The Perfect Stranger (7 page)

He didn’t move, his hands curled around her shoulders, his grip firm but with the same gentleness he always showed her. Like the good cop she now knew him to be, he gave no sign that her question had hit its target. Except for the deepening of the cleft in his chin.

Saura tried not to feel the thrill, but the memory intruded anyway—the night in the cabin, when she’d lifted first her finger to his chin. Then her mouth. Then, finally, her tongue.

“You have no idea what scares me,” he said in a dead quiet voice that sent her heart on a long, slow free fall.

She kept her chin angled, refused to let him see the intense curiosity swirling deeper. She’d called him
étranger
in the bayou, but the joke had been on her. Their paths had never directly crossed, but she could have filled several newspapers with what she knew about the man. She could have kept a blog running for months. She’d heard the stories, after all. From Cain. And Gabe. And Alec. And even when she’d felt nothing, she’d found herself asking questions. Wanting to know more.

Because even as a stranger, the man had fascinated.

During the time when her brother had lost both his faith and trust in law enforcement, D’Ambrosia had been one of the few to stand by him. To risk his own career to help clear Cain’s name. Her brother more than respected this man. He trusted him.

Saura looked up at him now, through the shadows of her small house, but did not see the man of singular focus her brother had told her about, the one who neither took prisoners nor made compromises. Who routinely requested assignments no one else wanted. Who could rub elbows with the criminal elite as easily as he could blend with the burgeoning drug subculture. Who’d stayed on duty after Katrina, when so many of his fellow officers had fled. Who’d gone through house after house…

Who walked away at the end of his shift without turning back.

Nor did she see the man who drove himself and tested himself, who could empty round after round into a target while a bandanna covered his eyes. Who never joined his colleagues for a beer. Whose desk had no pictures of loved ones.

Who allegedly saw everything, and felt nothing.

Saura wanted to see that man. She wanted to see the emptiness. The soulless eyes. But it was the man from Lucky’s who stood so close she couldn’t breathe without pulling the scent of soap and leather and him deep within her. It was the man from the cabin, who’d touched her and held her.

And though rumor had it nothing scared Detective John D’Ambrosia, the primal glitter in his eyes made her wonder. “Then tell me,” she whispered.

He did nothing at first. Didn’t speak. Didn’t move. She didn’t even think he breathed. But then he lifted a hand from her and skimmed it along her neck, brought it to the side of her face. She shivered. Five weeks before, as she’d stood naked in the darkness, he’d pulled her against him as he unfastened her French braid. Then, he’d run his fingers through her hair and let it fall against her shoulders. Now he lifted a single finger, and twirled a single strand.

“The call comes in the middle of the night,” he said in a disturbingly emotionless voice. “I answer on the first ring. Six minutes later I’m out the door. Twenty-two minutes later, I get out of my car and walk past the poor schmuck who found the body.”

Saura stilled. She ignored the feel of his finger tangled in her hair and absorbed him, not the stranger from the bayou as he’d been moments before, but the driven detective her brother had told her about. His eyes had gone flat, leaving only the objective cop, walking through the night to a crime scene.

Police work changed people, she knew. Forced them to compartmentalize their lives. Good versus bad. Work versus home. But that was impossible, she also knew. Stains had a way of spreading one fiber at a time, corroding whatever they touched.

“He’s been on the force for years,” he was saying, his voice a monotone. “He’s a good cop. Thorough. Desensitized. But now he’s pale and his eyes are glassy, and from the smell I know he’s just lost his dinner.”

The slippery sense of dread stunned her. She’d asked the question. She’d wanted to know what scared him. But she hadn’t really expected an answer, had been throwing down a dare rather than voicing a genuine curiosity.

Now he wouldn’t stop touching, wouldn’t stop twirling her hair around his finger, watching her with a detached intensity that made her wish she’d taken the time to pull on the biggest, thickest robe she owned…

“But I keep walking,” he went on, and even though she had no idea where he was going, she was there with him. Moving through the night. “I’ve seen the coroner’s car. I know he’s inside. So are the paramedics. But they’re just standing a few feet from the door. They’re not needed anymore.”

But John was. A detective, John had to face what no one else wanted to see. He had to see, and touch, and understand. To envision those last final moments and put together bloodstained pieces that lay fractured beyond recognition.

