Hall, Jessica (13 page)

He met her gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, and one looked like it
was starting to swell. "What you looking at?"

"Nothing, Billy." She ducked her head. "I'm
sorry."

"You're sorry. You're damn right, you're sorry." His
gaze moved around the kitchen, then focused on the basket of wet clothes. His
voice went low and soft. "You ain't got your chores done yet?"

Cecilia looked down at her folded hands. "It's the last load.
The rain got to them before I could."

He made a snorting sound and took another drink. "You been
sittin' round watching game shows all day again."

"No, honey. I cleaned the kitchen and did the wash and fixed
you a nice dinner." He'd forgotten that he'd gotten mad watching the
evening news and thrown the set across the room.

Billy wasn't a big man, but he could move fast when he wanted to.
He was up and had her by the shoulders before she could blink. "Don't you
he to me."

"The TV set's broke." She cringed away from his hot
breath. He'd never hit her yet, but there was something different about him
today—something frightening in his eyes. "I can't watch it."

"But you want another one, don't ya?" He slammed her
back against the refrigerator. "A bigger one? A better one?"

"I don't. Really I don't, Billy." She could hardly breathe,
caught between his weight and the hard flat door. "I—I don't like
TV."

"You got something better to do?" His eyes narrowed.
"You been talking to that dyke next door again?"

She shook her head.

"Better not."

Billy hated Lilah, their next-door neighbor, but it wasn't because
she was a lesbian. Cecilia suspected that her husband had tried to hit on Lilah
more than once, and she'd flatly refused.

Maybe sex would calm him down. "How about I make you feel
better, honey?" She licked her lips, the way he liked her to.

"Been wanting it, huh?" He stared at her breasts.
"Can't get enough of me."

She hated sex with him, but it was better than tiptoeing around
him for the rest of the night.

His eyes went to the window, and his expression changed. "I
ain't got time." He let go of her and went back into the bedroom. He came
out with his shotgun and a box of ammunition. "I'm going hunting. I'll be
back later."

He hadn't gone hunting in years. "All right."

"Don't sulk now." He yanked up the hem of her skirt and
ground his palm against her crotch. "I'll take care of you later."

After her husband left the trailer, Cecilia didn't move. Only when
she heard his truck pull out onto the road did she pull down her skirt and let
the tears go. She felt so dirty when he touched her like that—like she was some
whore instead of his wife.

"Cecile?"

The sound of Lilah's voice made her wipe her face with her apron.
"Just a minute." She didn't open the screen door. "Did you need
something?"

"I heard Billy shouting." The busty blonde peered out
from under her umbrella. "He hit you?"

"No, I told you, he never hits me."

Lilah walked up the steps and closed the umbrella as she opened
the door and stepped inside. Under her coat she was wearing one of her work
outfits—a spangled orange minidress that hugged her voluptuous curves—and the
glitter made Cecilia blink. "I heard him clear across the yard this time.
You got to get yourself away from that man, girl."

Get away from Billy Tibbideau? She almost laughed. She had no
family to go to, and she'd dropped out of school at sixteen, so no one would
hire her. Billy was all she had.

"I could help you get a job." Her neighbor tugged up the
edge of the low-cut bodice. "Bartholomew's hiring."

Lilah danced five nights a week at Bart's Strip Club, but she had
a gorgeous body and no qualms about showing it off. Cecilia didn't even like
undressing with the lights on. "Thank you, but I couldn't do anything like
that."

Her neighbor rolled her eyes. "You'd be waiting tables,
honey, not stripping."

Lilah kept talking about the job, but Cecilia couldn't concentrate
on what she was saying. She kept thinking of Billy carrying the shotgun out to
his truck.

"Thanks again, but I'm fine," she interrupted her
neighbor in midsentence, and opened the screen door. "Excuse me now, I've
got some work to do."

After Lilah left, Cecilia went to the phone. She'd call Caine and
tell him Billy had gone out to do some hunting. Caine would have to decide
what, exactly, her husband intended to hunt.

Sable didn't slow down until she was out of the city and on one of
the lesser-traveled back roads into the bayou, and even then she couldn't stop
shaking.
How did he find me so fast?

J. D. had told the ER staff they weren't to tell anyone she was
there. Marc's murderer must have followed her from the fire to the police
station, and from there to the hospital. Or one of the cops had told him where
to find her.

He'd strangled that young technician so he could get to her. What
else was he capable of doing?

Now that she'd stolen a car, she'd have to move quickly, and stay
on the move. If the police caught up with her—if J. D. caught up with her—she
wouldn't get another chance to run. And she had to see Caine first.

Caine Gantry had a lot to answer for.

The turnoff to Gantry Charters was marked by a neat, hand-lettered
sign at the corner of a narrow dirt road, and as she turned she heard the faint
sound of outboard motors and men shouting. Caine's boats were coming in from a
long day out on the water, which meant his entire crew would be on the docks,
unloading their catch and whatever passengers they'd
brought
along for the ride. It was Monday, so there probably wouldn't be too many
tourists wanting to fish.

As she shut off the headlights and coasted to a stop a few hundred
yards from the dock, she saw the silhouette of the big man standing at the end
of the pier, dragging a bulging net dangling from a deck hoist over the side of
a big charter boat. He centered the net and lowered it almost into a huge,
square wooden barrow, then released it. The oysters hitting the wood clattered
like dishes someone had dropped breaking.

He won't do anything to me in front of his crew,
she
promised herself as she got out of the car and headed for the dock.
After
what Remy did for him, he wouldn't dare.

