Cole Dempsey's Back In Town. Suzanne McMinn

Cole said.

      “And you would care.”

      She shook him off, trying to ignore the effect his hands had on her body. Her pulse jumped off the scale and she felt as if her heart was in her throat. It was bad enough that he was back—the last thing she could handle was him touching her.

      “What are you doing wandering around the house in the night?” she demanded, as if she weren’t doing the same thing.

      “I went for a walk down by the river.”

      Was he restless, too? Why? She wanted—and didn’t want—to know what he was thinking.

      “What are you doing wandering around in the night?” he asked in turn.

      She said nothing. In the spectral dark she could see the bright shine of his eyes and something deep inside her quivered when he reached back up and touched her cheek.

      “I don’t want to hurt you, Bryn,” he said in a quiet voice. “That’s not why I came to you.”

      For some strange reason, the tenderness of his words made her want to cry.

      “Then why did you come?” she whispered tautly.

      In the teeming silence, she saw something in his eyes shift, heat, and there it was, the inexplicable seductive frisson tugging her toward him just as it had on those long-ago days in the summer shadows of Bellefleur. And she understood why she was suddenly struggling to contain tears. But before he could speak, the screech of a tire from outside pulled her away, then the sound of shattering glass broke the night.

      Chapter 3

      Something crashed on the floor of the front hall mere feet away, and there was another screeching sound. Bryn’s stomach dipped crazily. She froze for just an instant, her brain computing facts. That sound was a car, and that crash was something thrown through the window. She pushed past the hard shadow of Cole. Her bare feet raced across the wood floor and she flung open the door even as she registered the stab of something sharp and ice-hot.

      “Wait, Bryn!” Cole came up behind her, grabbed her as she would have torn outside onto the portico. The half moon that had lit the grounds earlier in the evening hid behind clouds, and beyond the splash of the porch lantern, she could see nothing but impermeable dark.

      “Let go of me,” she demanded, fighting Cole’s too-intimate arms plastering her to his too-hard body.

      “They’re gone.” He relaxed his hold.

      Bryn hit the switch in the entry hall. The overhead chandelier spilled blinding light down on the room. Her breath jammed her throat.

      Glass lay everywhere. A rust-red brick sat innocently amongst the shards. It took a beat for her to register the fact that something was tied to it.

      She took a step toward it and cried out in pain.

      “Bryn!” Cole reached out to her again. As his arms went around her, he felt her trembling.

      He knew the last thing she wanted was his help. “I’m fine,” she said.

      “You’re hurt.”

      “There’s a note.” She started to hobble her way across the glass-littered pine floor, but Cole—wearing shoes—crunched straight for the brick and reached it before her. He knelt and picked it up. A small sheet of white paper was tied to it with a strand of twine.

      He ripped it off and opened it. The block-lettered words burned up at him.

      The son of a murderer isn’t welcome in St. Salome Parish.

      The old bitter fury washed through him, thick and greasy and nauseating.

      “What does it say?”

      He stood, turned. Bryn’s face was pale, anxious. She was good and freaked-out by what had just happened, and he tamped down his own rage against the past and this town and the injustice he’d waited fifteen years to make right. He handed her the note.

      She read it and lifted huge, haunted eyes to him. The small piece of paper shook in her slender fingers. “We have to call the police,” she said hoarsely.

      “Right. That’ll help.” He couldn’t stop the sarcasm that laced his words. The police in St. Salome Parish hadn’t given a rat’s ass about the Dempseys fifteen years ago and he wouldn’t be surprised if that hadn’t changed. The Dempseys’ nomadic lifestyle, moving from sugarcane plantation to sugarcane plantation every time Wade Dempsey had got drunk and in trouble, had seemed to end here. No more alcoholic binging, no more fighting and no more of the philandering that Mary Dempsey had borne with a stoic determination to keep her family together.

      They’d had three good years in Azalea Bend. Three years of putting down roots, thinking they’d found home. It was their family’s new start. With Wade on the wagon, his genuine passion for the sugarcane fields had landed him the position of plantation manager by that third year. God, Cole had been proud. And maybe, just maybe, he’d hoped even he, once merely the son of a hired hand, would be good enough for the daughter of Maurice Louvel….

      But it had been no bright new beginning. Rather, it had been an all-too-lurid end. And when Aimee had died, it had also been all too clear that their acceptance into St. Salome Parish had been the worst kind of mirage.

      They were outsiders.

      Even Bryn had turned her back on them.

      “I’m calling the police,” Bryn insisted. “Someone threw a brick through my window. This note is a threat. Maybe they can get fingerprints or analyze it or something.”

      She sounded so desperate and scared.

      “Fine, call the police. But the two of us have already handled the note.” Which probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, but neither of them had been thinking.

      “Oh, God.” She dropped the note and took a step back. A smear of blood stained the pine floor where she’d stepped.

      Reaching out to her without thinking, he picked her up into his arms. The fit of her sexily curvaceous body, the scent of her orange jessamine soap, the feel of her blunt-cut shoulder-length gold hair brushing his cheek, mingled with the magnolia air sweeping in from the broken window, dreamy and nightmarish all at once. How had he teased himself into believing that he could feel nothing for Bryn Louvel? She evoked a beat inside him as distinctive as a Zydeco rhythm.

      And as hard to forget.

      “I can walk—” she started.

      He knew where the kitchen was located, and even as they left the fulgent glare of the chandelier-lit entry hall, he paced toward it, giving her no time for further protest. Bryn’s body felt light, though she’d noticeably filled out since she’d been sweet sixteen.

      And filled out in all the right places.

      She was tall, slender but toned and far too fascinating with her big, wary eyes and full, kissable lips. She pulled at his heart even as his head told him she was dangerous.

      Holding her like this made him remember all too well that there had been tender moments between them. But that had been before their world had spun apart, leaving nothing but bitterness and regret.

      Pushing through the swinging door that led into the humongous Bellefleur kitchen, he saw that a light had been left on over the sink. In its ghostly spill, he set Bryn down by the round fruitwood table. She grabbed hold of one of the cane-back carved chairs, putting her weight on the uninjured foot. He pulled back another chair.

      “Sit.” He headed for the sink.

      “Do I need to remind you this is my house?” The chair scraped against the floor as she settled into it. “Who the hell do you think you are? If you hadn’t stopped me, I might have gotten a look at that car—”

      Cole grabbed a towel by the sink and turned on the water. He looked back at her.

      “No,