“It’s dark.” But Saura already knew that. She could see the stillness of the night. Felt it radiating from the man whose thighs brushed her own. “There’s not much light inside, just one lamp in the corner. The CSI photographer is squatting near the body. Each flash of his camera reveals the blood on the floor.” He hesitated, shifting his hair-wrapped finger to stroke the underside of her jaw. “The walls.”

Outside the wind whispered against the windows. Inside, the heater spewed warm air from vents along the wood floor. But the coldness moved through Saura like ice laying siege to a stream.

“Then I see the sheriff,” John added, but now she wanted him to stop. She didn’t want to see what he saw. Know what he knew. “He’s a grizzled old man. Fought in ’Nam.” Hesitating, he let silence spill between them. But he never released her from his gaze. “Some call him the Silver Fox.”

Everything closed in on Saura—the dark blue walls of the old house, the heat of John’s body swirling around hers—and the name. The Silver Fox. Her uncle.

“He’s crying.” John bit out the words, and now his face changed. The glitter returned to his eyes, the recrimination to his voice. His forefinger remained against her jaw, but now his thumb joined it in a slow dance. “Leaning over his nephew.”

Her brother, Cain.

“Who,” John added, “is on his knees, next to his sister’s body.”

Saura ripped away from him, and tried to breathe. “John, don’t—”

“So it’s John now?” He lounged against the old secretary like a cop one hundred percent in control. “Because it sure wasn’t that night, was it?” The cleft in his chin deepened. “It was
étranger,
wasn’t it? Stranger.”

She backed away, couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen the trap he’d so methodically laid. She’d asked the question; she’d wanted to know. What scared a man like Detective John D’Ambrosia?

But she’d never expected him to throw the night they’d made love back into her face, to twist those mindless hours into something dark and horrific. To paint in very explicit terms what could happen to a woman who went home with the wrong man.

“You left that bar with me, anyway, didn’t you?” he pressed with a ruthlessness she recognized too well. “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going—you didn’t
know
where you were going.”

The truth of his words stabbed through her.

“But you went anyway,” he said, and now his lips curved into a slow, languorous smile. “To have sex with me.”

He made it sound so crass and dirty, so…calculated.

So stupid.

“Don’t look so shocked, sugar. It’s no secret, at least not between us.” Nor was the way his gaze slipped from her face to the pajama top that hung open at her chest. “I was there. I saw the way you looked at me. I felt the way you touched me.”

And she’d felt the way he’d touched her. So softly. So gently. With a need that had scorched clear down to her soul.

“Get out.” She refused to let him stand there so smug and superior, acting as though she was a foolish twit so hot for him that she’d thrown caution to the wind. “Take your stupid games and get the hell—”

“You were scared,” he said as she whirled toward him, “but that didn’t stop you from leaving with me. You knew what you were doing was reckless, but that didn’t stop you, either.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe I didn’t care—”

“Bingo.” He covered the distance between them before she could so much as breathe. “You didn’t care,” he said, closing in on her. “Nathan Lambert doesn’t care. You see something you want, you go after it. You take it. And if someone gets hurt in the process, you don’t care.”

Her heart kicked hard. “You’re twisting my words—”

Eyes on fire, he backed her against the doorjamb. “I could have killed you,” he said, lifting a hand to her throat. “So many times.” His callused fingers feathered against her neck. “In so many ways.” His thumb dipped into the V of her collarbone. “You were at my mercy,” he said, and his expression darkened. “I could have done anything—and no one would have been there to stop me.”

She swallowed hard, refused to give him the satisfaction of defending herself. Of explaining.

“But you got naked with me anyway,” he added in a dead quiet voice that made her throat go tight. “You lifted your mouth to mine and took what I had to give.” Slowly, he slid his pinkie along to her bottom lip. “Then you took more.”

Then she’d walked away.

With his body sandwiching her against the door, Saura knew she should get away from him. Shove him onto his back and slam the door in his face. And yet, against the silence she heard what he did not say, saw what he did not want her to see. And perhaps most damning of all, felt what he did not want her to feel. The restraint, and the fear.

His eyes held the same bone-chilling dread she’d seen when he’d insisted she had no idea what scared him.

But now she did know, and the knowledge disturbed as much as it thrilled. Detective John D’Ambrosia, this man who allegedly felt nothing, felt everything. Deeply. It wasn’t machismo or ego that drove him, wasn’t a deep need for control that led him to try to dismantle her investigation. It was…fear. For her. Because of the night in the bayou, when a leap of faith had propelled her into taking the biggest chance of her life.

