by Rebecca York
The words were harder for her to say. Instead she turned, holding out her arms, and he came into them, hugging her tightly and kissing her cheek before setting her a little away.
“I didn’t just bring a present for you to feed the horse. I brought you something from New Orleans.” Reaching in his pocket again, he held up a small box. When she only stared at it, he removed the top and took out a gold locket hanging on a slender gold chain.
She reached to touch the beautiful piece, stroking the engraved work on the front of the locket. She had never held anything so precious or so finely made in her life.
She shook her head in regret. “I can’t take anything like that from you.”
“Of course you can.”
Lifting out the locket, he held it in his hand, then sprang the catch. Inside were two miniature portraits. They had been done by a skilled artist, because she recognized the people immediately and gasped.
“You and me.”
“Oui.”
“But how?”
“Do you remember that man who came to your father’s house, saying he was traveling through the area?”
“Yes.”
“You gave him a meal and he kept staring at you. You told me he made you uncomfortable.”
She laughed. “Oui. I wondered what he wanted.”
“I am sorry I distressed you, chère. But he was the artist who painted these portraits. I needed him to see you, so he would understand your beauty for himself. So I sent him into the bayou. You should have heard him complain about having to travel to the backcountry.”
“Oh, Andre.” She stopped, overwhelmed with emotion, needing to clear her throat before she continued. “You went to a lot of trouble for me.”
“I wanted to give you a present that would mean something—to both of us.”
She closed the cover with regret, then stroked her thumb over the shiny surface. “My father would never let me wear this. I’d have to hide it from him.”
“I know that. Until I get his permission to court you, you can wear it under your dress, next to your silky skin.” As he spoke, he took the locket from her suddenly stiff fingers, reached around her neck and fastened the clasp. He looked for a moment at the locket resting against her bodice. Then he gravely opened the first two buttons and slipped the locket inside. It was hot against her skin, hot like his touch, as he opened two more buttons, just that simple act sending currents of heat through her body.
“Andre,” she sighed as he leaned down, then stroked his lips gently against the tender skin below her neck. “Oh, Andre.”
“I will have you for my wife,” he whispered.
She wanted that to be true. So much. At night, in her narrow bed, she longed to reach out and find herself in a wider bed—with him beside her. But she didn’t think it could ever happen. He was like the lord of the manor and she was one of the peasants. If she was going to have anything with him, she must grab what she could, while she could. Well, not everything. Only what wouldn’t get her in real trouble.
When he opened his saddlebag, she looked at him questioningly. He only smiled at her and led her farther into the bayou.
They came to a place under a spreading oak tree, where she saw he had gathered leaves and moss into a soft pile. And when he opened the saddlebag, she saw that he had brought a coverlet with him.
Her pulse was pounding as she watched him spread it on the leaves, making a bed. When he turned back to her, his face was serious. “I want us to be comfortable when I take you in my arms.”
“I…” She had been bold in kissing him, letting him touch her in forbidden places. But lying down with him was something she knew went too far.
“You are thinking we shouldn’t do that,” he said.
She could only nod.
“I know why it’s a bad idea for you. But, chère, I would never hurt you. Never do anything we shouldn’t.”
They had already done things they shouldn’t, if she were strictly honest with herself. Yet when he sat down and held out his hand, she took it and sat beside him, feeling her back stiffen as she tried to keep from shaking.
And she knew he could feel it, too.
“You’re right to be nervous. But you never have to be frightened of me. I respect you too much to hurt you.”
“Respect? How can you respect a woman who is sitting with you on a bed under an oak tree.”
“Because I love you,” he said again. “Je t’aime,” he repeated.
“Oh, Andre!”
“I’m not saying that because I am going to force you into anything,” he added hastily.
“I know.” She dragged in a breath and let it out in a rush, then said the words that had been bottled up inside her since the first afternoon they had met out by the old fallen tree. “I love you so much.”
“My love. My angel. I ached to hear that. Thank you for being brave enough to tell me.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Oui. You should. I live for the time we can be together as man and wife.”
It was the same for her. She dared to let joy leap inside her.
He squeezed her hand, kissed her cheek, his lips soft and gentle. When he turned her to him, she let him gather her into his arms, let him run his tongue along her closed lips. She should keep them closed. But she couldn’t. She opened for him, glorying in the sensation of his tongue caressing the inside of her lips, her teeth, then engaging her own tongue in a slow, erotic tryst that made her blood heat and her pulse pound.
While he kissed her, he stroked his hands along her ribs as he had done before, then slowly slid them inward, teasing the sides of her breasts, then finally cupping them in his hands through the fabric of her bodice and chemise.
She should stop him. He shouldn’t touch her like that. But she was helpless to say the word no.
Instead she turned more fully toward him, a small sound rising in her throat as he caressed her there. Then he did something new, his fingers brushing over her hardened nipples, making heat leap inside her. Helplessly, she felt a pleading sound rise in her throat.
“Andre. Oh, Andre.”
“You like that?”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t know anything could feel that good.”
