Free Sins of the Storm by Jenna Mills Page B

penance.”
    “Isn’t it? Are you sure? Because it sure seems that way to me. You were there, ’tite chat. ” The flare of her eyes touched him in ways he refused to let himself feel. “You were in the room. And you’ve always wondered, haven’t you? You’ve always wondered what would have happened if you’d walked in a minute or two earlier? If you’d made your presence known.”
    Slowly, she shook her head.
    “What if you’d screamed? You could have stopped them.”
    “No.” The word was sharp…broken.
    “So here you are now, ready to testify, to immerse yourself all over again, to go back and live that night again and again and—”
    “He’s lived like a king!” The words erupted from her as she came alive and shoved hard against his body.
    But Jack didn’t move, just kept standing there, sandwiching her between his body and the window.
    “He acts like he owns the city,” she hissed as Jack took her wrists and simply held her. “Do you have any idea what it was like, any idea at all, seeing him all these years? Seeing him on television, being treated like a celebrity…a god? Seeing him smile as he fakes his Cajun accent, seeing his face smirking at me from cookbooks? Everywhere I looked—”
    “Then why now?” The question ate at him. “Why not before? Why wait all these years to make your move? You could have stopped—”
    “No!” She twisted away, stared off into the darkness beyond the window.
    Jack told himself to step away, that he’d pressed enough. But the cop he’d become joined with the boy he’d been—and for the first time since Camille had come home, he felt fear.
    Hers.
    “Hey…” The cop told him to give her space. The man he didn’t want to be urged him to turn her in his arms and take her face in his hands, press his advantage.
    But it was the boy who won, the boy who guided his hands around her waist. “Talk to me,” he murmured. “Tell me…”
    Everything. He wanted it all, every last detail. Why she’d gone away—why she’d stayed away. Why she’d severed ties with her family. Why she’d let them worry that she could be dead when all the while she’d been watching from afar….
    “The tree house is gone.”
    The words, so soft and out of the blue, slipped through him like an unexpected shot of whiskey. He looked through her reflection toward the sprawling old oak fifty feet from the house, where he and Gabe had once built a fort.
    “Katrina,” he told her. “She hit us hard.”
    Beneath his hands, Camille’s shoulders, normally tense and squared, dropped. “I tried to find out,” she said, and in her voice, he heard the same agony he’d felt halfway around the world. “For days I searched the Internet…went to the news sites, the television stations and newspapers….”
    In those first few days, solid information had been impossible to come by. The images captured on film, those of entire neighborhoods under water, of citizens trapped and abandoned, had chilled.
    “You were still there, weren’t you?” she asked, and in the window’s reflection, she lifted her eyes to his. “In the Middle East.”
    He closed his eyes, could still feel the sting of the sand. He’d been in Iraq. Well to the north of Baghdad, Kirkuk had been relatively secure. The insurgency had been in its infancy. But only two weeks before, a female pilot had been picked off while walking to get mail.
    Jack’s wife of eighteen months, Susan, had been in Louisiana.
    “Yeah.” The images slammed in from opposite directions, the ugliness of the war, and the destruction of his home. Maybe that’s why he’d let the young children lull him into complacency a few weeks later. Maybe that’s why he’d trusted…when he should have been alert.
    Maybe that’s why he’d damn near lost his leg—and had lost his career.
    “I always knew it could happen,” she said. “I remember Dad talking about the levees and that New Orleans was shaped like a bowl and if the big one ever