She knew she should say something—refute or deny or defend—but there was nothing to say. Because he was right. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. He could have killed her. Easily. Brutally. She would have put up a fight, but he was bigger, stronger, and in the end, he would have won. But she’d left with him anyway. She’d gotten naked. She’d given herself to a man who could have taken so much more.

Who
had
taken—

She blocked the thought before it could form, refused to feel one blade of empathy or admiration for this man who could crush the future she was beginning to realize she wanted.

“So tell me,” he said, shattering the silence. “Is that what you’re going to do with Lambert? Get him alone in that big bedroom. Look at him in that way of yours,” he added, reaching for her hand and curling his fingers around her palm, skimming his thumb along the sensitive flesh there. “Touch him and get him all hot and bothered—”

Because the image he painted disgusted her, she lifted her chin and let a slow smile curve her lips. “It worked with you, didn’t it?”

T
he moon had come out. Earlier, when he’d charged her front porch, there’d been only darkness. Now the goddamn moon glowed through the naked branches and flirted with her face, revealing the defiance in her eyes. Her body vibrated with challenge—a fact his noticed too well. He could feel all of her, the curves and the softness and the heat, the jerky rise and fall of her shoulders. No matter how unaffected she pretended to be, by his words, his presence, the frenetic riff of her heart gave her away.

Because in that moment, there was nothing cold, or still.

Stepping closer, he allowed his hips to rock against hers, allowed her to feel the hard lines of his body. But he did not allow himself to touch her as he wanted. And he did not allow himself to take her face in his hands, and lower his mouth to hers. To taste and—

“You think you know what you’re doing,” he said, reaching for her hand and closing his fingers around her palm. The warmth of her flesh defied the untouchable facade she was trying to portray. “So maybe you sidestep him the first time,” he added, drawing their hands to the door beside her face. “Maybe you have a headache.” Just the thought of her alone with that man sickened him. “But you don’t know when to stop, and neither does he. So the next time you’re together, he’s got insurance.”

Pressed up against his, her body tensed.

“Maybe he knows what you’re really after. Maybe he doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter—
because he doesn’t care.
He just wants what he wants.”

Her eyes went dark, and before she even spoke, he knew he was finally hitting a nerve. “Kind of like you,
étranger?
”

The urge to grin surprised him. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to tell him no. Or maybe he’ll make you beg.” The words scraped on the way out. “For your life—or for more. He can do that, you know.” Curled inside of his, her hand chilled.

It was all he could do not to rub.

“It only takes one little drink, laced with rohypnol, GHB, or any other roofie,” he forced himself to say.

Her mouth opened slightly, and from her expression he knew she recognized the names of the most common date rape drugs.

“Two little milligrams and he’ll have you on your back and eager for—”

She shoved him, hard, and even though he could have held her in place, he let her put distance between them. “Is that what scares you?” she asked with a sugary calm that fascinated. “Me? With Nathan?”

The sound of Lambert’s first name on her tongue made his blood pump hot and hard. “You asked the question,
belle amie.
I’m just giving it to you straight.” As he’d done his entire police career. But never before had the truth boiled like acid in his gut. “I’ve seen what men like Lambert do. The carnage in their wake. If you want to vilify me for trying to make sure you’re not another casualty, go ahead. But know this. I’ll be watching.” Because she was his friend’s sister, he told himself. Because she was innocent in all this.

But even as he spoke, he recognized the lie. “If you so much as breathe the same air that man does, I’ll know.”

Her smile was slow and amused and damn near made him come unglued. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

In other words, she was going to damn well do as she pleased.

Because he didn’t trust himself to be around her one second longer, not without doing something they’d both regret, he turned to leave. But a blur of red caught his eye. He spun toward the interior of the ridiculously cozy house, where through a pass-through he saw a small round table. With roses on top.

And he knew. God Christ almighty, before he even took the first step, he knew.

“What are you doing?” Saura demanded, finally, finally sounding off balance. But he was already across the living room and into the kitchen, grabbing the green glass vase. He took it to the sink and shook the long stems out, letting all twelve buds tumble against stainless steel.

“John—”

He grabbed the card, read the message, felt everything inside him go stone cold. On a hard breath he turned and found her standing too close, just barely prevented a collision.

