Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

"I saw your car," he said, his voice strained and hoarse. "Saw the light…"

His broad shoulders rose and fell. He turned to pace, but her small hand settled on his arm, holding him in place as effectively as an anchor. He looked down into her angel's face, and the air fisted in his lungs. She had left her glasses on the hall table, and she looked up at him with night blue eyes that mirrored the need that ached in his soul.

"I don't really care," she said softly.

It didn't matter they had fought or that she had no hope for their future. This was just one night, and she felt so alone and so afraid. She looked up into his shadowed face, taking in the hard angles, the scarred chin, the eyes that had seen too much pain. It wasn't the face of the kind, safe lover she always envisioned for herself, but love him she did, and as they both stood there hurting, she needed him so badly, she thought she might die of it.

"Just tell me you'll stay," she whispered. "Just tonight."

He should have said no. He should have walked away. He should never have come to her in the first place, but then he'd never been very good at doing what was right. And he couldn't look into her eyes and say no.

"You shouldn't want me," he murmured, amazed that she did.

Laurel raised a hand and pressed her fingers to his lips. "Don't tell me how bad you are, Jack. Show me how good you can be."

He closed his eyes against a wave of pain, leaned down and brushed his lips against her cheek. It was as much of an answer as Laurel needed. Taking him by the hand, she led him up the back stairs and into her moonlit room.

They undressed each other quietly, patiently. They made love the same way, immersing themselves in the desire, steeping themselves in the experience, savoring the tenderness. Gentle touches. Soft, deep kisses. Caresses as sensuous as silk. A joining of bodies and two scarred souls. Straining to reach together for a kind of ecstasy that would banish shadows. A brilliant golden burst of pleasure. Trying desperately to hold on as it slipped away like stardust through their fingers.

And when it was over and Laurel lay asleep in his arms, Jack stared into the dark and wished with all that was left of his heart that he wouldn't have to let her go.

Chad Garrett tipped his battered Saints cap back on his head and let the sunrise hit him flush in the face. Above the Atchafalaya the sky was aglow with soft stripes of color. Orange the shade of a ripe peach, warm and estival. Pink as vibrant and silken as the underside of a conch shell. Deep, velvet blue, the last of the night, set with a diamond that was the morning star.

He grinned to himself at the image he had painted with his thoughts. He had a natural gift for words. He figured he would write down the description as part of his makeup work for playing hooky from school. Mrs. Cromwell would give him a thundering lecture for missing English class again, but she would melt like butter when he handed in his short story about dawn in the swamp and the peace a man could find on the water. She'd do handsprings over his new word-"estival"-and that was an image that nearly made him chuckle. Mrs. Cromwell was fifty-eight and wore support hose and dresses that had enough fabric in them to clothe a family of four.

She was a good old girl, though, and Chad liked her as well as he liked any of his teachers. He was a good student, bright, capable. Hardly knew what a B was. But he didn't really care much for school, and, to the dismay of his teachers and the heartbreak of his mother, had no immediate plans to further his education once he graduated in June. This was where he wanted to be. In the swamp, observing nature, absorbing the beauty, the peace. He supposed he would relent after a year or two, go up to USL and study to become a naturalist or an environmental scientist of some kind or another. But for a while all he wanted to do was just be. He figured he would only be eighteen once. Might as well enjoy it.

He was his father's son in more respects than his big, raw-boned frame and square, good-looking face. Hap Garrett knew the value of contentment. He usually just smiled and turned a blind eye on those mornings when Chad didn't quite make it out of the boat shed without getting caught. As his dad liked to remind him, he'd been young once, too, and hadn't had much use for advanced algebra himself.

Chad steered his bass boat toward the shallows along a shaded bank, where a bit of yellow plastic ribbon marked one of his nets. The catch was good. He would make a couple hundred dollars today if his luck held down the line. The economics would appeal to Mr. Dinkle, whose class at ten he would miss.

He dumped the crawfish into an onion sack, sorting out the contorted body of a drowned water snake, which he tossed onto the bank. Some hungry scavenger would make a meal of it. Nothing went to waste in the swamp. Chad figured, if he was real lucky, he would witness nature's recycling, and that would appease Mr. Loop, fourth-period biology. He didn't figure he would have much of a wait. There was something up on the bank creating a powerful stink, the gagging, curiously sweet stench of death. The scent would act as a beacon.

Curious, he waded ashore and tied off his boat on a hackberry sapling. While he might not have given a fig how the balance of world power worked or how to find the square root of a negative, Chad wanted to know every detail about the life of the swamp.

It looked to him as if something had been dragged up on the bank. The weeds were bent and stained with blood. Might have been a deer that had gotten itself in trouble with a gator while drinking from the stream. It could have pulled itself back up onto the shore only to die of blood loss and shock. Or it could have been that a bobcat had caught himself a coon or a possum or a nutria, ate his fill, and left the rest. There were a dozen possibilities he could think of.

He pushed aside a tangle of branches and stopped cold in his tracks. Of the dozen possibilities he had considered, he hadn't included this. For the rest of his life he would see that face in his nightmares-beauty distorted grotesquely by death and the plain, hard realities of nature, blue eyes forever frozen in a shocked stare that made him think she had witnessed her own terrible fate and had seen beyond it to a terrible afterlife.

A woman lay dead at his feet. Horribly dead. Hideously dead. Naked and mutilated, with a white silk scarf knotted around her throat and a scrap of paper clutched in her stiff, lifeless hand.

Laurel woke alone. She wasn't surprised, so she told herself she couldn't be disappointed. But she was. Her brain told her she was foolish, that it wasn't practical or smart to want a future with Jack Boudreaux. He had too many ghosts, too much emotional baggage. But her brain couldn't do anything to banish her memories of the night-Jack's tenderness, the longing in his eyes, the pounding of his heart beneath her hand. Her heart was determined to hold on to those memories and the slim hope that went with them. Foolish, foolish heart.

He had gone at first light, she knew. Just as she had done before. She swept her arm across the vacant space beside her, finding nothing but a tangled sheet and a twisted spread. Not even his warmth lingered, just the scent of man and loving.

What would she do about him? What could she do? She couldn't change his image of himself. She had enough on her hands as it was.

That reminder brought thoughts of Savannah, and Laurel's stomach tensed like a fist at the thought of the conversation she would have with Aunt Caroline this morning. Restless, anxious, she climbed out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and panties, and went in search of her pocketbook and the roll of Maalox tablets therein. It lay on the bench in the courtyard, where she had left it, the fine calfskin coated with thick, velvety dew. She wiped it off with the tail of her oversize T-shirt and went back upstairs to sit on the bed.