Maryse was relieved that Luc’s Jeep was nowhere in sight when she pulled her rental up at the office. She was simply out of energy for confrontations. Ten or so a day was probably a national limit or something. She let herself into the office and went straight to her lab, unlocking the deadbolt with a key from her personal set. Then she pushed open the lab door and went straight for her catalog on the desk in the far corner.
She was two hours and at least thirty flagged items into her catalog when she glanced down at her watch and realized the time. Tapping her pen on the desk, she thought about her options—head home or into town for an early dinner with Sabine. She had just settled on early dinner when the office phone rang.
She checked the display and felt her heart speed up when she recognized the number for the lab manager at the university in New Orleans. “Aaron,” she answered, “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon. I don’t suppose you have any good news for me?” She waited expectantly, wondering if he was about to give her a way to spend some of her newfound riches.
“As a matter of fact,” he began, and Maryse could feel him smiling over the phone, “I have excellent news. You know that one batch you threw in for the hell of it—Trial 206?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it passed tests one and two with flying colors. I’m moving to test three this afternoon and possibly four tomorrow. Can you get me more? I might not have enough to carry through the remaining trials.”
Maryse let out the breath with a whoosh and held in a shout. “That’s fantastic! Let me check that number.” She unlocked her desk drawer and pulled her notebook from inside, then flipped the pages past failure after failure until she reached the possible success, Trial 206.
Then she groaned.
“Is something wrong?” Aaron asked.
“No,” Maryse hedged, “not exactly. But thanks to a couple of drunken fishermen and an out-of-control barge, Trial 206 might not be as easy to obtain as it was before. Those idiots took out the entire group of plants. I’ll have to find another location. I know I’ve seen them somewhere else, but offhand, I can’t recall where exactly.”
“Don’t sweat it, Maryse,” Aaron said. “You’re way ahead of the game. Even if you have to propagate your own plants, it would only take a few more months, right? Maybe you should check on seeds just in case.”
Maryse tapped her fingers on her desk. “You’re right. I’ll get out my seed catalog and see what I can work out. In the meantime, I’ll try to remember where I saw that other batch. Let me know how far you get with what you have. I’ll also contact every nursery I can find and see if they happen to have a full-grown bloom.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Aaron said. “Chin up, Maryse. This is only a momentary delay, and this is the best run yet.”
Maryse thanked him and hung up the phone, excited and frustrated all at the same time. She’d only thrown that specimen into testing for the hell of it. At the time, she hadn’t been paying too much attention to whether that particular batch was a hybrid, like so many others in the bayou were. Without another look at it, she couldn’t know for sure. And now she didn’t even know where to find another. Her “momentary delay” was suddenly looking pretty major.
“Wow,” Luc said, striding into her lab. “This is some setup for a botanist.” He walked over to her desk and picked up her notebook, scanning the pages. “What are you doing in here, exactly?”
Maryse grabbed the notebook from his hands and shoved it in a drawer, locking it afterwards. “What I do in here is none of your business. I rent this space from the state, so it’s off limits to anyone I haven’t personally invited in. That list starts with you.”
Luc gave her a lazy smile. “Aww, c’mon, Maryse. I thought we had come to some sort of working arrangement.”
Maryse narrowed her eyes at him. “You mean an arrangement like you towing my truck and sending me a rental without asking? The kind of arrangement where the big, strong man takes over because the helpless female couldn’t possibly handle things?”
Luc stared at her for a moment, and if she hadn’t been so aggravated, his confusion might have been amusing. “I was only trying to help. My buddy works at the dealership, so I called in a favor. He’s not charging you for the tow.”
Maryse stared back at him, feeling just a tiny bit guilty but not about to admit it. “Look, Luc. I’m not trying to be a bitch, but I’m used to doing things for myself. I don’t like people making decisions for me.”
Luc shrugged. “Whatever. But maybe if you let other people make decisions for you, your life wouldn’t be such a mess. Exactly how many people told you not to marry Hank Henry?”
Maryse felt the blood rush to her face. “That is none of your business, and you’re not furthering your cause by insulting my intelligence. There were a lot of reasons I married Hank, none of which I need to discuss with you.” She shook her head. “I simply don’t understand what you get out of being in this backwoods place harassing me. Isn’t there a more lucrative assignment calling you in this great state? Not that I’ve actually seen you out working on anything.”
