”
he asked in a quiet, fascinated voice she recognized too well. The kind of voice her uncle and brother used when someone had just slipped up and given them a piece of information they very much wanted, but didn’t yet understand. “
You
looked for her?”

The urge to step back streaked through her, but she knew he would only come after her. “She’s my cousin. I love her.”

“Your uncle is sheriff,” John pointed out. She could almost see the pieces shifting against each other, trying to form a picture in his mind. “Your brother was a cop. Your family has money. You could have hired an army of private investigators—”

“They did,” she said. “At first. My uncles had the cops all over it.” Saura had been out of her mind with worry—and guilt. “Pretty young girl gets in her car to drive to New Orleans, but never arrives. Her car is found three days later down by the river, stripped. No sign of the girl, nothing missing from her room, no clothes or makeup or jewelry—”

John frowned. “They suspected foul play.”

“She was young, vulnerable, a Robichaud—a picture-perfect target. Uncle Eti was convinced there would be a ransom note. Edouard and Cain weren’t so sure, thought maybe Camille herself had been the target, not the family bank account.”

“And you?” John asked. “What did you think?”

Saura thought of the carefree smile on Camille’s face. “After Uncle Troy died, after the authorities insisted she was wrong, that no one had been in the study with him, that he put the gun in his mouth of his own volition, Cami was never the same. It was as if something inside her…died.”

It wasn’t until over a decade later that Saura had learned how lost and broken her cousin had felt. How alone.

“At school, some kids started to call her Crazy Cami, but she never fought back, never seemed to care.” That had been Cain and Gabe’s realm. And Jacques’s.

But as far as Saura knew, no one else knew about the nightmares. She’d woken Camille from them, held her and rocked her, promised her everything would be okay. “When she left—when she vanished, I couldn’t help but think, what if she’d been right? What if that bastard really did murder my uncle? What if he was afraid Cami would remember his face? His voice? That someday someone would believe her—” Slowly, she looked up and met John’s gaze. “What if he’d come back for her, covered his tracks once and for all?”

Dim light played across the lines of John’s face. “You thought your cousin’s disappearance had to do with her father’s death.” It was a statement, not a question, and with it came a wave of acceptance she hadn’t expected.

“But no one would listen to me. Except Gabe. He felt like hell for dismissing her when she tried to tell him, for insisting she was just confused, that she’d imagined everything.”

John swore softly.

“He went after her,” Saura added. “And so did I.” There’d been no leads, but she’d refused to let that stop her. For years she’d been slipping in and out of shadows, extracting information no one wanted her to have. It was as if every breath she’d been taking had been preparing her to help her cousin.

Somewhere in the distance, a train horn sounded. “What happened?” John asked.

She lifted a hand to shove the hair from her face. “The first cards came, to Gabe and Aunt Gloria and me. Camille telling us that she was sorry. But that this was how it had to be. She was safe. She left on her own accord. And she wasn’t coming back.” Fleetingly, Saura glanced at the bottom drawer of the old secretary, where the card sat in a box with every other piece of correspondence she’d received from her cousin. “
That
is when the investigation changed. The police lost interest, and my uncles called off the investigators, retained only one or two to keep their eyes open for a runaway.”

“They just let her go?” The disbelief in his voice almost soothed the edges of the memory.

Saura swallowed. “I told them they were making a mistake, that we couldn’t just give up on her, that we had to—” She could still see her uncles standing so tall and powerful and utterly unyielding. She’d wanted to shove them. To scream at them.

Instead, she’d taken matters into her own hands.

“We let her down,” she said quietly. “
I
let her down. I was her cousin by blood, but her sister in every way that mattered. I promised her I would take care of her, be there for her, but—”

He didn’t let her finish. He caught her arms and looked down at her with an intensity that made her pulse surge a little too fast. “You did
not
let her down.”

“But I did,” she said. “I knew Cami never recovered from losing her dad. I knew she’d been ostracized, that people pointed and laughed at her, that she would wake up screaming…” Saura squeezed her eyes shut, opened them with a harsh breath. “I promised her. I promised her I would be there for her—”

“And you have been.” The words were strong, his voice tender. “For thirteen years you’ve looked for her.”

And she couldn’t take it. Couldn’t let him slay her with a tenderness she neither anticipated nor wanted. A concern that made her feel small and fragile in ways she’d vowed to never be again.

