Cole Dempsey's Back In Town

The soothing palette of ivory, oatmeal and gray in the grand bedroom suite that had once been her parents wasn’t soothing tonight. Bryn rose, paced to the verandah doors, pushing back the creamy silk drapes outlined with grosgrain ribbon. She stared out at the thick, unknowable night. He’d booked two weeks already and had asked Melodie if he could stay longer. And what was worse, seeing him had upset her. Damn him for knowing it so easily, too.

She was still in shock from seeing him, in fact. His chiseled, hard face was almost unrecognizable as that young, gentle teen who’d wooed her in the summer gardens long ago. He’d slip up from the sugarcane fields to find her, his bare muscular arms glistening in the humid heat. He would wink at her, watch her with his remarkable eyes, cast her smiles, and slowly, with his whispered words and stolen kisses, he drew her into his magic world of hopes and dreams. He’d always wanted to make something of himself. He’d been ambitious and arrogant even then.

And she, who had known nothing but privilege, was awed by him. In those days, she’d had everything but feared her own shadow. He’d had nothing but exuded the confidence that he could do anything. Together, they’d steal away on secret dates, sometimes with Aimee’s help, and other times without it—like the night he’d tempted her down the latticed ivywork outside her window and made love to her for the first time under the star-splashed sky.

He’d made her believe that, like him, she could do anything, too. But the truth had been that neither of them could control the events that had torn them apart.

Damn him for coming back.

The phone in her office rang. Bryn hurried across the aged heart-pine floor, her bare feet padding silently. While none of the visitor accommodations included telephones for the sake of their guests’ serenity during their stay, Bryn kept phones installed in her personal office here as well as her business office downstairs. They were the only two land lines in the main house.

“Just checking to see how your meeting went with the bank today,” came Drake Cavanaugh’s voice in response to her hello.

Bryn hesitated, despite the fact he was her oldest friend and had stood by her ever since Aimee’s death. Their relationship had grown by gentle degrees from friendship to fondness, and only recently had Drake expressed a desire to take their longstanding relationship to the next level. His marriage proposal had taken her completely by surprise, though looking back, she realized she’d ignored the signs of his changing feelings.

And now that Cole was back, she knew why.

She’d walled up her emotions fifteen years ago. She’d loved Cole with her whole heart, and the day he’d broken it it had nearly killed her. She’d been protecting herself ever since. Even with Drake.

“It went fine,” she said finally. “But I need to have a good year, that’s all. Then we’ll take a look at the books and they’ll decide if I’m ready for a loan.”

“I’d co-sign and you could get a loan now.”

“I know.” Bryn cradled the phone against her shoulder as she slipped into the comfortable wingback chair behind her desk. “But you know I won’t do that.” Especially now that Drake had revealed his deeper feelings for her. She couldn’t let herself become indebted to him that way, not if she wasn’t sure she would marry him.

“You know I’ll keep offering,” he said. Bryn was quiet, and after a beat, Drake asked, “Is something wrong?”

There was no point in keeping it a secret. Melodie was a chatterbox. The whole town would know by tomorrow. As soon as Melodie mentioned the name of their new guest, people would recognize it. Melodie was young, but even she had heard the story, if not the name of Wade Dempsey’s son. Dempsey itself was a common enough surname, but plenty of older residents in Azalea Bend would remember and put it together.

“Cole Dempsey’s back in town.”

“You’re kidding.”

Now Drake was quiet.

“I wish I were. He’s staying here. He booked a room.”

Drake let out a curse beneath his breath.

“He’s a lawyer now. In Baton Rouge. Have you heard of Granville, Piers and Rousseau?

“He’s in with them?” Bryn could hear the shock in Drake’s voice.

“Yes. Or, he said he was.”

“Do you want me to come over? I’m in the city tonight, but—”

“I’m fine.” As a member of the state congress, Drake spent a lot of time in Baton Rouge, had a lot of connections. He kept his parents’ old Georgian in Azalea Bend for his frequent visits to St. Salome Parish. “Maybe you could check out his story. Find out if he’s really with the Granville, Piers and Rousseau firm.”

She didn’t really doubt Cole on that fact, but it seemed wise to check. She couldn’t think of anything else to do and she was grasping at straws. She promised Drake she would call if Cole caused trouble, but she knew she wouldn’t. Drake and Cole had never been friends, and she doubted the passage of time had lessened that tension. As the prosecutor for St. Salome Parish, Drake’s father had handled—or deliberately mishandled, according to Cole—the case against Maurice Louvel, leading to his acquittal for the shooting of Wade Dempsey. Once, years ago, she had confided in Drake about her secret affair with Cole. And the fact that now Drake had let her know about his true feelings for her could only make things worse. She was about to go back to bed when the phone chirped again.

