“You just got through telling me it was good for me.”
“I was being manly and comforting you. Now it’s just plain self-preservation. I’ll buy you clothes tomorrow. You can get ten pairs of jeans for all I care.”
A faint smile curved her mouth. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
He continued to look at her pointedly.
Flame heaved a sigh. “I don’t have any underwear on. I wasn’t going to wear your brother’s. My leg is sore. I kicked the driver to make him wreck. Well,” she hedged, “I was hoping to break his neck and eliminate him altogether.”
He reached for the waistband of her jeans. “We’re going to have to do something about that temper of yours. You can’t go around killing people because they piss you off, not even when you have reason to be pissed off.” His fingers brushed bare skin. Soft skin. Her belly was firm, but so damned soft he wanted to lean forward and press his mouth against it.
She stiffened, her hands covering his, stopping the movement but holding his fingers against her stomach. He could feel the tremor running through her. “I’ll do it myself.”
“And I was having such fun.”
“Look the other way. I’m not putting on a show for you, perv.”
He closed his eyes obediently and lay back on the bed again, suddenly tired. It had been a long, frustrating day. He had more questions than answers. Burrell was dead. He was no closer to finding Joy Chiasson than the day he’d arrived in New Orleans, and he was certain when Flame peeled off her jeans, and he got a good look at her injured leg, he wasn’t going to like what he saw.
She wiggled against him as she dragged off the jeans. Twice he heard a gasp escape as she tried to be careful removing the garment. He opened his eyes just as she dragged a sheet around her.
“Fils de putin!” He bent closer to inspect her leg. “Maudit!”
“You’re looking.”
“Hell yes, I’m looking.”
“Stop swearing. It’s not that bad. A few bruises, a little swelling. What did you expect? The bike was going fast, so was the Jeep and I kicked him as hard as I could. It wasn’t all that soft when I landed either.”
“How did you manage to make it back through the swamp on this leg? You were running full-out, I saw you.”
She shrugged. “I found out a long time ago, you can endure anything if you have to. Whitney didn’t defeat me, Raoul. I learned a lot of very valuable lessons.” She looked him straight in the eye. “He isn’t going to get me back. I’d rather die. If you or anyone else managed to get me there, I’d take down his house and everyone in it. I mean it. Think long and hard on that before you decide to try bringing me back.”
He looked down at her mottled leg. From knee to hip her thigh was black and blue with ugly swollen blotches that might indicate internal bleeding. “Fils de putin.” He swore again under his breath, his hands going to her leg, lifting it onto his lap as if he could magically take the pan away.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I heard you. You need to see a doctor, Flame.”
“I meant it. I can’t go through that again. I really meant it.”
“I know. What the hell are we going to do about your leg?” His palm stroked down her skin, his touch feather-light, barely there, but she felt it all the way to her bones. I’m taking you to Grand-mere. She knows the treateur- the healer. They’ve been best friends for years.”
“Take me tomorrow. I can’t be around anyone tonight.” Her chest hurt. She felt as if someone had dropped a hundred pound weight on her. A part of her wanted to scream and scream, another part wanted to flood the world with tears, but the worst part of her, something cold and dark and ugly, wanted to go hunting. “Did you tell Lily you found me? She’s the one who sent you after me, didn’t she? If you or your friend told her…”
“Lily doesn’t know we’ve had any contact. No one told her anything. If Whitney is alive and he’s aware of your presence here, it didn’t come from any of us.”
She believed him. She rarely believed anyone, not really. Not all the way. But with Raoul, she felt almost as if she knew him intimately, the real Raoul, not the one every one else saw. And God help her, she actually believed him. “Maybe I’m just tired.” She murmured the words aloud.
“You didn’t do this, Flame. You didn’t cause Burrell’s death.”
“How do you know that? Whitney’s capable of anything, even killing a kind old man just to get the end results of his experiment. He must have changed a lot over the years to have you think he wouldn’t do it, or he hid that side of himself well.”
“I didn’t much like him. None of us did. He was cold. Inhuman.” He shifted her as gently as possible until they were turned around in the bed. “Lie down.” He waited until her head was on the pillow before he pulled a blanket over her. “I never could understand how Lily loved him. She didn’t know he wasn’t her biological father. She found out after he died.”
“He isn’t dead.”
“Maybe he isn’t. In all honesty, you’ve got me halfway believin’ the man is out there somewhere recording every move we make.” Gator switched off the lights and stretched out on the bed beside her, careful to avoid touching her leg.
“I should leave.”
He heard the sound of his heartbeat accelerate. He knew she heard it too. The protest surged up, a strong tidal wave of denial. The walls rippled with a low pulse of dissent. She laid her hand over his.
“I’m not going. I have to find out who did this to Burrell. I’m just saying, it’s the smart thing to do. And there’s Joy. Someone did something to her. I wish I could believe she was dead, but I don’t.”
In the darkness he turned his head to look at her. “You don’t think she’s dead? Why? What makes you think she’s still alive?”
She would never have told anyone else. Ever. She would have gone to her grave and never told a single soul. Sometimes when I go places I hear echoes of sounds.” She waited for him to snicker. To laugh. To say she was crazy.
He twisted his fingers through hers and brought her hand up to his chest, over his heart. “Go on.”
“I think plants sometimes absorb the sound. It gets trapped there in certain plants and I can hear it.”
“You think the sound is trapped in the plants?” The pad of his thumb brushed idly over the back of her hand. “I’ve heard it too, the echo of screams, or laughter. The murmur of voices. At first I thought it was because my hearing was so acute, but then I realized that I was hearing something that had taken place in the past, minutes to months earlier. I thought it could be pockets of space, like the air pockets in a car when it sinks under water. But sound disperses. That didn’t make any sense at all. But plants don’t have ears. How the hell would they hear?”
“The echo of the past in certain places really bothered me.” She sniffed, still trying to get a handle on her emotions. It helped that Gator had bantered a little with her, but she still wanted to cry a river of tears for Burrell. For Joy. For herself. She forced control, wanting to share something of herself with Gator, just because he cared enough to comfort her. The casual rubbing of his thumb over her hand should have been trivial, but it wasn’t.
“I did consider that maybe Whitney had managed to drive me out of my mind, but then I remembered it had happened a couple of times when I was really young, before I realized just what a monster he really was, so I did some research. I wrote down each time I heard the sounds and tried to remember everything that was around me at the time. The one thing each incident had in common was that there were plants there. Not a single plant, but a large group of plants.”
“I never thought of plants. How would they hear things?”