Manners, but flaunted tradition. Elegant, but proudly sported a tattoo. Vanessa had cued in on his Rolex, but didn’t seem moved by the moneyed crowd.
A puzzle Lucas would like to solve. Later, much later.
Even though he stepped outside into the blast of a humid summer night, the heat couldn’t match the fire coursing through him. He could still feel the brush of her hand against his chest. Instead of the sweet scent of the magnolia trees dotting the country-club lawn, he smelled her alluring Asian-spice perfume.
As much as he valued the control he’d gained over his life and his actions, he’d only narrowly resisted yanking her against himself and kissing her until neither of them could breathe. Forget networking. Reputations and decorum be damned.
For the first time in a long, great while, the thrill of the hunt had taken over but had nothing to do with his career.
When his senses seized him, so did the memories. He longed for the cigarettes he’d given up, since trips into the past didn’t come without ghosts. Wandering past manicured flower beds behind a posh Atlanta country club, he instead remembered the scent of chicory, fish fresh from the stream, Spanish moss dripping like tattered lacy curtains over the swamp. He recalled friends he’d partied with in New Orleans, the small knot of family he’d left behind and crawfish boils shared with both—the potatoes, onions and dark red crustaceans spilling out across a newspaper-lined folding table, while the music heated up and whiskey cooled the fire.
Louisiana would always be in his blood, he supposed, even if sometimes he wanted to exorcise it from his mind.
And here, on the outside, beyond the windows where the thoroughbreds looked out into the mundane, with his past shimmering in his blood, seemed the perfect place to wait for Vanessa. When the party was over, they would continue what they’d started.
He justified his exit from party networking by reminding himself he was mostly a mystery to the people inside, and it wouldn’t be wise to push himself too firmly just yet. His change of heart and legal specialty wouldn’t be welcomed by some, wouldn’t be believed by others. Keeping his distance, allowing them to learn about him in pieces, and, of course, letting the rumors fester and grow more elaborate could only help.
For years he’d deliberately kept the details of his past sketchy. Having a shady cousin who specialized in security matters worked in his favor at times. Some of his history they would never learn—or understand—but that also had its advantages. In his new life he wanted to walk in the light. He was tired of wading through muck, even though he always managed to find the gold in places nobody else wanted to go.
A talent or a curse?
He wasn’t sure he cared anymore. At least the money he’d earned had its uses. It provided comfort and security where once he’d suffered misery and chaos.
He heard the stumbling shuffle behind him before he turned and saw the heavyset man coming down the path. He guessed his age at under twenty-five, possibly a former athlete who’d stopped intense training and taken up late-night steak dinners and bourbon.
“Hallooo!” the guy said as he waved—and weaved—drunkenly toward Lucas.
Damn it to hell. I don’t have time for this.
“Bea-u-ti-ful night, ya think?” the drunk guy mumbled, gesturing with the crystal tumbler in his right hand.
“Ou—” Lucas had to physically stop the Cajun French from leaking out. “Yes.”
“I tell ya.” The man clapped a friendly hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “I haven’t seen a night like this ’un since our big hunt of oh-two. We were stalking these turkeys…”
Please, dear God, not another hunting story.
“Fascinating,” Lucas cut in. “Are you a professional?” From experience, he knew hunters loved this mistaken assumption.
Sure enough, the guy’s chest puffed out. “Nah. Just do it on trips with the firm.”
“What firm?” Lucas asked casually.
If possible, his chest expanded more. “Douglas and Alderman.”
“Ah. Top drawer.”
“You bet yer ass.”
For a moment, Lucas wondered if the guy talked with that heavy slang at the office. He couldn’t imagine so. Douglas and Alderman were reportedly both a couple of old-moneyed curmudgeons, who brandished traditionalism, dignity and family pedigrees like swords.
“’Course he’s gone and done it now.”
“Who?”
“Broke the code.”
Lucas angled his head as the guy took another long swallow from his glass. “Who broke what code?”
“Douglas. Joseph freakin’ Douglas.”
Ah. The premier curmudgeon. Who certainly wouldn’t want to be gossiped about by a junior executive. Which this guy had to be.
Lucas fought against curiosity and ethics. The latter he’d given up some time ago, and now wanted back. He should excuse himself. Hell, he should run the other way.
He didn’t move.
Though he’d never had the pleasure of a face-to-face introduction with Douglas, earlier that evening he’d not-so-subtly steered his elegant wife in the opposite direction from Lucas and the circle of people he had been talking to. They were undoubtedly part of the crowd who would likely never accept Lucas’s change of specialty. Of course, his lineage didn’t include Civil War generals whose wife and children had held their ground against Union troops in front of the family’s plantation home, then served them fried chicken, turnip greens and biscuits until peace was declared, thereby saving one of the few seventeenth-century homes still standing in Atlanta.
By contrast, Lucas’s ancestors had probably been too busy helping Blackbeard and Jean Lafitte pirate and profit in the Big Easy to bother with turnip greens.
He wondered if Douglas’s dissing could be an effort at intimidation. It likely wasn’t personal; he probably just didn’t like competition. Douglas’s firm had a division that specialized in helping companies and hospitals protect themselves against frivolous lawsuits—exactly the job Lucas had just been hired to do by Geegan, Duluth and Patterson.
“I couldn’t believe it,” the drunk guy muttered, hanging his head. “Ya can’t have two wills. Ya just can’t.”
Despite his effort not to listen, Lucas’s legal antenna shot up. “No. You certainly can’t.”
“Mrs. Switzer, she’s so nice. She’s so broke. It’s not right. We have to help her.”
“Of course you do.”
“But it’s still not right. The other will, you know.”
“The other will?”
“The one Mr. Switzer had Mr. Douglas draw up last month, just before he died. Why did he have to even talk to that stripper? And in Daytona Beach?”
