Knight Errant Page 3

  In the ten years he’d worked for Falcone, Nicholas had never been invisible. Wherever he’d gone, he’d been treated like a man with money and power. Few people, if any, had cared that the money came from criminal enterprises, that the power extended from a major crime boss.

  He wished he could be invisible now.

  Across the room Lainie shrugged. “You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened in the neighborhood in months.”

  He wondered if she found him interesting. Her behavior downstairs this afternoon would suggest no, but here she was. She could have delivered Jamey’s message and left again, but she seemed comfortable leaning against the doorjamb and talking—as long as they weren’t talking about her.

  “Where did you live before you came here?” he asked, testing the theory. The shadows that crossed her face proved him right.

  She shifted her body so that her hands were tucked between the wood and her back and moved her gaze to a stained spot on the floor. “Georgia.”

  “What city?”

  Another shift, an uneasy look, an unsteady voice. “I grew up in Savannah,” she said at last, “but I’ve lived the last five years in Atlanta.”

  So awkward. Did she have something to hide, or was he simply stirring up memories that she didn’t want to face? He’d had plenty of those of his own. For ten years he’d kept the most important ones locked tightly away, unable to live with the guilt and the sorrow, taking them out only when necessary to shore up the hatred that had kept him going. In prison, once he’d been locked away, he had found it impossible to keep the memories at bay. They had haunted him, tormented him and, eventually, come to comfort him.

  “So what do you do over there?” With a backward jerk of his head, he gestured to the house across the street. When Jamey had written a year ago about his marriage, he had mentioned the women’s center. Nicholas had figured it was doomed to fail. The residents’ resistance to outside interference, combined with the usual vandalism and threats, would surely leave the place boarded up or burned down before it even got open and running, he had thought. Obviously he had been wrong.

  “A little bit of everything. I fill in wherever they need help.” The edginess gone, she gave him another of those long looks. “If you don’t have any plans for the immediate future, they could use a little help from you.”

  Nicholas Carlucci doing volunteer work at a women’s center in his old neighborhood, like some sort of do-gooder, someone with a conscience. Now there was an unlikely image. “I’m no gardener or handyman.”

  “Good, because those are my jobs. But you are a lawyer .”

  “A lawyer convicted of multiple felonies. A disbarred lawyer.”

  “They disbarred you. They didn’t magically erase your knowledge and understanding of the law. They can’t stop you from offering advice for free.”

  His smile was cynical. “Look at my life. Look at the mess I’ve made. Would you take advice from me?”

  “They say you were one of the best lawyers in the state. There are clients at the center who need better help than they can get through legal aid but don’t have the money to pay for it.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  The signs of her annoyance were subtle, but he recognized them—the thinning of her lips, the narrowing of her eyes, the slight cooling of her voice. “Think about it. Maybe you’ll change your mind.” With that she pushed away from the door, walked out and closed it quietly behind her. A moment later he heard her own door across the hall close.

  Change his mind? He didn’t think so. He had known from the moment he’d accepted the first case Jimmy Falcone had brought to him that his legal career would be short. Even if he got his license to practice law reinstated, who would want a lawyer who’d gone from representing the bad guys to being one himself and then betraying them? Decent people wouldn’t want his help, and he had no desire to help guilty people. He’d done enough of that with Falcone.

  Leaving the window, he went into the bedroom, where he’d spent the better part of the past two weeks, like the past five years, day after day lying on his back, staring at nothing. By now he recognized every water stain above and every lump in the mattress underneath. Thanks to the open windows, he knew the routines of the street by sound alone. He heard the voices of kids going to school, the footsteps of parents going to work, the sound of running water as the flowers in front of O’Shea’s were watered, the doors opening downstairs and the slow scrape of the chair as the first customer seated himself.

  Now he would have new sounds to listen for. The water running in the bathroom next door. The light tread of footsteps on the stairs. The opening and closing of her door. The sounds of living of Lainie Farrell, with her sleek hair, pouty mouth, nice body and pretty hazel eyes. Right now she was just an intrusion, but she held the potential to become so much more. An annoyance, a threat, a temptation, a danger, a regret.

  He sat down on the bed near the night table, and the springs squeaked. The table that wobbled on uneven legs held only two items: an alarm clock that had been slashing the wrong time—12:00—since he’d moved in and a photograph of his first temptation, his first regret. It had been taken on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge on a sunny fall day. The color was faded, the clothing dated, but it was his most prized possession. It was the only photograph he had, dated and signed on the back. Love, Rena. It had gone with him everywhere, from one apartment to the next in Baton Rouge, from the third-floor walk-up above his first storefront office to a fancier place on the edge of the Garden District to Jimmy’s bona fide Southern mansion across the river. To the prison in Alabama and now here, only a few blocks from where he’d started out forty-three long, hard years ago.

