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,
