Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3) (6 page)

Parking the truck in the expanse of dirt between the house and the base of the hill that separated it from the water, Luke glanced at Arielle in the passenger seat next to him. “You still want to do this?”

“Are you asking again if I’m scared?”

He heard the challenge in her voice and was way too smart to say that most women would be. Clearly, Arielle wasn’t most women.

“Just making sure you want to go exploring in the dark.”

“Who said anything about exploring?”

Whoa
. “So, let’s get right down to business then.” Except he wasn’t entirely sure
what
that business was.

He assumed this was a hookup of some sort, but after the conversation with Lacey, he’d sensed a strange distance from Arielle and a pullback from the flirting they’d both been enjoying. Throughout the rest of the evening, she’d evenly divided her attention among the guests and her maid-of-honor duties and saved a little time for Luke. Too little. He’d snagged a few dances and more conversation, but something had definitely changed, and it wasn’t on his end. He was still as attracted to Arielle as he’d been the minute he’d met her.

He hadn’t really been able to pin her down until the festivities wound down, when she’d returned from the bridal dressing room in jeans, sneakers, and a simple navy tank top that did crazy things to her curves and even crazier things to his hormones. Then, she’d announced the bet was on, and they were going to the mountain.

She put her hand decisively on the door latch, ready to climb out of his truck with the speed of a woman who really had some business to get down to. “Let’s go,” she said.

He reached out and closed his hand over her arm, which felt narrow in his fingers, but strong, too. Deceptively strong. “It’s going to be very dark out there.”

“Then it’s a good thing you found your way around with your eyes closed today.”

He lingered for a moment, memorizing her striking features in the reflection of the headlights he’d yet to turn off. Her cheekbones were high, her lips wide, her jaw straight. But there was something in her eyes that kind of scared him. Determination. Raw, focused determination. To do what?

“Are you going to tell me why we’re here?” he asked.

She gave a very light laugh, absently toying with the pearl necklace she wore. He didn’t recall her wearing that at the wedding, and it seemed an unusual choice to go with jeans and a simple top, but what did he know about fashion?

“You seem pretty smart,” she said. She pushed the door open, stepping down from the high truck. “You’ll figure it out.” She slammed the door and disappeared into the darkness.

Okay then.

He turned off the ignition and lights and sat for a second, scanning the dark shadows outside the truck. He’d fought too many wars to follow blindly. He reached into the side compartment and snagged a small but powerful flashlight, slipping it into his pants pocket. Swinging down to the ground, he rounded the truck to meet her. Neither spoke as they got close enough to make out each other’s face, and Luke automatically reached for her hands.

“Don’t tell me you want to go into that house,” he said.

She eyed the building, even the outline of it nearly impossible to see now. “Not now. I want to take you to the hill. I have to show you something.”

“In the dark?” He almost pulled out the flashlight, but stopped, waiting to see what she had in mind with this midnight adventure.

“You can feel things better in the dark.”

Like…her body? An automatic male response cut through him, getting primed for what he hoped she had in mind, despite her all-business attitude.

With a surprisingly calm demeanor, she held his hand and started walking away from the truck, with an utter lack of…sensuality.

“This isn’t about sex, is it, Arielle?”

Her step slowed. “That’s why you think I brought you out here?”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

She let out something between a sigh and a laugh, carefully navigating over the dirt road that rounded the side of the house and led toward the base of the hill. “I have an apartment, you know.”

“Not as adventurous.”

She smiled up at him, her white teeth showing in the dark. “I suppose you like adventure, having been in the French Foreign Legion and all.”

“Unlike a lot of the seven thousand guys I fought with, I didn’t join for the adventure.” He heard the flat tone in his voice, felt it in his gut.

“Then why did you join?” she asked as they walked.

He didn’t answer while they found the closest thing to a path there was, his brain going back to his run along here in broad daylight. He’d made the trip once with his eyes open, and she hadn’t been there. Then he’d repeated the course with his eyes closed, as he’d learned to do in every run drill he’d practiced. That time, he nearly flattened the unexpected visitor.

“Or is that part of the thing you don’t talk about?” she prodded to break the silence.

“I thought my sister told you the story of why I left the States.”

“I know there was the accident that scarred her and that you felt guilty for your part in it and ran away,” she said. “That’s her perception of why you left.”

“That’s why I left the States,” he said. “Not why I joined the Legion.” For some reason, he wanted to confide in this alluring woman, which didn’t make sense, but here, in the deep, dark night, that need felt right. So he went with it.

“You of all people will appreciate what actually happened.”

She leaned into him, silently asking for more.

“I made a bad, bad bet and lost.”

“What did you bet on?”

“I bet I had the balls to kill a guy for money, and when push came to shove, I didn’t, and I had to get the hell out of Dodge before someone killed me.”

She slowed down, and his eyes had adjusted enough to the lack of light to see the stunned look on her face, underscored by a low, distant rumble of thunder far out in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Are you surprised I was involved in something like that?” he asked.

“I’m surprised the thing you did after you discovered you weren’t able to take someone’s life for money was join an army to, well, I assume, kill people for money.”

“Trust me, the irony wasn’t lost on me. And it really wasn’t for money. The Legion doesn’t pay enough for that to be the sole reason for joining.”

“So, what was your reason?”

Oh, hell. He was all in now. “I was hiding, to be perfectly honest. In the French Foreign Legion, you get a new name, a new identity, and you’re completely protected and anonymous.” He put a hand on her back to guide her to where the path swerved after the second grouping of oleander bushes.

