Knight Errant

  “Who are you, Lainie Farrell?” Nick murmured, touching a finger to her bare shoulder.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Marilyn Pappano

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Copyright

  “Who are you, Lainie Farrell?” Nick murmured, touching a finger to her bare shoulder.

  She tried to smile. “No one you’d want to know.”

  He turned her to face him. “You’re wrong. I do want to know you. In every sense of the word.”

  It was nothing but the simple truth. He did want to know this woman. And if that meant slowly seducing her, if it meant taking his sweet time and winning her over one word, one touch, one promise—one kiss—at a time, then that was what he would do. Even if it killed him.

  It wouldn’t, of course. Succeeding would kill him. Lying naked with her, kissing her, touching her, filling her, satisfying her, finding his own satisfaction inside her...

  And it would be the sweetest death any man could ask for....

  Dear Reader,

  They say all good things must end someday, and this . month we bid a reluctant farewell to Nora Roberts’ STARS OF MITHRA trilogy. Secret Star is a fitting windup to one of this New York Times bestselling author’s most captivating miniseries ever. I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say this: You’re in for the ride of your life—and that’s after one of the best openings ever. Enjoy!

  Marilyn Pappano also wraps up a trilogy this month. Knight Errant is the last of her SOUTHERN KNIGHTS miniseries, the story of Nick Carlucci and the bodyguard he reluctantly accepts, then falls for—hook, line and sinker. Then say goodbye to MAXIMILLIAN’S CHILDREN, as reader favorite Alicia Scott offers Brandon’s Bride, the book in which secrets are revealed and the last of the Ferringers finds love. Award-winning Maggie Price is back with her second book, The Man She Almost Married, and Christa Conan checks in with One Night at a Time, a sequel to All I Need Finally, welcome new author Lauren Nichols, whose Accidental Heiress is a wonderful debut.

  And then come back next month for more of the best romantic reading around—right here at Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Eric, Ont. L2A 5X3

  Marilyn Pappano

  KNIGHT ERRANT

  Books by Marilyn Pappano

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  MARILYN PAPPANO

  After following her career navy husband around the country for sixteen years, Marilyn Pappano now makes her home high on a hill overlooking her hometown. With acreage, an orchard and the best view in the state, she’s not planning on pulling out the moving boxes ever again. When not writing, she makes apple butter from their own apples (when the thieves don’t get to them first), putts around the pond in the boat and tends a yard that she thinks would look better as a wildflower field, if the darn things would just grow there.

  You can write to Marilyn via snail mail at P.O. Box 643, Sapulpa, OK 74067-0643.

  Prologue

  Nicholas Carlucci had risked his life on a regular basis for ten years without feeling the slightest fear or hesitance. Every time he’d gone to work, every time he’d gotten into a car with his boss, every time he’d picked up the phone to carry out one order or another, there had always been some danger. It came with the territory working as the personal attorney for the top organized crime figure in Louisiana. It was part of the job, and it had never bothered him. He had never been afraid.

  Today he was.

  It was a damp New Orleans morning, and he was dressed in a jumpsuit, awaiting transfer from the correctional center that had been his home the last two weeks to the federal correctional institute in northern Alabama. His hands were cuffed in front of him, his ankles shackled with leg irons, as he shuffled along, last in the line of four prisoners bound for the U.S. Marshal’s Service van that would take them east.

  He had known from the beginning that this day would come. Still, he dreaded it. The thought of prison, of bars, electronic gates and armed guards, made his stomach queasy. Until the last two weeks, he had never been confined, had never spent even one night in jail. He didn’t know how he would handle night after night in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, with no freedom, no privacy, no dignity, being treated as something less than human, locked behind bars, too dangerous to unleash on the world. He didn’t know if he could survive.

  But it had been his choice. Smith Kendricks, the assistant U.S. attorney who was prosecuting Jimmy Falcone, had offered Nicholas a deal. He had been willing to keep Nicholas out of jail in exchange for his testimony. Nicholas had refused. He hadn’t wanted Jimmy’s lawyers to be able to accuse him of trading testimony for leniency. He hadn’t wanted his accusations against his boss to be tainted in any way in the jury’s mind, and so he had pleaded guilty to his own charges before ever setting foot in Kendricks’s courtroom. He had chosen to go to prison because he’d had no other option. It was the only way to stop Falcone. It was the only way to fulfill his need for vengeance.

