Tempestuous/Restless Heart (32 page)

“Danielle,” Remy started, then choked a little as his heart leaped into his throat. He was going to do it—right here, right now—he was going to tell her. So they’d only know each other a short time, that didn’t make a damn bit of difference. He was dead certain of his feelings. “Danielle,” he started again. “I lo—”

“Hey, Remy!”

He squeezed his eyes shut just briefly, as if a sudden knifing pain had gone through his head. Marie. The tireless Marie. Marie the Undaunted. Marie “I Want Us to Get Married” Broussard. She couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to show up if someone had given her a list of ten ways to ruin his evening.

“How about a dance,
cher
?” she said, blatantly ignoring the fact that he was holding another woman’s hand.

He started to scowl at her and was about to tell her no when Danielle suddenly backed away. He looked at her, surprised and annoyed and confused. She gave him a smile as phony as a three-dollar bill and said, “Go ahead, Remy. My arthritis is acting up anyway.”

Marie latched on to him with all the tenacity of a snapping turtle, her small hand clenching his in a fierce grip. She jerked him out into the throng of dancers, as purposeful as a tugboat hauling a barge up the Mississippi. He gave Danielle one last befuddled look before she disappeared from view.

Danielle stood at the edge of the crowd watching even though it was torture for her. The dark-haired young woman fit perfectly with Remy. She was petite and feminine, looking virginal and bridelike in her white sundress. She stared up at him with affection and determination.

“Auntie Danielle,” Jeremy said, tugging at the leather cord of her belt. “Will you come and see now? It’s so neat and I know the way and I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like it even in Africa.”

She looked down at her nephew, perversely annoyed that he had distracted her from wallowing in self-pity. “What, Jeremy?”

“Will you come now?”

“Come where?”

“Out to see our secret.”

“Jeremy, it’s dark out. I’ll come see it tomorrow. Why don’t you go see if Tinks will dance with you?”

He regarded her with utter disgust, turned and stormed away. Danielle sighed. Another strike against her in the child-rearing category. She looked back out at the dancers, wincing as she caught sight of Remy and his little partner.

“I could look that young again,” she muttered to herself. “With the aid of a belt sander and a tube of caulk.”

“Oh, that Marie Broussard,” Giselle said, shaking her head with disapproval as she took up the spot Jeremy had vacated. “She’s been chasin’ him so long you’d think her legs woulda give out by now.”

Danielle’s head snapped around and she had to strain to sound nonchalant. “They’ve known each other a long time?”

“Always. They went to school together.” Giselle rolled her dark eyes and tilted her head to the angle of conspiracy and said, “You think she might have taken the hint by now.
Mais non
, she still thinks he’s playin’ hard to get. Some folks just need to be hit over the head with a thing, you know?”

“Yeah,” Danielle whispered. “Some folks do. If you’ll excuse me, Giselle, I think I’m going to step outside for a breath of fresh air.”

She didn’t wait for a response. She didn’t even chance a look at Remy’s sister for fear she might see pity in her eyes. She mowed a path to the front door and nearly stumbled down the steps in her haste to get away from the people and the music. Her sandals scuffed over the crushed shell of the parking lot as she walked out toward the bayou.

As she stared out at the black water she gave an involuntary little moan. Her feelings felt like they’d been run through a blender on puree. In the course of a matter of days they’d been jerked out of the compartment she had relegated them to, turned inside out and upside down. This was all Suzannah’s fault. If it hadn’t been for her half-sister, she would have right now been happily holed up in some remote corner of the world in a photographic frenzy, wearing out her Nikon shooting pictures of boulder formations and window casings. Well, “happily” might not have been the right word to use, she reflected, but at least she would have felt calm and in control. She wouldn’t have been doing something stupid like falling in love with younger men.

“Hey, Danielle, where you at?”

Remy’s low, rough voice came to her with all the beckoning warmth of a flannel blanket on a chill night. She wanted to wrap herself in it and shut the world out. The cynic in her sneered.

