“My turn,” Danae said, clapping her hands.
Alaina laughed as she released Joelle, who turned to look at a smiling Danae.
“The dimples,” Joelle said. “I remember them.”
Danae’s smile widened and she wrapped her arms around Joelle, tightly squeezing her.
“I’m so glad William found you,” Danae whispered.
“Me, too,” Joelle said.
“This calls for a toast,” Alaina said.
Danae released her and they both looked over at their big sister, who was pouring champagne into beautiful crystal glasses.
“I cleaned some of the crystal to get ready for this moment,” Alaina said. “Please don’t tell me you don’t drink.”
Joelle laughed. “I’m not a professional, but at the moment, I can’t think of anything more perfect than champagne.”
Alaina smiled and her whole face brightened, her happiness so clear. “You haven’t had Danae’s cheesecake yet. I bet it’s more perfect than champagne, but she was cruel and wouldn’t let me try a piece before we left.”
Danae blushed a bit, clearly pleased with Alaina’s praise, and Joelle felt her chest tighten as if her heart were expanding inside it. All the anxiety and doubts she’d felt were wasted emotion. These women were so comfortable...so right.
She took the glass of champagne that Alaina offered her and watched as Alaina lifted her glass in the air.
“To sisters,” Alaina said. “To us.”
“To us,” Joelle and Danae repeated and they clinked their glasses together.
Joelle couldn’t remember any moment in her life more perfect than this one.
* * *
TYLER MADE HIS way around the back of the house, pushing through the dense undergrowth, looking for any sign that someone else had passed this way recently. If Carter and his father both felt things weren’t right on the LeBeau estate, then Tyler had no doubt they were right. If someone was prowling around the estate, he wanted to get a handle on it now and try to keep things from getting as out of hand as they had with Alaina and Danae.
So far, he’d turned up nothing. The house appeared tight as a drum. One window downstairs was broken, but it was boarded up. The rest were nailed shut. Danae’s fiancé, Zach, the contractor making repairs to the house, had made sure everything was sealed tight before he returned to his regular workweek in New Orleans and so far, Tyler hadn’t found a single thing the contractor had left undone.
Tyler knew the front door was the questionable point. It was a huge wooden double door, ornately carved, likely ridiculously expensive, and was equipped with ancient hardware complete with giant iron keys like those you’d see in a horror movie. In anticipation of Joelle’s arrival, he’d ordered some security equipment, but it hadn’t arrived until today. As soon as he finished his perimeter walk, he’d start setting up the equipment, beginning with the alarm on the front door.
When he rounded the corner for the side of the house containing the long patio, he paused, staring into the brush. Something looked off. He stepped into the trees and pushed through the foliage, working his way around a forty-foot-square region. On the surface, everything appeared normal, but the telltale signs of recent passage were visible to someone as skilled in tracking as Tyler was.
Some of the broken branches could be attributed to the storms that had swept through the area lately, but the depressions in the ground cover were the result of being trod upon. The ground cover was too dense to make out an actual footprint, but the size of the indentations was too large for any of the creatures that would normally roam the woods, except maybe bear. And if a bear had passed this way, Tyler would see far more damage to the branches.
He followed the depressions and the broken branches about twenty yards into the swamp before turning around. Someone could have traversed the swamp from any number of locations surrounding the house, and may have walked hundreds of yards or even miles to throw someone off the track. Likely, the tracks would come out on one of the many dirt paths that led through the swamp, easily reachable by an ATV. As most everyone in Calais owned or had access to an ATV, that didn’t narrow the suspect pool even a bit.
Turning back, he tried to track the depressions toward the house, but they seemed to end about twenty feet from the patio, which made no sense. Tyler could understand if a stalker had a viewpoint to simply observe the comings and goings of the house in order to plan a strike. The military often watched from one vantage point but attacked from another. But from this vantage point, all he could see was the corner of the house and a bit of the patio. No window or door offered a view inside, except for the small pane of glass on the exterior door off the laundry room. But he couldn’t see in that pane from his current position.
Deciding he wasn’t going to figure it out standing there, he made a mental note to keep an eye on this location and continued back to the patio. The stone patio didn’t leave any opportunity for tracks, so he checked the windows and scanned the nearby brush, but the only tracks he saw were his own from when he’d hauled away brush earlier that day.
As he made his way down the patio toward the kitchen, he heard the high-pitched voices of the three sisters. The excitement was clear in their tone, and Tyler was happy that Joelle’s reunion with her sisters seemed to be going so well. He’d had no doubt that would be the case, but he understood why Joelle was nervous. It was a whole lot to absorb, especially some twenty-five years later and after living so long as an adult with no family to speak of.
He had a key to the patio door that led into the kitchen, but didn’t want to startle them by letting himself in, so he rapped on the glass panes and waved when they whirled around. Joelle hurried to the door to let him in while her sisters stood there, clearly waiting for an introduction.
“Guys,” Joelle said, “this is William’s son, Tyler—my personal bodyguard.”
They both smiled and the taller one walked over to extend her hand. “I should have known,” she said. “You look just like your father. I’m Alaina.”
“Nice to meet you,” Tyler said. “You look like the pictures I’ve seen of your mother.”
Alaina beamed and Tyler understood why his old friend Carter had gotten himself tied down. Alaina LeBeau was gorgeous and, according to his father, brilliant. And from limited exposure, he’d already gathered she had personality to boot. Triple threat. Carter had made a good choice.
“You must be Danae,” he said and extended his hand to the youngest of Ophelia’s daughters. Danae was shorter and curvier than Alaina, and looked like a combination of Alaina and Joelle. Perhaps she’d taken after both parents, while Joelle looked more like their father. Not that it mattered. Apparently any combination of those genes produced good-looking women.
Danae shook his hand and smiled. “It’s nice to meet you. William talks so much about you. We’re thrilled that you’ll be checking up on Joelle. We worry about all of this, and it’s too much for Carter to handle alone.”
“Oh, he’s not checking up,” Joelle said. “He’s living here, going with me when I leave the house. For all I know, he might be sitting guard outside the bathroom when I shower.”
A flash of Joelle standing naked and wet under a shower stream bolted through his mind, and he felt his chest constrict. Instantly, he forced the image from his mind. The last thing he needed was to imagine Joelle—or any other woman—naked and vulnerable.
“I don’t think it will come to that,” he said. “Well, if you ladies are okay in here, I’m going to start installing a security alarm on the front door.”
“That’s a great idea,” Alaina said.
Danae waved a hand over the counter, which was loaded with food. “Do you want to eat? We brought a feast with us.”