Cry Wolf

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.

"How old were you?" he asked.

Laurel pulled up a black-eyed Susan and began plucking off the petals methodically. "Ten."

He wanted to offer some words of sympathy, tell her he knew how tough it was. But the fact of the matter was, he had hated his father and hadn't mourned his passing for even a fraction of a second.

"What about you?" Laurel asked, giving in to her curiosity on the grounds of good manners. He had asked her first. It would have been rude not to ask in return. "Do your parents live around here?"

"They're dead," Jack said flatly. "Did he want you to be a lawyer, your daddy?"

Laurel looked down at the mutilated flower in her hand, thinking of it as a representation of her life. The petals were like the years her father had been alive, all of them stripped away, leaving her with nothing but ugliness. "He wanted me to be happy."

"And the law made you happy?"

She shook her head a little, almost imperceptibly. "I went into law to see justice done. Why did you go into it?"

To show my old man. "To get rich."

"And did you?"

"Oh, yeah, absolutely. Me, I had it all." And then I killed it, crushed it, threw it all away.

Jack shifted his weight restlessly from one squishy wet sneaker to the other. She was turning the tables on him, neatly, easily, subtly. He shot her a glance askance. "You're good, counselor."

Laurel blinked at him in innocence. "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean, I'm the one asking the questions, so how come I'm all of a sudden giving answers?"

Her mouth turned down in a frown. "I thought this was a conversation, not an interrogation. Why can't I ask questions?"

"Because you won' like my answers, sugar," he said darkly.

"How will I know until I hear them?"

"Trust me."

Laurel took advantage of the silence to study him for a moment as he stared out at the brown water, that intense, brooding look on his face. The feeling that he was two very different men struck her once again. One minute he was the wild-eyed devil who wanted nothing more than to get into trouble and have a good time; the next he was this closed, dark man who kept the door shut on the part of himself he didn't want anyone to see. She found herself wanting to know what was on the other side of that door. A dangerous curiosity, she thought, pulling herself back from asking more questions.

Down the bank Huey suddenly bounded out of a stand of cattails and coffee weed, baying excitedly. The children who had been chasing around their parents' cars farther downstream came running, squealing with excitement to see what the hound had discovered, shrieking delightedly when they found the dog's quarry was a painted turtle with a spotted salamander riding on its back.

The turtle lumbered along, ignoring the sniffing hound, its lethargic gait seeming out of sync with its gaudy coloring. Its ebony-green shell shone like a bowling ball and was crisscrossed with a network of reddish-yellow lines. A broad red stripe stroked down the center of it from head to tail. The salamander flicked its long tongue out at the dog, sending Huey into another gale of howls that in turn set the children off again.

Poor Huey couldn't seem to figure out why the turtle didn't spring away from him so he could give chase. He batted a paw at it and yipped in surprise as the salamander shot off its hard-shelled taxi and skittered into the tall weeds. The hound wheeled and ran, bowling over a toddler in his haste to escape.

Being the closest adult, Laurel automatically went to the little girl's aid. She hefted up twenty pounds of squalling baby fat and perched the child on her hip as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Don't cry, sweetie, you're okay," she cooed, stroking a mop of black curls that were as soft as a cloud.

The little girl let out a last long wail, just to let the world know she had been sorely mistreated, then subsided into hiccups, her attention suddenly riveted on her rescuer. Laurel smiled at the swift change of mood, at the innocence in the chubby face and the wonder in the round, liquid dark eyes. A muddy little hand reached up and touched her face experimentally.

"Jeanne-Marie, are you okay, bébé?" The child's mother rushed up, her brows knit with worry, arms reaching out.

"I think she was just startled," Laurel said, handing the baby over.

After a quick inspection satisfied her parental concern, the young woman turned back to Laurel with a sheepish look. "Oh, look! Jeanne-Marie, she got you all dirty! I'm so sorry!"

"It's nothing. Don't worry about it," Laurel said absently, reaching out to tickle Jeanne-Marie's plump chin. "What a pretty little girl."

The mother smiled, pride and shyness warring for control of her expression. She was herself very pretty in a curvy, Cajun way. "Thank you," she murmured. "Thank you for picking her up."