  Awkwardly he climbed into the van and settled on the worn seat. It was a long drive to Talladega, and the marshals didn’t offer to loosen the handcuffs or remove the leg irons for the duration. He clasped his hands, trying unsuccessfully to relieve the pressure on his wrists, and stared out the window as the doors slammed and the driver pulled away. It was barely five o’clock on October 15, too early for the sun to burn away the wispy fog that obscured everything around them. It wasn’t fair that his last view of the city where he’d lived most of his life should be like this—dark, shrouded, mysterious. He needed something to remember, some image to keep him company for the next five years, some memory to keep him sane.

  The van drove through the quiet city and eased onto the nearly deserted interstate, traveling through a ghostly haze that cloaked all signs of life around them. It was eerie, ethereal, almost like being dead. Sometimes it felt as if he were dead. Sometimes he was convinced he had died fifteen years ago on a rainy Baton Rouge street—his soul, at least, if not his body.

  That
was why, in all those years working for Falcone, he had never been afraid. He’d had nothing to lose. The worst anyone could do was kill him, and most of the time that would have been a relief, a welcome release from a life he couldn’t bear.

  That was why he shouldn’t be afraid now. He had accomplished his goals. A conviction in Jimmy’s case was inevitable. The old man was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. He was finally going to pay for his sins.

  The sound of the road under the wheels changed. Though gray mist still surrounded them, Nicholas knew they were crossing the Lake Pontchartrain bridge. Soon they would be passing through Slidell, then across the state line into Mississippi. In thirty-eight years he had rarely traveled outside the state, had never felt any desire to. Everything he needed could be found right here in Louisiana. The only things he wanted couldn’t be found anywhere.

  Forgiveness. Peace. Rena.

  He raised both hands to rub his eyes. He didn’t want to leave Louisiana. The only places important to him were there—the shabby French Quarter neighborhood where he’d grown up, the New Orleans mansion where he’d grown old and Baton Rouge, home to his greatest joys and his greatest sorrows. The state was too much a part of him to leave it behind.

  But he was leaving it. He was being taken, manacled and shackled, four hundred miles and a world away from his home. So far that he might never find his way back, and for so long that he might be forgotten before he returned.

  His thin smile was bitter. Then again, he might not live to come back. There were more than a few residents at the correctional institute who owed a favor or two to Jimmy. If his former boss wanted him to die in prison, he would.

  But at least he would know he had won. He would know that Jimmy had been punished. He would die a satisfied man.

  Chapter 1

  The cab pulled to the curb behind a long line of parked cars, across the street and a block away from Kathy’s House, and the driver looked in the rearview mirror. “Looks like they’re having some sort of celebration today.”

  “Their first anniversary,” Lainie Farrell murmured from the back seat. The women’s center serving the New Orleans’ neighborhood known as Serenity, named for its main street, had opened a year ago to great cynicism. Not many people besides its director, Karen O’Shea, had thought it would last through the first year, but not only had they survived, they had expanded. Last spring Karen had opened the Serenity Street Alternative School in the carriage house out back, and in early summer the neighborhood’s first grocery store had opened, funded by a grant Karen had pursued. According to rumor, now she was working on tending both the residents’ spiritual needs as well as the physical, trying to entice a nondenominational church and a doctor to open their doors down here. Major accomplishments for a neighborhood that everyone had once agreed should be dozed to the ground and turned into a garbage dump.

  Lainie shifted on the seat, feeling the broken springs give underneath her. She’d been working at Kathy’s House for three weeks now. They had no use for her particular skills—actually, they remained ignorant of her particular skills—but they always needed a pair of helping hands, and she provided them as their jack of all trades. One day she might fill in for the absent receptionist, and the next she would assist the nursing staff with inoculations. Yesterday she had mowed the large yard, watered the flowers and weeded the beds, and Monday she was scheduled to chauffeur a couple of residents to various offices downtown. Although the work was occasionally more physically demanding than she was accustomed to, she enjoyed it. Her mother had always told her that helping others was good for the soul, and the past three weeks had proved it to be true, at least to some extent.

  Helping others when she wasn’t lying to them through her teeth might prove a little more soul-enriching, but she wouldn’t have the opportunity to find out. When her job here was done, she would leave Kathy’s House, Serenity and New Orleans behind.

  “They know how to party.”

  She glanced at the driver, seeing only the back of his head. Sam had done a fair imitation of a cabbie, driving like a bat out of hell while keeping up a steady stream of conversation. His mama would be proud, he’d joked, when he slid behind the wheel. All those years of college, law school and government service, and look where he’d ended up.

  She would have taken a real cab, if it’d been possible to convince a real cabbie to come here. In the last ten years, the crime spiraling out of control had turned Serenity into an armed no-man’s land. Until a year ago, even the New Orleans Police Department had drawn the line at Decatur Street, where Serenity ended a few blocks back, refusing to actually enter the neighborhood itself. Then Karen had moved in and run into trouble with the punks and the gangs. Because she was the widow of a highly respected NOPD detective who’d been best of friends with another detective, an FBI agent and the U.S. Attorney himself, that policy had soon changed. The cops made routine patrols through the neighborhood now, but the cabs still stayed away.