“That’s just it,” she said, twisting from his arms. “I couldn’t even get that part right. I searched for her until—” She looked away, felt the burn clear down to her bones.

And again John touched her, his fingers to the underside of her jaw, urging her face toward his. “Until what?”

Until life got complicated. Until she fell in love and got careless. Until Adrian died, and everything fell apart. “It doesn’t matter,” she said against the tightness in her chest. This wasn’t what she wanted from John, damn it. Compassion and concern. Tenderness. The combination swirled through her like a seductive drug and made her want, made her remember. What it felt like to be alive—what it felt like to love. To lose.

“All that matters,” she said very quietly, “is that the bastard who destroyed my cousin’s life is still out there. Still hasn’t paid, still walks free—”

John went very still. And against her face, his fingers tensed.
“Saura.”

Just her name, that was all he said. But he might as well have stripped off her jeans and sweatshirt, her bra and panties, left her standing there painstakingly naked. Because his voice told her that he saw. That he knew.

“Tell me,” he said very slowly, and his eyes practically glowed. “Tell me who killed your uncle.”

S
aura had two choices. She could pretend, or she could take a leap of faith. Standing in the muted lamplight, she looked up at John, the shadows across his face and the strength in his eyes, the conviction in every solid line of his body, and for the first time in a long time, she didn’t want to pretend.

“Lambert,” she said, lifting her chin. “Nathan Lambert killed my uncle.”

For a moment John said nothing. Did nothing. Remained as he was, one hand curved around her shoulder and the other against her jaw, and looked at her. Looked hard. Looked and reminded her what it was like to not be alone.

Then he turned away and took a few steps, stopped abruptly and shoved a hand through his hair. “Christ, Saura—”

“Don’t.” This time it was she who moved, she who went to him and curled her fingers around his forearm. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong,” she said. “Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m playing with fire. And don’t you dare tell me to back off.”

“If Lambert finds out you’re a Robichaud—”

“He’ll kill me. Yes, I know.” She stepped closer. “But he won’t find out.”

The cleft in his chin darkened. “You don’t know that. Your family is well known, you’re in the spotlight—”

“
They
are. But
I’m
not.
You
didn’t even know.
You—
a cop who’s friends with both my brother and my cousin.”

“Goddamn it,” he snapped. “That’s different. I didn’t have any reason to suspect—”

“No,” she said, trying not to drown in his scent, in memory. In truth. “You had no reason to suspect. You saw only what you wanted to see, what was easy to see.” Just like everyone else. “A lonely woman. One whose name you didn’t know, didn’t want to know. Someone you could hold onto then let go of without looking back.”

“I’m not the one who walked away.”

“But you would have,” she said with amazing calm. “Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? Walk away. Stay uninvolved.”

Validating her point, he gave no reaction to her words. “This isn’t about me.”

Once Saura had been a woman who felt everything with an intensity that had often gotten her in trouble. She’d been called reckless and restless. Life had been for exploring, and she’d explored. It was as if she’d always been in search of something, that until she found it she would never be satisfied.

Until Adrian. With Adrian she’d felt whole, and satisfied.

And then he’d died, and for two years, Saura had felt nothing at all. Until John. She’d approached him in the bar not out of the brash passion which had once driven her, but a numb desperation. To see if she could feel again. If she could want. If the woman she’d once been still lived, or if the bullet that killed Adrian had killed her, too.

The answer stunned her. From the beginning John had awakened her body. But with his simple question—the disappointment, confusion and yearning bleeding through her—she realized the awakening extended beyond the needs of her body.

“No, it’s not,” she agreed, and somehow her voice didn’t break. For a foolish, dangerous moment, she’d slipped. And she’d wanted. Him to understand—him to be different. Him to feel the same irrational need that she did.

“It’s about me,” she said. “The truth. What people see—and what they don’t.”

What he had seen. And more sobering, what he
hadn’t
seen.

He almost seemed to wince. “Talking in riddles—”

“Forget it.” She’d already said too much—and he hadn’t heard any of it. Hating the way she felt inside—raw and exposed—she walked to the window, stared out at the clay pots on her front porch. The butter-yellow pansies looked scraggly. They needed water.

“Saura.”

Again he spoke only her name. But the way he said it—rough and…tentative, maybe even frustrated—carried an intimacy that rivaled the way he touched her with his hands.

