Temptation curled around her and drew her toward him. It seemed insane, this attraction between them. She didn't want a man in her life right now. She had all she could do to manage herself. And Jack would not be managed. He had a wildness about him, an unpredictability. He could tell her he had suddenly decided to fly off to Brazil for the day, and she wouldn't have been a bit surprised. No, he was no man for her.
But his offer was tempting. She could almost feel the mud between her toes, smell the bayou, feel the excitement of lifting a net full of clicking, hissing little red crawfish out of the water. It had been years since she'd gone. Her father had taken her and Savannah -against Vivian's strident objections. And she and Savannah had snuck away on their own a time or two after he had died, but those times were so distant in the past, they no longer seemed real. Now Jack was offering. Good-time Jack with his devil's grin and his air of joie de vie.
She looked up at him, and her mouth moved before she could even give it permission. "All right. Let's go."
Chapter Ten
They rode in Jack's Jeep down the bayou road, turning off on a narrow, overgrown path a short distance before the site of their accident. Lined with trees, rough and rutted, it had Jack slowing the Jeep to a crawl, and Huey jumped out of the back, eager to begin his exploration of this new territory. Laurel hung on to the door as the Jeep bounced along, her attention on the scenery. She knew the area. Pony Bayou. So named for a prized pony owned by a local Anglo planter back in the late seventeen hundreds. The pony was "borrowed" by a Cajun man who planned to use the stallion for breeding purposes. A feud ensued, with considerable bloodshed, and all for nought as the pony got himself mired in the mud of the bayou and was devoured by alligators.
Despite its gruesome history, Pony Bayou was a pretty spot. The stream itself was narrow and shallow with low, muddy banks and a thick growth of water weeds and flowers. A perfect haven for crawfish, as was evidenced by the presence of two beat-up cars parked along the shoulder of the road. Two families were trying their luck in the shallows, their submerged nets marked by floating strips of colored plastic. Half a dozen children chased each other along the bank, shrieking and laughing. Their mothers were perched on the long trunk of an ancient brown Cadillac, swapping gossip. Their fathers leaned back against the side of the car, drinking beer and smoking nonchalantly. Everyone waved as Laurel and Jack rumbled past in search of a spot of their own. Laurel smiled and waved back, glad she had come, feeling lighter of heart away from the aura of her family.
They parked the Jeep and gathered their equipment as if this were an old routine. Laurel pulled on a pair of rubber knee-boots to wade in, grabbed several cotton mesh dip nets, and clomped after Jack, who had nets tucked under his arm and carried a cooler full of bait. Huey bounded ahead, nose scenting the air for adventure. Jack scolded him as the hound splashed into the bayou, and Huey wheeled and slunk away with his tail tucked between his legs, casting doleful looks over his shoulder at Jack.
Jack scowled at the dog, not appreciating the fact that he felt like an ogre for spoiling Huey's fun. Laurel was giving him a look as well.
"There won' be a crawfish between here and New Iberia with him around," he muttered.
"Depends on how good a fisherman you are, doesn't it?" She lifted a brow in challenge.
"When you grow up fishin' to keep your belly full, you get pretty damn good at it."
Laurel said nothing as she watched him bait the nets with gizzard shad and chicken necks. He had grown up poor. Lots of people had-and did-in South Louisiana. But the hint of defensiveness and bitterness in his tone somehow managed to touch her more than she would have expected it to.
There was such a thing as being poor and happy. After her father had died, Laurel had often offered God every toy she possessed, every party dress, for the chance to have parents who cared more about her and Savannah than they did about wealth. She had known a number of families whose parents worked on Beauvoir, who had little and still smiled and hugged their children. The Cajuns were famously unmaterialistic and strongly family-oriented. But she had a feeling this had not been the case with Jack's family.
Curiosity itched inside her, but she didn't ask. Personal questions didn't seem wise.
They each took a net out into the water, spacing them a good distance apart. Jack worked quickly and methodically, the ritual as second-nature to him as tying his shoes. Laurel kept stumbling over tangles of alligator weed that was entwined with delicate yellow bladderwort and water primrose. The spot she had chosen to drop her net was choked with lavender water hyacinth that fought her for control of the net.
"Uh-huh," Jack muttered dryly, suddenly beside her, reaching around her, enveloping her in his warm male scent. "I can see you grew up eating store-bought crawfish."
Laurel shot him an offended look. "I did not. I'll have you know, I've done this lots of times. Just not in the last fifteen years, that's all."
Jack set the net and helped her wade back to shore, balancing her when the roots and reeds caught at her boots. When they were back on solid ground, he gave her a dubious look.
"I saw where you grew up, sugar. I can't picture any daughter of that house wading for mudbugs."
"That just shows what a reverse snob you are," Laurel said as she stepped out of the hot boots and let her bare feet sink into the soft ground of the bank. "Daddy used to take Savannah and me."
She leaned back against the side of the Jeep and stared across the bayou, thinking of happier times. On the far bank lush ferns and purple wild iris grew in the shade of hardwood trees dripping moss and willows waving their pendulous ribbons of green. In brighter spots black-eyed Susans and white-topped daisy fleabane dotted the bank like dollops of sunshine. Somewhere along the stream a pileated woodpecker began drumming against a tree trunk in search of an insect snack and the racket startled a pair of prothonotary warblers from their roost in a nearby hackberry sapling. The little birds fluttered past, flashes of slate blue and bright yellow.
"What happened to him?" Jack asked softly.
Emotion solidified in Laurel 's throat like a chunk of amber. "He died," she whispered, the beautiful growth along the far bank blurring as unexpected tears glazed across her eyes. "He was killed… an accident… in the cane fields…"
One swift, terrible moment, and all their lives had been changed irrevocably.
Jack watched the sadness cloud her face like a veil. Automatically, he reached for her, curled his arm around her shoulder, pulled her gently against his side. "Hey, sugar," he murmured, his lips brushing her temple. "Don' cry. I didn' mean to make you cry. I brought you out here to make you happy."
Laurel stifled the urge to lean against him, straightening away instead, scrubbing at the embarrassment that reddened her cheeks. "I'm okay." She sniffed and shook her head, smiling against the desire to cry. "That just kind of snuck up on me. I'm okay." She nodded succinctly, as if she had managed to convince herself at least, if not Jack.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Tough little cookie, bucking up when she wanted to crumble. She was a fighter, all right. He had learned that not only by experience, but through his reading. According to the papers he had culled out of his collection of a year's worth, she had been as tenacious as a pit bull going after the alleged perpetrators in the Scott County case. She had driven her staff mercilessly, but worked none harder than she worked herself in the relentless-and, as it had turned out, futile-pursuit of justice. He couldn't help wondering where that hunger for truth and fairness had come from. Reporters had described it as an obsession. Obsessions grew out of seeds sown deep inside. He knew all about obsessions.