“I’m right here,” she said, not turning around.

He shuffled up behind her and slid his arms around her waist, dropping his chin down on her shoulder. “Don’t be ticked off at me ’cause I danced with Marie. She’s like a pit bull, that one. Once she latches on it’s hard to shake her.”

“I’m not mad,” she said flatly. “You’re my nanny not my personal slave. Dance with whoever you like.”

“I like you.” He twirled her around to face him and pulled her into his arms for a slow dance to music he provided himself, his voice rising softly above the hum of insects and the far distant bellow of an alligator.
“Demander comme moi je t’aimais, ma jolie fille.”

“What’s that one about?” Danielle asked dryly. “Cooking muskrats on an open fire and the treachery of women?”

He tilted his head back and gave her a sober look as he translated. “ ‘Ask how much I love you, my pretty girl.’”

“Maybe you should sing that one to the long-suffering Marie.”

“I don’t love Marie. I love you.”

Danielle was certain her heart had stopped. Catastrophic full cardiac arrest. She swayed a little on her feet as she stared at him. He’d said it. Heaven help her. The fool in her had wanted to hear those words so desperately and now he’d said them. Now what was she supposed to do? Be selfish and grasp what he was offering or be noble and give him up for his own good?

She stared at him and considered as her emotions wrestled inside her. He was so handsome and so sweet. He made her feel things she had only read about in
Cosmo.
Did she really want to give all that up? No. She was by nature a selfish person. Hadn’t she been told as much? Hadn’t she drummed that idea into her own psyche over the last year? Why should she change at this late date? Why shouldn’t she just throw caution and good sense to the wind and indulge herself? Why shouldn’t she tell Remy she loved him?

“Remy, I—”

“Auntie Danielle!”

Danielle looked past Remy’s broad shoulder to see Tinks barreling across the parking lot as fast as her little feet could fly. Her face was stark-white in the dark.

“Auntie Danielle! Come quick! Jeremy’s hurt real bad!”

The emergency room of the community hospital in Luck was painted a shade of green guaranteed to make a person sick if he weren’t already ill to begin with. The chairs in the waiting room were molded plastic, the floor covered with a hard gray linoleum that amplified the sound of pacing footsteps.

Danielle could not sit, unable to contain her worries to a chair. Back and forth the length of the reception desk, her arms wrapped tightly around her as if she were trying to physically hold herself together. Remy had tried to console her, but she had shrugged him off. He had finally relegated himself to a chair, pulled his cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, drawing owlish stares from his family. The entire herd of Doucets had followed the ambulance, with the exception of Giselle and her husband, who had taken all the children to Remy’s parents’ house to wait for word of Jeremy’s condition.

This is all my fault
, Danielle thought for the millionth time. If only she had paid more attention to Jeremy when he tried to get her to go outside with him. If only she had let him tell her the story of what he and Tinks had discovered on their nature hike with Papa Doucet. If only she hadn’t been so wrapped up in her own worries, wallowing in self-pity because it was her fortieth birthday. Now, for all she knew, Jeremy might not live to see his tenth.

They had found him in the dense forest behind Renard’s, unconscious, a gash in his forehead and a snake bite on the back of his small hand. He and Tinks had snuck away from the dance, bent on bringing their find to Danielle if they couldn’t get Danielle to their find—an abandoned quail’s nest with eggs still in it. According to Tinks, they had swiped a flashlight out of the minivan and stolen off to the woods to get the nest. Unfortunately, a copperhead had chosen the same time to make his dinner of the abandoned eggs. Jeremy had been bitten just as he’d reached for the nest. Terrified, the two children had turned and run back in the direction of Renard’s, but Jeremy, possibly already feeling the effects of the snake’s venom, had stumbled and fallen, striking his head.

Every time she closed her eyes Danielle could see the terrible image of her nephew, the mischief maker, the human tornado, lying so unnaturally still on the ground. And it was all her fault. Her stomach turned as she wondered how she would ever again be able to face Suzannah.