Slowly, she looked from the plants to his reflection on the glass. The urge to retreat from the intensity in his eyes was strong, that knee-jerk reaction from looking dead-on into the sun. But the curiosity was stronger.

“Tell me,” he said, and the words swirled through her like a dangerous drug. “Tell me what people see…what they don’t.”

He was a cop. He knew how to interrogate. He knew how to vary his technique based upon his subject. He would know when to keep his distance and circle close. It was all a matter of getting what he wanted.

She knew all that. But none of it overrode the longing. It unfurled through her like a frayed ribbon and though she could think of a hundred reasons to open the front door and stand there until he left, she shifted her gaze to the night beyond, and did exactly as he asked.

Because she couldn’t remember the last time anyone
had
asked.

“When I was little,” she said, and although her heart pounded, her voice was quiet, “I could smile and kiss my uncle on the cheek, curl up on the sofa with a book, and within minutes he would forget I was there. He would make phone calls or review cases, leave his notes on the coffee table—notes he hid when my brother walked in.” Until Cain got older. “But that he never hid from me. Never thought I would even look at.”

That fact had hurt…until she’d learned to use it.

“Do you have any idea how easy it was?” Through the window she watched him. “There’s a man in a bar or a restaurant, maybe at the track. He’s guarded, maybe even packing. Looking over his shoulder. But then there I am, asking for directions, or maybe asking for the time, always with a smile.”

The man in the reflection tensed.

“It’s like taking candy from a baby,” she added as an old Cadillac wheeled around the corner one block down and cruised toward them, lights bright and hip-hop music blaring.

Now he moved, so fast she wondered if he ever did anything slowly. In one smooth motion he lunged for her and practically dragged her from the window, had her body pressed against the wall and his gun in his hand long before the beat-up car moved into range.

The Caddy cruised right on by. But still John didn’t move, barely breathed. He knew he should relax, quit crowding Saura against the wall. No shots had been fired. It had only been his own goddamn paranoia, the fea—

No. Not fear. Fear had no place in this. It was the certainty, the head-on instinct of the cop that made it impossible for him to stand down around her.

That he kept his arms around her had nothing to do with how damn bad he’d wanted to touch her, with the ache he’d seen in her eyes, the pain she concealed behind a sensuous smile.

“How long?” he gritted out, wondering how the hell she could have been invisible to anyone. Ever. Because she wasn’t invisible to him. He could see her in vibrant, punishing detail, and what he saw almost made him forget everything he’d taught himself about survival. Everything his father had taught him.

“I was seventeen the first time,” she said. Her candor made him wonder how long she’d been waiting for someone to listen.

“My uncle had been investigating a forgery ring,” she was saying. “He’d nailed a few underlings, but no one would talk.” Her smile was low, smug. “Until I found a courier in a pool hall, and let him buy me a beer.”

John squeezed his eyes shut, opened them a long moment later. “Your uncle…did he know?”

A low gleam moved into her eyes. “He knew he got information and made his bust, sent a finder’s fee to a post office box.”

Back away,
John told himself.
Back the hell away.

“And you had the satisfaction of knowing you’d done something he couldn’t do.”

Dark hair fell against her face. “I had the satisfaction of knowing I could make a difference. That I could take what everyone thought of as a weakness and use it to my advantage. It was the most incredible rush I’d ever known. But it wasn’t until Cami disappeared—”

Her words stopped, and silence poured in.

Shifting, John eased away to brace his arms against the wall on either side of her. He was a trained interrogator. He knew how to extract information. But as he looked into her haunted eyes, he realized it was the man in him who wanted her to keep talking. The man who’d first seen her across the smoky barroom. Who’d let her touch him, when he’d been sure that he could never be touched.

That he never wanted to be touched.

The cop, the one who could wear down the most unrelenting of suspects, who knew how to survive, told him to end this right here, right now.

“What happened when Cami disappeared?” he asked.

She looked at him a long moment before answering, as if searching for a cue card with all the right answers. Then her expression softened. “Something inside me changed.” With the words she slipped from beneath his arm and moved away from him. And he let her go.

