Carolina Moon

nice.”
    “It’s a good house.” But he looked at her as he said it. “It’s a good spot. I’ll let you get doing,” he added, and started down the steps. He stopped beside a tough-looking pickup that desperately needed washing. “Tory? You know that picture of you I carried in my head?” He opened the truck door, and a quick little breeze ruffled through his sun-streaked hair. “I got a better one now.”
    He drove off, keeping her framed in the rearview mirror until he made the turn from hard-packed dirt to asphalt.
    He hadn’t meant to bring up Hope, not right off. As the owner of Beaux Reves, as her landlord, as a childhood acquaintance, he’d told himself it was a straight duty call. But he hadn’t fooled himself, and he obviously hadn’t fooled Tory, either.
    Curiosity had sent him straight out to what people hereabouts still called the Marsh House, when he’d had a dozen pressing matters demanding his attention. He’d been raised to run the farm, but he ran it his own way. That way didn’t please everyone.
    He’d learned to play politician and diplomat. He’d learned to play whatever role was required, as long as he got what he wanted.
    He wondered just what role he’d need to play with Tory.
    Whether she was ready to admit it or not, her coming back shifted all manner of balances. She was the pebble in the pond, and the ripples were going to run long and wide.
    He wasn’t sure what to do about her, what he wanted to do about her. But he was a man of the land, and men who made their living from earth and seed and weather knew how to bide time.
    On impulse he pulled the truck to the side of the road. He had no business making this stop when all his responsibilities were gathered at Beaux Reves. The new crops were coming up, and when the crops grew, so did the weeds. He had cultivating to oversee. This was a pivotal year for the plans he’d implemented. He wanted his finger on every step and stage.
    Still, he got out of the cab, walked across the little wooden bridge, and stepped into the swamp.
    Here the world was green and rich and alive. Paths had been cleared and alongside them, neat as a park, grew azaleas in staggering, stubborn bloom. Among the magnolia and tupelo were swaths of wildflowers, tidy hills and spears of evergreens. It was no longer the exciting, slightly dangerous world of his youth.
    Now it was a shrine to a lost child.
    His father had done this. In grief, in pride, perhaps even in the fury he’d never shown. But it had lived inside him, Cade knew, like a cancer. Growing and spreading in secret and silence, those tumors of rage and despair.
    Grief had been treated like a disease inside the walls of Beaux Reves. And here, he thought, it had been turned to flowers.
    Lilies would dance in the summer, a colorful parade, and the delicate yellow irises that liked their feet wet were already blooming in the spring shadows like tiny sunbeams. Brush had been cleared for them. Though it grew back quickly, as long as his father had lived there had been hands to hack it down again. Now that responsibility lay on Cade as well.
    There was a small stone bench in the clearing where Hope had built her fire that last night of her life. There was another arched bridge over the tobacco-brown water haunted by cypress trees, bordered by thickly curling ferns and rhododendrons flowering in sheer white. Camellias and pansies that would bring flower and scent over the winter when they thrived.
    And between the bench and the bridge, in the midst of a pool of pink and blue blossoms, stood a marble statue carved in the likeness of a laughing young girl who would be forever eight.
    They had buried her eighteen years before, on a hill in the sunlight. But here, in the green shadows and wild scents, was where Hope’s spirit lay.
    Cade sat on the bench, let his hands dangle between his knees. He didn’t come here often. Since his father’s death eight years before no one did, at least no one in the family.
    As far as his mother was concerned, this place ceased to exist from the moment Hope had been found. Raped, strangled, then tossed aside like a used-up doll.
    Just how much, Cade asked himself, as he had countless times over that long sea of years, just how much of what had been done to her was on his head?
    He sat back, closed his eyes. He’d lied to Tory, he admitted now. He did want something from her. He wanted answers. Answers he’d waited for more than half his life.
    He took five