Target (7 page)

“Forgive me for my inopportune appearance at your home.” The voice had a girlish quality that didn't fit. “I really did intend to sit in my vehicle until I saw signs of you being up and about. Then I was going to ask for an appointment to interview you.”

Interview?
Geez, she sounded like someone from the press and if she was, it meant he'd already been traced here from California. But Joan Reeves didn't resemble any picture he'd formerly had of reporters. But then, how would he know how a reporter might look? “Calling would have been a better idea.”

“Oh, dear, you are angry with me. Come to that, I'm angry with myself. I can be
so
impetuous. I tried to call several times but all I got was a busy signal.”

Of course that's all she'd heard. He had made sure of that the moment he and Aurelie got home.

The woman cleared her throat. “I've made a bad first impression. How silly of me. Would you give me another chance and tell me when I could come by and interview you, Mr. Board?”

“You're a reporter.”

“No! Why would you think that? I won't bore you with all my credentials except to say that my current job—the one that pays the bills—is with a book factory in New York State.” She peered closer, apparently for signs that they understood. “I write books that have other people's names on them—from an outline I'm given. It's really very common, but I'm also working on a project of my own and that's where you come in. Could you give me a little time later?”

Nick began to feel sorry for her. “What kind of project?”

“I already have a contract from a big publisher although I'm not allowed to discuss it yet. I can show you some of the books I've written for the book factory.”

He was aware of Aurelie's fingernails in the skin of his arm. Dammit, she was shaking. “Why not call later, Ms. Reeves.”

“Oh, I will, thank you very much. And I'll bring a document that says you have to approve anything I write about you.”

She wasn't damn well going to write anything about him if he could pull that off. Meanwhile, he'd better not alienate her until he saw where he stood.

Joan Reeves backed away. “I'm at the Roll Inn if you want to get hold of me. I'm not planning to do anything but wait there until I can talk to you.” She hesitated

“Call me later,” Nick said. He only wanted to get Aurelie inside the condo.

“I'll call,” Joan said, starting to walk backward. “I didn't tell you what I'm working on. It's really exciting. My book is called
Then and Now. Subtitle: Ties That Divide
. Subtitle:
The Lives of Antebellum Houses and the Generations of People They've Owned.
” She paused for breath. “You see how clever that is? The people the houses have owned, not the people who have owned the houses. I have a solid history of Place Lafource and it's early inhabitants but I have to work on the ‘now.'I need to know all about you and your sisters.”

“Y
ou're shaking all over,” Nick said, helping Aurelie lead Hoover directly into the mudroom. “It's okay. Or are you cold? Of course you are.”

“I'm not cold. In this coat, I'm boiling. I'd be boiling without the coat. Nick, it's like, well, is that woman bizarre or am I looking for mutants under every rock? Don't try to soften anything for me. Just give it to me straight. If you think I'm losing my grip, just spit it out.”

He laughed but his heart wasn't in it. “You'd have to be strange not to find Joan Reeves unusual. She could be perfectly honorable, but her presentation is something else.”

A shower stall stood in one corner. There wasn't a bath, not that getting Hoover into one would be easy. Aurelie pushed the dog inside the glass door and turned on the water. When she was satisfied with the temperature, she closed the door.

Hoover, no fool, blinked at the situation and scooted around to sit in the dry spot immediately behind the stream from the showerhead.

“I need a chair,” Aurelie said. She reached in again with a bottle of shampoo and squirted some on the dog.

Nick pulled a wicker-back chair closer and Aurelie stood on it. She hooked an arm over the top of the enclosure, grabbed the showerhead and yanked it back and forth until soapy water and dirt streamed from Hoover's fur.

He caught Aurelie around the waist. “Come on down and let me do that. You'll dislocate your arm.” He realized he was grateful she still had on the rain slicker.

“I can manage.” And she did. It took fifteen minutes but eventually water ran clear from the animal's coat and Aurelie got down. She cracked the door and squeezed her arm back inside to turn the water off. “That was the easy part. Now—stand still, boy—I've got to dry him. Do you have any old towels you don't care about?”

He figured he would after this and took a pile out of the linen closet.

Aurelie had him put them on the chair then looked at him critically. She waved a finger at his lower regions. “You need to go get those wet jeans off.”

“What would be the point? I might as well help with the drying first.”

She spread large towels on the floor and unsnapped her slicker. Once she had it off she hung it on the back of the door and turned to him. “D'you have a hair dryer in here?”

