The Perfect Stranger (12 page)

The urge to back her against the wall and—

He didn’t know what. He only knew that she was wrong. He was wrong. For the first time in he didn’t know how long, he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to step
toward
her, not away; he wanted to taste, to carry her to the bed, and this time, damn it, this time he didn’t want her to cry.

This time, he wanted to know that she made love to him, not a stranger.

The thought fired through him, sent him striding into the cool night air. But then he stopped. And then he turned.

“There’s something you should know.” At the dead quiet of his voice her eyes flared. “You were wrong,” he said. “Earlier—when you told Lambert good-night.”

He wasn’t sure what he wanted, but Saura said nothing, just kept the door half closed between them, and looked at him as if he’d suddenly pulled a knife on her.

Walk the hell away, the cop instructed. But the man stayed and made another misplaced vow. “He can’t have tomorrow.”

Saura blinked. “What?”

“Tonight,” he said. The confusion in her voice drove him. “When Nathan brought you home. You promised if he gave you tonight, you’d give him tomorrow.”

He moved without warning, giving her no time to slam the door on him. With two steps he conquered the distance between them and took her face in his hands. And then his mouth was on hers and he kissed her with the hard possessiveness of an addict falling off the wagon. On a low growl he tore away and looked down into her eyes, all wide and damp, realized how damn easy it would be to drown. So he refused to let himself see. And he refused to let himself want.

But most of all, he refused to let himself need. “That’s not going to happen.”

On cue the cop returned, and he walked away.

Saura didn’t watch him go. She closed the door and secured the locks, shut the blinds and switched off the lamp, walked into the kitchen.

For so long there’d been nothing. No interest or motivation. No anticipation or curiosity. No passion. No disappointment.

No pain.

For someone with the excitable blood of her Cajun ancestors, the abrupt cessation of every emotion had been like living without a life force. She’d awakened every morning and gotten dressed, walked through her day as everyone else did. She said the right things. Did the right things. She ate and drank and breathed, but inside, there’d been nothing.

Shock, one of the kinder doctors had said. Grief, her family believed. And maybe they’d all been right. In losing Adrian she’d lost more than the man she’d loved. She’d lost hopes and dreams. She’d lost her future. And a child.

Closing her eyes, she put her hands to the flatness of her stomach and felt the stab of pain all over again. No one had known, not Adrian, not her. When her period failed to come during those long cold weeks after she’d buried him, she hadn’t thought twice about it. Grief was like that. But three weeks turned into four, four into five, and then the nausea came. And the dizziness.

She’d been nine weeks along when the doctor confirmed her pregnancy. And for the first time since Adrian’s death, she’d wanted to live again. She’d cared. She’d started to eat regular meals and drink lots of water, take long walks through the woods.

And then the baby had died. Just like that. With no warning, no cramping, no spotting. Wearing a new pair of stylish maternity jeans, she’d gone in for her first sonogram and lain there awaiting the moment she’d heard so much about, when a woman saw her baby for the first time. There would be pictures. She could carry it with her at all times, pull out the black-and-white image and see that something of Adrian still lived.

But the technician grew very quiet, and turned the screen away from Saura.

And in that moment she, too, had died. Again.

And she’d stayed that way for a long, long time. Until Renee Fox came to town and proved that lives could go on, that happiness could bloom from the ashes of sorrow. Saura had watched her brother come back to life, had watched the love grow between him and Renee, and she’d started to wonder, and want. Nothing specific, simply a vague sense of longing. She’d
wanted
to
want,
and that, she’d figured, had to count for something: a start, maybe, like the first few drops of water melting from an icicle.

The only shoes she knew to step into were those she’d once worn, so she’d picked up the threads of her old life and vowed to find the truth about Alec’s death, and to once again look for Camille. Somehow, both had felt…right.

D’Ambrosia wasn’t part of the plan. She didn’t want to want
someone
again. She only wanted to be
Femme de la Nuit.
She wanted to do what she knew how to do, what she was good at. What wouldn’t crater her all over again.