“Bryn, it’s Melodie. I stopped by the Kwik Pak on the way home and ran into Mr. Brouchard. I mentioned Cole Dempsey and he told me who he was. Why didn’t you tell me Cole Dempsey was Wade Dempsey’s son? I’m so sorry! I feel awful about just leaving you there.”

“It’s all right. It’s no big deal.” Maybe if Bryn kept telling people that Cole Dempsey being back in town was no big deal, no one would pay any attention to him. Spin control.

“Do you want me to come back?” Melodie asked. “I could get my things, spend the night.”

“No. I’m fine. Thanks, anyway. You have class in the morning. You don’t need to be way out here.” Melodie attended college part-time in Baton Rouge.

“He’s— Well, he’s not like I expected,” Melodie said.

“What did you expect?” He was everything Bryn had expected and worse.

“I don’t know. He’s so— Gorgeous. Charming. Rich. My God, did you see that Cobra in the drive? I just didn’t expect—I guess I had in mind this hired hand’s son, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a bad boy.”

“People change,” Bryn said briefly. “Thanks for calling, Melodie, but I’m all right.”

She hung up. The linen-upholstered walls with their hand-stenciled white medallions seemed to close in on her. She tried to sleep, but only tossed and turned. The room felt suffocating, and her mind wouldn’t stop turning. She got up, pulled off her pajamas and put on shorts and a pink hibiscus-colored T-shirt. Silently, she slipped into the hall, padded barefoot down the main stairs—

And slammed straight into a hard shadow at the bottom of the steps. Strong arms grabbed her, held her tight. He smelled like musk and man, and a hopeless need built inside of her.

“Dammit, Bryn, you’ll kill yourself barreling down stairs in the dark like that,” Cole said.

“And you would care.”

She shook him off, trying to ignore the effect his hands had on her body. Her pulse jumped off the scale and she felt as if her heart was in her throat. It was bad enough that he was back—the last thing she could handle was him touching her.

“What are you doing wandering around the house in the night?” she demanded, as if she weren’t doing the same thing.

“I went for a walk down by the river.”

Was he restless, too? Why? She wanted—and didn’t want—to know what he was thinking.

“What are you doing wandering around in the night?” he asked in turn.

She said nothing. In the spectral dark she could see the bright shine of his eyes and something deep inside her quivered when he reached back up and touched her cheek.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Bryn,” he said in a quiet voice. “That’s not why I came to you.”

For some strange reason, the tenderness of his words made her want to cry.

“Then why did you come?” she whispered tautly.

In the teeming silence, she saw something in his eyes shift, heat, and there it was, the inexplicable seductive frisson tugging her toward him just as it had on those long-ago days in the summer shadows of Bellefleur. And she understood why she was suddenly struggling to contain tears. But before he could speak, the screech of a tire from outside pulled her away, then the sound of shattering glass broke the night.

Chapter 3

Something crashed on the floor of the front hall mere feet away, and there was another screeching sound. Bryn’s stomach dipped crazily. She froze for just an instant, her brain computing facts. That sound was a car, and that crash was something thrown through the window. She pushed past the hard shadow of Cole. Her bare feet raced across the wood floor and she flung open the door even as she registered the stab of something sharp and ice-hot.

“Wait, Bryn!” Cole came up behind her, grabbed her as she would have torn outside onto the portico. The half moon that had lit the grounds earlier in the evening hid behind clouds, and beyond the splash of the porch lantern, she could see nothing but impermeable dark.

“Let go of me,” she demanded, fighting Cole’s too-intimate arms plastering her to his too-hard body.

“They’re gone.” He relaxed his hold.

Bryn hit the switch in the entry hall. The overhead chandelier spilled blinding light down on the room. Her breath jammed her throat.

Glass lay everywhere. A rust-red brick sat innocently amongst the shards. It took a beat for her to register the fact that something was tied to it.

She took a step toward it and cried out in pain.

“Bryn!” Cole reached out to her again. As his arms went around her, he felt her trembling.

He knew the last thing she wanted was his help. “I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re hurt.”

“There’s a note.” She started to hobble her way across the glass-littered pine floor, but Cole—wearing shoes—crunched straight for the brick and reached it before her. He knelt and picked it up. A small sheet of white paper was tied to it with a strand of twine.

He ripped it off and opened it. The block-lettered words burned up at him.

The son of a murderer isn’t welcome in St. Salome Parish.

The old bitter fury washed through him, thick and greasy and nauseating.

“What does it say?”

He stood, turned. Bryn’s face was pale, anxious. She was good and freaked-out by what had just happened, and he tamped down his own rage against the past and this town and the injustice he’d waited fifteen years to make right. He handed her the note.

She read it and lifted huge, haunted eyes to him. The small piece of paper shook in her slender fingers. “We have to call the police,” 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, feeling, it was under control now. If she’d felt that same crackle of awareness, she wasn’t going to let it rule her. “I know you were just trying to help. I don’t think I’m going to need stitches,” she added.

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.