Luc gave her a smug smile. “I’m the nephew of the district operations supervisor, so I’ve got family at the top of the food chain. I pretty much get to do whatever I want.”
“Then why on Earth would you want to be here?”
“It was either this or some forgotten forest in the middle of nowhere north Louisiana. This is close to my apartment in the city and the retirement home my grandparents live in now. Don’t even try to get me pulled from this assignment. It would take a hurricane to remove me from this marsh.”
Maryse gave him a matching smile. “Yeah, well, say hello to Hurricane Maryse. As of this morning, you’re standing on my property, so your food chain just became extinct.”
He gave her a puzzled look, but Maryse couldn’t really blame him. It was a strange statement. “What do you mean, ‘your property’?”
“Apparently, all of this land belonged to Helena Henry. The entire preserve. She leased it to the state for their studies and to keep it protected, but it was hers to own and hers to give. And this morning, it was willed to me.”
Luc stared at her in obvious shock. “Helena Henry owned this land? And she willed it to you?”
“Yep. Which makes this my office that I’m leasing to the state that I’m leasing part of back to myself.” Maryse paused for a moment, the absurdity of that business transaction just hitting her.
“So you’re leasing from yourself,” Luc said, “and you’d like me to respect your privacy. Is that about right?”
Maryse blinked, surprised Luc had caught on to everything that fast. “Yes.”
Luc nodded. “I have no problem with that. Sorry, I never meant to make you uncomfortable. I guess I’m just used to dealing with a different kind of woman.” He extended his hand. “Truce?”
Maryse hesitated for a moment, then rose from her seat and placed her hand in his, trying to ignore her body’s response to his strong hand clasped around hers. She released his hand and stuck her own in her jeans pocket, silently willing the tingling to stop.
Luc smiled and exited her lab, closing the door behind him.
Maryse stared at the closed door for a moment, then sat on her desk. What was it with that man? No matter how hard she tried to stay angry at him, he always managed to diffuse the situation and leave her wondering how he would look naked. Luc LeJeune was definitely a walking hazard to her mental and emotional health. Just when she thought he was a complete and utter cad, he managed to turn the tables on her by saying something unexpected, and an apology had been the absolute last thing she had expected.
I’m used to dealing with a different kind of woman.
Yeah, Maryse would just bet he was. The sexy, self-confident kind of woman that Maryse would like to be but didn’t have a clue where to start. And given her current situation, it didn’t look like she was going to find time to research it anytime soon.
In addition to everything else she had on her mind, Luc’s comment about his uncle had left her a bit unsettled. If his uncle was really as highly placed with the state as he claimed, Luc might still be able to make trouble for her if he thought she wasn’t doing her job.
She’d just have to be careful—make sure she didn’t let her personal research and the small matter of Helena Henry get in the way of her job any more than it already had, at least during work hours. Which meant the first item on her list was figuring out a way to avoid the ghost during working hours anyway. If the will reading had been any indication, anything involving Helena was bound to be trouble.
Maryse shook her head as her mind roamed back over the events of the morning. What a fiasco. Then, with a start, she remembered where she’d seen that other group of plants and groaned.
Directly across the bayou from Helena Henry’s house.
Luc heard the lab door slam behind him and turned in his chair. Instead of the aggravation he’d expected, Maryse had that look of intent concentration mixed with excitement that you get when you have a great idea but are still trying to work out the details. She didn’t even acknowledge him as she pulled on her rubber boots and hustled out of the office without so much as a wave or a backwards glance.
Luc sighed. So much for his powers of sexual attraction. He’d gotten women in bed with less than a handshake and an apology before, but Maryse Robicheaux was a force to be reckoned with.
Of course, with the day she’d had, Luc couldn’t blame her too much for being distracted. She’d gone from a wrecked truck to inheriting a game preserve, and, technically, it wasn’t even quitting time.
Still, he’d thought they’d moved beyond suspicious. But if the scene in her lab was any indication, Maryse’s defense system was back in full force. But why? Was it really because he’d had her truck towed, or was it something else entirely? Granted, he sometimes had trouble remembering all that women’s independence stuff. Not that he didn’t like strong women—hell, he’d been raised by the strongest of women, his grandmother. But he was also Choctaw, and it was ingrained into them from a young age to take care of their responsibilities—especially to their women.
