“He’s no good, you know,” Ellen Hayward had told her twin daughters on more than one occasion. “He’s like his father, who, I hate to say, drinks way too much. It’s no wonder Edward’s wife ran off and left him with the boys.” In the kitchen of their home off Royal Street, Mom had carefully cut biscuits from the thick dough she’d flattened over their grandmother’s wooden cutting board. Pausing, she’d straightened, the flour-dusted cutter in one hand, poised over the dough. “Oh, my.” She’d shaken her head and pursed her lips. “I hate to say it, girls, but those Bridges boys? Big trouble.” She set down the cutter and fingered the cross dangling from a gold chain on her neck. “Lord have mercy on their souls.”

“‘Lord have mercy’ is right,” Arianna, the bolder of the twins, had said. She’d sent her sister an amused glance as she’d stage-whispered, “Jase is hot!” Her eyes, the same golden brown as her sister’s, had sparkled with mischief.

“Oh, for the love of Saint Peter,” their mother had admonished. “Girls!” She’d raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if seeing past the plaster and molding she could view heaven. “Why did you give me girls?”

The twins had giggled at their mother’s discomfiture, because truth be told, what would Ellen Mae Allemande Hayward have done with boys? Dealing with all that energy and testosterone? Oh, sure. Hunting, fishing, boxing, and football were not on their mother’s top one thousand things to do. Nope, Ellen wasn’t exactly the den mother or football mom type. She was lucky she had girls. Brianna’s tendency toward being a tomboy was worrisome enough for their mother. As it was, the girls kept her on her knees and praying throughout the week. With boys, she would’ve had permanent scars on her patellas.

So, of course, Ellen’s warnings had gone unheeded and added gasoline to the fire of Brianna’s interest. Now, though, she pushed aside thoughts of her mother, their tidy home not far from the university, and her own fascination with the wild teenager who had grown to become this man striding toward her.

“Jase Bridges,” she said, feeling her shoulders straighten a tad.

“So you do remember.” His smile stretched.

“Yeah, of course.” As traffic passed, she hoped that she hid any indication of her fascination with him way back when. The rebellious kid who had flagrantly disrespected authority was almost gone. Almost. From first glance Jase appeared to have straightened up from the tattered, I-don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass eighteen-year-old. But something told her that the same rebel lurked beneath the façade of slacks and white dress shirt with its sleeves rolled up, a bit of a tattoo showing above the bend of his elbow. A rattler, she recalled, coiled around his biceps.

“I overheard your conversation with Detective Bentz.”

“How?”