She wanted to
want,
not to
feel.

But now, God help her, every time she so much as thought about D’Ambrosia, everything inside her exploded like a kaleidoscope of color. She wanted—and she felt.

And it terrified.

Saura opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water. She’d been afraid before. When her father died, then her mother. When she’d wandered into the swamp looking for a fabled treasure and got lost. When at fourteen one of her uncle’s friends had wandered drunkenly into her bedroom and started slurring about how much he could teach her—

To this day she didn’t know who had frightened her more—her uncle, or her brother. Clutching the sheet to her chest, she’d realized for the first time they were both capable of murder.

Her fear had changed after that, matured. She’d begun to see it as a challenge, a test, and she’d come to crave the taste of conquering it.

Until one well-placed bullet taught her that sometimes what you fear most pales in comparison to reality. It was that reality she didn’t want to live through again. She didn’t care if anyone thought her a coward.

Taking a long sip of water, she crossed the kitchen to the mail sitting on the counter. Absently she thumbed through the newspaper flyers, the bills and a decorating magazine addressed to the previous owner. Then she saw the envelope. It was small and white, her name and address neatly typed across the front. None of that made her heart pound. But the upper right corner did.

There was no stamp, no postage mark.

Going very still, she reached for a tea-stained dishtowel and used it to hold the envelope as she slid a knife along the seal. From inside she withdrew a single sheet of note-paper. On it were nine neatly typed words.

John could be brutal. And John could be harsh. He could be crass, but he could also be elegant. And kind. Whatever the situation warranted, the cop could produce. It’s how he kept his solve rate so high—and how he stayed alive.

Unlike his father.

Mike D’Ambrosia hadn’t known how to be anyone other than who he was, and he hadn’t known how to separate his life as a cop from his life as a man. A father. He’d just been Mike, idealistic and bighearted, an altar boy turned beat cop who believed if he went to church every Sunday and provided for his family, if he followed the rules, everything would be okay.

And it had been, until the day he’d answered a domestic violence call and made the mistake of turning away from the seemingly distraught father to check on the small child who lay whimpering on the sofa.

One mistake. One misjudgment. So many lives changed.

Sitting in a tattered wingback chair covered in a faded floral fabric, John forced himself to give the old woman a soft, sympathetic smile. But inside frustration wound tight.

She was so lying.

“You’re sure you didn’t see anything?” he asked.

Violet Hebert shifted uncomfortably. They sat in the front room of her small house on the outskirts of the Garden District, she on an old camel-back sofa in the same rose-covered fabric as his chair. Behind her, sun spilled in through the gauzy sheers and glinted off the white of her hair.

It was hard to believe this docile grandmother in her homemade dress was the woman he’d been seeking since the explosion. Three separate witnesses placed her at the warehouse in the days prior to the fire. One placed her there the day of.

“I am surely sorry, Detective,” she said, her lyrical voice that of the Old South. “I do wish I could help you. But I was frightened after the explosion.” She glanced at the metal detector propped in the corner of the room. According to her story, she’d been at the warehouse as part of a regular sweep of the old industrial area.

“I—I know I should have come forward and let the police know I’d been there, but I was…frightened.”

John was not in the habit of interrogating little old ladies, especially with pictures of her entire family, past and present, looking on from the top of a grand piano in need of a paint job. Uncomfortably cramped in the small chair, he let his knees fall open and leaned forward.

“Frightened of what? If you didn’t see anything…” He let the words dangle, the question clear. If she didn’t see anything, didn’t know anything, why was she afraid?

She clasped her hands. “I am an old woman,” she said in that way his grandmother had often used, feigning weakness with a strength that had once made his back go straight. “But I am not a fool.” Nervously, she glanced away before continuing. “Warehouses don’t just explode, Detective, and bad guys do not take kindly to witnesses.”

