Wild Fever Read online

  “Hey,” Sean Hebert said as he leaned down. He pushed back the Stetson on his head full of blond hair as the sun glinted off the Sheriff’s badge on his chest. “Just wanted to let you know things will be moving along soon.”

  “Thanks.” Olivia tried to raise her window in the hopes that she could get away without him realizing who she was.

  Unfortunately, he put his hand on the window and pulled down his sunglasses. “You look familiar.” He studied her a moment with his dark eyes, and then suddenly smiled. “I’ll be damned. Olivia Breaux has come back to Lyons Point.”

  “Hi, Sean. What’s in the road?” she asked, hoping he would forget any questions he might have. Sean had always been good looking, the guy every girl wanted to date in school – her included for awhile.

  “Gator,” he responded with a wide smile. “You know how they like to cross this area to the other canal. So, what’s brought you back home? We figured never to see you again? Are you married?”

  Here was one question she could answer. “Nope. Not married.”

  “Want to go out while you’re in town?”

  She pushed her sunglasses back up and forced a smile. “I need to see to a few things.”

  “Of course, of course,” he hurried to say. “I know where to find you.”

  “Alrighty then.” She rolled up her window when she saw the tail of the gator disappear over the other side of the road. The cars began to fire up and drive away.

  Olivia, however, couldn’t move her car since Sean was still leaning against it. He kept smiling as he straightened and patted her hood.

  She drove away hoping every encounter would go as smoothly, if not as strangely, but she knew there were old friends who hadn’t forgiven her for leaving. Friends who would love to rub it in if they knew why she had returned.

  Her heart was still hammering by the time she turned off the main road onto a dirt road. It was just as bumpy as she remembered, which, oddly, brought a smile to her face.

  Cows and horses grazed peacefully in the pasture on her left, while on her right, a new house was being built. How she missed the rice fields. Strange, since she had thought she hated them.

  She had to slow the car to a crawl as some parts had slag while others had so many holes she had nowhere to drive. It was thirty minutes later when she spotted the mailbox with the immaculate flowerbed around it.

  “I’m home,” she murmured.

  Olivia turned in the drive and found herself grinning wildly when she saw the old wooden house on stilts, just as it had been nine years earlier.

  She parked her car behind her grandmother’s old Chevy truck and turned off the ignition as she sat there looking around. She could almost pretend that it was the day after graduation, and that the last years hadn’t happened.

  Sitting in a parked car without AC in the Louisiana sun was a great way to get heat stroke. Olivia opened the car door and stood.

  The first thing that hit her was the humidity. The second was the smell of the bayou, and then her grandmother’s cooking. There was nothing that could match it.

  “It’s about time you arrived. Now get on up here,” her grandmother said with a wave of her wooden spoon from the steps of the porch.

  Olivia let out a laugh. She might have spoken to her grandmother every week, but she hadn’t seen her in years. Her silver hair was pulled back in a loose bun, and she wore her favorite rose embroidered apron.

  She didn’t hesitate another second in grabbing her purse and one of her bags before running up the steps. Olivia paused long enough to look over the bayou and the cypress trees.

  With a shake of her head to dispel memories, she turned and opened the door to the screened porch. She didn’t dwell, because there would be enough time for that later.

  Olivia hurried into the house. As soon as she entered, all her cares dropped away just as they used to. She shut the door and dropped her bag and purse seconds before she was enveloped in a hug.

  “It’s so good to have you home, sha,” her grandmother whispered brokenly.

  Olivia felt tears threaten her own eyes as she returned the embrace. “It’s good to be home.”

  She hadn’t realized just how much she had needed her grandmother until that moment. It wasn’t just her words, but the woman herself. Her house had become Olivia’s home after her parent’s death when she was seventeen. As horrific as that was, it was as if nothing dared to come near her as long as she was in that house.

  Everything changed the day she left Louisiana.

  “Now, none of that,” her grandmother said and stepped back to look at her. “You need some rest and food. You’re too skinny, sha.”

  “Only you would say that, Maman.”

  Her grandmother looked at her with eyes the same black as her own, before she turned to the stove and began to stir something in the pot. “Then it’s a good thing you’ve come home.”

  “Yum. I smell gumbo.”

  “Sha, as if I’d let you come home and not greet you with proper food.”

  Olivia opened the fridge and pulled out a Coke. She sipped the beverage as her gaze caught the loaves of fresh bread on the counter that her grandmother baked every day.

  “Anything interesting happen on your drive in?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Sean Hebert was a Sheriff’s deputy?”

  Her grandmother’s sly smile said it all. “So, you ran into Sean. He always asks about you when he comes out here.”

  “He comes out here?” Olivia asked in shock.

  Her grandmother tasted the gumbo and put another pinch of pepper in. “He checks in on me from time to time. He’s not the only one who asks about you. Now, what had you running into him?”

  “Gator in the road.”

  “Ah,” she said with a nod of her silver head. “That does tend to stop traffic.”

  Olivia took another drink as she debated whether or not to tell her grandmother the rest. “Maman, he asked me out.”

  “Good, good,” she said with her back to Olivia.