At the secretary she stopped and ran her finger along the glass door. “My puzzle solving went from a game to a calling,” she said. “It took over and defined me. It was like every time I hit a brick wall with Cami, I had to score a touchdown for someone else. To prove that I could. That I was—”

Worthy.
She didn’t say the word, but it was there in her face, there in the way she seemed so lost and alone in her own home, the way she’d tried to hide the tears after they made love. And it stabbed through John with a precision that disturbed him on too many levels to count.

She skimmed a lock of hair from her face. “The first time Cain used me—”

“Your brother knows?” he asked before she could finish. Somehow, it didn’t fit. And somehow, damn it, he didn’t ever want to hear her talking about being
used
again.

“No.” Her eyes sparkled, knocking fifteen years from her face and distancing her even further from the sultry vamp from six weeks before. “I always worked through a series of covers,” she said. “No one in my family ever had any idea who
Femme de la Nuit
was.”

Everything inside of John stilled.
“Femme de la Nuit?”
he whispered in a strangled voice he hardly recognized. Denial came next. With her hair tangled around her face, Saura’s bulky sweatshirt and faded jeans made her look so damn close to the girl next door it made his chest tighten. That she was speaking of the once notorious private investigator as if she were saying absolutely nothing of consequence was too incongruous.

“Sweet Mary.”
All the misshapen pieces slid into a picture so crystalline clear and brutally sharp that the truth of it sliced through him. No wonder T’Paul thought she was dead. They all did.

“You were
Femme de la Nuit.
” Lady of the Night. Bold. Fearless. One hundred percent thorough.

“I still am.” Her fleeting half smile damn near ripped out his heart. “Just a little rusty.”

He knew the stories. He knew her track record. He’d heard the speculation—the lady of the night had been a hot topic of debate among the boys at the station. They’d taken bets—just how did she get her hands on information no one else could? How far would she go, how many lines did she cross? Were her charms reserved for men only? For one at a time? Or would she do whatever it took?

Christ, John bet on the latter: no limits, no lines, one partner or two, male or female or both. Whatever it took.

Now, blood roaring, he slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out the listening device she’d given him, the one which had allowed him to torture himself with sounds of her and Lambert. And finally it all made freaking sense. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”

A game she’d played many, many times before.

The girl next door vanished, replaced by the smooth, confident lady of the night. “
We
are,” she corrected, somehow looking taller. Sleeker. More in control. She crossed to the window and eased back the curtains. “He yours?”

Christ, even her voice was different. Lower. Stronger.

And John didn’t need to stand beside her to know what she saw. Who she saw. He’d seen T’Paul earlier, slouched down with a bottle in a paper bag on the porch of a vacant house across the street. “Yes.”

Her smile surprised him. It was slow and daring and so damn provocative it was all he could do to remain where he was. She seared him with it, let the moment stretch into a long, taut line between them.

Then she moved to the door. “It’s late,” she said with a fake yawn. “What time should I expect you tomorrow?”

In other words, he was dismissed. Taking his time John crossed to her, and now he permitted himself to touch. He lifted a hand to her face and eased a tangle of hair behind her ear, let his fingers linger against the curve of her cheek. “What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”

She lifted her eyes to his. “We both know you can’t stay.”

The truth of her words should have slapped him into reality. He couldn’t stay. He knew that. Didn’t want to stay. That’s why he’d let her go that first night—and why he’d been trying to get rid of her every night since then. Because when he was with her, all he wanted to do was touch. And taste. And keep. Everything else faded—the promises he’d made and the vows he ruled by, the bloodstained memories that drove him, punished him, even after the passing of over twenty years.

But holy God, one look at the pain and courage in her eyes, and all that just—disappeared. “Why not?”

Her eyes changed, shifted from the glimmer that haunted to a dull glaze that punished. “Because that’s not what you do.”

The simple statement stripped him bare. She looked at him as though she could see everything.
Everything.
As though she knew, and she pitied.

“That sounds like a dare,” the cop in him said, taking over. The cop knew what to do, knew how to draw lines—knew how to clean up the mess the man had made six weeks before.

Her chin came up a notch. “Are you saying I’m wrong?”

His thumb slid from her cheekbone to her lower lip. “Do you want to be?”

She did as he’d expected—as he
wanted—
and reached for the glass knob and pulled open the door. But then she smiled—
smiled,
damn it, as if rather than calling her bluff, he’d amused her somehow. “Nathan is picking me up at 7:30.”