  “Do you think he’s there?”

  She didn’t need to ask who he was. He was her only reason for being here. He was of great interest to the NOPD, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney. Especially the U.S. Attorney. Nicholas Carlucci had single-handedly made Smith Kendricks’s case against Jimmy Falcone. Carlucci’s testimony and the evidence he’d provided against his former boss and associates were in part responsible for Kendricks’s move from an assistant’s slot into the big boss’s office over a year ago. There was a personal connection, too, some past relationship between Carlucci and Jolie Wade, an outstanding reporter who was the media expert on Jimmy Falcone and all his dirty dealings and who just happened to be Mrs. Smith Kendricks.

  “I doubt it,” she replied at last. A week after she’d started working down here, Nicholas Carlucci had come home, fresh from the federal prison system. She had been working in the yard that day, had seen him walk up the street, a duffel bag over one shoulder, and turn into O‘Shea’s, the bar across the street from Kathy’s House that was owned by Karen’s husband. Jamey O’Shea and Carlucci had been best friends when they were kids. Jamey had remained his only friend through the years he’d worked for Falcone.

  Jamey had made available one of the two empty apartments above the bar, and Carlucci had moved in. According to Karen, he rarely came out. He just holed up in there and brooded—and he had plenty to brood about. The private vendetta that had led him to betray his long-time boss and everyone he’d ever worked with had failed. For ten years he had gathered evidence, meticulously building a case against Jimmy Falcone. He had put his own life in danger, had survived at least one attempt on it and had voluntarily accepted a prison sentence of his own, all so he could see Falcone punished—though why, no one knew. Carlucci had already been locked in a cell in Talladega when the guilty verdicts came back on the old man. Carlucci had been finishing the first year of his sentence when the appeals court had overturned Falcone’s convictions.

  Though Kendricks’s case against him had been airtight, the appeals ruling hadn’t really surprised anyone. Corruption ran rampant around Jimmy Falcone. So did fear. A half-dozen other times he’d gone to trial, and a half-dozen times the same things had happened. Witnesses had disappeared or developed amnesia. Judges were coerced or bribed. Jurors were blackmailed, threats made against their families. Always; the final result was that Jimmy had gone free. Nicholas Carlucci had risked his life and spent five years in prison, and Jimmy Falcone had walked free. Good reasons for brooding.

  She had met Carlucci only once. She and Karen had gone to O’Shea’s for cold sodas after work a few days ago, and he’d been sitting in a dark corner, nursing a beer. Jamey had introduced them, and he’d given her a look, a slight nod, then turned inward again. He hadn’t looked like the dangerous man he was reputed to be. He had looked lost.

  “You’d better go before people start wondering why I’m here.” Sam turned in the seat to grin at her. “If they ask how you convinced a cabbie to come down here, tell ’em you used y
our considerable charms to persuade me.”

  She gave him a dry look as she picked up the bags on the seat beside her. “I’m not supposed to be charming. I’m supposed to be down on my luck.”

  “You certainly look the part.” His teasing faded. “If you need anything...”

  She nodded, then climbed out. She was standing on the sidewalk, shifting the two nylon duffels and the scuffed leather backpack when Sam leaned over to see her through the open window.

  “Hey, what about my tip?”

  She bent down, resting one arm on the door. “Here’s a tip—get out of here before someone comes along and decides to rob you.”

  “Let ’em try. I’ve got a gun.”

  “So do most of the punks down here. Trust me, their guns are probably bigger than yours.” She stepped back and, with a wave, he pulled away from the curb, making a tight turn in the street and heading for Decatur. Sighing heavily, she started toward the next block, Kathy’s House and O’Shea’s.

  The anniversary party looked like a big success. The yard and the big, wraparound veranda were crowded with people, and the smell of burgers charcoaling filled the air. Several dozen cars were parked all along this block and into the next, and balloons, streamers and kid-produced posters decorated the length of the wrought-iron fence out front.

  A thorough look identified a fair number of the guests for her. There were Smith and Jolie Kendricks, talking to Cassie and Reid Donovan. Cassie was one of the two teachers at the alternative school and Jolie’s younger sister. Reid was Jamey’s son from an ill-fated teenage marriage and a former member of one of Serenity’s toughest gangs. Looking at him now, no one would ever guess that he’d once been as troubled as any kid Lainie had ever seen. Oh, the things the love of a good woman—and father and stepmother—could do for a man.