“What was your name?”

“Ricard Caron.” He emphasized the hated French accent.

“Can I call you Ricard?”

“Please don’t,” he said in all seriousness. “I hate the name.” And all the…misery it represented.

“But you’re not anonymous or protected now.”

“No need. The guy who was after me is dead.”

“So you didn’t really want to be in this mercenary army?”

He let another distant rumble answer for him.

“Am I getting into the ‘I don’t talk about this’ territory?” she asked, giving his hand a gentle squeeze.

“You’re there,” he told her. “And speaking of territories, where, may I ask, are you taking me?”

“To the top. To where you plowed me over.”

He let go of her hand to put his hand on her back, enjoying the play of tension in her muscles and the undercurrent of resolve that hummed through her. It was sexy. But, then, so was everything she did and said.

“I haven’t apologized enough for that?” he asked.

She laughed, but the non-answer felt deliberate.

“What were you doing up here, anyway?” he asked.

Her back muscles tensed. “Just thinking. Getting my head in the wedding game,” she said, slipping out of his touch to take a few steps away.

“Hey, no.” He snagged her hand. “I don’t want to lose you out here.”

“You won’t.” But she tucked her hand back into his, another part of her that was small but surprisingly strong. “So you were saying you hated being Ricard Caron?”

“Mmm.” He nodded. “When I left the Legion, I purposely had my name—my real name—pressed into the back of my tags. Except…” He shook his head, laughing. “The guy who did it spelled Luke the French way, L-U-C, so I’m always doomed to have a little of that country hanging around my neck.”

After a beat, she asked, “So how wonderful was it to mend fences with Gussie and your parents?”

“Wonderful, but we’re still mending,” he told her. “That’s why I decided to take this job, so I could spend more time with my little sister. Except she seems pretty damn happy without me, but still…”

“Oh, Gussie has plenty of room in her heart for you and her boyfriend, er,
fiancé
,” she corrected. She shook her head and sighed softly. “I can’t believe she’s getting married.”

“Honestly? I can’t believe she waited until she was thirty,” he said. “Gussie always wanted a big family. She better get cracking.”

Finally, near the top of the rise, which probably peaked at under twenty-five feet and plateaued for a quarter acre, she stopped and turned to face the black expanse of water.

A distant lightning bolt sliced the sky, a streak of white gone in a blink. Neither of them spoke until after the thunder, about five or six seconds later.

A breeze, powerful enough to flutter her hair, blew over them.

“That storm’s not too far away,” he said.

She nodded. “I know. I can feel the electricity in the air.”

He took a step closer, venturing to put a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe that’s not the storm, Arielle.”

She didn’t move, so he got near enough to smell the remnants of hair spray from the brushed-out wedding hair. He slid his hand from her shoulder to stroke her hair, which was absolutely the most insanely stunning thing he’d ever touched. Not silk, it was more like heavy, thick strands of satin and velvet. He couldn’t stop himself from putting his lips on the top of her head, actually wanting to bury his mouth in that—

“Is there any way to stop you?”

He stilled. “I’m sorry—”

“I mean, from…this.” She gestured around. “From destroying this hill.”

The words were so unexpected, such a complete one-eighty from where he thought they were going or why they were there, he stood speechless for a moment.

“You can’t bulldoze this rise,” she said. “Not until I am absolutely sure that it isn’t sacred ground.”

He blinked at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

With two hands, she lifted the strand of pearls that hung around her neck. “I found this here today, and I believe that this unusual hill might be a sacred burial mound, most likely from Calusa Indians who, according to a Google search on my smartphone, lived here thousands of years ago. Until the proper archaeological inspections and digging have been done, you cannot level this ground.”

He tried, really tried, to process it all. But it wasn’t easy being drop-kicked from the pleasure he’d expected to…
this
. So, she’d found a necklace someone lost, checked the Internet for the name of an Indian tribe, and deduced that he couldn’t go forward with construction because dead people were buried there?

It would be funny, except it wasn’t.

“That’s why you brought me up here?” Incredulity lifted his voice. “Why didn’t you just tell me at the wedding?”

“I needed to get up here again, to…feel it.” She dropped her head back slightly and closed her eyes, touching the necklace. Whoa. The woo-woo girl was cray-cray.

“So, what do you feel? Is it the Age of Aquarius yet?” he asked.

She snapped her head up to scowl at him, her eyes glinting in clouded moonlight. “Don’t make fun of me.”

Kind of hard not to. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and sighed. “Okay, why don’t you start from the beginning? You found that string of stones up here.”

She bristled at the words, but nodded.

“You dug it up or it fell from a tree or…what?”

“It was on the ground. A bird pooped on it.”

He snorted softly, but realized instantly she wasn’t joking. “Are you sure the bird didn’t poop it out?”

Black eyes narrowed. “You’re hilarious. But that doesn’t change what I believe, which is that this is most likely an artifact from Native Americans who lived here long ago. And if they lived here, there’s a reason this land that we’re standing on is elevated, and that reason could be because the bones of tribe members are buried here, along with art and religious items. That makes this land protected by the government, and you cannot put a bulldozer on it until the proper archaeological inspection has been done and the land is cleared to—”

“That’s all been done,” he interjected, mentally skimming the three inches of county and state documentation that the former general contractor had filed and notarized before he’d been fired. “Listen to me. There are a half-dozen different pre-construction surveys and inspections, and they’ve all been done. Boundary, topographic, deformation, geodetic, and location surveys, especially this close to the water with the Army Corps of Engineers breathing down a builder’s neck.”