"Well, I'm sure the dog's owner would apologize to you," Laurel said dryly, shooting Jack a glance over her shoulder. "If he would ever admit the dog is his."

The woman was understandably baffled, but nodded and smiled and backed away toward the rest of her group, telling Jeanne-Marie to wave as they went.

Laurel waved back, then turned toward Jack, a smart remark on the tip of her tongue. But he had a strange, stricken look on his face, as if he had seen something he hadn't been at all prepared for.

"What's the matter with you?" she said instead. "Do you have a phobia of children or something?"

Jack shook himself free of the emotion that had gripped him as he had watched Laurel with little Jeanne-Marie. Dieu, he felt as though he'd taken an unexpected boot to the solar plexus. She had looked so natural, so loving. The thought had crossed his mind instantly, automatically, that she would make a wonderful mother-as Evie would have if she had ever gotten the chance. If their child had ever been born. Thoughts he didn't usually allow himself during daylight hours. Those were for the night, when he could dwell on them and beat himself with them and cut his soul to ribbons with their razor-sharp edges.

"A-no," he stammered, blinking hard, scrambling for a mental toehold. He shrugged and flashed her a smile that was pale in comparison to his usual. "Me, I just don' know much about babies, that's all."

Laurel gave him a look. "I'll bet you know all about making them, though, don't you?"

"Ah, c'est vrai. I'm a regular expert on that subject." His grin took hold, cutting his dimples deep into his cheeks. He looped his arms around her, catching her by surprise, and shuffled closer and closer, until they were belly to belly. "You want for me to give you a demonstration, sugar?" he drawled, his voice stroking over her like long, sensitive fingers.

Laurel swallowed hard as raw, sexual heat swept through her.

"You certainly have a high opinion of your own abilities," she said, grabbing frantically for sass to ward off the other, more dangerous feelings.

He lowered his head a fraction, his dark eyes shining as he homed in on her mouth. "It ain't bragging if you can back it up."

Laurel 's pulse jumped. "I'll back you up," she threatened with a look of mock consternation. She planted both hands against his chest and shoved.

He didn't budge. Just grinned at her, laughing. Fuming, she pushed again. He abruptly unlocked his hands at the small of her back and she let out a little whoop of surprise as she stumbled backward. Momentum carried her faster than her feet could catch up, and she landed on her fanny in a patch of orange-blossomed trumpet creeper. Peals of high-pitched laughter assured her that the children had witnessed her fall from dignity. Before she could even contemplate resurrecting herself, Huey bounded out of a tangle of buttonbush and pounced on her, knocking her flat and licking her face enthusiastically.

"Ugh!" Laurel snapped her head from side to side, in a futile attempt to dodge the slurping dog tongue, swatting blindly at the hound with her hands.

"Arrête sa! C'est assez! Va-t'en!" Jack was laughing as he shooed Huey out of the way. The hound jumped and danced and wiggled around their legs as Jack stretched out a hand to Laurel and helped her up. "You can't get the better of me, catin."

Laurel shot him a disgruntled look. "There is no 'better' of you," she complained, struggling to keep from bursting into giggles. She never allowed herself to be amused by rascals. She was a level-headed, practical sort of person, after all. But there was just something about this side of Jack Boudreaux, something tempting, something conspiratorial. The gleam in his dark eyes pulled at her like a magnet.

"You only say that 'cause we haven't made love yet," he growled, that clever, sexy mouth curling up at the corners.

"You say that like there's a chance in hell it might actually happen."

The smile deepening, the magnetism pulling harder, he leaned a little closer. "Oh, it'll happen, angel," he murmured. "Absolutely. Guar-un-teed."

Laurel gave up her hold on her sense of humor and chuckled, shaking her head. "Lord, you're impossible!"

"Oh, no, sugar," he teased, slipping his arms around her once again. "Not impossible. Hard, mebbe," he said, waggling his brows.

The innuendo was unmistakable and outrageous. Their laughter drifted away on the sultry air, and awareness thickened the humidity around them. Laurel felt her heart thump a little harder as she watched the rogue's mask fall away from Jack's face. He looked intense, but it was a softer look than she had seen there before, and when he smiled, it was a softer smile, a smile that made her breath catch in her throat.