He so did not trust himself to touch her right now.

She stood there in her flannel pajamas, with her hair spilling around her face and a question in her eyes. Beyond her, on the counter, sat a fat cat cookie jar. There was an old-fashioned teakettle on the gas stove.

“He knows where you live?” The question tore out of him. He looked back at her and tried like hell not to see the woman who lived in this house, the woman who displayed faded photographs and had a tattered afghan on her sofa, who put marshmallows in her hot chocolate.

Her eyes met his. “I don’t owe you any explanations, you know.”

The words were tart. Her voice was…not. He ignored both. “Do you have any idea—”

“Yes.” Snatching the card, she crumpled it in hers. “I know what would happen if Nathan knew where I lived.” Frowning, she opened the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed the wadded card into the trashcan. “Do you really think I’m that careless? That I would have pictures of my family—
my brother, for God’s sake—
lying around, if there was even a sliver of a chance Lambert might see them?”

Yes.
The word boiled through him. She was a woman who believed there was a difference between chances and calculated risks. In the five short weeks he’d known her, he could think of at least three times she’d taken her life into her own hands. Without a safety net.

But here in her kitchen, he didn’t see the daredevil. He saw the woman. Cain’s sister and Gabe’s cousin. A Robichaud. In her eyes glowed the same fierce intelligence he’d seen from others in her family on too many occasions to count. The same cunning. But there was a gentleness there, too, something soft and protective and…wounded. And it painted a far different picture than he wanted to see.

Which, in turn, made her far, far more dangerous

Yes, she was reckless. Yes, she took risks. And yes, she would gamble with her life. But not with her family. She would never jeopardize them. Like every other Robichaud, she would lay down her life to protect those she loved—

The thought stopped him cold. Protect. Those. She. Loved.

Saura was trying to protect someone—someone she loved. And she was willing to risk her life to do it.

“Then how did the roses get here?” he asked.

The smile surprised him. It was sad and faint, and damn near knocked the breath from his lungs. “I brought them,” she said, and he couldn’t help but think this was the real Saura talking, without defense mechanisms and shields of bravado, without pretense or ammunition. “Thought it’d be a shame for them to die alone.”

His smile surprised him even more. It was equally faint, but he refused to let it be anything else. “You brought them.”

“I keep an apartment in an old brownstone in the warehouse district,” she said, reaching for the vase and refilling it with water. Then she replaced the roses. Artfully. “That’s where he picks me up and drops me off.”

John watched her slender fingers toy with the long stems, how they handled the thorns without missing a beat. “He’s been inside?”

He hated the way the question burned on the way out.

“Of course.” She reached for the last rose. “It’s fully furnished, with clothes and food, pictures and magazines and—”

“A bed?”

In the sink her hands stilled. Through the hair falling into her face she looked up at him, with an odd combination of surprise and hesitation in the dark moss of her eyes. “He thinks I live there,” she said quietly. “Without a bed, don’t you think Nathan might get a bit suspicious?”

Nathan.
Not Lambert.

Taking the rose from her hand, he ignored the sharp stab and shoved the stem into the vase. “Most men would,” he agreed, wiping the smear of blood on his fingertip against his jeans.

“The sheets are wrinkled.” She took his hand and turned on the water, moving his finger under the stream. “Even though the bed has never been slept in.”

He pulled his hand back, knew he had to get the hell out of there. “If you want to stay alive, you’ll keep it that way.” Frowning, he turned and headed toward the door.

“John—”

Not
étranger.
Not Detective.

From the threshold he turned back and forced himself to ignore the way she looked standing by the antique secretary, with those liquid eyes trained on him. The porch light brightened the area, illuminating an old black-and-white photo—one featuring younger versions of Cain and Gabe and an unknown girl—through the glass doors. Its position—prominent yet protected—in her home made him wonder.

He bit back the thought, knew better than to wonder. Not about the woman who pretended to be a daredevil, not about the flicker of vulnerability she didn’t want anyone to see.

“There’s something you should know,” he said. “Nathan Lambert isn’t the only man who knows how to get what he wants.”

Then he walked into the night.

She gave him fifteen minutes. During that time she slipped into jeans and a turtleneck, braided her hair and pulled on a knit cap. With a check of the clock above the stove, she flipped out the light and double-checked the locks, then returned to her bedroom. There, Saura fired up her laptop and checked e-mail.

