away from the historic district, but she could lose herself in the crowd heading for El Centro Community College just beyond, if she…could…just….
The obstacle of a second man, angling toward her from behind the train stop’s handicap access ramp, forced her to a stumbling stop. No….
Tailored suit, despite the August heat wave. Expensive sunglasses. An air of absolute entitlement, even for nobility. More Comitatus.
If her years of uncovering every scrap of information she could find on them had taught her nothing else, it taught her how to recognize their agents.
Fight. No, move. No—fight! Sibyl pivoted—but here came the couple who’d chased her. She fell an instinctive step back and spotted a third enemy—privileged walk despite his cheap clothing and beach-blond hair—closing in from another direction. They’d surrounded her. They’d won. Again.
“It’s all right, honey!” lied the beauty queen, reaching for her. “You can trust—”
The scream of a train whistle drowned her out.
Sybil spun to face the light-rail train that loomed down on her with an urgent wail of warning. A blow hurled her into brick pavement.
Then…? Silence.
Wouldn’t a train’s impact hurt more? She curled her hand on the hot bricks beneath her…and smelled the earthy, unmistakable scent of man on top of her, sheltering her. She felt the rub of coarse skin on her bare arms, of denim on her bare legs. Despite the gruff cursing over the screech of metal brakes, she felt safe.
Literally. Someone saved her.
Someone who weighed almost as much as a train, even so.
Opening her eyes, Sibyl turned her head to the man who rolled off her. His size momentarily blocked the sun and blue sky. Swarthy, she noted. Angry…she’d been angering men for a long time now. This one, at least, had some cause.
He could have died. Which meant he, at least, didn’t want her silenced.
“What the hell were you doing?” her savior demanded, cutting through her shock. His accent held the familiar trace of Louisiana—rural Louisiana. He pulled her effortlessly upward with one huge, rough hand around hers, and she let him. “When a train’s about to hit you, you move, you don’t just stand there!”
Sibyl barely reached his broad chest, even in her cowboy boots. The muscles of his shoulders bulged under his T-shirt; the muscles of his thick arms she could see for herself under sun-browned skin. Substantial, she thought. Blue collar, not white collar. A two-day beard shadowed his jaw. Primitive. And he'd risked his life for her.
A strange sensation filled her. After a decade alone, she searched for a label, then surprised herself. Trust? She trusted him. Completely.
“Oh, thank God!” Arden Leigh put on a surprisingly good show of concern. So did her beau and the blond man, with their prep school postures and thrift store clothes. The one man who’d dressed Comitatus-wealthy had vanished. Safe. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“I guess you just don’t have the way with women that Trace does.” The blond man laughed. Sibyl’s hero grunted casual disgust, but she didn’t hear his reply.
They were together. This man—Trace—who seemed like the anti-Comitatus, knew people she’d assumed were her enemies. And yet, as the others crowded around her, Sibyl instinctively pressed back against her savior’s solid body. Fear, she understood. It shouldn’t stop her from finding out more about these not-quite-Comitatus types…or their friend. If she could trust him.
Needing time, needing proof, Sibyl rolled her eyes upward and dropped into a feigned faint, like some damsel in distress.
Her hero caught her, swept her into his hard arms, held her close to his broad, warm chest—and growled an unheroic, “Crap.”
Sibyl had no intention of analyzing the feelings that swept past her wall of reason, this time.
Some truths were just too dangerous to consider.
Chapter 1
“Doubt separates people…it is a sword that kills.”
—Buddha
New Orleans, three months later
Trace Beaudry didn’t consider himself a big thinker.
Big? Hell, yeah.
A thinker? Not so much.
But even he couldn’t ignore the significance of finally entering his ancestors’ once grand, now ruined, home. This house could have been his inheritance if he’d been smarter, classier, better. He’d tried. He’d failed. Now the house sat empty and rotting.
And here Trace stood, the bastard end of his genetic line—hefting the sledgehammer that would take it down.
Even through the bandanna across his face, even with a fresh stick of peppermint gum in his mouth, the fancy “bungalow” stank as thick and awful as any other New Orleans flood house. It had stood empty for years before Hurricane Katrina turned even nice areas of New Orleans into Southern Lake Pontchartrain. But what really trashed the building were the months it sat untouched, afterward. The Judge—Trace couldn’t think of the man he’d first met on his fifteenth birthday as a father—had apparently fought the city’s attempts to force his hand. For once, the Judge lost.
And now his illegitimate son crossed the threshold at last.
Dirt and flyspecks darkened lead cathedral windows. Deadly black mold laced across layers of brittle wallpaper that sagged like bunting from an equally grimy ceiling. Inches of bug-infested filth carpeted both the floor and the museum-quality furniture strewn about by forgotten floodwaters. A ceiling fan’s blades wilted like an upside-down flower, pulled downward as those waters had receded, and then dried like that, as much as anything ever dried in Louisiana. A rat scurried up the curved, wrought-iron staircase.
Trace knuckled his hard hat back as he took it all in—and snorted.
“Eh?” asked Alain, who’d grown up in the same trailer park as Trace. He ran the construction crew hired for this gut job. He’d bid extra low, just to see this little piece of Trace’s fancy-schmancy history.
Trace shook his head, at a loss for the right words. Irony? Symbolism? Karma? He didn’t want to call on the botched education that his embarrassing attempt at legitimacy, at life as a LaSalle, had bought him. He’d tried living in his father’s world. He’d failed. End of story. Now he settled for, “Life’s funny, huh?”
Then the six-man team set about knocking down every bit of the house except the frame and foundation. They started by emptying it, piling up mounds of trash and recyclables at the distant, weed-shrouded curb. Then they shoveled muck off the floor into wheelbarrows to cart outside. Only later could they break down the walls, pull out the insulation and leave only the bungalow’s frame to be rebuilt. Trace liked the honest, hard work of it—no polish or sophistication required. No stupid rituals or secrecy, either. He liked sweating and lifting and pushing his fighter’s body to the limit without hurting anyone. He liked not thinking.
This was why he’d left
