Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

"Yes, it is," she argued. "I won't have you fucking my baby sister, Jack."

"Why is that? Because I didn't do you first?"

She threw the matchbook down, color rising high into her cheeks. "You son of a bitch."

"Stop it!" Laurel snapped, shoving her chair back and rising to her feet. She turned toward her sister, a part of her shocked by the pure hatred she saw burning like pale blue flame in Savannah 's eyes as she stared at Jack, a part of her too annoyed to pay attention to it. "Sister, I appreciate your concern, but I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself."

Savannah blinked at her, looking stunned. "No, you can't. You need me."

"I need your support," Laurel qualified. "I don't need you screening my dates."

Savannah picked out four words from the rest and drove them through her own heart like a stake. "I don't need you." Baby didn't need her, didn't want her, preferred the company of Jack Boudreaux. Panic clawed through her, and fury poured out of the wounds as hot and red as blood. Her one chance to do something important was being snatched away from her. Everything she wanted was always beyond her reach. Coop. Laurel. Baby was turning away from her for a man. And she was left with nothing, just another slut like every other slut in south Louisiana.

"After all I've done for you," she muttered, her lush mouth twisting at the bitterness, at the irony. "After all I've done for you, you don't need me."

Laurel 's jaw dropped. "That's not what I said!"

"Well, fine," Savannah went on. "You go on and have a high old time with him and just forget about me. I don't need you, either. You're nothing but an ungrateful little hypocrite, and I can't think why I ever would have saved you from anything."

Tears shone like diamonds in her eyes. She caught at her artificially plump lower lip with her teeth, raking color into it. "I never will again," she vowed, her voice choked and petulant. "You can count on that. I never will again."

" Savannah!" Laurel started after her as she whirled and ran into the house, but Jack caught her by the shoulder.

"Let her go, angel. She's in no mood to listen. Let her cool off."

Seconds later the Acura roared to life at the side of the house, and then came the angry screech of tires on asphalt.

Laurel turned and slammed her fist into Jack's shoulder, not to punish him, but because she needed to hit something, anything. "I don't understand what's going on with her!"

"She's jealous."

"No," she murmured, leaning into him as the anger seeped out of her muscles, leaving her trembling. "It's not as simple as that."

"Yeah, well…" He heaved a sigh and slipped his arms around her, resting his chin atop her head. "C'est vrai, life's a bitch. Nothin's ever simple…"

Certainly not in Laurel 's life. She seemed interminably tangled in a web of obligations. He wanted to cut her loose, if only for a little while, give her a break… have her all to himself so he might pretend she could be his.

"Except fishin'," he said, going with the impulse that had brought him here at this ungodly hour in the first place. "You ready to come fishin' with me, ma petite?"

"I never said I'd go fishing with you," Laurel said, frowning.

"Sure you did. Last night." He tucked a knuckle under her chin and tipped her face up. "You whispered it in my ear while we were makin' love. You said I could take you anywhere. I'm taking you fishin'."

They went out in a pirogue Laurel had more than a few reservations about. Slender and shallow as a pea pod, it was made of weathered cypress planking and bobbed like a cork on the inky, oily surface of the bayou. Laurel stood on the dock for a long moment, looking dubious, as Jack loaded fishing gear into the bow.

"Are you sure this thing is safe?"

"Oh, absolutely," he drawled, adding a cooler to the cargo in the nose of the boat. The pirogue dipped and swayed on the water as if protesting even that slight load. Unconcerned, Jack climbed in, braced his feet, and reached a hand up to help her aboard. "An old friend of mine made this pirogue for me. As he would say, 'This boat, she rides the dew.' "

Laurel swallowed hard as she stepped down into the craft and felt it bob beneath her. She grabbed hold of Jack's biceps for an instant to steady herself and to pull him with her if she went overboard. "Was he sober at the time?"

"Hard to say," Jack mused, easing her down on the boat's plank seat. He jammed a red USL Ragin' Cajuns baseball cap down on her head and stepped deftly over the seat to take up the push-pole at the stern. "Ol' Lucky Doucet, he used to be some kind of wild."

He pushed off, and they moved away from the dock, the pirogue seeming to skate across the water, as graceful as a blade on ice. Laurel took a deep breath and willed herself to relax.

"Used to be?" Tipping the oversize cap back on her head, she twisted around to look at him. "Is he dead?"

"Naw, he's married. Got himself a beautiful wife, a little daughter, another baby on the way."

"Busy man," Laurel said dryly.

Happy man, Jack thought, sinking the fork of the push-pole into the muddy bottom and sending the pirogue gliding forward. A hard, hollow ball of longing lodged in his chest, taking up valuable air space, and he scowled and did his best to smash it with a mental mallet of self-punishment. He'd had his chance, and he'd blown it in the worst possible way. He didn't deserve another.

Pushing the dark thoughts from his mind, he turned his attention on Laurel and all the little puzzle pieces he had yet to find to complete his picture of her. She sat on the hard plank seat of the pirogue with the posture of a debutante, her gaze scanning the far bank of the bayou, where an alligator was sunning itself. Even in her baggy clothes and the too-big cap she looked feminine and graceful. He shook his head at that, a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

She wasn't his type. Not at all. These days he usually went for curvy, carefree girls with big breasts and uncomplicated brains, women who wanted nothing more from him than a good tussle between the sheets. He didn't know what Laurel Chandler would want. She claimed she wanted nothing from him, and yet he felt something about her drawing on him like a magnet. Instinct told him his curiosity could be dangerous, but the warning wasn't strong enough to overpower the attraction. Besides, he told himself smugly, he couldn't get in any deeper than he wanted to.

He piloted the pirogue to a favorite fishing hole, a place where willows shaded the banks, and bass, bream, and crappie cruised among the cypress stands and wallowed in the sluggish water edging the thickets of reeds and cattails. Laurel passed on the offer of a pole and instead pulled Evil Illusions out of the canvas tote bag she had brought with her. The morning passed to the trill of cicadas, the whine of a fishing reel, the splash of fish fighting against a future in a frying pan. Conversation became as sporadic and desultory as the breeze.

Laurel found the quiet soothing in the wake of Savannah 's blowup. With an effort she pushed the questions about her sister's behavior to the back of her mind and tried to lose herself in the pages of Jack's book. Not a difficult thing to do. Despite his show as a simple Cajun boy, he was an excellent writer, talented, clever. He had the ability to pull the reader into the story as if through a portal into another dimension. The visual images were sharp, dark; the emotions so thick and electric, they left her skin tingling. The fear that built from paragraph to paragraph was almost unbearably intense. The sense of evil that overshadowed it all was at once subtle, insidious, and overwhelming.

Strong impressions from a man who claimed he didn't care much about anything that went on in the world around him except having a good time. No, she thought, watching as he cast gracefully toward the edge of a tangle of water hyacinth, these impressions, these dark fantasies didn't come from Jack the Party Animal. They came from the other Jack. The man with the burning gaze and the aura of danger. The man who stood silent and watchful behind the facade of the rogue.