After deleting a fresh batch of spam, she powered down and went into her closet, checked the closed-circuit monitor that maintained a vigil on the perimeter. No one, not Nathan Lambert nor Detective D’Ambrosia, was going to catch her by surprise.

Once she was sure no one lurked outside, she grabbed her purse and let herself into the alley, walked the length of four houses before exiting on the street behind her.

In thirty minutes she would arrive at the house adjacent to Lambert’s St. Charles Avenue mansion. There, tucked securely in his neighbor’s overgrown bougainvillea, she had a tape to retrieve, and one very important question to answer.

“This her?”

John glanced at the fuzzy pictures he’d taken with his cell phone camera, of Saura with the wrong color hair—and the wrong man. “Normally she’s a brunette,” he said, sliding a second series of pictures onto the sticky table at the back of The Easy Note. He’d been surprised how few hits he’d encountered when he’d done an Internet search on Saura Robichaud. With her family, he’d expected her picture to be splashed across any number of Web sites.

It wasn’t.

“These are a few years old,” he said, lining up the shots of Saura with a succession of men—her uncle the senator at a campaign event, her brother and cousin at what looked to be a graduation celebration, and finally, a third picture with a fourth man. Adrian Doucet. Her fiancé, according to the news story. Who’d been murdered in cold blood two years ago.

There’d been no pictures, no mentions, of Saura Robichaud since then.

T’Paul Lareau stubbed out his cigarette and picked up the picture of Saura with Cain and Gabe. Narrowing his eyes, he put it back on the table, and used his fingers to block out everything but the oval of Saura’s face. “She ever go blond?”

“Probably.” Watching his trusted, but very-under-the-radar informant, John saw something in the other man’s eyes he categorically did not like. “You know her?”

T’Paul reached for the picture of Saura and her fiancé. “Thought so,” he drawled, reaching for a new cigarette. “But maybe not. The woman I’m thinking of is supposed to be dead.”

“How long?” John asked.

“Two, maybe three years.”

The time frame fit. “What was her name? How’d you know her?”

“Didn’t really know her,” the informant said. “Just saw her around the Quarter and at the track. At Jazz Fest one year.” He slid his unlit cigarette along the photo of Saura and her uncle. “But the broad I’m thinking of never dressed like this,” he said, outlining her simple, slim-fitting rose-colored gown. “Black was more her color. And her hair was usually blond. Sometimes red.”

The blade of unease John had been fighting from the moment he’d learned her identity drove deeper. A socialite going single-handedly after a notorious criminal…something so didn’t add up. “And you thought she was dead?”

“Everyone did.”

“Who’s everyone?”

T’Paul ripped a match from the book and dragged it along the inside strip. “No one in particular, it’s just no one saw her anymore. She just—vanished, like some of those casino owners who ticked off the Russian Mafia. I figured a pretty thing like her must’ve gotten mixed up with something she shouldn’t have.”

Or some
one.

John reached for the pictures he’d taken of Saura and Lambert, resisted the urge to fold them in his hands. “Might be her,” he conceded, trying to fit the pieces together.

Saura Robichaud was a woman of secrets. She was clever and she was guarded. But she was also…vulnerable. It wasn’t a word he liked—and he knew damn sure it wasn’t a label she would appreciate. But he couldn’t shake the memory of her in those ridiculous pajamas.

“Here’s what I need you to do. Follow her. Find out where she goes. Who she sees. How long she stays.” He paused as the waitress delivered his beer, slid her a five, then picked up the bottle and took a long sip. “She’s got an apartment in the warehouse district.” He set the bottle onto the table. “Find it.”

Saura slipped her hand into the pocket of her bulky jacket and closed her fingers around the small tape recorder. She’d retrieved it with ease, had returned to her house less than ninety minutes after slipping down the alley. She’d entered the same way she exited, then slipped through the darkness to her closet, where the closed-circuit monitor had revealed a man slumped against the iron fence of a vacant house across the street. A vagrant, perhaps.

But she didn’t think so.

Now she lifted her face to the cool morning breeze, knew her brother, a nature photographer, would appreciate the way the sun glinted against the watery carpet of duckweed. Along the shores of the no-name lake, frail-looking cypress trees jutted up against the gray sky, providing shelter for a handful of egrets. Winter had stripped the oak and maples of their leaves, but along their naked branches clusters of buds waited for the temperature to warm.