“Yes,” he said. Just as well his jeans were wet. They had a dampening effect on some things and he needed that. He looked away from her pale pink cotton nightie, low at the neck, sleeveless and reaching just past midthigh, and found the dryer. She had put the darn slicker on over her nightie without bothering to get dressed and now she was behaving as if she were still a skinny little kid.

Hoover didn't need encouragement to move quickly from the shower, but Aurelie had to all but lie on top of him to make him flop in a heap on the towels. She set to work rubbing him down, working from his nose toward his tail. One towel after another piled up in a clean but saturated heap.

Nick plugged in the hair dryer and trained it on the dog. He and Aurelie worked in silence until the animal was damp dry. By that time he lay on his back, feet flopping in ecstasy at having the warm air wiggled back and forth over his tummy.

“Good enough, Hoover,” Aurelie said, standing and urging the dog to his feet. “C'mon, boy.” She took him from the mudroom and quickly returned to help clean up.

Without warning, she dropped the pile of towels she'd gathered from the floor.

“What?” Nick said. “Why did you do that?”

“All I'm doing is—just racing around, trying not to think.” She crossed her arms. Her long black hair stood out from its center part in even tighter curls than usual. “I feel as if we're running down a steep hill and picking up speed. And we don't have any brakes. You know what I mean?”

“Just drive in your heels, Rellie. We know how to do that. We've been doing it for years.”

“I don't want anyone's pity.”

“I'm not pitying you, dammit.”

She poked his ribs. “I didn't mean you, moron!” She dug at him with a sharp finger, advancing while he retreated. “Did you really hear what that woman said. She wants to find out all about you and your
sisters?
”

He made a grab for her hand and caught it. “She's just a woman working on a project and she's real enthusiastic. She doesn't know anything about us. And she won't find out anything we don't want her to know. Rellie, the three of us are fine. Maybe not perfect, but not damaged, either, and she won't be able to make us say things that could make her suspicious.” Not a lot, anyway.

“Sometimes I'm not so sure we aren't damaged.” She stood close, looking at her feet. “We've had so much good luck. Who would ever expect a busy, important woman like Delia to just about drop out of the life she knew to take care of them? She protected us, made sure we went to the kind of schools we should never have had a chance at. She's always been there for us.”

The break in her voice didn't reassure him. “Delia loves the life she has. If she didn't she could have moved on once we had our feet under us. I think she wanted a reason to get off the merry-go-round. She's told us as much, Rellie. Please stop worrying about her.”

“That could be because she doesn't want us to feel we've robbed her of something more in her life.”

“She was married once, remember? She says he was a dog and she's better off without him or any other man unless she happens to need or want one for a bit.”

“Don't talk like that about her, it doesn't sound nice,” Aurelie said, tightening her arms beneath her breasts.

Skinny little kid? Not for a long time. Full and high, he couldn't miss how round her breasts were, or fail to see the pressure of her nipples against the cotton.

Geesh, this was a nightmare.

Uh-uh, a saint he wasn't. Aurelie Board was a dream to look at, a small-scale all-woman with the oval, soft-mouthed face that had become the measure he judged other women against. Her hairline had that heart shape, coming to a sharp point in the center. And she was the least vain female he'd ever met.

He filled his lungs. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep in. You don't have any distance to go to get to work.”

“Do you think you can sleep?” she asked. “I don't. Nick, I know I sound childish, but all I want is to go on the way we were. Not having to worry about outsiders, I mean.” When she looked at him, her gray eyes shimmered. With both hands flattened on his chest, she rested her cheek on top. “We'll get through it, but what will it cost?”

He held his hands a couple of inches away from her before finally settling them on her back. He held still, afraid to move. “Whatever happens, we haven't done anything wrong. Thanks to my mother, we didn't die in that mine. We'll always stick together and if bits of our stories come out, we'll cope. Maybe some will feel sorry for us. We should try not to fight that, just let it go away.”

“You're the sensible one—in theory.” Once more she raised her face. This time she put her chin against his chest and he could feel her breath on his skin.

“Would you feel better if you went back to New Orleans for a bit?” He didn't want her to say yes.

“No. My decision on that hasn't changed. I'll go back if and when I can be useful, in whatever capacity I choose to be there.”

Her eyes closed, squeezed tightly shut, and tears glittered on her lashes. Nick wrapped his arms tightly around her and pressed his face into her hair. It smelled nice and he rubbed his cheek over it.

