Tall, Dark and Paranormal: 10 Thrilling Tales of Sexy Alpha Bad Boys

by Opal Carew

  “There was no wolf, cher.”

  “What about the howls in the swamp? The tracks. The deaths?”

  “What about them?”

  “Why do you keep denying even the possibility that there’s a wolf or ten out here?”

  “Because there isn’t.”

  I gave a frustrated little shriek and resisted the urge to kick him.

  “You want me to prove it? Tonight I take you. I know this swamp like I know my own name. If there’s anything here that doesn’t belong I’d have seen it.”

  Unless he was hiding something, and I kind of thought that he was. Maybe I shouldn’t go tripping off merrily into the swamp with him in the dark. I might never be heard from again.

  Be safe, Simon had said. What had he meant? From the loup-garou? Or from Adam?

  What choice did I have? If I was going to fulfill my vow, I needed help. And the only help available was the only man who’d made me feel alive since my whole world died.

  Life certainly was a vicious bitch.

  Another thought occurred to me, one that made me dizzy with dismay. I collapsed on the bed. “I’m no damn good at this.”

  Sex required responsibility. Protection. My celibate lifestyle had kept me free of disease. I was also free from birth control, being both a widow and an idiot.

  The bed dipped as Adam sat beside me. His hip brushed mine, but he touched me nowhere else, and for that I was grateful. When he touched me I couldn’t think.

  “You’re very good at this, if you’re askin’ me.”

  “What?” My mind wasn’t keeping up with the conversation.

  “You said you were no damn good, but you are.”

  I smiled before I could stop myself. “Thanks. But I meant the technicalities. Protection. We didn’t use any.”

  I saw the understanding spread across his face. I waited for the horror, the panic, the escape, but it didn’t come. “You don’t have to worry.”

  “I think I do.”

  “You wanna ask me have I been with a lot of women?”

  I shrugged. My lame-ass equivalent of “Hell, yes!”

  “Once I fucked like rabbit, my father said.”

  “How ... flattering.”

  “He thought so.”

  Now would be the time to ask about his father. Then again, what did it matter how, when, or why Ruelle Senior had died?

  “Me, I was lookin’ for love. What’s that song? In all the wrong places.”

  The sadness on his face made me want to touch him, but I knew where that would lead.

  “Those days are gone,” he murmured. “Love isn’t for me.”

  “Why not?”

  Adam contemplated my face. “You aren’t lookin’ for love. We both know that.”

  He was right, so I dipped my head.

  “I want you. Shouldn’t, but can’t seem to help myself. I see that red hair …” He picked up a strand and rubbed it between his fingers. “Smell your skin, stare into your pretty green eyes, and I lose my mind.”

  Being wanted for my body was something new; I kind of liked it.

  “Since I left the army, there’s been no one.”

  “No one?” I found that hard to believe.

  “No one,” he insisted. “And in the army, they tested us regular for every old thing. I came out clean, cher, and clean I still am. Right?” He quirked his brows, and my face heated.

  I’d never had a conversation like this before, although if I planned to spend the rest of my life alone, with the occasional lover to take off the edge, I’d have to get used to them.

  “There was never anyone but Simon,” I whispered. The words until you hung in the air unspoken.

  Adam touched my hair again. “Why not?”

  “He was everything, and when he died—” My throat closed.

  “A part of you went with him.”

  I didn’t bother to answer. Couldn’t, really.

  “It’s not natural to be alone.”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are. You’ll fall in love again.”

  “No,” I snapped.

  “No?”

  “I don’t ever want to feel again the way I felt when he died.”

  “So you feel nothing?”

  “I had my shot. Simon was it for me.”

  “You don’t think you can love twice in one lifetime?”

  I lifted my head, looked him straight in the eye. “No.”

  He must have seen that I meant what I said, because he gave a sharp nod, as if we’d sealed a bargain. I guess we had.

  “You’re like a wolf,” he murmured, “mating for life. If one dies, the other is forever alone.”

  “How do you know so much about wolves?”

  “Common knowledge, no?’

  I stared at him, suspicious though I wasn’t sure why. He was right. The whole mating-for-life thing was common knowledge.

  “There’s more to be concerned about than STDs.” All I needed was a baby. I could barely take care of myself. Adam wasn’t doing much better.

  In truth, I wasn’t crazy about kids. I didn’t long to be a mother. Maybe this made me a freak of nature, but that’s how I felt. I was an only child. I’d never played well with others. Without brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, I’d had neither a reason nor an inclination to babysit. Kids just made me twitchy.