“Violet,” he started, but when disapproval filled her eyes he corrected himself. “Mrs. Hebert. You don’t have to be afraid.” Still leaning forward, he opened his hands in a pleading gesture. “We can help you. We can protect you—”

“Like you protected that man?” The question was sharp, and with it she stood, moving away from the window and wrapping her arms around her frail body. “With all due respect, Detective, I saw the news stories. I know what happened. A man died—”

John stood. “Not just a man, Mrs. Hebert. His name was Alec, and he was my friend.”

She turned toward him, lifted wary eyes to meet his. “Your friend? Is that why you’re here? As a friend, not a cop?”

The question scored a direct hit. “His wife is a good woman.” He sidestepped the query. “She deserves to know the truth.”

From somewhere beyond the small room came a soft thud, and Violet’s eyes widened. John spun and took an instinctive step, but before he even hit the foyer a wiry gray tabby bolted into the room and scrambled to the top of the sofa.

“Francois!” Violet admonished with a soft clucking noise. “I declare you are going to be the death of me yet.”

John watched her cross to the cat and run her hand along its fur, but he’d been a cop too long for the sight to automatically soothe him. He’d been on too many stakeouts, walked through too many allegedly deserted buildings. He’d heard too many muffled thuds, had dreamed his father’s death too many times.

“I truly am sorry,” Violet said again. Her smile was the epitome of genteel politeness. “But there is nothing more I can tell you.”

Nothing more she
would
tell him, John corrected silently. Because she was right. If Lambert found out she’d been in the vicinity of the warehouse the day it blew, in all likelihood her house would go up in flames within hours. And despite the protection John had promised her, he knew that until Lambert was brought down, Violet Hebert would never be safe again.

Nor would Saura.

The thought ground through him. They’d talked earlier, confirmed plans for tonight. In just a few hours she would again resume her place on Lambert’s arm. Listening to every word, John would be close enough to make sure the scum didn’t try to get her anywhere closer than his arm.

“I understand,” he told Violet, because he did. He crossed to her and pressed his card into her surprisingly strong hands. “My cell number is on the back. If you think of something, anything, you can call me anytime.”

The little black dress hugged in all the right places. Saura looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, trying to reconcile the woman who stared back at her with the woman she’d been for the past two years. The woman who’d worn jeans, T-shirts and flip-flops, not designer dresses, sheer nylons and stilettos.

The loud knock at the bedroom door killed her musings. “You said five minutes,” John reminded.

She had. Ten minutes ago. “Almost ready,” she told him, but still did not move. In truth she was ready, at least technically so. For Nathan. But for John…

It had been a long time since she’d dressed while a man waited in the other room. It was silly and she knew it. John’s presence should have made no difference. They had a working partnership. But as she’d slipped from her sweats and stood in the bathroom wearing only a pair of panties and a bra, her thoughts had been of him, standing so rigidly near the sofa. Of the Glock she’d seen holstered around his shoulders.

She’d offered him a soda—he didn’t want one.

She’d flipped on the TV—he’d flipped it off.

She’d handed him a magazine—he’d tossed it on the sofa.

Concentration, she’d realized. He’d already been readying himself for the night and didn’t want to break his thoughts.

She’d tried to find the same concentration, but as she’d removed her underwear and reached for the black lacy set she’d picked up that afternoon, her thoughts had returned to the man in the other room. What would it feel like for him to—

She’d broken the thought, but others had formed, when she’d slipped into her dress and run her fingers through her hair, when she’d put on her lipstick.

For Alec, she told herself, with one last glance in the mirror. She’d dressed for Alec. Not for Nathan, and not for John. The two of them were simply means to a very important end.

From her bed she picked up her handbag and crossed to the door, thought briefly of the cryptic note instructing her to stay away from Lambert. Threat or warning, she didn’t know, but either way, she’d not mentioned it to John. There was always the chance he’d sent it himself, to scare her away or test to see if she’d tell him about it. She didn’t want to think that but could not dismiss the possibility. Nor could she dismiss the certainty that if John did not send the note and she did tell him about it, he would call tonight off. And that she couldn’t let happen.