"I like to see you laugh, 'tite ange," he said, lifting a hand to straighten her glasses. He brushed gently at the smudge of mud Jeanne-Marie had left on her cheek. His fingertips grazed the corner of her mouth and stilled. Slowly, deliberately, he hooked his thumb beneath her chin and tilted her face up as he lowered his mouth to hers.

Not smart, Laurel told herself, even as she felt her lips soften beneath his. She wasn't strong enough for a relationship, wasn't looking for a relationship. She couldn't have found a more unlikely candidate in any event. Jack Boudreaux was wild and irreverent and unpredictable and mocked the profession and system she held such respect for. But none of those arguments dispelled the fire that sparked to life as he tightened his hold on her and eased his tongue into her mouth.

Jack groaned deep in his throat as she melted against him. His little tigress who hissed and scratched at him more often than not. She didn't want him getting close, but once the barrier had been crossed, she responded to him with a sweetness that took his breath away. He wanted her. He meant to have her. To hell with consequences. To hell with what she would think of him after. She wouldn't think anything that wasn't the truth-that he was a bastard, that he was a user. All true. None of it changed a damn thing.

He tangled one hand in her short, silky hair and started the other on a quest for buttons. But his hand stilled as a high-pitched, staccato burst of sound cut through the haze in his mind. Laughter. Children's laugher. Jack raised his head reluctantly, just in time to see round eyes and a button nose disappear behind the trunk of a willow tree.

Laurel blinked up at him. Stunned. Dazed. Disoriented. Her glasses steamed. "What?" she mumbled, breathless, her lips stinging and burning, her mouth feeling hot and wet and ultrasensitive-sensations that were echoed in a more intimate area of her body.

"Much as I like an audience for some things," Jack said dryly, "this ain't one of those things."

Another burst of giggles sounded behind the tree, and Laurel felt her cheeks heat. She shot him a look of disgust and gave him an ineffectual shove. "Go soak your head in the bayou, Boudreaux."

He grinned like a pirate. "It ain't my head that's the problem, ma douce amie."

She rolled her eyes and sidled around him, lest he try anything funny, heading back to the Jeep and her boots. "Come on, Casanova. Let's see if you can catch anything besides hell from me."

They went back into the water, and Jack lifted the first of the nets, revealing a good catch of fifteen to twenty crawfish. The little creatures scrambled over one another, hissing and snapping their claws. They looked like diminutive lobsters, bronze red with black bead eyes and long feelers. Laurel held an onion sack open while Jack poured their catch in. They moved down their row of nets, having similar luck with each. When they were through, they had three bags full.

By then the sun had turned orange and begun sliding down in the sky. Dusk was coming. With it would come the mosquitoes. Ever present in the bayou country, they lifted off the water in squadrons at sunset to fly off on their mission for blood.

Laurel arranged things neatly and efficiently on her side in the back of the Jeep. Jack tossed junk helter-skelter. The bags of crawfish were stowed with the rest of the gear, an arrangement Huey was extremely skeptical of. The hound jumped into his usual spot and sat with his ears perked, head on one side, humming a worried note as he poked at the wriggling onion sacks with his paw.

On their way back out to the main road Jack stopped by the old Cadillac and gave one bulging bag to the families, who probably relied on their catch for a few free meals. The gift was offered without ceremony and accepted graciously. Then the Jeep moved on, with several children chasing after it, flinging wildflowers at Huey, who had garnered a daisy chain necklace in the deal.

The whole process was as natural as a handshake. Reciprocity, a tradition that dated back to the Acadian's arrival in Louisiana, a time when life had been unrelentingly harsh, the land unforgiving. People shared with friends, neighbors, relatives, in good times and bad. Laurel took in the proceedings, thinking that since her father's death, no one at Beauvoir had ever offered anyone anything that didn't have strings attached.

"That was nice," she said, sitting sideways on the seat so she could study his response.

He shrugged off the compliment, slowed the Jeep for the turn onto the main road, pulled his cigarette out from behind his ear, and dangled it from his lip. "We caught more than we need. They got a lotta mouths to feed. Besides," he said, cutting her a wry look, "I don' want 'em gettin' any ideas about suing me for Huey traumatizing their bébé."