  Simon and I had decided all we needed was each other. We’d planned to travel the world, sleep in tents until we couldn’t anymore, then retire. Besides, if I wasn’t going to have Simon’s child, I certainly wasn’t going to have anyone else’s.

  “I can’t,” Adam murmured.

  To make sure we were talking about the same thing, I asked, “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t get you, or anyone else, pregnant.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I could ask what was wrong with him, but since he hadn’t offered to tell me, should I? What was the etiquette for something like this? I didn’t have a clue.

  Adam stood and turned away, as if the conversation upset him. Maybe he’d been wounded, although I hadn’t seen any scars and I’d seen pretty much everything. Perhaps, unlike me, he’d wanted children one day. Learning he’d never have them might account for some of the sadness in his eyes.

  The question was: Did I believe him?

  I studied Adam’s tense shoulders. A better question might be: Why would he lie?

  Since I couldn’t come up with an answer, I went to him and slid my arms around his waist. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No?”

  The way he said the word, with that French twist, always made him sound just a tad sarcastic, which was probably the whole idea.

  “For us, that’s a good thing.”

  He turned in my arms, taking me into his. “Whatever you say.”

  “We’re having a—”

  Adam tilted his head. “A what?”

  An affair sounded too long-term and old-fashioned, a fling too flippant for the intensity of what we’d shared.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But whatever it is, it’s about sex, not love, or kids, or anything but the moment. Right?”

  “What man would say no?”

  Lowering his head, he kissed me, putting all of himself into the embrace. Only later, when we were back in bed, my heart still pounding, my chest still heaving after another bout of exactly what I’d wanted, did I consider his response. Or rather his lack of one. Adam had the habit of answering every one of my questions with a question of his own.

  And that wasn’t really an answer at all, was it?

  Chapter 17

  I awoke to the sun and an empty bed. I tried not to be hurt. This wasn’t a relationship. We’d both made that perfectly clear. So why did I feel as if I’d been screwed in more ways than one?

  The only indication that Adam had been here at all were his jeans on the floor and my dry clothes folded on the dresser. My gris-gris perched at the apex. I wondered what he’d made of that. Prob
ably nothing. Having lived here all of his life, he’d no doubt seen a thousand of them.

  Would it still work after being soaked by rain, then scorched by electric heat? I had to hope so, since I needed to get through the swamp without being eaten by alligators. I couldn’t believe I was putting such store in a bag of herbs, except I hadn’t seen a gator since Charlie died.

  I got dressed and shoved the gris-gris in my pocket. My hair was a mess, or at least it felt that way to my fingertips. I couldn’t find a mirror anywhere.

  There was something odd about that but I couldn’t figure out what without coffee. There wasn’t a pot in the house, either.

  Maybe Adam was just a guy’s guy—didn’t care to primp. And really, what could he do? He was gorgeous wearing tattered pants, a two days’ growth of beard, and twigs in his hair. I wish I could say the same about myself, minus the beard, of course.

  In the kitchen, I pounced at a scrap of paper on the counter, frowning at the map, which detailed a path from the shack to the mansion. There wasn’t a single personal word on the page.

  What had I expected? A declaration of everlasting love?

  “A little praise would be nice. Hey, Diana, rabbits pale in comparison to you.’ “ I snorted at my own wit. Might as well, no one else would.

  The storm was gone, leaving behind a bright blue sky through which the sunshine blazed. Shards of light sparkled off the glistening droplets of rain that lingered everywhere. From the position of the sun, I’d missed not only breakfast but lunch.

  In the night the cypress trees had seemed to blot out the moon and the stars. Against the sun, they weren’t any help at all.

  I glanced about hopefully, mind cursing my own stupidity when I realized I was looking for Adam. Why would he leave a map if he was going to hang around? Even stupider was my desire to see him. If I wasn’t careful I’d forget every vow I’d made. I’d stop searching for the loup-garou and spend all my time in bed. The idea was far too tempting.

  Annoyed with the wishy-washiness of my resolve, I forced myself to march toward the bedroom window to search for tracks. The ground was damp; there had to be something. Unless there’d been nothing.

  Coming around the corner of the house, I stopped dead. The earth beneath Adam’s bedroom window had been turned up, as if someone had considered planting flowers or a shrub, then changed their mind.

  Except the yard was a swamp. Anything planted there would be overtaken in a month. What would be the point?