“There’s more, love.” He gathered her close, then lay back on the coverlet, taking her with him, holding her in his arms, pulling her body against his, her skirts tangling around their legs as he rocked with her.
Flames lapped at her. The flames of hell, she thought. But she didn’t care. There was only this moment, this man and the desperation they shared.
He rolled to his back, pulling her on top of him, stroking his hands down her body so that every aching inch of her was pressed to his.
They were both shaking with strong emotions. All she could think was that the clothing they wore was in the way. And she knew at that moment she would have let him do anything he wanted with her.
“Andre, I need…” She wasn’t even sure how to finish the sentence.
“I know, love. I know.” He adjusted her body, so that her aching center was pressed to the hard rod of flesh at the front of his britches. It felt so good there. No, wonderful.
“Oh!” Unable to stop herself, she moved against him, her desperation rising as his hands pressed her to him, then played with her breasts through the fabric covering them.
She heard herself moan. She knew she had turned into a total wanton as her movements became frantic, as she strove for something she couldn’t name. And then a burst of pleasure grabbed her, making her call out with the wonder of it.
She was left limp and panting, her head pressed to his shoulder as he stroked her back and tangled his fingers in her hair.
“What did you do to me?”
“I gave you—”
Before he could finish his answer, a sound intruded into the dream. A woman’s voice, chanting, pulling Morgan away from Andre as surely as if strong fingers were tangled in her hair, yanking painfully. Yanking her back to reality.
Chapter Four
Morgan woke, breathing hard and feeling disoriented. Her body was flush with the aftermath of sexual release—a sensation she hadn’t experienced in a long time.
In the dark she felt her face heat as wisps of the erotic dream drifted through her mind.
Where was she? In a bed. She had been sleeping. Now she was awake.
Something had snapped her out of the dream. A sound.
It filtered into her consciousness, making the hairs on the backs of her arms stand up and her skin tingle. It was a woman’s voice, chanting to the sound of a drum.
Out in the humid night.
Morgan strained her ears, trying to figure out the words. But she couldn’t make any sense of them, and finally she came to the conclusion that they were in some language she didn’t understand. An ancient language that sounded rough and primitive and evil.
She shivered. Evil. Yes, the chant sounded like pure evil. Meant to do harm.
To her? Or to Andre Gascon?
Suddenly Morgan was very glad that she was safe inside the house, not out in the midnight garden.
Slipping from the bed, she glided to the window, staying to the side as she peeked out. Moonlight silvered the garden. From the safety of her bedroom, she searched the grounds of Belle Vista.
She was in rural Louisiana, she reminded herself. At the Gascon family home. She had come here because Andre Gascon had asked for a private detective to figure out who was killing people in the swamp near his home. Killing people and making it look as if a big cat had done it. And somehow that was supposed to be his fault. She hadn’t quite figured out how that fit into the scenario.
But maybe he was doing something illegal with animals. Maybe he had a zoo out there in the bayou, and he was letting the residents roam around at night. She’d come up with that theory last week, and it made as much sense as anything else.
He had hired her to get to the bottom of his problem. Or so he said. Perhaps he had brought her here to use her in some way.
The thought was ludicrous. Use her for what?
Still, she sensed he might not have been entirely honest about his motives. And his having hired her didn’t restrict her to any limits he set. She would look for that zoo. But not now. Not out in the darkness, when her head was pounding in the same insistent rhythm as the drum she heard outside.
She pressed the palm of her hand against her throbbing temple. It only gave a focus to the pain.
As her eyes probed the shadows beyond the lawn, she froze. All at once what had looked like tree branches resolved itself into another shape. There was someone out there—the long, lithe figure of a woman. Chanting and banging on a small drum.
Morgan had been standing at the side of the window. Now she felt a strange compulsion to show herself. Stepping in front of the glass, she faced the darkness.
As if the strange visitor knew she was being watched, she looked up toward the window where Morgan stood. They were too far away and it was too dark for their gazes to meet. But as she stared at the figure, her mind flashed back to the house on the edge of town—the one with the sign in the window that said Voodoo Priestess. The one where she’d seen someone watching her.
Were they one and the same? It was impossible to tell in the dark. But Morgan was trained to take in the details of a person’s appearance. This individual seemed to be about the same height, weight and shape.
The voodoo priestess, if that was who she was, tipped her head to one side. In acknowledgment? Or triumph?
Morgan didn’t know. But she felt a profound sense of relief when the woman picked up her drum and faded into the darkness under the trees.
Realizing she had the windowsill in a death grip, Morgan loosened her hand and pressed her forehead against the hard glass, thinking that she’d gone from arousal to terror in the space of a few minutes. The sensations weren’t all that different: her heart was still pounding; a film of perspiration coated her skin; and the neck of the robe felt like it was cutting off her breath.
She opened the top two buttons, but it didn’t help. The whole robe felt like it was pressing too hard against her body, making her hot and edgy.
Striding to the bathroom, she filled a glass with water and gulped it down. But it hardly helped to calm her as she thought about what had happened.
