Read KILLING ME SOFTLY for Free Online Page B

breathing, maybe even her heart if he listened closely enough. He definitely heard her sigh.
    Slowly, her gaze locked onto his. "What are you guilty of?"
    The urge to slide the hair from her face was strong. The curiosity streamed through him like an aphrodisiac. What would she feel like? What would she taste like?
    "That's the question, isn't it?" And from what his uncle had said, she hadn't wasted any time asking it. "And while I'm sure the fate of my soul must make intriguing conversation, I assure you it's also quite pointless."
    "Tell me, though, which of my alleged sins would you like to know more about. Burning Savannah's pictures?" He'd stood on a warm spring evening with a small bonfire before him, and he'd fed it all he had to give. "That has to make me guilty, right?"
    Her eyes almost seemed to glow. "I don't know, does it?"
    "What about vanishing for six weeks after the grand jury failed to return an indictment?" He'd never told a soul where he'd gone, what he'd done. Not his uncle, not his cousin, not even his sister. "Does that titillate you?"
    The question dangled between them on the cool breeze, but Renee said nothing.
    "Or maybe," he said hoarsely, and took a deliberate step closer, violating the proper space between strangers, "you're more interested in how women come and go from my bed faster than I can develop the film of what happens there."
    She lifted her chin. "If that's the truth, yes."
    Not many people went toe to toe with him. Even fewer questioned him. He was a man who'd learned to use his size to his advantage. Step a little too close, stare a little too long, and he could send even a jaded punk into a skid. Size and proximity. They were the most reliable weapons he possessed.
    Renee Fox responded to neither. She just … looked at him. Sweet Mary, he would have sworn she looked through him.
    "Why are you still here?" he asked. "What do you want from me?"
    "The truth," she said, point-blank. "About Savannah." Her voice was quiet but laced with steel. "After all the rumors, it's only natural I'd want to understand what really happened to her."
    "Natural. Now there's an interesting word." A word that had nothing to do with the way her voice flowed through him like the moonshine he and Gabe had sneaked from Uncle Edouard's liquor cabinet in honor of their thirteenth birthdays. "Tell me, cher . Does this really feel natural to you?"
    Her eyes darkened, answering his question without words. "Completely."
    Like hell. On a hot stream of adrenaline, he lifted his hands to his eyes like a camera and framed her face, noted the way the shadows played across her eyes, like Spanish moss shimmying against the night sky. Her irises were dark olive, earthy like the swamp, with the same combination of mystery and beauty and danger.
    She went very still. "What are you doing?"
    He shifted the angle of his hands, focused on her mouth. Her top lip had a rounded bow, the bottom was full. "Studying," he murmured, knowing he was making her uncomfortable. "Imagining."
    The lines of her face went hard as she turned from him and headed for the steps so quickly the curtain of dark hair swung like a shield against her face. "I was wrong to come here."
    "Yes, you were." He stepped into her path, not about to let her go. "But you came anyway, and now here we are." Alone. In the dark. "Don't you want to know what I see when I look at you?"
    Her shrug was artful. "Not especially."
    "I see something wrong," he said anyway. Something that bothered him. "And the cop in me wants to know why."
    "That's what this is about? The cop in you?"
    "And the photographer," he conceded. "But mostly the man. When he sees you, he sees beauty on the outside, but something darker on the inside. Something … lost and alone. Broken."
    That was it. She seemed broken.
    Her skin reminded him of the petals of a magnolia, far lighter than the majority of the residents of south Louisiana. It fascinated him to discover there in the faint moonlight that her