"How could they sue if he's not your dog?" Laurel asked sweetly.

"Tell it to the judge, angel."

"I may just do that," she said, crossing her arms and fighting a smile. "There's still the little matter of my aunt's flower garden…"

"Only through God may you be set free, brothers and sisters!" Jimmy Lee let the line echo a bit, loving the sound of his own voice over loudspeakers. Never mind that they were cheap, tinny-sounding loudspeakers. Once the money started rolling in for his campaign against sin, he would go out and buy himself new ones. And a new white suit or two. And a fancy French Quarter whore for a weekend… Yes, indeedy, life was sure as hell going to be sweet once the money came rolling in.

He had no doubt he would be rich and famous. Despite the betrayal of that little faggot Matthews, who had run the "news" version of Saturday's debacle instead of the version Jimmy Lee had envisioned on the ten o'clock report. Jimmy Lee was too good-looking not to make it, too charismatic, too good at pretending sincerity. He had it all over the other televangelists. Jim Bakker was a fool and had gotten his ass thrown in prison to prove it. Swaggart was careless, picking up prostitutes on the street. They had both fallen by the wayside, opening the road to fame and fortune for Jimmy Lee Baldwin. In another five years he'd have himself a church that would make the Crystal Cathedral look like an outhouse.

The followers of the True Path cheered him, looking up at him as though he were Christ himself. Some wore looks of near-rapture. Some had tears in their eyes. All of them were saps. In another era he would have made a fortune selling snake oil or the empty promise of rain to drought-plagued farmers. He was a born con man. But in this the age of self-awareness and the search for inner peace, religion was the ticket. As L. Ron Hubbard had once said, if a man wanted to get rich, the best way was to form his own religion. Jimmy Lee looked out on the pathetic, avid faces of his followers and smiled.

"That's right, my friends in Christ," he said, walking to the other end of the rented flatbed truck that was serving as his stage for the afternoon. "Only through faith. Not through liquor or drugs or sins of the flesh!"

He loved the way he could build a sentence to a thundering crescendo. So did his faithful. There were women in the crowd who looked positively orgasmic over the magic of his voice.

"That's why, my beloved brothers and sisters," he said softly.

He raised his crumpled handkerchief to his face and blotted away the sweat that was running down his forehead. The day had turned into a damn steambath. His white shirt was soaked through. His cheap linen-look jacket hung on him like damp wallpaper. He wanted desperately to take a cool shower and lie naked on his bed with a lovely young thing reviving his energies with her sweet hot mouth. But for the moment he was stuck on the back of this flatbed truck with the sun beating down on him, boiling the sweat on his skin. The first thing he was going to do when he was rich and famous was move his ministry the hell away from Louisiana.

"That's why we have to do this battle. That's why we have to vanquish our wicked foe who would lead us all into temptation and deliver us into the hands of evil. That's why we must smite down the dens of iniquity!"

He swung his arm in the direction of Frenchie's, which was across the parking lot behind him, and his small gathering of devout cheered like the mob at Dr. Frankenstein's door. Such eager little sheep. Jimmy Lee grinned inwardly.

Laurel climbed out of the Jeep, took several swift, angry steps toward the gathered crowd, then stopped in her tracks, the soles of her sneakers crunching on the fine white shell. Her every muscle tensed as her conscience warred with the part of herself that was preaching self-protection. This wasn't her fight. She wasn't up to handling a fight. But it made her so damn mad…

"You fixin' to whup him onstage this time, 'tite chatte?" Jack asked, curling a hand around her fist and lifting it experimentally.

She shot him a look of pure pique and jerked away. "I'm going to have the Delahoussayes call the sheriff. If no one else is going to help them, that's the least I can do."

Jack shrugged. "Go ahead, darlin'. For all the good it'll do."

"It most certainly will do good."

He rolled his eyes and trailed after her as she marched onward. "You haven't met Sheriff Kenner, have you, sugar?"

