His answer stung, though she told herself it shouldn't have. He was a rake, a womanizer. He'd probably slept with half the women in the parish. It shouldn't have meant anything to her. She pushed the reaction aside and tried to decipher what he might be feeling in the aftermath of the death of a woman he had known-intimately-whose parents were friends of his.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Be sorry for Annie, not for me. I'm alive." For all the good he did anybody. His mouth twisted at the irony, and he reached for his whiskey to numb the ache. The liquor went down, as smooth as silk, to pool in his belly and send a familiar warmth radiating outward.

"I'm sorry for T-Grace and Ovide," Laurel said, recalling too vividly the scene that had been played out on the gallery, remembering too clearly the desperation in T-Grace as she begged for help. "They asked me to be their liaison with the sheriff."

"And you agreed."

"Yes."

"Naturally."

Even though he settled his fingers on the piano keys once again and started to play something slow and bluesy, she caught the caustic note in his voice. Slowly she straightened away from him, her gaze hard and direct. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Jack didn't bother looking at her. He could feel the defensiveness going up like a wall around her, just as he had intended. "It means you're a good little girl, doin' the right thing."

"They're friends," she said shortly. "They asked me for a favor. It seemed a small enough thing to give them in light of the fact that their daughter has just been murdered. They don't understand police procedure. They don't trust the system to work for them."

"Imagine that," he drawled sardonically.

Laurel bristled. "You know, I'm sick of your smart-ass remarks, Jack. It may not be perfect, but it's the only system we've got. It's up to people like you and me to make it work."

He went on playing, wishing it would release some of the tension that was coiling inside him like a copperhead about to strike. He was feeling mean. He was feeling too sensitive, as if all his nerve endings had been exposed and rubbed raw. His strongest instinct was not to let anyone near. He wanted to draw himself into that small, dark room inside himself, as he had when he'd been a boy waiting for the thundering hand of Blackie Boudreaux to come down on him. He wanted to go to that place where no one could touch him, no one could hurt him, where he couldn't feel and didn't care.

But Laurel Chandler sat beside him, prim and properly affronted by his lack of faith in her precious system of jurisprudence. Damn her.

"It didn't work very well for you, did it, 'tite chatte?"

The slyness in his tone cut Laurel to the quick, and pain flowed through her at the thought that she had shared that experience with him-had trusted him with that fragile, damaged part of her heart-only to have him use it against her.

"Fine," she said. She hit the keyboard with her fists, pounding out a discordant tangle of notes as she rose from the bench. "The system sucks. So we should just throw our hands up and let crime run rampant?" She paced behind him, trying to channel the hurt into anger. An argument was something she could grasp and wield with skill. More productive than grief or fear. "That would be great, Jack. Then we could all do what you do-sit around and do nothing while our society comes apart at the seams."

He arched a brow as he swung around on the bench to face her. Stretching out with deceptive laziness, he leaned his elbows back against the piano and crossed his ankles in front of him. "What?" he demanded belligerently. "You think I should do somethin'? What would you have me do? Wave a wand and bring Annie back to life? I can't. Shall I look into a crystal ball and see who killed her? I can't do that, either. See, sugar? It's like my old man always told me-I'm just fuckin' good for nothin'."

"How convenient for you," Laurel snapped, ignoring the softer part of her heart that ached for Jack the abused child. She was too angry with him to feel sympathy. He reminded her too much of Savannah, wallowing in the polluted waters of her past instead of picking herself up and doing something positive with her life. "You don't have to take responsibility for anything. You don't have to aspire to anything. If the going gets tough, you can always turn around and blame your past. You don't have time to care about anyone else because you're so damn busy feeling sorry for yourself!"

He was on his feet and towering over her so quickly, she barely had time to suck in a breath of surprise. Common sense demanded she back away from him, the way she might back away from a panther encountered in the wild. But a deeper instinct made her hold her ground, and a tense, itchy silence descended between them.

He stared at her long and hard, his chest heaving with temper, his jaw set so rigid that the scar on his chin glinted like silver in the faint light. But the fire that had flared in his dark eyes died slowly, leaving that age-old abject weariness. The corners of his mouth cut upward in a bitter imitation of a smile.

"You don' want me to care about you, sugar," he murmured. "Everybody I ever cared about is dead." He raised a hand to caress her cheek, and she started at his touch. "See? I told you I'd be bad for you. You should have listened."