  Looking at her now with the distance of age, he could admit that she wasn’t a great beauty, though he’d thought so at the time. Her hair was brown, long and straight, her nose freckled, her mouth always smiling, her hazel eyes always laughing. She had saved his life the day she had walked up to him on campus and introduced herself. He’d been one frustration away from taking the next bus back to Serenity and living out his life as a failure, but Rena had stopped him. Within a month they were living together. After another month he had asked her to many him. When he finished law school, she had promised, and she had dropped out of her own classes to make it an easier goal. She had worked two jobs and paid the bills, and he had taken the heaviest class loads the school allowed and studied every spare minute of the day.

  But it had been for nothing. He had finished law school, but there’d been no marriage, no kids, no home, no future. By then Rena had been dead for three years, and it had been Nicholas’s fault. His and Jimmy Falcone’s.

  He picked up the picture, holding it as if it were a fragile object that might disintegrate at his touch. In the intervening years he had aged, of course, from time to time noticing another gray hair popping up where before there’d been only black. He was more than twice her age now, old enough to have a daughter her age, but she had been captured in time, forever young, forever beautiful, forever and always the only person who had ever mattered.

  Everything he’d done in the last half of his life had been for her. All of it before her death had pleased her. Everything after would have shamed her. In losing her, he had become a man who no longer deserved her. He had dishonored her memory. He had dishonored himself.

  And he would do it all over again given the chance.

  Lainie slept in late Sunday morning, making up for the long hours she’d stood in darkness at the window last night and stared out over the street. She had watched lights go off in houses and apartment buildings down the block and had seen the kids come out like cockroaches in the night—the teenagers and the young adults whose age qualified them for that description if their actions didn’t. A year ago they had congregated in the park, trashing it every night for Karen and her converts to put right every morning, but finally they’d admitted defeat. Now they gathered in the street or on the sidewalks. They had been
quiet last night, with none of the loud music, raucous laughter or outbreaks of trouble that had once disturbed everyone’s sleep, but they had bothered her all the same.

  Working on Serenity had been one thing. She’d been like most of the staff at the center—a nine-to-five soldier. They did their good during daylight hours, coming after the sun was well above the horizon and leaving again before it set, going to their safe homes in their safe neighborhoods and putting Serenity and its problems out of their minds until their next daylight foray.

  Living here was totally different. Though circumstances had improved since Ryan Morgan’s death last year, there was little safety to be found on Serenity. Those punks on the street last night had chosen to drink beer and talk. They could just as easily have decided to open fire on the darkened apartments around them. They’d done it in the past. There wasn’t a person on Serenity who didn’t know someone who had died an early and violent death.

  Of course, she knew someone, too, and she’d lived in a neighborhood that shared much more in common with New Orleans’ prestigious Garden District than Serenity. But violent death in that neighborhood had been an aberrancy. Here it was a common occurrence.

  She sat cross-legged on the bed, a cup of tepid coffee in one hand. Rather than get dressed and go downstairs to make real coffee, she’d settled on hot water from the bathroom and a spoonful of instant crystals. Soon, though, she would dress and venture out. She was going shopping today. She didn’t intend to spend a lot of money on the apartment, even if the money wasn’t coming out of her own pocket, but, unlike her neighbor, if she was expected to live here for an unspecified period of time, she required a minimum of comfort. That included, at the very least, someplace to sit besides the bed and someplace for her clothes besides the floor. Cassie Donovan had given her directions to a nearby shop that ambitiously called itself Vieux Carré Antiques. What they sold was mostly junk, but the owner was brave enough to deliver, and there were usually decent bargains to be had on furniture, provided a person wasn’t too picky.

  If Lainie were picky, she wouldn’t be living here, job or no job.

  After swallowing the last of the coffee, she gathered a complete set of clothes and left the apartment, locking the door behind her. It was a silly gesture, really. The bar downstairs was closed, so there was no one else in the building but Nicholas Carlucci. The chances that he might slip into her apartment while she was in the shower were somewhere between slim and none. Such an act would require interest of a degree that he certainly hadn’t displayed. Still, while she’d brought little enough with her yesterday, there was an item or two in her bedroom that she would prefer escaped everyone’s attention, especially his.

  The bathroom at the end of the brightly painted hallway was long and narrow, with a big, old tub filling more than half the space. The tub was probably original to the room, the shower a later addition. The entire room, also on the receiving end of Cassie’s creative attention, was done in white—walls, built-in shelves, trim, floor, everything except the ceiling, which had been painted a lovely sky blue.

  She closed and locked the door, then stripped off the white V-necked T that served as a nightshirt. While the water in the tub heated, she inventoried the contents of the shelves that were the only personal items in the room. There was her own makeup, perfume, toiletries and towels—nothing too personal, everything generic or bargain—basement priced. The contents of the higher shelves were no more personal or revealing: Carlucci’s toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream and a six-pack of bath soap, minus one bar. Shampoo, conditioner, a razor and blades, four neatly folded towels, matching washcloths and a half-empty bottle of aspirin.