Laurel considered the question rhetorical. She couldn't see that it would make any difference. Baldwin and his congregation were trespassing. Trespassing was against the law. The sheriff's job was to uphold the law. It was as simple as that.

They had to pass Baldwin 's makeshift stage on the way to the bar. Laurel held her head high and fixed the self-styled preacher with a baleful glare.

Jimmy Lee had caught sight of her the second she had wheeled into the lot with Jack Boudreaux. Laurel Chandler. God was smiling down on him today, indeed.

He waited until she was almost even with the truck before calling out to her. "Miss Chandler! Miss Laurel Chandler, please don't pass us by!"

She shouldn't have slowed down. She should have kept right on marching for the bar. She didn't want to go any deeper into this than she was already. But her feet hesitated automatically at the sound of her name, and something pulled her toward Jimmy Lee Baldwin. Not his charisma, as he would probably have preferred to believe. Not his air of authority. But something that had been with her since childhood. The need to stand up to a bully. The need to try to make people see a charlatan for what he was. The need to fight for justice.

She turned and marched right up to the front of his stage and glared up at him.

"Join us, sister," Jimmy Lee said, holding his hand out toward her. "I don't know what hold this vile place has over you, but I know, I know you are a good person at heart."

"Which is more than I can say for someone bent on harassing law-abiding citizens," Laurel snapped.

"The law." Jimmy Lee bobbed his head, a grave expression pulling down his handsome features. "The law protects the innocent. And the guilty would hide like wolves in sheep's clothing, hide behind the law. Isn't that true, Miss Chandler?"

Laurel went still. His eyes met hers, and a chill of foreboding swept over her skin despite the heat of the day. He knew. He knew, and the bastard was going to use it to his own end. Without looking, she could feel the curious eyes of his fifty or so followers falling on her. He knew. They would know. That she had failed. That justice had slipped from her grasp like a bar of wet soap.

"My friends…" Baldwin 's voice came to her as if from a great distance down a long tin tunnel. "Miss Chandler has herself been a soldier in the fight against the most heinous of crimes, crimes against innocent children. Crimes perpetrated by depraved souls who would masquerade among us, showing us righteous faces by day and by night subjecting our children to unspeakable acts of sex! Miss Chandler knows of our fight, don't you Miss Chandler?"

Laurel barely heard him. She could feel the weight of their gazes press in on her, the weight of their judgment. She had failed. "… unspeakable acts of sex…" She shivered as she felt herself drawing inward, pulling in to protect herself. "… unspeakable acts of sex…" "Help us, Laurel! Help us…"

Jack watched her go pale, and he damned Jimmy Lee to eternal hell. His own personal philosophy of life was live and let live. If Jimmy Lee wanted to make a buck off God, that was his business. If people were stupid enough to follow him, that wasn't Jack's problem. He would have gone right on ignoring Baldwin and his band of lunatics. He wasn't out to fight anyone's fight. But the bastard had gone too far. He had somehow, some way managed to hurt Laurel.

Before he could even fathom what lay beneath his response, Jack hopped onto the hood of Baldwin 's borrowed truck and proceeded to climb over the cab. He jumped down onto the flatbed, landing right smack behind Jimmy Lee, who bolted like a startled horse, but didn't move quickly enough to get away.

Jack caught hold of Baldwin 's arm and deftly twisted it behind the preacher's back in a hold he had learned the hard way-from his old man. He grinned at the man like a long lost brother and spoke through his teeth at a pitch only Jimmy Lee could hear. "You got two choices here, Jimmy Lee. Either you can suddenly succumb to the heat of the day, or I'll break all the fine, small bones in your wrist."

Baldwin stared into those cold dark eyes, and a chill ran down him from head to toe. He'd heard rumors about Jack Boudreaux… that he was wild, unpredictable, affable one minute and mean as sin the next. Boudreaux was, by all accounts of the people who read his books, seriously unbalanced. The hold tightened on his wrist, and Jimmy Lee thought he could feel those small bones straining under the pressure.

"That's right, Jimmy Lee"-the smile chilled another degree-"I'd sooner break your arm."