She had gone to bed in the damn robe. The same one Andre had handed her in the SUV. When she’d first put it on after the flood, she’d slipped into a dream about a woman named Linette and a man named Andre—who looked a lot like the present owner of Belle Vista.
She’d seen him clearly. But she had been inside the woman’s skin, inside her head, so she didn’t know what Linette looked like.
Wait! She did. She had seen the miniature portrait. The woman’s hair had been long, not cropped to chin length. But her eyes had been blue, like Morgan’s, and her features had been similar—as much as she could tell from a tiny oil portrait.
Something else flitted through her mind. What had Janet said? Her hair was too short. But her eyes were the right color. Did Janet know about the woman in the portrait? Had she seen it?
Morgan’s pulse was pounding, and she ordered herself to calm down. She was always cool and collected in the face of danger, but since the flash flood, she’d lost her equilibrium.
She had a right to be off balance. A voodoo priestess, or someone like that, had awakened her with a malevolent chant. The woman had been outside in the shadows, working some evil spell.
Evil spell? She snorted. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing. Not at all, she assured herself.
But the chanting and drumming had definitely affected her, even if the magic wasn’t real. Of course, the woman certainly wanted it to be real. And for whatever reason, twice now, something strange had happened to Morgan. She’d dreamed of people she didn’t know. People who seemed to have lived around here. Apparently it was only a brief ride to Belle Vista from the cabin where Linette had lived.
Morgan pulled herself up short. If there was any magic involved, it came from the damn robe. Had the voodoo priestess cursed it? Or had Andre infused it with magic?
Yeah, right.
That her mind was taking this direction appalled her. She had been hired for a specific job that had nothing to do with a voodoo priestess. Or maybe it did, come to think of it, since Andre had carefully neglected to include anything about the woman in his report on the town.
She was going to ask him about that. But not until morning when she knew where to find him.
The robe felt as if it was burning her skin, and she couldn’t stand to wear it another nanosecond. Even if she had to wrap herself in a sheet, she had to get the damn thing off.
With fingers that were almost frantic, she worked the buttons, restraining the impulse to simply rip the garment down the front. When she was free of the strait-jacket, she tossed it onto the small upholstered chair in the corner of the bedroom.
Naked, she breathed out a sigh of relief, then began prowling the room.
She hadn’t thought to look for anything else to wear. Now she started opening drawers. In one she found a man’s dress shirt, soft from many washings.
Earlier she’d shied away from the idea of wearing anything that might belong to Andre Gascon. But necessity made her slip into the shirt. As he’d warned, it was much too long. But when she rolled up the sleeves, she decided it would make a good enough nightshirt.
Clicking the light on her watch, she saw that it was too early to get up. And she was reluctant to prowl around a strange house in the dark, dressed like a ragamuffin.
So she lay back down, knowing that the possibility of sleep was a distant one. In fact, her mind was whirling with too many ideas. She tried to think about the mystery of the chanting woman outside. But she kept coming back to the mystery of Andre Gascon. And the other man named Andre whom she had met only in two very vivid dreams.
The long-ago Andre had stirred her senses, made her aware of hot, sexy feelin
gs that she hadn’t experienced since she’d been in Trevor’s arms. Dreaming of him had brought her to orgasm, if she were honest.
Damn him. He wasn’t Trevor. He wasn’t her husband, the love of her life. The man who had taught her about sex. Taken her skydiving and spelunking and to the Ritz in Paris. Deliberately she brought back the feelings she’d experienced when she’d learned of his death. The aching sense of loss and despair.
He had been so much a part of her life that she had hardly known how to cope. Lucky for her, her old colleague from the Peregrine Connection, Lucas Somerville, had persuaded her to join him in Baltimore. He’d gotten her a job at the Light Street Detective Agency, when she would have spent her days lying in bed in the dark, mourning her loss.
The friends she’d made at Light Street and Randolph Security had rallied around her, too, and helped pull her through the worst of it. They were the most amazing group of men and women she had ever encountered. They had all been through dangerous and frightening experiences.
Annie Oakland and Max Dakota had almost died preventing a terrorist attack. Hunter and Kathryn Kelley had fought off a government conspiracy. Sam Lassiter had come back from an alcoholic stupor.
They were strong. They had lent her their strength. And she had told herself that if they could survive, she could, too.
Still, the reality of Trevor’s loss had always been a given in her life. Even when the grief had dulled, it was still a part of her soul.
Tonight she felt more alive than she had since his death. She should welcome that feeling, she told herself. Instead she resented it. She had gotten used to living a certain way—until a dream lover had brought her to a new level of reality.
A dream lover. She hated that part of it as much as anything else. He wasn’t even real.
Or was he? Did he have something to do with the present Andre Gascon? She wanted to put that notion out of her head. Maybe she did, because sometime before dawn, she fell asleep.
When she woke, bright sunlight was streaming in the window, sunlight that helped banish all the strange and disturbing notions that had been churning around in her head not so long ago.