French Silk(94)

It was as though he'd been bewitched. French Silk had an ambience that mystified and intrigued him. It wasn't the old building itself, or even the French Quarter. He'd been there many times since he'd moved to New Orleans. He'd found it charming, but it had never made him feel as though he had gone through a time warp on the other side of which everything moved in slow motion and nothing was what it seemed.

It wasn't the physical place that had mesmerized him. It was Claire. She exuded a mystique that confounded him. That unnamed quality was dangerously romantic, totally alluring, and potentially disastrous. It had trapped him like an invisible web. The harder he struggled against it, the more ensnared he became. Even now, while he should be plotting a way to catch her, he was devising means to protect her from prosecution.

Crazy, he thought, shaking his head over his own culpability. But he went with it anyway. There was no harm in exploring alternatives, was there? In fact, wasn't that the sensible, responsible, professional thing to do?

Who else was a viable suspect?

Ariel Wilde. She was pregnant now, but she could have offed her husband for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it would be tough to prosecute her and emerge a hero. He could always raise doubt as to who had fathered her child. But a good attorney would object to that line of questioning. The judge might rule in defense's favor, and that would be that. Nipped in the bud. The jury would never know about Ariel's affair with her stepson, and Cassidy would be despised for casting aspersions on a saintly expectant mother.

Joshua Wilde. Cassidy's gut instinct told him that the young man wouldn't have the gumption to kill a fly, much less a tyrannical father. On the other hand, he'd had the moxie to boink his old man's wife.

The problem with prosecuting Ariel or Josh was that he didn't have a shred of physical evidence on either of them. It was all circumstantial and conjecture. If the jurors followed the judge's instructions and entertained any reasonable doubt, Ariel and Josh would walk. Assistant District Attorney Cassidy would have lost his credibility and let the real killer, whoever it might be, go free.

That prospect was unthinkable. His main objective was to make sure that didn't happen. Above all else, he was committed to catching the bad guy and convicting him.

Or her.

Thoughts of Claire made him swear liberally as he ground out his first, virtually unsmoked, cigarette and lit another. He envisioned her as she had been that afternoon. Her dishevelment had been fetching, the perspiration having given her skin a healthy glow. The humidity had made the hair around her face curl beguilingly. She had looked hot and bothered. But when he'd confronted her about it, she'd been too damn proud to claim those two human frailties, jealousy and lust.

Feeling restless and mean, Cassidy rolled off the bed and hiked a pair of jeans up over his hips. He didn't bother buttoning them before he yanked open the French doors and stepped onto the balcony. The air was even sultrier than it had been earlier. There wasn't a breath of breeze.

He glanced toward the French doors of Claire's room and saw darkness. She was sleeping. He gazed up at the sky; the low clouds looked swollen and bruised. The smell of rain was pervasive, but he didn't feel a drop. The atmosphere was electrically charged, as though something consequential were about to take place.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a flash of lightning sizzled across the sky just above the motionless treetops.

* * *

When the sky was split by a brilliant, jagged fork of lightning, Claire sprang into a sitting position. She held her breath in anticipation of the thunder. It cracked like a whip across the roof of the house, rattling windows and glassware. It was followed by a strong gust of wind. Her French doors burst open, swinging into the room and banging against the interior walls. The sheer draperies billowed like sails suddenly unfurled.

Claire slid from the bed and walked across the room. Rosesharon's trees were swaying in an angry wind that seemed to be blowing in no particular direction. It tore at her hair and molded her chemise to her body. Another bolt of lightning temporarily spotlighted the balcony.

That's when she saw Cassidy. He was standing at the railing, shirtless, smoking, looking straight at her. She started to duck back into her bedroom and seal shut the French doors, but she couldn't move. His riveting gaze had immobilized her. Saying nothing, he pushed himself away from the railing and came toward her with a slow, measured, predatory tread.

Her heart started racing as fast as the frenzied wind. Her mind spun as erratically as anything in the wind's path. She spoke the first inane words that came to her: "I didn't know you smoked."

Cassidy still said nothing but continued moving forward in that same dangerous manner. He didn't stop until he was within arm's reach. Claire felt herself drawn to him by a physical and inexorable tug, as though he had a powerful magnet inside his chest.

Breathlessly she said, "I think a storm is finally about to break."

He flicked his cigarette over the balcony railing, then reached for her, pulling her against him with the force of the next thunderclap. The kiss he ground upon her mouth was as ruthless as the wind. He snapped open her hair barrette and let it drop unheeded to the floor, then moved his fingers through her hair, tilting her head first to one side, then the other, so that her mouth had to obey the rapacious demands of his.

Heat emanated from him, through his skin, through the hair that matted his chest. His unleashed sexual desire seeped into Claire and she responded, suddenly acknowledging it as the source of her recent discontent. It blossomed and spread through her—a sweet, aching need for this … for Cassidy.