LITMIR.BIZ

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train that loomed down on her with an urgent wail of warning. A blow hurled her into brick pavement.

      Then…? Silence.

      Wouldn’t a train’s impact hurt more? She curled her hand on the hot bricks beneath her…and smelled the earthy, unmistakable scent of man on top of her, sheltering her. She felt the rub of coarse skin on her bare arms, of denim on her bare legs. Despite the gruff cursing over the screech of metal brakes, she felt safe.

      Literally. Someone saved her.

      Someone who weighed almost as much as a train, even so.

      Opening her eyes, Sibyl turned her head to the man who rolled off her. His size momentarily blocked the sun and blue sky. Swarthy, she noted. Angry…she’d been angering men for a long time now. This one, at least, had some cause.

      He could have died. Which meant he, at least, didn’t want her silenced.

      “What the hell were you doing?” her savior demanded, cutting through her shock. His accent held the familiar trace of Louisiana—rural Louisiana. He pulled her effortlessly upward with one huge, rough hand around hers, and she let him. “When a train’s about to hit you, you move, you don’t just stand there!”

      Sibyl barely reached his broad chest, even in her cowboy boots. The muscles of his shoulders bulged under his T-shirt; the muscles of his thick arms she could see for herself under sun-browned skin. Substantial, she thought. Blue collar, not white collar. A two-day beard shadowed his jaw. Primitive. And he'd risked his life for her.

      A strange sensation filled her. After a decade alone, she searched for a label, then surprised herself. Trust? She trusted him. Completely.

      “Oh, thank God!” Arden Leigh put on a surprisingly good show of concern. So did her beau and the blond man, with their prep school postures and thrift store clothes. The one man who’d dressed Comitatus-wealthy had vanished. Safe. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”

      “I guess you just don’t have the way with women that Trace does.” The blond man laughed. Sibyl’s hero grunted casual disgust, but she didn’t hear his reply.

      They were together. This man—Trace—who seemed like the anti-Comitatus, knew people she’d assumed were her enemies. And yet, as the others crowded around her, Sibyl instinctively pressed back against her savior’s solid body. Fear, she understood. It shouldn’t stop her from finding out more about these not-quite-Comitatus types…or their friend. If she could trust him.

      Needing time, needing proof, Sibyl rolled her eyes upward and dropped into a feigned faint, like some damsel in distress.

      Her hero caught her, swept her into his hard arms, held her close to his broad, warm chest—and growled an unheroic, “Crap.”

      Sibyl had no intention of analyzing the feelings that swept past her wall of reason, this time.

      Some truths were just too dangerous to consider.

      Chapter 1

      “Doubt separates people…it is a sword that kills.”

      —Buddha

      New Orleans, three months later

      Trace Beaudry didn’t consider himself a big thinker.

      Big? Hell, yeah.

      A thinker? Not so much.

      But even he couldn’t ignore the significance of finally entering his ancestors’ once grand, now ruined, home. This house could have been his inheritance if he’d been smarter, classier, better. He’d tried. He’d failed. Now the house sat empty and rotting.

      And here Trace stood, the bastard end of his genetic line—hefting the sledgehammer that would take it down.

      Even through the bandanna across his face, even with a fresh stick of peppermint gum in his mouth, the fancy “bungalow” stank as thick and awful as any other New Orleans flood house. It had stood empty for years before Hurricane Katrina turned even nice areas of New Orleans into Southern Lake Pontchartrain. But what really trashed the building were the months it sat untouched, afterward. The Judge—Trace couldn’t think of the man he’d first met on his fifteenth birthday as a father—had apparently fought the city’s attempts to force his hand. For once, the Judge lost.

      And now his illegitimate son crossed the threshold at last.

      Dirt and flyspecks darkened lead cathedral windows. Deadly black mold laced across layers of brittle wallpaper that sagged like bunting from an equally grimy ceiling. Inches of bug-infested filth carpeted both the floor and the museum-quality furniture strewn about by forgotten floodwaters. A ceiling fan’s blades wilted like an upside-down flower, pulled downward as those waters had receded, and then dried like that, as much as anything ever dried in Louisiana. A rat scurried up the curved, wrought-iron staircase.

      Trace knuckled his hard hat back as he took it all in—and snorted.

      “Eh?” asked Alain, who’d grown up in the same trailer park as Trace. He ran the construction crew hired for this gut job. He’d bid extra low, just to see this little piece of Trace’s fancy-schmancy history.

      Trace shook his head, at a loss for the right words. Irony? Symbolism? Karma? He didn’t want to call on the botched education that his embarrassing attempt at legitimacy, at life as a LaSalle, had bought him. He’d tried living in his father’s world. He’d failed. End of story. Now he settled for, “Life’s funny, huh?”

      Then the six-man team set about knocking down every bit of the house except the frame and foundation. They started by emptying it, piling up mounds of trash and recyclables at the distant, weed-shrouded curb. Then they shoveled muck off the floor into wheelbarrows to cart outside. Only later could they break down the walls, pull out the insulation and leave only the bungalow’s frame to be rebuilt. Trace liked the honest, hard work of it—no polish or sophistication required. No stupid rituals or secrecy, either. He liked sweating and lifting and pushing his fighter’s body to the limit without hurting anyone. He liked not thinking.

      This was why he’d left his friends—fellow outcasts from their fathers’ world of privilege and power—back in Dallas, once they started making noises about fixing that world. They thought too much.

      Trace was a man of action.

      “So much for curb appeal, eh?” Alain joked from the street, hours later. The once-white wall had grayed to the waterline, with a spray-painted cross tagging the date of its inspection. Its ancient oak and magnolia trees stood dead, killed by poisons in the long-standing water as much as by drowning. But at least outside, in the humid Louisiana November, they could all breathe and switch to fresh gum.

      “Yeah,” snorted Trace, strangely dissatisfied whenever he stopped for too long. “We should hire out as decorators, huh?”

      Which is when Bubba called them to “come see.” So they pulled their bandannas back up like Old West bank robbers and headed back in.

      Bubba had torn big swaths of moldy wallpaper off the foyer wall.

      “Smart,” mocked Trace, of the extra dust. “The air wasn’t nasty enough.”

      Then he saw the picture—the fresco, he labeled it in a brief echo from his attempt at higher education—that Bubba had uncovered.

      That weight he’d first felt in his chest this morning, that searching for words? It tripled. The plaster painting was ruined, darkened with mold here, torn away with the paper there. But enough remained for them to make out the basics. It showed a field of battle, with banners and horses and knights in armor, some upright, some dead. They all wore swords. One, standing, wore a crown—the king. Another, dead or dying beside the king, had some kind of drinking horn lying near him. Maybe the king had poisoned him. Trace wouldn’t put that past his father’s ancestors.

      God forbid rich folks paint the foot soldiers on their wall, right? Or the peasants who shined their armor and cleaned up after their horses. Or, for that matter, their

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