“Your girl there needs some meat on her bones,” Mama Joe said as if Josie wasn’t at the table. “Feed that girl, Connor. I know you know all about what goes with what and all that fancy cooking, but this girl needs some nourishment for the soul.”
“I’ll take another corn-bread muffin, then,” Josie said, pointing toward the always-on stove at the back of the restaurant. “And some more of that crawfish-and-corn chowder.”
“It’s bisque,” Connor corrected with a grin. “But I’ll have some, too.”
Mama Joe put her hands on her ample hips. “Y’all see the stove. Help yourself. Me, I got to get off these tired feet and watch NCIS reruns.”
“She’s got a thing for Mark Harmon,” Connor pointed out.
“Don’t we all?” Josie jumped up and served herself in a true native way that made him laugh.
They’d be leaving at dark, starting with a pirogue ride through the swamp and moving on to a pickup truck hidden in some bramble somewhere on the other side of the bayou. This place had a system of getting people in and out and gone before any lawmen or angry men could find them. And Connor had already lingered too long. The shadows stretching toward the water could hold people who were willing to shoot all of them.
“So we have a plan,” Josie replied when she came back to the table. “We have to start at the beginning, which means the main estate and the garage. You think we might find something on the silent partner there?”
“Yes. He closeted himself in the office there a lot. We start back at the mansion on the river, move to his penthouse in New Orleans if we need to, and we might have to take a quick jaunt to Europe.”
“The bureau won’t let you leave the country, Connor.”
“But you might.”
“Hey, we’re not that comfortable with each other. I can’t allow that, so don’t even tease about it.”
“I am teasing,” he said, not teasing. He’d do whatever he had to do to get out from under the yoke of Armond’s weighty pseudo-friendship. He had to think of Deidre, and now he had to think of Josie. She wouldn’t like that, but it wasn’t his nature to put women in harm’s way. An old-fashioned notion but one he couldn’t break. He should have been there with his mom the night she died, but he’d been out looking for a good time.
Too late to make up for that mistake.
Never too late to learn from that mistake.
And as Mama Joe would tell him, never too late to pray for forgiveness and start all over with a born-again attitude.
Could he start fresh? He planned to do just that once this case was solved.
But first, he had one more question to ask Josie.
“What happened in Dallas?”
She dropped her buttered corn-bread muffin and sat openmouthed. “What does that matter now?”
“You obviously had to get out of Texas. I need to understand why.” He’d wondered about that all day. They might get into some heavy stuff before this was over. He wanted her to be prepared. He couldn’t have her falling apart on him.
His common sense told him that wouldn’t happen, but he needed to put up a wall between them so he wouldn’t get distracted.
Right now she looked aggravated, her expression heating up with a mad shine. “Is that a deal breaker, Randall? Do you demand a clean working record with all your handlers?”
“It might be an issue. I can’t have you choking on me.”
She glared at him over her sweet tea. “Are you serious? I mean, I’ve pretty much forgiven you all of your shortcomings, not to mention sticking my neck out to help you with Armond. And I trusted you not to leave me out here in this isolated swamp, and now you decide to interrogate me?”
“I just want to know,” he said. “Nothing to do with this Armond stuff. Just what happened.”
She gave him a look that caused the butter on her muffin to slide right off. “I don’t have to explain that to you.”
“Defensive, aren’t we?”
“Seriously, are you messing with my head for a reason?”
He leaned forward, twirled his straw in his tea. “Yes. You have my file, so you know my weak spots. C’mon, you answered when I asked about your mother, so I know you’ve overcome that. This has to be something else.”