Sins of the Storm Read Free Page A

know.” She’d been gone a long time. And no one knew why, whether she’d left of her own will, or been taken. Whether she’d left at all—or been killed. Whether she was hurt, whether she even cared. If she was alive.
    That reality, that truth, the pain she’d caused her family, was something she’d have to live with for the rest of her life.
    “Your mother—”
    “I’ve been with her the past week,” she said, bypassing questions she wasn’t ready to answer. “And Saura.” At the secluded home in a neighboring parish where her mother had grown up, and her cousin still lived.
    “So I’m the last to know.” The lines of his face, those wide flat classic Cajun cheekbones, tightened.
    Camille closed her eyes, saw her brother. Gabriel had been a sophomore at Louisiana State University when she left. Now he was all grown up, a New Orleans Assistant District Attorney. He’d left for Costa Rica with his fiancée—a woman named Evangeline whom Camille’s mother adored—the day before Camille arrived. “Not the last.”
    But that didn’t seem to mollify Jack. On a rough sound from his throat, he shoved a hand through his hair, the same pecan color as before, but thicker than she remembered, longer than he’d been wearing it the last time she’d seen him—when he’d been twenty-one and cocksure and hot to show the world that while Gator Savoie was his father, Jack was not and never would be that man’s son—and swore softly.
    “ Mon dieu, Cami…where the hell have you been?”

Chapter 2
    I t should have been an easy question. It was an easy question. Where had she been? Where had she been for the past fourteen years, while her family searched and worried? While her mama lit a candle in church every Sunday and cringed every time a call came in from out of state?
    Where had she been when her cousin Saura suffered a breakdown?
    When her brother Gabe’s world fell apart?
    Where had she been when Jack—
    She wasn’t going to answer. He could see that in the dark haze that shadowed her eyes. Blue, he knew, the kind of soft light blue some folks compared to the sky on a summer day. He couldn’t see that blue now, couldn’t see much in the shadowy room, just the way she stood tall and defiant despite the fact her back was to the wall.
    “Answer me.” The words burned, but he kept his voice nice and slow and quiet, tender even. “Please.”
    Backing her into a corner, making her feel trapped, would get him nowhere.
    Finally she moved. She lifted a hand to slide the damp hair from her face, drawing his attention to the freckles across the bridge of her nose. “It’s not that easy.”
    He didn’t even try to stop the low rumble of laughter. “With you, nothing is.”
    Her smile was slow and wide and sure, and with it, the years fell away, and he could see her again, see little Cami as she’d been before. Before she’d seen her father die. Before folks started calling her Crazy Cami.
    Before she’d started throwing dragons in his path to see if he could slay them. “You shouldn’t be here.”
    She didn’t flinch, just kept watching him through those secret-drenched eyes. “I’m kind of getting that feeling.”
    “Damn it, Camille—”
    “No.” She stepped toward him, closing the distance he’d put between them. “I didn’t expect open arms, Jack, not after all this time. But I didn’t expect this, either,” she said, glancing from him to the holster he’d tossed to the ground. “A gun?” She looked back at him. “A silent alarm?”
    This is Camille, he kept telling himself. Cami. But instincts wouldn’t let him relax. Every time he asked a question, she countered with one of her own.
    “You’ve been gone a long time,” he said. “A lot has changed.” Things she may have seen, like the bridge washed out beyond town and the massive number of trees that had perished due to saltwater incursion, the new townhome development in the shadow of the abandoned sugar factory. But there