  She pulled out a chair at the table and sat. She knew better than to get in the middle of her grandmother and cooking. “Is that all you have to say?”

  “You could do worse. Sean has made a name for himself in the parish. He’s respected, and he’ll be sheriff one day.”

  Olivia just couldn’t see herself as the wife to a cop in any form. “I think it might be too soon.”

  Her grandmother placed the wooden spoon down too gently. When she turned, Olivia saw that determined glint in her dark eyes, the one that said she was about to get an earful.

  “I hate what happened to you, my girl, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy you’re home. That man you had in Dallas is no man. If he was, he would have admitted his guilt instead of letting you take the blame and getting fired for his actions.”

  Olivia knew she was right, but it was still hard to accept. Calvin had been all she wanted. He was successful, gorgeous, and well off. He treated her as if she were a princess.

  Right up until funds went missing from their work, and he placed the blame on her. It didn’t matter how much she professed her innocence, Holbert and Dobbs Incorporated believed him – a man who had been with the company for ten years – over her.

  To make matters worse, that’s also when she learned he was married. With three kids.

  It was as if the kicks wouldn’t stop coming. The final jolt had been when she ran out of money and had the hard choice of paying for her car or her apartment.

  Olivia had no alternative but to pack up her belongings and return to the only place she could to lick her wounds and try to piece her life back together.

  “It wasn’t his mistake, Maman,” Olivia said. “I think he targeted me because I worked in accounting. He stole those funds, and put the blame on me. Everything he did was done through my computer, at my desk, with my access code. Who else could the company blame?”

  Her grandmother rubbed her hand up and down Olivia’s arm. “Are
they still going to press charges?”

  “Oh yeah. That’s a given. I may go to jail, Maman.”

  “Not going to happen, sha. Now get some bowls. The rice is done and so is the gumbo.”

  Olivia let her grandmother take over with talk of her flower garden, town gossip, and inordinate things that kept her listening as she ate.

  It wasn’t until they were sitting on the porch drinking wine with the crickets singing and the smell of gardenias that Olivia realized her grandmother had gone out of her way not to mention a single person Olivia knew in Lyons Point.

  “You don’t have to protect me, Maman.”

  Her grandmother snorted, not even pretending not to know what she was referring to. “Of course I do, my girl. It’s what I’ve done since the moment you came into the world.”

  “I hired an attorney,” Olivia said. She didn’t want to bring it up again, but she wanted her grandmother to know that she was going to fight. “I told her everything. I gave her texts, emails, and even phone messages.”

  “Is she capable?”

  “I wouldn’t have hired her if she wasn’t. She has roots in Louisiana as well. Her father’s family is from near Lafayette.”

  That made her grandmother smile. “Do you think she can get the charges dropped?”

  “If you met her, you’d understand why I chose her. She’s like a pitbull in the lawyer world.”

  Her grandmother threw back her head and laughed. “We’ll have to invite her down. I’d like to meet her. What’s her name?”

  “Ava Ledet.”

  Her grandmother nodded and sipped her wine. “I want Calvin’s balls in a bag.”

  That caused Olivia to start laughing so hard she spit out her wine. Leave it to her Maman to say something like that. “I think Ava will get them for you.”

  They sat on the porch for another twenty minutes in silence until her grandmother rose and kissed her on the cheek before going off to bed.

  Olivia couldn’t go yet. It had been too draining of a day to try and turn everything off and find sleep. She pulled her legs up against her in the chair, and thought back to nights in high school when she and her friends would sit on her porch late into the night.

  There had always been a plethora of food for her and her friends to choose from. Her grandmother loved to have a house full of people to feed. Olivia hadn’t comprehended until now just how lonely her grandmother must have been to go from a houseful to no one in a day.

  Olivia hadn’t been thinking about her grandmother the night she left. She had been thinking of herself. Just as she hadn’t been thinking about her job when she was busy kissing Calvin or running his errands while he went in and stole from the company.

  She was paying for her sins now, and rightly so. After all her grandmother had done in taking her in and raising her, Olivia hadn’t done well by her.

  That was going to change. Olivia might have wanted out of this small town, but she had a chance to start again here. She wasn’t going to turn her nose up at it now.

  She stood and walked to the door of the porch. The screen kept the mosquitos out so that they could enjoy the night, but Olivia wanted a closer look at the water.

  The moonlight had always been so pretty on the water. Not even that could compare to the way the beams shown through the moss hanging from the cypress trees.

  Olivia walked through the door and down the steps to the dock. It was narrow and long, and showed evidence of several boards having been replaced recently. She walked to the end and looked down at the still water.

  The bayous scared some people, but for her, it was what she had grown up with. There were terrors out there like gators and cottonmouths, but there was beauty as well.

  Olivia didn’t know how long she stood there before she realized the crickets had ceased. Suddenly the hair on the back of her neck lifted, and she knew she was being watched. It was a predatory, threatening feeling.

  And it scared the hell out of her.

  She backed up a step as her gaze skimmed the area looking for what it could be. There were plenty of shadows for it to hide in, which didn’t make her feel any better.