Restless murmurs began rumbling through the crowd like distant thunder. The preacher ground his teeth. He was losing his momentum, losing his hold on them. Damn Jack Boudreaux. Jimmy Lee had had them on the brink of a frenzy, champing at the bit to launch him on the road to televangelist greatness. He cast a glance at his followers and back at the man beside him.

"Sin," he said, and the pressure tightened. "I-I can feel the heat of it!" He rolled his eyes and swayed dramatically on his feet. "Oh, Lord have mercy! The heat of it! The fires from hell!"

Jack let him go and watched with a mixture of cynicism and satisfaction as Baldwin staggered away across the flatbed. Obviously a disciple of the William Shatner/Captain Kirk school of acting, Baldwin stumbled and swayed, contorting his face, wrenching his back, calling out in staccato bursts as his audience gasped in alarm. Several women screamed as he finally collapsed onto the bed of the truck and writhed for another thirty seconds.

People rushed for the stage. Jack strolled across to the prostrate form of the preacher and calmly snatched up the microphone.

"Hey ever-body! Come on inside and douse those fires of hell!" he called, grinning like the devil. "Drinks are on me! Laissez le bon temps rouler! And tell 'em Jack sent you!"

The contingent of Frenchie's patrons who had been standing at the back of the crowd or lounging on the gallery sent up a wild chorus of hoots and cheers and made a mad dash for the bar. Jack hopped down off the truck. Laurel didn't even look up at him, but turned and started back for the Jeep.

"Hey, sugar, where you goin'?"

"Home. Please," Laurel said, emotion tightening around her throat like a vise. There was a pressure in her chest, in her head. She wanted-needed-to escape.

Jack caught her by the arm and shuffle-stepped alongside her. "Hey, hey, you can't run off, spitfire. T-Grace is gonna have the place of honor all set for you."

"What for?" She stopped and wheeled on him, her body vibrating with tension, her face set in lines of anger and something like shame tinting the blue of her eyes. "I failed. I lost."

Jack's brows pulled together in confusion. "What the hell are you talkin' about? Failed? Failed what?"

She'd choked. She'd lost it. If it hadn't been for his coming to the rescue, there was no telling what humiliation she might have suffered. She felt as if Baldwin had reached right into her and pulled out that part of her past to hold it up to his followers like a science experiment gone wrong.

"You stood up to him, Laurel," Jack said softly. "That was more than anyone else was willing to do. So you didn't deliver the knockout punch. So what? Lighten up, sugar. You're not in charge of the whole damn world."

His last line struck a chord, brought back a memory from her stay at the Ashland Heights Clinic, brought back Dr. Pritchard's voice. How egotistical of her to think that she was the center of all, the savior of all, that the outcome of the future of the world rested squarely on her shoulders.

She was overreacting.

She had come here to heal, hadn't she? To take control of her life again. If she ran now, from this, she would be giving in to the past when she had vowed to rise above it.

She looked up at Jack, at the concern in his eyes, and wondered if he even knew it was there.

"Thank you," she murmured. She wanted to reach up and touch his cheek, but it seemed a dangerously intimate thing to do, and so curled her fingers into a loose fist instead.

Jack eyed her suspiciously. "For what?"

"For rescuing me."

"Oh, no." He shook his head and backed away from her a step, raising his hands as if to ward off her gratitude. "Don' make me out to be a hero, sugar. I had a chance to make a fool outa Jimmy Lee, that's all. Me, I'm nobody's hero."

But he had saved her-several times-from her own thoughts, her own fears, from the dark mire of depression that pulled at her. Laurel studied him for a moment, wondering why he preferred the image of bad boy to champion.

"Come on, 'tite ange," he said, jerking his head toward the bar. "I'll buy you a drink. Besides, I've got a lawyer joke I just remembered I wanted to tell you."

"What makes you think I want to hear it?"

Jack slid an arm around her shoulders and steered her toward Frenchie's. "No, no. I know you don't wanna hear it. That's half the fun of tellin' it."

Laurel laughed, the tension going out of her by slow degrees.

"What's the difference between a porcupine and two lawyers in a Porsche?" he asked as they skirted around Baldwin 's truck. "With a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside."

They crossed the parking lot, Jack laughing, Laurel shaking her head, neither one aware that they were being very carefully watched.