A Bad Boy is Good to Find(29)

“Aren’t you stepping into her jaws, then, by going on her show?”

“I’m in control now. She’s in my jaws.”

“Hardly. She’ll be the one doing the editing.”

“But I’m writing the script. It’s not as if any of this is real.”

“A typical reality show, then.”

“Exactly. And with your acting skills it should be better than most.”

“I’ll tell you straight up. I don’t like it.”

“I know. That’s part of the appeal for me.” She shot him a dry smile.

“I’m impressed that you trust me to go through with it.” Con looked at her, expressionless.

Lizzie froze. Would he? Or would he screw her? Or more likely, would he screw Maisie and then they’d both screw her? Suddenly all that empty air under the jet threatened to suck her screaming into an abyss.

She struggled to look composed. “You have a bizarre sense of honor. I believe you when you said you’d have married me that day. I believe you’ll marry me now.”

“And divorce you.” He spoke softly, eyes narrowed.

The breath squeezed out of her lungs. She held his gaze. “Yes. And divorce me. By age twenty-six I’ll be a gay divorcée and you’ll be off on your merry way to seduce some other hapless heiress.”

“That’ll be tricky if I’m famous as the man dumped by Lizzie Hathaway.” Humor twinkled in his eyes.

“This show is going to blow your cover. What a tragedy, you’ll never be able to pretend you have a private jet as everyone and their dog will know you’re just a gold-digging grease monkey.”

A muscle flickered in Con’s cheek, and she suffered a stab of regret over her snobbish jibe, which was the kind of thing her parents would say. It felt dead wrong to insult his profession, which he obviously enjoyed and was good at.

But he’d preyed on her hopeful naiveté, exploited her trust. He deserved to feel pain.

She looked out her window. Blue sky for miles.

“You can see why I was afraid to tell you the truth,” said Con after a pause. “You’d have tossed me out on my ass.”

“As you so richly deserve.”

“But think about it. You didn’t love me because I was a big-shot engineer, or because my folks had some fancy estate on a bayou. You loved me because of the good times we had together. The dinners we cooked, the walks in the park holding hands, the long conversations about books, music, life. The kissing and hugging and…”

“The hot sex.” She hissed it between tight lips. Tried to ignore the odd tug she felt as memories forced their way back.

Con looked at her with those deep brown eyes. “None of that was fake. I had the best time of my life with you.”

Shit. He was getting to her again. How did he do that? She couldn’t deny that it was the best time of her life too, by a long, long, long way.

Then she remembered. “I thought you were someone else. Someone who loved me.”

She looked right at him. Steeled herself against his masculine profile, those dark, soulful eyes.

He held her gaze. “I wanted to be that person. Someone who could love you the way you deserve. But that part of me is…Broken.”

“That makes two of us.”

He looked at her, eyes so sad, as silence roared between them over the hum of the engines.



Con got a nasty feeling in his stomach as the pilot asked them to put their seat-belts on in preparation for landing.

They’d never left the continental United States.

All those snake-curving rivers, all that lush green beauty—he’d never seen it from the air before but he was pretty sure it was the Mississippi Delta he’d spent some seriously rotten times in. And that glimmering fat ribbon down there had to be Old Man River itself. They’d probably flown right over his “alma mater” down in Natchez. And if he wasn’t very much mistaken, right now they were coming in for a landing in…

Louisiana.

He glanced at Lizzie. Tight-lipped, she adjusted her seat-belt—she’d never unfastened it—and stared out the window.

You have good food to eat, a roof over your head, you’re helping Lizzie get back on her feet. You aimed too high and got your wings burned off. You called the tune, and now you have to pay the piper. Deal with it.

He’d been honest when he told her he couldn’t love her. When you loved people, you lost them and it ripped your heart open and bled out all the good stuff. Left nothing but the working parts.

Turned you into the kind of person who could deceive someone you cared about.

He took a deep breath and straightened his cuffs. Braced himself as the plane descended toward a sliver of tarmac shimmering in the afternoon heat. A couple of bumps and they were down.

He forced a smile. “We’re here.”

“Yes.” She didn’t glance at him. She looked nervous, stiff, her fingers fumbling with her seat-belt clasp, eyes darting about.

“We don’t have to go through with this, you know,” he said softly. “You don’t have to be a liar. We can tell them it was a mistake, that we’re not ready to get married or something.”

He held his breath and cursed himself for wanting to marry her anyway. It made no sense, but—

She turned on him, eyes wide. “I’m not a liar. I’m marrying the man of my dreams, remember?” She yanked her bag down from the overhead compartment. “You were the man of my dreams not so very long ago. I’m just playing fast and loose with chronology.”

He held out his hand to take her bag. She ignored it.

“Where are we?” he asked the middle-aged pilot who had emerged from the cabin.

“This is the Houma-Terrebonne airport in Houma, Louisiana.”

I knew it. Con managed a polite nod and glanced at Lizzie.

She stood rigid as they waited for the door to open.

What the hell were they doing here?

He shouldn’t have told her where he was from, but he’d vowed to himself he wouldn’t lie to her anymore. Wouldn’t even bend the truth. He’d turned over a new leaf, and he wasn’t going back.

Whatever you’ve got coming to you, you deserve it.

A deep, ugly voice from the past echoed in his head. Made his fingers curl into fists.

“This way, watch your step!” The cheerful pilot gestured to the stairs. Con indicated that Lizzie should go first, and she did, tossing her hair stiffly behind her shoulders.

Heat and humidity wrapped around him. A black limo idled on the stained tarmac, shining in the sun. A driver got out. “Miss Hathaway?”

“Yes.” Lizzie handed him her bag and climbed into the car with no further preliminaries. Con put his own bag in the trunk.

“Where are we going?” he asked the driver, fear snaking in his gut.

“Some place called the Dumas Plantation.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t sure why. Probably near home.

Home. What a funny word for your own personal hell.

He climbed into the car with Lizzie and closed the compartment between them and the driver.