  The low rumble of a growl made her heart hammer against her ribs. That wasn’t any animal she knew. Olivia spun around and ran up the dock. She tripped on the steps, slamming her shin against a board as she reached for the handle to the door. Even then she didn’t stop until she was inside the house with the door locked.

  She backed away from the door, waiting for something to bust through. Seconds turned to minutes, but nothing happened. She checked the locks on the doors, but left the lights on as she walked to her room in a vain effort to find sleep.

  ~ ~ ~

  Vincent was closing in on the creature when he caught sight of Olivia Breaux. He was so shocked to see her standing at the edge of the water with her hair loose, and her long legs bared by her shorts that he was struck senseless by her beauty, struck dumb at having her so close again.

  She had always had that affect on him. It was just one reason he had kept his distance from her. It hadn’t helped that he wanted nothing more than to kiss her.

  Vincent forced his gaze away, but the creature was gone before he realized it. He let out a silent curse as he once more looked at Olivia.

  He was afraid the beast had found its next target.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was the smell of the bread baking that woke Olivia. She rolled onto her back and yawned as she stretched her arms over her head. It had taken her hours to fall asleep after that eerie feeling the night before.

  She wanted to laugh it off, to toss it aside as her imagination, but she couldn’t. The fear had gripped her tightly, and hadn’t loosened its hold until the wee hours of the morning.

  Olivia blew out a breath and looked to the window where the golden rays of the morning sun filtered through the blinds. The soft whirl of her ceiling fan mixed with the sounds from the kitchen, and her grandmother’s humming took her back to her childhood in an instant.

  If only she could go back and relive the night she had left. How different her life would be if she had stayed. Hindsight, however, was 20/20, and there was no use thinking of the could’ve-beens or should’ve-beens.

  Olivia threw off the covers and rose to pad into the bathroom. She walked out fifteen minutes later showered, dressed, and ready to face the day. Whatever it might bring.

  “Oh, good. You’re up,” her grandmother said as she flashed a smile before she turned to the stove and the eggs she was scrambling. “Bacon is on the table.”

  Olivia grabbed a piece and took a bite. She reached for the bread knife and began to slice a loaf that was cooling. “What’s the plan for today?”

  “I need to head to Grace’s. I’ve baked her some bread, and I’ll be taking some gumbo over to her as well.”

  Grace had been her grandmother’s best friend since they were young girls. Ever since Grace fell and broke her hip three years earlier, her grandmother had been bringing food and doing some cleaning.

  “There are some items I need from town. Want to pick them up for me?” her grandmother asked.

  Olivia stilled. She knew exactly what her grandmother was doing – forcing her to face the world and the small town she wanted to hide from.

  She set down the knife and turned. “Maman, I-”

  “You’re a Breaux,” she interrupted and dumped the eggs into a bowl that she set on the table. She placed her hands on the back of the chair and regarded Olivia. “We’re fighters, Olivia, even when we don’t think we can.”

  Those words stayed with Olivia long after breakfast was over and her grandmother had departed for her visit with Grace. Olivia left the list of groceries on the table, trying her best to ignore it as she cleaned the kitchen.

  She finished drying the last of the dishes and put them away, only to turn and see that damn list. Olivia smoothed the dishtowel on the edge of the sink.

  With a frustrated growl, she grabbed the list and her purse before
she headed to her car. The entire drive to the small grocer, Olivia kept praying that she could get in and out without anyone recognizing her. It had been almost a decade since she had left. Surely she had changed enough that people wouldn’t know her.

  To prove just how awful her luck was, Olivia had no sooner walked into the store than she literally ran into Sean. “I’m so sorry,” she hurried to say.

  “I’m not.” His smile was too bright, alerting her that their bumping into each other hadn’t been an accident. “How does it feel to be back home?”

  Olivia licked her lips and slid past him to grab a basket and loop it over her arm. “It’s been good.”

  “I’m glad you’re settling in nicely.”

  She pursed her lips trying to think of a way to get him to leave. When nothing came to mind, she walked to the produce section and stood looking at the bell peppers.

  “I could throw a party and invite everyone over.”

  Olivia began to feel sick. No doubt Sean had been telling everyone – and he knew everyone – that she was back. So much for her hiding out and taking baby steps back into the world she had left behind.

  “Sean, I think someone just hit your car,” came a deep voice behind Olivia.

  She remained staring at the bell peppers. It had been the worst idea to stop here. She should have gone into Crowley. At least there she had a chance to get in and out without being stopped.

  “He’s gone. You can let go of the pepper now.”

  Olivia looked down at her hand to find she had picked up one of the bell peppers and squeezed it so hard her fingers had punctured the skin. Dear God, what was wrong with her?

  “Thank you,” she said. She turned around and looked into bright blue eyes. There was only one family she knew to have eyes that distinct color – the Chiassons.

  Excitement coursed through her as she thought it was Vincent. Even though the man had the same dark hair, and the same Chiasson good looks, he wasn’t Vincent.

  Her disappointment was palpable.

  He smiled softly as his gaze held hers. “Olivia, right? I’m Beau Chiasson.”