Free Hot Touch by Deborah Smith

wanted to know.”
    “The truth you’ve been told might not be true at all.”
    She drew back angrily, like a cat about to arch its back and spit. “No one from the Ancelet family ever cared to offer a different version!”
    “Keep going, don’t argue,” he ordered, waving her anger away impatiently. “Tell me all these rumors you were given.”
    Breathing hard, staring at him furiously, she gathered steam like an overworked engine, which was what he’d hoped she’d do. He wanted to get everything out in the open before she realized how much she was revealing about herself and retreated.
    Her voice rose. “My mother deserted my father and took me with her.”
    Caroline stood up, walked a few feet away, and stood with her back to him. “She took me to live with her parents. My father went after her. There was a big fight, she got drunk, she and I left in a car, and he followed. A few minutes later she lost control and the car ran headfirst into a tractor-trailer rig. Mother was thrown out of the car and killed. I went through the windshield.”
    “Dieu!”
    Paul got up and reached for her, but she moved away, bitter with the world now. She clutched her wadded scarf to her stomach, whipped around to face him, and planted her bare feet solidly in the deep sand.
    “My father found the accident. That night, while I was in surgery, he shot himself.”
    Even his worst imaginings hadn’t prepared him for this. Stunned, Paul stared at her open-mouthed.
    Her anger deflated and she looked as if she might crumple. “He didn’t even care that his daughter was alive and needed him. He just didn’t care. See? Those are my memories. Those are what ate at me the whole time I was growing up. I can barely stand to be back in Louisiana.”
    “Caroline, shhh.” He held his hands out, cajoling her with body language because he didn’t have adequate words.
    “It appears that after I got out of the hospital no one in my mother’s family wanted me. None of the noble Cajuns wanted a hideous little mangled girl. So I got stuck with my father’s cousin and his wife in Connecticut, who never let me forget how much trouble I was and how grateful I ought to be that my father’s family, at least, was decent!”
    Paul moved toward her, crooning a soft, deep sound in the back of his throat.
    She looked at him in alarm. “Stay back! I don’t want sympathy from you or anyone else around here!”
    The broken, pleading quality of her voice told him that she didn’t know what she wanted, except to figure out how people could be so rotten to their own flesh and blood.
    “That’s okay, I understand,” he murmured as he reached her. Then he swept one arm around her shoulder and the other around her waist.
    Her mouth popped open and she dropped her lump of scarf. He pulled her against his half-clothed body and cuddled her in a bear hug that was too kind and soothing for her to resist.
    “We’re capable of lots of
good
things too, us Cajuns,” he told her in a very low voice. “Like this, see?”
    She shivered, covered her face with both hands, and stood rigidly within his grasp while he talked to her softly, telling her that he understood why she felt the way she did, telling her that it was all right for her to take it out on him, that he didn’t mind.
    When he said that, she sagged against him like a broken doll, digging her hands into his arms while she bowed her forehead to his shoulder. “I’m sorry for taking it out on you,” she offered in a tearful voice. “My feelings are nothing personal against you, Blue.”
    “You think all Cajun women are like your mother? I take that personal.”
    “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that I’ve spent my whole life hating her and my father for the mess they made of their lives and mine. I didn’t deserve to suffer for their mistakes.”
    “You’re right,
chère
, you’re right.” He rubbed one big hand up and down her back, massaging the tense muscles there. The wind