Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

" Savannah and I used to come out here when we were kids," Laurel said softly. "Never too far from home. Just far enough so we thought we were in another world."

To escape. Jack heard the words. They hung in the air, there for anyone who knew the secret desires of unhappy children. "Me too," he said. "I grew up over on Bayou Noir. I spent more time in the swamp than I did in the house."

To escape, Laurel thought. They had that in common.

"I had a secret hideout," he admitted, staring out past the swamp to another time. "Built it out of peach crates and planks I robbed from a neighbor's pasture fence. I used to go out there and read my stolen comic books and make up stories of my own."

"Did you write them down?"

"Sometimes."

All the time. He had scribbled them down in notebooks and read them aloud to himself with a kind of shy pride he had never experienced in anything else. He'd never had anything to be proud of. His daddy was a piss-mean, drunken, good-for-nothing son of a bitch who had told him time and again he would never be anything but a good-for-nothing son of a son of a bitch. But his stories were good. That realization had been a surprise as wonderful as the Christmas his maman had given him a real cap gun-which he also kept at his hideout. More wonderful, really, because the stories came from him and proved he was worth something.

Then had come the day Blackie had followed him out to his secret hideaway. Drunk, as usual. Mean, as always. And the hideout was smashed, and the comic books and his stories and the dreams that were attached to them plunged into the bayou.

As worthless and useless as you are, T-Jack…

Laurel watched his face, saw the way his jaw hardened against some unpleasant memory, saw the anger in his dark eyes and the vulnerability that lay beneath it, and her heart ached for him. The few words he had spoken about his childhood had sketched a bleak picture. She could only guess that what was passing before his mind's eye now was a chapter from that time.

"Daddy had an old bâteau with a little trolling motor on it," she murmured to break his tension. "He taught Savannah how to work it. It was our secret, because Vivian would never have approved of her daughters doing such a thing. After he died, we used to sneak away and go out in it all the time. It made us feel closer to him somehow."

And far away from Beauvoir.

Jack turned toward her, shifting his weight on the bench, searching her face with his gaze. She looked a little embarrassed, as if she had never told anyone this particular secret before. The idea pleased him in a way he shouldn't have allowed, but he didn't try to stop it.

"When I was a kid, I used to think my family would be great if only we had money," he said. "I thought every problem we had was because we were poor. That wasn't true at all, was it?"

"No," she whispered, bleakly.

She stared down at her hands, fingering a thumbnail that had been bitten to the quick. She looked small and tired and vulnerable, not strong enough to fight off all the feelings coming home had churned up. She had gone off to create a life for herself, never suspecting that life would chase her right back to the problems she had been escaping from.

"Dieu," Jack muttered, letting his arm slip off the bench and around Laurel 's shoulders. "I'm not doin' my job very well, am I?" he asked in a teasing voice while he massaged her shoulder. He leaned down close and nuzzled her ear. "I brought you out here to have fun, to make you happy."

Warmth bloomed inside Laurel. She told herself she didn't want it, but the voice wasn't stern enough to make her move away from him. She shot him a wry look. "I think you brought me out here with ideas of raiding my panties."

He grinned an unholy grin, his eyes shining like polished onyx in the fading light. "Mais oui, mon coeur," he murmured, his smoky voice purring deep in his throat as he slipped his other arm around her. "That's how I plan to make you happy."

Had any other man made such a statement to her, she would have cut him off at the knees with her rapier tongue and sent him crawling home. Jack's arrogance, tempered with his sense of humor, only made her want to go along on whatever wild adventure he suggested. That wasn't the smart thing or the safe thing, but it was the most tempting thing. As his lips found her throat and he began to kiss her with teasing little taste-testing kisses, the temptation grew stronger.

"I thought-" She broke off at the breathless sound of her voice, cleared her throat, and tried again. "I thought you were going to be on your best behavior."

He chuckled wickedly against her neck, sliding a hand up and down her upper arm, his thumb brushing seductively against the side of her breast. "Sugar, this is my best behavior."

A shudder of pure longing went through her. She had ignored her physical needs for so long, she had forgotten what it was to want a man.

No, her mind insisted, the correction cutting through the haze of desire, she had never known what it was to want a man. Not the way she wanted Jack. She had grown up subduing herself sexually, avoiding something she had seen only the ugly side of. Her marriage to Wesley had been a marriage of friends, passionless on her part because she didn't think herself capable of passion.

She'd been wrong. As Jack trailed kisses down the column of her throat to the sensitive curve of her shoulder, passion came to life inside her like a fire that had been smoldering beneath cold ash. It startled her, frightened her. She didn't want to want him. She had never wanted to think of herself as being vulnerable to the lure of sex.

"You told me not to trust you," she said, trying to stiffen muscles that had begun to melt with the warmth of desire. "You said yourself, you're bad for me."

"Well, you can't listen to me, darlin'," he murmured, kissing his way back up her neck to her ear. He traced the tip of his tongue around the rim of the delicate shell, drew the lobe between his lips and sucked gently. "I'm a writer; I tell lies for a livin'."

"Then I should know better than to get within an arm's length of you."

"Why? We don't need to talk at all for making love. Bodies don't tell lies, sweetheart." To prove his point he caught her hand and drew it to the front of his jeans, pressing her palm against his erection, holding her there while he feathered kisses along her jaw to the corner of her mouth and probed delicately with the tip of his tongue. "I want you, angel," he whispered seductively. "That's no lie."

She snatched a breath and forced herself to stand instead of succumb. Her legs wobbled beneath her, and she was glad her flowing, gauzy skirt hid her quaking knees. She folded her arms across her middle, holding herself together, keeping her hands from reaching out to him.

"I don't have casual sex with men who are admittedly liars and bastards," she said, struggling for and not quite managing the calm, cutting voice that had won her more than one court case.

Jack looked up at her from the bench, eyes wide with false innocence. He splayed his hands against his chest and rose with careless grace, stalking her across the narrow confines of the pontoon.

"Did I say I was a liar?" he asked with disbelief. "Oh, no, chère," he purred, backing her into the console. "I meant to say I was a lover. Come here and let me show you."

Laurel shook her head, sidestepping him as he reached for her, amazed at his ability to change personas-teasing, then sober, then seductive, then teasing again. It was almost more unnerving than his ability to make her want him. "Last night you warned me away from you. Today you act as if it never happened. Who are you this time, Jack?"

His expression grew serious, intense, as he stared down at her, and a tremor went through her. This Jack looked like a dominant male, a predator, capable of anything. "I'm the man whose gonna make love to you until you forget every stupid thing I ever said," he muttered.