Sins of the Storm Read Free Page B

were other changes, as well.
    “Did you ever stop to think maybe that’s why I’m here?”
    “Then you need to turn right around and leave.” The words were harsh, but out of respect for what they’d once shared, who she’d once been, he kept his voice quiet. “Because no matter what you think you know,” he added, and this time he broke his cardinal rule. He reached for her, and touched, connected. “You shouldn’t be here.” Not now. With the past bubbling up. The scum who called himself a writer would want to interview Camille for his exposé.
    And the man she’d tried to incriminate all those years ago would do everything in his power to make sure that never happened.
    “Jack…” she whispered, with a quick glance at his hands on her arms. Then she lifted her eyes. “You almost sound scared.”
    It was a hell of a time for her to start making sense. She’d been gone, but he had not. He’d been here when her brother had nearly been killed. He’d been here when the man responsible had strolled from the courthouse, as though he owned the goddamned world. “Marcel Lambert—”
    “Finally made a mistake, yes, I know,” she said, and her eyes took on a hard glow. “He went after Gabe. He confessed, told him everything.”
    Everything. The truth about a legend that had haunted her family for decades, an unholy alliance to locate a religious relic that had vanished during the Civil War, lies and betrayals and deceptions, the shards of glass found on the floor of her father’s study—and the bullet that had ended his life.
    “And then he claimed entrapment,” she added with a core of steel the eighteen-year-old had not possessed. “And now he’s living like a prince while his lawyers introduce one stall tactic after another.”
    While the media continued to harass her brother, speculating how far he would go for revenge. That’s why Gabe had taken his fiancée to Costa Rica, to get her away from the reporters who dogged them everywhere.
    “But here you are,” Jack muttered. “After all this time. Do you have any idea what Lambert will do when he finds out—”
    “I’m not scared of him.”
    “He killed your father.”
    “And destroyed yours,” she added.
    But Jack ignored her comment. Because he finally realized the cat-and-mouse game they’d been playing. The timing of her return was not coincidental. “You’re here for the trial.”
    “I’m here for me, Jack. I’m here because it’s time.”
    They were foolish words, and they scraped. “Time for what?”
    “To get my life back.”
    She made it sound so damned simple.
    “I need to know what’s going on,” she said, hugging her arms around her body and drawing his attention to the knit top clinging to her chest. She was still wet, and the room was cold. “Why the gun? Why the silent alarm? It’s been a long time since anyone has given a damn what happened at Whispering Oaks.”
    “Like I said, cher— a lot has changed.”
    “Of course it has,” she conceded, watching him, almost assessing. “But that’s not an answer. What’s going on? Who did you expect to find here?”
    If he knew the answer to that…“Go back to your mama’s,” he said with an insolence that brought an immediate burn to her eyes. “Let her give you some of that gumbo you always liked…give you the welcome you want.”
    That he couldn’t.
    For a long moment Camille said nothing, just watched him as if she could sear a hole right through him. Then she released a slow breath and damn near crucified him with her eyes.
    “Bayou d’Espere isn’t the only thing that’s changed.”
    And then she was gone, turning and walking away, again, leaving only the sound of her footsteps against the old wood floor, and the lingering, damning scent of lavender.
     
    She’d forgotten.
    No longer concerned with concealing her presence, Camille ignored the protest of the front door and stepped into the sauna of a Louisiana almost-summer night. The rain had