Aurelie slid her hands until they rested at the back of his waist.

They swayed a little and he played with the soft ends of her hair. Sometimes people needed the comfort they got from physical contact. He loved the way she felt against him.

The wet jeans weren't inhibiting a thing anymore. He could probably bend iron bars with his dick. Nick settled his teeth together. Even thinking that word with Aurelie in his arms felt crude. But it was true. The reactions he had to her didn't feel wrong. She wasn't untouchable, even if he was having trouble believing that.

He had to hold on a bit longer. She'd get herself together shortly and go to bed. He gritted his teeth again.

“I won't have any peace unless we find out that Baily's death had nothing to do with Colin—with him looking for us, thinking he'd found Sarah and killing her once he'd gotten whatever he wanted out of her. Then we'll feel safer. I never thought I'd pray to find out a woman had killed herself,” she said.

“We'd both be fools not to hope for that. It wouldn't bring her back to life if we didn't.”

Aurelie sighed. She smoothed her hands up his chest and hooked them over his shoulders. Then he felt her fingers stiffen.

“What is it?” He ducked his head to look into her face and the luminous quality in her eyes let him know she felt a change between them. “It's okay,” he said.

“Is it?” For an instant she seemed ready to pull away—or smack him.

He couldn't take his eyes off her mouth, the way her full lips settled together after she spoke. Nick kissed her.

 

He had kissed her, and she'd kissed him back.

And he had melted her. Nothing had tasted sweeter, until the strangeness of it, the sense of the forbidden, shocked her to her toes. She had felt his reaction to her and folded herself into him as naturally as if they'd been dating all these years instead of living as family.

That brief, sensual warmth had lasted as long as it took her to remember Delia and, most of all, Sarah. Aurelie wished she could blame her conclusions on her imagination. She couldn't. Her sister was in love with Nick.

Anger, rage at the unfairness of it all, took over Aurelie. What about
her
feelings?

Sarah was older and had been the one to take care of her younger sister when things couldn't get any worse.

What kind of feelings did Nick have for Sarah? For either of them? She only wanted the tension and confusion in her head to go away.

The light in his bedroom had gone out.

That kiss could just as well have happened because the two of them were seeking comfort.

Sure it could.

Aurelie turned toward the window in her room. Early light, heavy with fuzzy gray, pressed into cracks around the blinds. She rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed, listening to Hoover snore gently.

Nick needed his sleep. His habit of turning off his alarm without realizing what he'd done was legendary. She would give him a little longer to become truly unconscious, then gather her one small bag and leave. Before they saw each other again—alone—she had to have time to let the memory of that kiss fade.

She had a key to Poke Around, so she'd go there and call a cab to get her out to Place Lafource. She needed her own vehicle.

Birds began to sing.

Aurelie got up, waited to be sure Hoover wouldn't stir, and sneaked across Nick's carpets to the kitchen. She wanted coffee, but a Coke would do and she could get that quietly.

“Hey,” Nick said and she started wildly. “You thirsty, too?”

He stood on one leg, the opposite foot braced on his knee. When they were all younger, and he'd already had the habit, they'd called him the Stork. She looked at his leg and he promptly put the second foot to the floor.

“Want some juice?” He wasn't smiling and his eyes were watchful.

Aurelie took the glass he offered—his glass—and swallowed some orange juice. “Thanks,” she said. Part of her wished she'd stayed in the bedroom, a bigger part wanted to be where she could see him.

He poured a second glass of orange juice and exchanged it for the one he'd been drinking.

“You're making yourself busy because you feel awkward,” Aurelie blurted out.

“You think?”

Her body warmed until she knew her face was pink. She blew at stray curls falling in her eyes. “What happened was nothing,” she said. “We were both exhausted and we'd had a terrible shock. We were emotional. Forget about it.”

Nick's dark blue eyes didn't shift from hers. He drank more juice but never looked away for an instant. Beard shadow darkened his jaw and Aurelie became very aware of how big he was—how big he had always seemed.

Creeping around and trying to leave without his knowing would be silly now. “I'm going to get ready and go over to Poke Around. I can get some boxes unpacked early—before I have to leave to look at apartments.”

“Why hurry? You haven't had any sleep.”

“I can't sleep in the day.”

“I'm exhausted.”

She smiled at him. “Get back to bed. You can't go out to the lab until the police release the building.”

He put his glass in the sink and took hers, even though she hadn't finished the juice. “Please don't leave without giving us a chance to talk.”