Blood Ties in Chef Voleur. Mallory Kane
Cara Lynn’s soft voice wrapped around his sore heart like a velvet bag that protects a fragile crystal. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” he responded. “Just wanted some air. I got hot.”
She stepped out onto the balcony beside him. “It’s cool out here, isn’t it? Look at the river. It’s so beautiful at night.”
“Really? You like all the garish lights on the cruise ships and the bridges? They’re just light pollution.”
She slapped at his arm playfully. “No, they’re not. It’s like Christmas every night!” she cried. “They blink and twinkle just like Christmas Eve when you’re supposed to be in bed. I love it. And after it rains, the whole horizon turns into a wonderland, shining like thousands of sparklers.”
He looked at her, his mouth curving upward in a reluctant smile. “How did you get to be twenty-six years old without ever growing up?” he asked. “You’re like a child. Does nothing bad ever touch you? Do you never feel sad or angry or grief-stricken?”
To his chagrin, her smile faded and the sparks in her eyes went out. “Of course bad things happen, Jack. Of course I can be sad and angry and grief-stricken. I thought my heart would break when my best friend Kate’s little boy was kidnapped recently.” She stared out beyond him, into an unhappy distance.
After a long time, she looked back at him and her smile returned. “But he was fine, and then I met you and my world was happy again.” She threw her arms up. “And it’s a beautiful night. Want to sleep out here? I can make a pallet on the balcony floor out of quilts.”
Jack shook his head. “I need to work on some plans. You need to go to sleep. Don’t forget everything you have to do tomorrow.”
Cara Lynn nodded and kissed him on the nose.
He recoiled. He didn’t mean to. But it was a knee-jerk reaction to the closeness he felt whenever they kissed. The longing that simmered deep inside him was becoming harder and harder to control. He craved her kiss and yet he didn’t like kissing her, because he was convinced that it was the kissing and touching that were the most intimate acts, not the sex.
This balancing act he was performing was about to drive him crazy. He didn’t want her to get even the most fleeting thought that he might not love her. But at the same time, he was becoming desperate to protect himself from falling for her. He had to keep all his plates spinning in the air, because through her was the only way he was ever going to find the proof he needed to clear his grandfather’s name.
So he returned her casual kiss—pressing his lips to her cheek near her temple.
She stepped back, her eyes bright. “Actually, yes,” she said, obviously working to make her tone casual and talkative. “I do have a lot to do tomorrow, and I’m tired tonight, for some reason.” She smiled at him as she backed through the French doors. “G’night, handsome.”
“Good night, beautiful,” he muttered, but she’d already gone inside and closed the doors.
Jack stayed on the balcony for another fifteen minutes or so, staring at the bridge lights. He squinted to see if that would help him to see them as Christmas lights, but it was a waste of time. Lights were lights, not fairy tale sparkles or holiday decorations.
However, they did draw the eye, kind of like a river full of stars. For a while he stared at them, letting his thoughts wander back over the party. He’d tried to catalog each person’s name as he met them, equating them to what his granddad had said about them, as best he could remember. And while he did that, he worked on remembering who he might have seen that didn’t seem to belong.
Cara Lynn’s father, Robert, was a wheelchair-bound man who had difficulty speaking. His grandfather had told him about the older of Con Delancey’s two sons, both of whom had been young men with new families when Granddad had known them twenty-eight years ago. He’d called Robert angry and bitter, incapable of holding his whiskey or his temper.
It hurt Jack to think that Cara Lynn had been brought up in such an angry, hostile home. But from her accounting, her experience had been very different than her older brothers’.
Harte and I didn’t have the same father as Lucas, Ethan and Travis, she’d told him. By the time we were old enough to remember, he’d had the stroke. The only anger I remember was toward himself—his body. Trouble talking and walking.
He thought about his own parents and how he had grown up. As an only child, the problems he’d had with his folks stemmed from their over-protectiveness of him. Their biggest fear for him was that he spent too much time at the federal penitentiary visiting his granddad. But they had never refused to let him go.
Michael, Con’s youngest son, seemed like a paragon of normalcy compared to Robert. Jack knew from Cara Lynn about Michael’s time spent in prison, as well as his issues with his oldest son Dawson, but he seemed a likeable man, and his children seemed extraordinary.
In fact, it was a little disgusting just how likeable, intelligent and successful all the Delancey grandchildren were.
Jack wondered how they would react when they found out that Armand Broussard, who’d spent over twenty-five years in prison for their grandfather’s murder, was innocent. Jack wasn’t sure who had actually killed Con Delancey, but he knew his granddad hadn’t done it.
He glanced absently in the direction of the foyer, where his briefcase sat on the floor next to the foyer table. Inside it were letters from his grandfather, and in one of those letters his granddad had written his account of the murder and named Con Delancey’s killer, or at least his opinion of who had killed him.
Jack couldn’t even imagine how the news of the killer’s actual identity would affect the Delancey grandchildren. Probably not a lot, he decided. After all, the oldest of them had been only ten when it happened.
Cara Lynn hadn’t even been born. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect her at all. At least Jack hoped it wouldn’t. Whoa. No, he didn’t. He gave his head a mental shake.
Of course he wanted it to affect Cara Lynn. Just as much as the rest of them. He hoped it would gnaw holes in their stomachs that their family had allowed the wrong man to be convicted of murder, just like it gnawed holes in his that his grandfather had been locked up for a quarter of a century for a crime he hadn’t committed.
He went inside, grabbed his briefcase from the foyer and set it on the kitchen table, brushing aside a small strip of paper sitting near Cara Lynn’s evening bag. He picked it up, thinking to throw it in the trash. It was old, yellowed and brittle, a tiny rounded edge of the flap of an envelope, an old-fashioned lick-’em, stick-’em one.
Where had it come from? He stared at it for a few seconds, rubbing one edge between his fingers. It turned to dust. Obviously old. Looking at his dusty fingers, he felt a strong sense that there was something important about it. It had been lying near Cara Lynn’s purse. Could that mean it had something to do with the lockbox or its contents?
He stopped and repeated the thought aloud. “The lockbox,” he whispered, considering the implications. If it really was an envelope, then that meant there was a letter, didn’t it? A letter from whom? Maybe from Cara Lynn’s grandmother to her youngest granddaughter, written some time between 1986, when Con Delancey had died, and thirteen years ago when Lilibelle had died. Any paper could have turned yellow and brittle after being stored in a hot place, say an attic, for that long.
But how had Cara Lynn gotten the envelope—or at least that part of it? He looked at her purse, wondering if she’d left the envelope in there. With a furtive glance toward the back of the apartment, he released the clasp on the small rectangular bag and peered inside. No envelope.
So, if she actually had a letter that was inside the box, had she looked at it here at the table? And if she hadn’t put it back in her purse, where had she put it?
She