  Carlucci didn’t strike her as a man who got headaches but rather gave them to everyone else.

  With a shrug, she pulled the twin white shower curtains around the tub, turned on the shower and stepped inside. On a shelf she found the missing bar of soap and used it to lather her washcloth and her body, trying seriously not to think about whose hands had touched it last, not to acknowledge the odd intimacy in using the same bathroom, the same tub, the same soap.

  Showered and shampooed, dried, powdered and dressed, she left the bathroom with the T-shirt in hand and made it less than five feet before realizing that she was being watched. Carlucci’s door was open, as if he’d just come upstairs, and he was standing in front of it. As she watched, he slowly shifted, turning to lean one shoulder against the frame. He was dressed in what seemed to be the unofficial uniform of the men of Serenity. While the punks on the street last night had shown a decided preference for trendier styles and colors, the men wore jeans and T-shirts.

  And no one did more for snug, faded jeans and closefitting white T-shirts than Nicholas Carlucci. This wasn’t the lawyer of silk suits and leather shoes, of elegant homes, imported cars and high bank balances. This was the rebel. The renegade. The bad boy.

  Oh, but he was no boy.

  And that was the last thing in the world she needed to notice.

  Her feet stopped moving of their own will, and her hand knotted into a fist inside the folds of the T-shirt she carried. She took a deep breath, but it didn’t go far. There was a familiar tightness to her chest that kept it from expanding—fear, nerves, self-protection, arousal. Any combination or all of the above.

  She reached blindly and found the stair rail, grateful for its support. “Good morning.”

  He raised one brow slightly. “It’s afternoon.”

  “Then good afternoon.” He moved as if to go inside, and she hurriedly spoke again. “I didn’t hear you downstairs when I got up.”

  “Maybe because I wasn’t downstairs.”

  This time it was her turn to lift one brow. “I was under the impression that you never went out.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “Maybe. There’s a first time for everything.” She shrugged. “I was going to stop by before I left. I’m going furniture shopping. I thought you might like...” Almost losing her nerve, she blurted out the rest. “To come along.”

  For a long moment, his gaze didn’t waver from her face. Then, with a semblance of a smile, he looked away. “There you go insulting my apartment again. What’s wrong with having just a bed and a table?”

  “I guess you got used to the minimalist look in prison.”

  “There I had a dresser the size of a nightstand, a steel shelf bolted to the wall and a thin, lumpy mattress. It was about as comfortable as I imagine a slab at the morgue would be. I’m satisfied with what I have now.”

  There were people out there who wouldn’t mind seeing him on a slab at the morgue. That was why she was here—to keep an eye on him. To protect him.

  And who was going to protect her?

  “So you don’t mind spending all your time in bed.”

  There was that odd little gesture again, almost a smile but not quite. “I’ve spent some damned satisfying hours in bed.”

  Wrong conversation, she warned herself. This was definitely the wrong tack to take. But she responded anyway. “Alone?”

  It was more like a smile this time. “No, not alone. But the current situation is temporary. Like I said yesterday, it’ll change in time.”

  All in good time. That was exactly what he’d said. Four innocent words that had nothing to do with her, and yet they had made her hot, shivery and uneasy.

  “Where is this place?”

  For a moment she looked blankly at him, the question not registering. With a slow blink, she gave him the name and general location of the store.

  “Let me know when you’re ready. It can’t hurt to look.” Without waiting for a response, he went inside the apartment and closed the door.

  Lainie stood there, taking short, shallow breaths until the tightness in her chest eased, then forced herself to move one step at a time into her own apartment. Before she’d ever set foot outside Atlanta, she had been warned that Carlucci was handsome as sin, devilishly sexy and hard to resist. It hadn’t taken ten seconds the day
he’d come walking down the street with his bag to know the warning was based in fact. She had just somehow expected to be immune. After all, this was business, and she never let pleasure interfere. Besides, she wasn’t some giddy, eager, easily impressed young woman. She’d had her share of exciting, reckless and hopelessly doomed relationships, but those days were long behind her, and the days for an affair with an ex-con mob lawyer who had stood for everything she stood against would never come.

  She had no cause for worry. Every woman at Kathy’s House, happily married or not, had entertained at least one lustful thought since he’d come, and not one of them besides Karen had even gotten close enough to speak to him. Not one of them was living across the hall from him in what was turning out to be more intimate circumstances than she’d expected.

  Besides, she was hardly the sort of woman a man like him would turn to to break a five-year sentence of celibacy. No doubt he had a little black book overflowing with the numbers of women who were his type—wild, wicked and reckless. She, on the other hand, was settled, far from daring and too much effort for the results. And then there was her job. Behavior that was the least bit inappropriate would earn her a reprimand. Something so outrageous as an affair would mean the end of the career she had worked so hard for. She was mature enough to know that the best sex in the world wasn’t worth losing her job.