As if her thoughts had conjured up her sister, the waiting room doors slid open and Suzannah burst in with Courtland right behind her. Danielle stopped her pacing, stunned into motionlessness, and stared, thinking somewhere in the back of her mind that the pair didn’t look as if they’d just come from the Caribbean. There were no signs of recent fun in the sun. They were dressed casually, as if they had just been called from a quiet evening at home. Courtland’s pale hair was sticking up in back as if he might have fallen asleep on the couch while reading the newspaper. Suzannah’s patrician features were scrubbed clean of cosmetics.

Suzannah rushed toward her, her flame-red hair flying behind her, her big gray eyes shadowed with worry. “Danielle! How is he? Have you heard anything?”

Danielle stared at her sister, dumbfounded. “Suzannah? Courtland? How did you get here?”

There was a flash of guilt in Suzannah’s eyes as she exchanged a look with Butler, but the explanation was put on hold. The doors to the emergency room swung open and the doctor came out asking for Jeremy’s parents. The trio disappeared into the nether regions of the hospital, leaving the rest of the group wondering if the news was good or bad.

Danielle wheeled on Butler, feeling she had somehow been played for a fool. “What exactly is going on here, Butler? There’s no way in hell Suzannah and Courtland could have gotten here from Paradise Island in the ten minutes since you called them.”

The old retainer shifted uncomfortably on his chair, his cheeks flushing to a color that nearly matched his hair. “Och, well now, lass, they werna exactly that far away.”

“How far away were they
exactl
y?”

Butler stared down at his shoes. “Ar—um—the Grande Belle Inn. Here in Luck since yesterday. At the Pontchartrain Hotel before that.”

“There was never any trip to the islands, was there?” Danielle asked quietly.

He looked up at her and sighed, his eyes so full of pity Danielle almost couldn’t bear it. “No lass. Your sister was worried. Aye, we all were worried about you. You hie yourself off to godforsaken Tibet. We see not hide nor hair of you for a year. We had to do something to get you back amongst the living. Suzannah came up with the notion of having you stay with the bairns to prove to yourself you could do it.”

“To prove that I could do it,” Danielle whispered, appalled and humiliated. “You made a royal fool of me. Thank you very much. And look what happened.” She swung an arm in the direction of the doors to the ER. “I said from the first I was the last person Suzannah should have called on to stay with her children and I was right.”

“This wasn’t your fault, Danielle,” Remy said, pushing himself to his feet.

“Wasn’t it?” she asked, turning tortured eyes toward him.

“He’d been told not to go into the woods alone.”

“He wouldn’t have been alone if I had listened to him, if I had been paying attention to him instead of worrying about myself. Hell, he only wanted to impress me and I couldn’t bother to pay enough attention to him to realize that.”

“He wouldn’t have gone out there at all if I hadn’t taken him there first,
chère,”
Remy’s father said, his dark eyes solemn, the line of his mouth grim above his square jaw.

“You don’t understand,” she mumbled, tears rising up in her throat to choke her.

Remy started to put an arm around her, but she shrugged him off again. She was responsible, she should have to bear the pain alone. She’d been right to leave after the tragedy in London. She wasn’t fit for the role of parent, surrogate or otherwise. In London it had been her art that had distracted her from her duty. Here it had been her love life. Either way the proof was there: she was simply too self-absorbed to be reliable in a parental situation. She belonged alone. Like many a Hamilton before her, it seemed she was destined to be alone.

She had known that for some time now, had accepted it. Then Suzannah had lured her to New Orleans and she had been given a glimpse of the life she would never have. It seemed fate had an exceedingly cruel sense of humor, she thought as she leaned a shoulder against the plate-glass window and stared out at the parking lot. During this time with the children and Remy she had been forced to dig up every emotion she had. She’d banished demons she had never wanted to face and fallen in love with a dark-haired Cajun devil who was wrong for her from the word go.