"I took him around dat good spot over by Darel's place, 'n'
dat's where I heard dat hummin' again," Tag McGee, one of the older men on
the crew, was telling the others as they unloaded their catch. The lean,
weather-battered Cajuns who worked for Gantry had lived on the water all their
lives, and if they weren't fishing or hunting, they were talking about it.
"It bein' a full moon 'n' all, I tell the Yankee mebbe it's the old black
slaves what drowned in the bayou during the War a' Northern Aggression. Then he
say, 'Can we go on back now? I think I done caught enough.'"

All the men chuckled at that. Caine said something low to the old
man, who threw up a hand.

"I showed him it weren't nothing more than a shoal a' black
drum fish, hummin' together under the water, boss." Tag shook his head in
disgust. "He say, 'I don't want catch me no haunt fish.'"

"Still spooking the paying customers, Tag McGee?" Sable
said in a soft voice, drawing every eye and
bringing the work to a
temporary standstill. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Caine turned toward her, but with the sun setting behind him, his
face remained in shadow.

"Evenin', Ms. Duchesne." Tag looked from her to his
boss, cleared his throat, and then waved his arms at the men. "Y'all get
your asses in gear 'n' move these barrows over to the wet house."

Suddenly everyone was busy again except Caine, who merely waited
and watched as Sable walked steadily across the silvered planks to his boat.
Only when she halted a few feet away did he speak. "You're supposed to be
in the hospital with a bump on your head."

"It wasn't much of a bump." She eyed the short-handled
shovel he picked up. "Did you hear about the fire?"

"It was all over the radio and TV." He thrust the shovel
into the pile of oysters and picked up the end of the barrow. The big muscles
in his upper arms knotted, but he pushed it past her as if it weighed no more
than a baby carriage. "Everyone in the state knows. Go home, Isabel."

Sable followed him back to the wet house, where the men would
clean the fish and the oysters before loading them into huge refrigerated bins.
Caine took his barrow to the side of the shack, where one of the men was
staking a sheet of chicken wire over a dugout pit of glowing coals. After using
an outside hose to spray down the catch in the barrow, Caine started shoveling
the oysters onto the chicken wire. The water dripping from the shells made the
coals hiss and steam rise from the pit. "Caine, we have to talk."

"No, we don't." He paused to wipe some sweat
from
his brow and eyed the tree line. "Go to Remy's. He's worried about
you."

"It's important."

"I got a crew to feed." He went back to shoveling the
fresh oysters onto the chicken wire, then took some burlap sacks from a bucket
of salt water and draped the mound of shells. "Turn 'em in ten
minutes," he told the man tending the pit, then shoved the barrow to one
side and went around Sable.

She stopped him with a single question. "Were you in the city
this morning, Caine?"

Something crackled in the bushes.

Caine stared out at the swamp before he turned on her. "You
go on home, Isabel," he said, his voice as flat as his black eyes.
"You go on home right now."

"Oh, I'm not leaving." With the light in his face, she
could see the change in his expression. "Not until you tell what you've
done."

"What have I done?" He came to her and took her by the
arms, his grip hard. "You come in here." He marched her to the wet
house, and pointed to the big refrigeration cases. "You see those? I'll be
paying on them, and the ones I had to install on my boats, for the next five
years. They're making me buy a separate charter license for each of my boats
now, too. Most of the small outfits round here have been shut down because they
can't do the same." He released her. "I didn't do that, Isabel.
LeClare did that to
us."

She knew the old argument. Laws had been passed requiring oyster
fishermen to refrigerate their catch almost immediately after harvesting the
beds, to prevent contamination. There was also much stricter licensing now, as
well. Marc had been one of the primary movers on the legislation. "It's to
keep people from getting sick, Caine," she reminded him.

"LeClare and his kind have been harvesting beds where there's
sewage spill-off," he snarled. "No one fines them for the oysters
they fish out of the shit washed down from the city. No one blames them for
making people sick."

"The state is closing down those beds and you know it."
She sensed the men gathering around them in the dark, but refused to let them
intimidate her. She was Remy Duchesne's daughter, and she'd known most of them
from the time she could walk. "Billy was at the warehouse, wasn't
he?"

"I fired Billy," he told her. His expression changed,
became more withdrawn. "You'll have to ask him where he's been."

"Did he do it on your orders? Are you telling your men to set
fire to Marc's properties?"

The anger faded from his face as he let his gaze wander down to
her shoes and back up again. "Only fires I light are under the covers,
chère,"
he drawled, reaching out to glide his callused fingertips along the curve
of her cheek. "They take a long time to burn."

She knew what he was doing—he couldn't scare her off with his
legendary temper, so he was falling back on the other thing he was famous for.
Hilaire had told stories about Caine's appetite for women, how he sometimes
brought two girls home with him so he wouldn't have to go out a second time,
but Sable hadn't really believed that. She could only remember the shy, silent
boy who had worked for her father.

The boy had grown up, she realized, swallowing hard as he gathered
a handful of her hair and rubbed it between his fingertips. And maybe his rep
was a little understated. "I'm not interested."

He smiled and bent down, holding her by the hair when she would
have stepped away.

"Aren't you, Isabel?" He breathed the question against
her brow as he slid his thumb across her lower lip in a slow, taunting caress.
When she opened her mouth to reply, he rimmed the inside, testing the edge of
her teeth. "Don't you feel just a little hot now?"

Some of the men chuckled.

She ignored the blatant sexuality and focused on his eyes. She
knew he was putting on an act—wasn't he? She turned her head to one side to
avoid his probing thumb. "Why are you in such a hurry to get rid of
me?"

"You're not interested?" He dropped one hand on her
shoulder, and the other over her heart. "Then why are you trembling,
little girl?" He revolved his hard palm over the peak of her breast.
"Your nipple is hard. You cold?"