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wasn't thinking. You shouldn't be thinking about it, either. You're home now. Get some sleep.”
    Laurel sighed and pushed her overgrown bangs back off her forehead, watching as Savannah made her way to the door with her lazy, naturally seductive gait, her robe shimmering like quicksilver. “'Night, Sister.”
    “Sweet dreams.”
    She would have settled for no dreams, Laurel thought as she listened to the door latch and her sister's footsteps retreat down the hall. But no dreams meant no sleep. She checked the glowing dial of the old alarm clock on the stand. Three-thirty. She wouldn't sleep again tonight no matter how badly her body needed to. Her mind wouldn't allow the possibility of another rerun of the dream. The knowledge brought a sheen of tears to her eyes. She was so tired—physically tired, emotionally exhausted, tired of feeling out of control.
    With that thought came the memory of Jack Boudreaux, and a wave of shame washed over her, leaving goose bumps in its wake. She'd made an ass of herself. If she was lucky, he was too drunk to remember by now, and the next time she saw him she could pretend it never happened.
    There wouldn't be a next time if she could help it. She knew instinctively she would never be able to handle a man like Jack Boudreaux. His raw sexuality would overwhelm her. She would never be in control—of him or the relationship or herself.
    Not that she was interested in him.
    Tossing the coverlet and sheet aside, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, went to the French doors, and pulled them open. The night was comfortably warm, fragrant with the scents of spring, hinting at the humidity that would descend like a wet woolen blanket in another few weeks. The magnolia tree near the corner of the house still had a few blossoms, creamy waxy white and as big as dinner plates set among the broad, leathery, dark green leaves.
    She had climbed that tree as a child, determined to find out what the experience was all about. Tree climbing was forbidden at Beauvoir, the Chandler family plantation that lay just a few miles down the road from Belle Rivière. Tree climbing was not something “nice girls” did—or so said Vivian. Laurel shook her head at that as she wandered out onto the balcony.
Nice girls. Good families
.
    “Things like that don't happen in good families. . . .”
    “Help us, Laurel! Help us. . . .”
    The past and the present twined in her mind like vines, twisting, clinging vines attaching their sharp tendrils to her brain. She brought her hands up to clamp over her ears, as if that might shut out the voices that existed only in her head. She bit her lip until she tasted blood, fighting furiously to hold back the tears that gathered in her eyes and congealed into a solid lump in her throat.
    “Dammit, dammit, dammit . . .”
    She chanted the word like a mantra as she paced the balcony outside her room. Back and forth, back and forth, her small bare feet slapping softly on the old wood. Weakness surged through her like a tide, and she fought the urge to sink down against the wall and sob. The tears choked her. The weakness sapped the stability from her knees and made her curl in on herself like a stooped old woman or a child with a bellyache. The memories bombarded her in a ferocious, relentless cannonade—the children in Scott County, Savannah and their past. “
Nice girls.” “Good families.” “Be a good girl, Laurel.” “Don't say anything, Laurel.” “Make us all proud, Laurel.” “Help us, Laurel
. . . .”
    No longer able to fight it, she turned and pressed herself against the side of the old house, pressed her face against it, not even caring that the edges of the weathered old bricks bit into her cheek. She clung there like a jumper who had suddenly remembered her terror of heights.
    “Oh, God,” she whimpered as the despair cracked through her armor and the tears squeezed past the tightly closed barriers of her eyelids. “Oh, God, please, please . .