She batted his hand away and took a step back. He was trying to frighten her. The same man who had only hours ago wooed her with his wicked smile-No. Not the same man.

Angry with his chameleon act, angry that he would try to scare her, angry with herself for giving a damn what he did, she gave him one last look of defiance. "Play your games with someone else, Jack. I'm going home."

He watched her hop down off the stage and head for the front door, telling himself to let her go, telling himself he was better off not caring that she would walk out into the night alone. But he couldn't quite pull the door shut on that little room. He couldn't quite get the images out of his mind-Annie… Evie… Lost forever. The need to protect Laurel pulled against the need to protect himself, stretching his nerves as taut as violin strings, and he trembled with the tension of it, waiting for the thread to simply snap.

Laurel kept on walking, her head up, her slim shoulders squared, her tiny feet barely making a sound as her sneakers struck the floor. So small, so fragile, so fiercely determined to take on every rotten thing the world tossed her way.

Swearing under his breath, Jack jumped off the stage. He caught up with her in half a dozen strides and grabbed hold of her arm, halting her progress toward the door.

"I'll walk you."

"Why?" she demanded, glaring up at him. "What are you going to do, Jack? Protect me? You just finished telling me how dangerous you are. Why would I go with you, anyway? You're drunk."

His hand tightened on her arm. His temper boiled hotter, harder as the warring factions within him fought between the urge to throttle her or crush her against him.

"I'm not that drunk," he growled. "I said, I'll walk you home."

"And I asked you why," Laurel said, too angry to be cautious. A small, rational corner of her brain told her she was taunting a tiger, but she didn't listen. Something inside her was pushing her to recklessness. She didn't understand it, wasn't sure she wanted to understand it, but she couldn't seem to stop it. "Why?"

His nostrils flared. His brows pulled ominously low over his eyes. He looked like the devil glaring down at her, the hard planes and angles of his lean face cast in sharp relief. "Don't be stupid. Women are gettin' killed. Do you wanna be one of them?"

"What's it to you one way or the other, Jack?" she returned. "You don't care about anyone but yourself. After they find my body, you can drink a quart of Wild Turkey in my honor and tell people you slept with me a couple of times."

The leash on his control stretched to the breaking point. Rage rumbled through him like thunder, shaking him, swelling in his chest, roaring in his ears. He gripped her shoulders with both hands, trembling with the need to shake her like a rag doll and hurl her aside, out of his life.

"Damn you," he snarled, not even sure whether he was cursing Laurel or himself. "If you wanted an idealist, you shoulda gone shoppin' in a better neighborhood, sugar. I'm a bastard and a user and a cynic-"

"Why do you want to walk me home, Jack?" she demanded, matching him glare for glare.

"Because I've got enough corpses on my conscience to last me!"

A thick, heavy silence hung in the air around them as their gazes held. Jack's expression was fierce, wild. His fingers bit into the tender flesh of Laurel 's upper arms. She had the feeling that he could have snapped her in half like a twig. She had never been quite so aware of the differences in their sizes, had never felt quite so physically fragile.

"I've got enough corpses on my conscience to last me…" The words sank into her brain one by one to be scrutinized, and a chill ran through her.

She stared at him for a long moment, watching him struggle to rein back the beast that was his temper. As his breathing slowed, she forced herself to relax by degrees, and breathed easier herself as his grip loosened.

"Would you care to elaborate on that statement?" she asked softly.

Very deliberately he lifted his hands from her shoulders and turned away from her. "No, I wouldn't," he said, and he headed for the door.

They walked the dark, deserted streets to Belle Rivière in silence, not speaking, not touching. Jack had closed himself off entirely. Laurel watched him surreptitiously, wondering, the wheels of her lawyer's mind whirling as she scrambled for a logical explanation, her heart swearing there had to be one.

He walked her to the courtyard and held the gate open for her. She stepped into the garden, trying desperately to think of something to say that would somehow ease the tension between them, but when she turned to say it, he was gone. Without a word he had slipped into the black shadows of the trees that stood between Belle Rivière and L'Amour.

Time slipped by unnoticed as she stood with her hands wrapped around the iron bars of the gate, staring toward the brick house that stood on the bank of the bayou. No lights came on in the windows.