The Pepper in the Gumbo (Men of Cane River #1)(86)

She turned slowly, still holding the cover in her hands. She could see BWK now, the strong jaw, the stubble, the curve of his mouth. All he needed was a fedora tipped low over his face and a shelf of books behind him.

BWK. Her friend. Alice’s heart squeezed in her chest. He’d come to the zydeco festival after all. He’d been in Natchitoches the whole time. He’d also known about Norma Green and how her store had been threatened. After everything I’ve done to your life here.

“You’ve always wanted a building like this one,” she said, almost to herself.

“What?” Of all the things Paul had thought she would say, apparently this wasn’t one of them.

“You want to turn it into an office building. The cable guys told me. That’s why you wanted a good security system installed, too.” Alice rubbed her eyes. She refused to cry now. “I’ve been so blind. All of these little signs I tried to ignore. Nobody is that generous without a motive. I kept telling myself that you weren’t trying to buy us all off. I tried and tried to make myself believe you were just that nice.”

He stepped toward her. “Alice, it’s true. I paid off Norma Green but―”

“You’re so clever, really. I would never have agreed to it if I’d known it was you. But as BWK you could walk in here, scope out the place, get set up, and make your move. They call that a hostile take-over, right?”

“I don’t own this building. The security system was a good idea, to keep you and your books safe. Everything is still in your name.” Paul said, frustration coloring his words.

“Your mom came to my store and asked me to leave you alone. I thought that was so sweet.” For some reason the thought of Mrs. Olivier hurt more than almost anything else. “I really liked her, you know. Maybe she was more worried about me than about you. She already knew, didn’t she? About how you bought the building?”

“Alice! I didn’t buy your building and she doesn’t know anything about BWK.” Paul ran a hand through his hair, tension in every line of his body.

“Sorry, but I just don’t believe you. It’s hard to trust someone who has lied to your face every day you’ve known them.” Alice looked down at the cover of The Duke’s Secret. “Ironic, really,” she whispered to herself.

She turned toward the door, stopping to ask one more question. “You didn’t really buy those Arthur Rackham prints for a friend, did you?”

He looked pained. “I admit it. That was a lie. I just wanted to make up for being such a jerk.”

“No, Paul. That’s called buying people off.” She picked up the Browning book. “You have one of these, right? Unless you already stripped the pages out of it and fed it through your machine.”

“Alice, wait―” Paul said but the rest of his sentence was lost when she slammed the door.

She arrived at her apartment, not having seen a single step of the way, tears running down her cheeks. She should have trusted her first instinct and known that Paul was busy buying off the town. Nobody was that generous, that thoughtful. Everyone wanted money and power. It was part of the human condition.

She stood in the middle of her living room, weeping and clutching The Seraphim and Other Poems to her chest. After losing her parents and Mr. Perrault, watching her grandmother slide into dementia, and then having her brothers drift away into their own busy lives, Alice thought the world couldn’t break her. She thought she was stronger than anything life could throw at her. She certainly thought she was safe from someone she’d only met a few weeks ago.

Everything she’d known about herself was shifting, changing. She wasn’t invincible. Her comfortable life had been completely open to anyone who wished to plunder it, and she hadn’t even known.





Chapter Twenty-Five


Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It’s just always all in the way you use it. You can’t really blame anything on the technology. It’s just the way people use it, and it always has been.—Steve Martin





“We’ve got cosplayers on the sidewalk with broadswords and metal detectors,” Andy said. He was staring out the front window.

Paul heaved himself off the couch and stood next to Andy. Tuesday had started with the undeniable influx of out-of-towners searching for Alice’s rings, hoping to win the grand prize at the opening.

“They’re scaring the locals. We should ask them to leave off the body armor until the party.” Paul went back to the couch and slouched into the cushions, reopening his book. The sun streamed through the window and it would have been ideal if he hadn’t been in such a foul mood.

“And the chainmail bikinis. Not that I really object,” Andy said.

Paul grunted and turned a page.

“Hey, Sparkly Vampire, life is still worth living.” He came and sat on the coffee table across from him. “Did her gumbo not taste like your mom’s? That stuff was spicy. I felt like my mouth was melting.”

“Gumbo’s fine.”

“Did you tell her you’ve never really wanted to live with twenty cats?”

“I like cats.”

“Wait, did she decide you’re too rich and famous to date?”

Paul said nothing.

Andy said, “I had this roommate in my freshman year of college whose girlfriend broke up with him and he decided to take it out on me. First, he just stopped talking. Then, he stopped showering and emptying the trash. Finally, he decided it was all my fault and one day, when I left my laptop unattended, he decided to download a vicious cocktail of viruses and I had to nuke the hard drive from orbit.”