style="font-size:15px;"> He nodded. “You’re going to be fine.”
“I was fine before you got here. I’m not fine now.” Her eyes accused him as much as her words. “Now you see why you can’t stay here, Cole.”
“I’m not leaving.”
Bryn heard the determination in Cole’s voice, and her chest tightened.
They fell into an uncomfortable silence. Around them, the big house creaked and settled.
“What do you really want from me, Cole?”
“I told you I didn’t come here to hurt you, Bryn,” Cole said. “And it’s true.” His eyes were deep, fathomless pools. “We need to talk about Aimee. I know it’s hard. I know you don’t want to even think about it, but we have to talk.”
He was right. There was no getting around it. Cole Dempsey had come back into her life and turned it upside down in a matter of hours. And he wasn’t going to leave without at least saying his piece. And after that— He still might not leave. But sticking her head in the sand wasn’t doing her any good.
“All right,” she said finally. “But I want to call the police first.”
Cole didn’t say anything as he followed her out of the kitchen. He took her arm as she struggled to walk on her bandaged foot. The pain was a dull ache compared to the dread licking at her stomach.
They reached the small anteroom off the entry hall she’d turned into a small but comfortable office. She’d colorwashed blue walls and added an eclectic mix of personal mementoes, artifacts and local crafts, yet there was nothing comfortable about it tonight. The silence lay turgid between them as she punched in the number for the police.
“An officer will be here as soon as possible,” she told him as she put the receiver back in its cradle a few minutes later.
He sat across the desk from her in a threadworn velvet wingback chair, and yet he was still far too close. He invaded her space by his mere presence at Bellefleur. An aura of immutable authority exuded from him. No matter what he wore, he would cut a powerful figure with his dark hair, perilous eyes and the solid breadth of his muscular body.
“You want to talk,” she said. “So, talk. You have till the police arrive.” Since he’d gotten here, he’d been acting as if he was in charge. She wanted to let him know that he wasn’t.
She caught the slight narrowing of his eyes, but he let her words pass unchallenged.
“Would you like a drink?” she offered, coolly hospitably. There was a bottle of brandy in the antique cabinet behind the desk. She needed a drink even if he didn’t.
The chair swiveled, and she took the bottle down, along with a couple of crystal glasses. She poured them each a glass, returned the bottle to the cabinet and raised the amber liquid to her lips. The brandy burned sweet and warm down her cold throat.
Cole didn’t touch the glass she pushed across the desk toward him.
“My mother became seriously ill a year ago,” he said in the still thick of the quiet office. “I buried her in Baton Rouge last month.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She truly hurt for him—but why was he telling her this? It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but she was hardly an old friend catching up on his life story since last they’d met. She’d never blamed Cole’s mother for what Wade Dempsey had done. If anything, Mary Dempsey was another of Wade’s victims. Still, she wasn’t sure what Mary’s death had to do with Cole’s return.
How long would it take for the police to arrive? The conversation had barely begun and already she wished it was over. She focused on the small bronzed bust of Alexandre Louvel, one of the first Louisianans to risk his resources turning Creole cane into sugar and thereby founding the Louvel fortune, standing sentry on a chipped and peeling painted column by the door. He’d found a way to profit on the lands he’d inherited, and Bryn often felt his vacant, heavy gaze as she sat behind this desk and tried to turn around Bellefleur’s future once again.
“I never thought I’d come back to Azalea Bend,” he said. “I worked my way through college, and on through law school. I never looked back, not once.”
He appeared to be in no hurry to get wherever he was going with this conversation, and that bothered her more than anything else. He was confident, composed, while she felt her own control slipping.
Time to cut to the chase and get this done. She turned her gaze from the bronze of Alexandre Louvel and squared it on Cole.
“I thought we were going to talk about Aimee.” Her hand shook as she lifted the crystal glass and took another sip. “Your father swore revenge, and he took it. Everyone at Bellefleur heard his threats. He went to town and got drunk—a dozen people saw him in the bar, talking crazy. The Louvels were going to pay. And he came back and killed Aimee…because she was the only Louvel he could find.” God, and how she blamed herself for that.
She’d been down by the river with Cole that night, both of them desperate and aching. Her sister had offered her comfort, even her help. Aimee had insisted that she could fix everything. But all Bryn had been able to think about was losing Cole. Wade would have to leave Azalea Bend to search for new work, and his family would go with him. She might never see Cole again, despite his promises to write and call. And if her parents found out she was trying to keep in touch with Wade Dempsey’s son…
She’d gone to Cole instead. And Aimee had waited for her. Bryn had come back to the house in time to hear her sister’s screams. She’d never known for sure where her parents had gone that night, but they’d been fighting and Patsy had driven off in the car. Her father had chased after her. Everything about that night had been awful.
They’d come home around the same time as Bryn. And then things had just gotten more awful.
“Those threats, they were empty words,” Cole replied. “He’d been unjustly fired and he went crazy. He got drunk. That doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Are you going to tell me why you’re here, Cole?” She couldn’t take much more. Remembering that night…it always killed her a little more each time. “We had this conversation fifteen years ago, and I can’t see one good reason to have it again.”
Cole leaned forward, his forearms resting on the solid polished mahogany of the desk that had once belonged to her great-grandfather. His voice lowered, as if meant only for her even when the two of them were alone in the house anyway.
“My mother went to her death wanting to believe my father was innocent—but fearing somewhere inside herself that he was guilty.” His eyes bored hard into hers. Emotion lurked in those lithoid depths, but it was unreadable. “She was haunted by that question, Bryn.”
She didn’t know what to say. Her family had been haunted by that night, too. What was Cole getting at?
She knew he was getting at something.
“Before she died, she told me something she’d kept secret all my life. She was pregnant with another man’s child when she married Wade Dempsey. He married her and gave me a name, and that’s why she stayed with him all those years, even with his philandering. Wade was sterile, couldn’t have any children of his own, but he treated me like his flesh and blood