She’s not your woman.
Okay, so he knew it was true, at least in the real sense of the sentiment. But until the DEQ was satisfied that his work in Mudbug was done, Luc felt responsible for Maryse, and if she was in some kind of trouble, then he felt obligated to help. In fact, if Maryse was the informant he sought, then it was his job to help. All kinds of trouble could be headed her way if the chemical company got wind that someone was airing dirty secrets to the DEQ.
He studied the locked lab door. That notebook…he hadn’t gotten a good look at the page, but he’d seen enough to know that it wasn’t filled with regular writing. Those symbols were chemicals equations, but high school chemistry was such a distant memory he’d never be able to scratch the surface of what exactly she had written, not even with all day to consider it. But he’d be willing to bet his department had someone who could decipher whatever Maryse had been so quick to hide.
He rose from his chair and studied the lock for a moment. It was one of the best, but not completely unbeatable. Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed dial.
“Wilson,” his boss answered on the first ring.
“It’s LeJeune. I need a set of B&E tools down here. Something that can get past a pretty high-tech padlock.”
“What’s wrong, LeJeune—the woman wearing a chastity belt?”
Luc counted to three, then replied. “Hilarious. She’s renting office space from the state that she’s turned into some sort of chemistry lab. I need to get in there and see what she’s working on.”
“She’s running lab experiments?”
“That’s what it looks like to me. Place is full of really high-tech equipment. We’re talking a lot more than just a microscope and some test tubes.”
“Why would a botanist need a chemistry lab? There’s nothing in her job description to require it. From what I’ve read, she’s supposed to just collect the samples and then they’re analyzed someplace else. You think she’s the informant?”
Luc studied the locked door for a moment. “Maybe, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s sort of an elaborate and expensive setup to turn someone in for polluting the water.”
“Then maybe she’s working with them. Did you ever think of that? Maybe she’s testing for them, hoping the water gets back to an acceptable place before someone discovers their dumping sites.”
Luc turned from the door and stared out the big front window at the bayou. “At this point, I guess anything is possible, although, I have to say, she doesn’t really fit the profile of a criminal. And there was another incident today that might cause us some trouble.”
“What kind of incident?”
“Apparently, that mother-in-law of hers owned this preserve and leased it to the state. Well, you’ll never guess who she left it to.”
“Good grief, LeJeune, and you think this botanist is pure as the driven snow? How the hell did the mother-in-law die?”
Luc rubbed his jaw with one hand. “I don’t know exactly.”
“Well, you best be finding out. This all smacks of a cover-up, and your unassuming botanist may be the biggest ringleader of all. You’re letting a nice set of T&.A cloud your judgment.”
“You know better, boss. I’m checking out everything.”
“Hmm. I’m certain you are. LeJeune, do you have any idea how uncomfortable it is to have the whole damned EPA up your ass? Because that’s what I have right now, and according to my wife, I’ve never had much ass, so it’s getting crowded down there and I’m more than a little uncomfortable. You don’t want me uncomfortable, do you?”
Luc closed his eyes for a moment, not even wanting to think about another man’s ass. “No, we wouldn’t want that.”
“Good!” Wilson disconnected, and Luc pressed the End button on his phone. What a friggin’ mess. The call had brought up a possibility Luc hadn’t even thought of, and it didn’t please him in the least. Was his boss right? Was his attraction to Maryse coloring his judgment? What if she was protecting whoever was making illegal dumps in the bayou? Then again, maybe his initial read was right, and she wasn’t involved at all.
He took another look at the locked door and sighed. No matter what, Maryse Robicheaux was up to something, and the way she shot out of the office led him to believe that she was off to do something important and personal. After all, she had taken the day off work. Glancing at his watch, he realized it had been ten minutes since Maryse had fled the office. He flipped his cell phone open again and punched some buttons.
A map of the Mudbug area filled the display, and Luc watched as a small blinking dot came into view, moving rapidly across the bayou that stretched alongside downtown. So whatever couldn’t wait had taken her into the bayou, and he’d be willing to bet everything he owned that whatever she was doing didn’t have anything to do with her job as a state botanist.
But he was about to find out.