"Why are you here?" Bleu Laveau said. She knew Roche Savage had come to the Parish Hall meeting because she was the one giving a presentation. He couldn't have any interest in plans to build a new school.
He had come for her.
A tall, rangy man, with curly, almost black hair and the bluest eyes she had ever seen, he was in the business of fixing minds. And from his reputation, he was very successful. Somehow he must have found out her secret and she was a challenge to him now.
Only one person in Toussaint was aware of the life she had been trying to outrun for more than three years, and her cousin, Madge Pollard, wasn't the gossiping type. That didn't mean Roche couldn't track her down some other way.
Why didn't he say something? Dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt with sleeves rolled back over his forearms, he looked casual but Bleu felt his tension. She inched away from him.
His relaxed stance didn't match the way he stared at her. As if he was planning his next move.
Roche weighed what he should do. Bleu's behavior had caught him off-guard. The woman trying to inch away, as if he might pounce on her, wasn't the one he'd first met a couple of weeks ago over a cup of coffee. Something had happened to make her afraid of him and he wished he didn't feel so certain about what that was.
Bleu was still moving. With her hair streaming in the wind, she took sideways steps up the slope from the Parish Hall to the spot where she had parked her Honda in the lane above.
Roche didn't follow her. "Just talk to me," he said. "That's all I want. Tell me what's wrong and I'll try to make it right."
She had been the last to leave a packed meeting on plans to build a new Parish school. Everyone else had already driven off.
And the instant she saw him, she had just about run away at first. He didn't get it.
Bleu's head pounded."Please excuse me, " she said. "I have to get home. Tomorrow's a full day."
What she wouldn't ask him was if he knew about her marriage, about the horrible, personal things she'd been forced to talk about with strangers. If he did know, he could also be aware of the way her former husband had turned sex into something horrifying, and that she had been left with a fear of intimacy.
Yesterday, the potential truth about Roche's interest in her suddenly became clear. She had been looking forward to having dinner with him when she figured it out: She wasn't his type. He had another reason for wanting to spend time with her—to see if she would make an interesting case study for his work, maybe?
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