Cole Dempsey's Back In Town. Suzanne Mcminn

social call. You could have been hurt, Bryn. You were hurt.”

      And he shouldn’t care that she was hurt. She’d trampled his heart fifteen years ago. Yet dark and unnervingly deep, he knew he did care and he fought inside himself to keep it under control. He was here for a reason, and opening his heart to Bryn again wasn’t part of it.

      He wrung out the wet towel and headed back across the room.

      “It’s just glass,” she said, leaning over to inspect the foot she’d elevated on the next chair. “I’m more worried about the window. And who did it. I’ve got a phone in the office—”

      “Let me take a look. You might need stitches. The brick’s not going anywhere. You can call in a minute.”

      She looked up at him, her face half-hidden in the brooding shadows of the room. Her soft lips were pressed in an unpliable line—whether from pain or stubbornness, he wasn’t sure. He flicked the switch on the wall, illuminating the table with the lantern-style chandelier. The room was a rustic, aristocratic melody, from the intricately cast arms of the lighting fixture with its delicate leaf-and-beading details to the collection of colorful plates and jugs crowding the overmantel of the old fireplace. Despite the museum-quality antiques filling the room, it had the lived-in feel of generations of Louvels.

      He pulled out another chair and drew it close enough to pick up her foot in his hands, rest it on his lap. The night was warm, but her skin felt cold. He could feel the tension in her body. The pieces of glass in her foot were small, thankfully, but when he pulled the sharp bits out, the blood flow increased. He placed the shards on the scarred, antiqued tabletop and wrapped her foot in the towel.

      “Do you have some bandages around here somewhere?” He settled her foot back on the other chair.

      “There’s a first-aid box in the cabinet by the sink,” she told him.

      He found a white plastic box with a red cross stamped on the top. He pulled out the gauze. She unwrapped the towel. The bleeding had slowed. She took the gauze and tape from him, clearly preferring to tend to herself.

      His gaze followed the line of her slender foot to the delectably curved calf, and higher. She wore lightweight cotton shorts and a slim-fitting boat-neck T-shirt that hugged the supple rounding of her breasts.

      He felt again a very sexual and all-too-familiar tug of awareness, and knew he was going to have to accept it. He’d been attracted to Bryn since he was seventeen years old. He couldn’t expect that to change just because he was older. His heart might be dead and ruined but his body was in full working order.

      But he didn’t have to act on that attraction…and couldn’t, because too much else had changed.

      His gaze continued to rise till he found himself meeting her water-hyacinth eyes, as deep a purple as the wild blossoms covering every bayou and swamp in Louisiana. And just as capable of robbing everything they touched of oxygen. For just a second, he thought he saw the same raw hunger that had so unexpectedly seized him.

      His chest hurt, and although he wasn’t even touching her, he was more aware of her than ever.

      She put the gauze on the table. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said in a brittle voice. Whatever she was thinking, feeling, it was under control now. If she’d felt that same crackle of awareness, she wasn’t going to let it rule her. “I know you were just trying to help. I don’t think I’m going to need stitches,” she added.

      He nodded. “You’re going to be fine.”

      “I was fine before you got here. I’m not fine now.” Her eyes accused him as much as her words. “Now you see why you can’t stay here, Cole.”

      “I’m not leaving.”

      Bryn heard the determination in Cole’s voice, and her chest tightened.

      They fell into an uncomfortable silence. Around them, the big house creaked and settled.

      “What do you really want from me, Cole?”

      “I told you I didn’t come here to hurt you, Bryn,” Cole said. “And it’s true.” His eyes were deep, fathomless pools. “We need to talk about Aimee. I know it’s hard. I know you don’t want to even think about it, but we have to talk.”

      He was right. There was no getting around it. Cole Dempsey had come back into her life and turned it upside down in a matter of hours. And he wasn’t going to leave without at least saying his piece. And after that— He still might not leave. But sticking her head in the sand wasn’t doing her any good.

      “All right,” she said finally. “But I want to call the police first.”

      Cole didn’t say anything as he followed her out of the kitchen. He took her arm as she struggled to walk on her bandaged foot. The pain was a dull ache compared to the dread licking at her stomach.

      They reached the small anteroom off the entry hall she’d turned into a small but comfortable office. She’d colorwashed blue walls and added an eclectic mix of personal mementoes, artifacts and local crafts, yet there was nothing comfortable about it tonight. The silence lay turgid between them as she punched in the number for the police.

      “An officer will be here as soon as possible,” she told him as she put the receiver back in its cradle a few minutes later.

      He sat across the desk from her in a threadworn velvet wingback chair, and yet he was still far too close. He invaded her space by his mere presence at Bellefleur. An aura of immutable authority exuded from him. No matter what he wore, he would cut a powerful figure with his dark hair, perilous eyes and the solid breadth of his muscular body.

      “You want to talk,” she said. “So, talk. You have till the police arrive.” Since he’d gotten here, he’d been acting as if he was in charge. She wanted to let him know that he wasn’t.

      She caught the slight narrowing of his eyes, but he let her words pass unchallenged.

      “Would you like a drink?” she offered, coolly hospitably. There was a bottle of brandy in the antique cabinet behind the desk. She needed a drink even if he didn’t.

      The chair swiveled, and she took the bottle down, along with a couple of crystal glasses. She poured them each a glass, returned the bottle to the cabinet and raised the amber liquid to her lips. The brandy burned sweet and warm down her cold throat.

      Cole didn’t touch the glass she pushed across the desk toward him.

      “My mother became seriously ill a year ago,” he said in the still thick of the quiet office. “I buried her in Baton Rouge last month.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that.” She truly hurt for him—but why was he telling her this? It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but she was hardly an old friend catching up on his life story since last they’d met. She’d never blamed Cole’s mother for what Wade Dempsey had done. If anything, Mary Dempsey was another of Wade’s victims. Still, she wasn’t sure what Mary’s death had to do with Cole’s return.

      How long would it take for the police to arrive? The conversation had barely begun and already she wished it was over. She focused on the small bronzed bust of Alexandre Louvel, one of the first Louisianans to risk his resources turning Creole cane into sugar and thereby founding the Louvel fortune, standing sentry on a chipped and peeling painted column by the door. He’d found a way to profit on the lands he’d inherited, and Bryn often felt his vacant, heavy gaze as she sat behind this desk and tried to turn around Bellefleur’s future once again.

      “I never thought I’d come back to Azalea Bend,” he said. “I worked my way through college, and on through law school. I never looked back, not once.”

      He appeared to be in no hurry to get wherever he was going with this conversation, and that bothered her more than anything else. He was confident, composed, while she felt her own control slipping.

      Time to cut to the chase and get this done. She turned her gaze from the bronze of Alexandre