  There wasn’t one, unless the ground had been dug up to hide the tracks of a man or a beast.

  I wanted to see Adam more than ever. Instead, I followed the map, returned to the mansion, changed my clothes, and left for town. I planned to head straight to Cassandra’s. Something weird was going on—in either the swamp or my head or both. She was the only person who’d given me any sort of answers. Bizarro as they might be.

  However, as I was trolling for a parking place, I remembered the library and the newspaper articles I’d already paid for, so I swung the car around and made a slight detour.

  The clippings were at the desk as Mrs. Beasly had promised, but she wasn’t. When I asked for her, the girl who’d handed me the packet said, “She never came in to work.”

  People ditched work all the time, though Mrs. Beasly didn’t seem the type. She was more the type to have fallen and she couldn’t get up.

  “Did someone check her house?”

  The young woman, who looked nothing like a librarian in the low-slung pants that barely covered her crack and the high-cut shirt, which barely extended beyond her breasts, nodded. “She’s just... gone. Her car, her purse, her suitcase all right where she left them, but no Mrs. Beasly.”

  That was new. No animal attack, no death by strangulation. Just poof. Maybe Mrs. Beasly’s disappearance was unrelated.

  I glanced at the manila envelope in my hand. But I doubted it.

  I thanked the girl and took a chair in the library, then dumped the clippings onto the table.

  Local Man Commits Suicide at Home read the first headline. The only thing different about the second was the date—about twenty-two years later. The articles went a long way toward explaining why Adam loathed the mansion. I wasn’t wild about the idea of multiple suicides there myself.

  The information was remarkably similar in the two deaths. Law enforcement theories ranged from self-termination to murder and back again. The family was investigated. The angle of the gun, lack of motive, and concrete alibis exonerated them.

  “Survived by one-year-old grandson,” I read in Grampa’s obituary, earning a scowl from the student at the next table. If she put her finger to her lip and told me to “shh!” I’d be tempted to shout. I always was.

  I searched through the clippings, looking for the obituary of Adam’s father, but there wasn’t one. Odd.

  And that comment Mrs. Beasly had made about the lack of girls born in the last century, I should determine if that was true—though what it had to do with anything, I couldn’t decide. I checked it out anyway, and unless someone had managed to birth a girl at home and keep the child off the records completely—a Herculean task even without the practice of assigning Social Security numbers in the nursery—there hadn’t been a Ruelle girl born in over a hundred years. I couldn’t find any obituary for Ruelle senior, either.

  Which was weird. But not impossible.

  I hadn’t asked Adam about any of this. When was the appropriate time to bring up an unfortunate tendency toward suicide in the family or their strange genetic anomaly? When he was making me come the first time? Or maybe after the third?

  I left the library, hurrying toward Cassandra’s, dodging tourists, every one seemed to be headed in the opposite direction. The wail of a saxophone hovered on the humid air, the mournful sound drawing me along with the crowd to Jackson Square.

  Located near the river, Jackson Square had once been a military parade ground. Now it was a civilized garden spot, bordered by shops, restaurants, and the towering St. Louis Cathedral. Artists had set up booths to sell their wares, but a good share of the tables belonged to psychics and Tarot card readers as well.

  In front of the cathedral, there appeared to be a party in progress. Musicians played, and if they weren’t playing they danced, while tourists tapped their feet or tossed change into the open instrument cases placed strategically on the street. Everyone was having so much fun, I wanted to. Inching closer, I let myself be carried away.

  I’d never been much for jazz, but this was something special. How could they make such spectacular music when people appeared to join and leave the band at will?

  “Does this happen every day?” I asked the man next to me.

  “Pretty much. The players change—whoever can make it does. Isn’t it amazing?”

  Definitely.

  Two police cars were parked right behind the musicians. The officers listened to the music, too, but they were also watching the crowd.

  “What’s with them?”

  “Trying to keep the drug dealing to a minimum. Puts off the tourists.”

  Such a pretty place, such beautiful music—of course there was something rotten beneath the surface.

  One of the officers separated from the others and strolled toward Muriel’s, a famous local restaurant, complete with the requisite ghost. A preppy couple was engaged in conversation with a grubby young man. When he caught sight of the cop heading his way, he took off. The couple’s eyes widened, and they disappeared almost as fast as the dealer had. The officer didn’t even spare them a glance.

  Though I would have liked nothing better than to walk into Muriel’s, take a table on the terrace, sip a glass of wine while I waited for a glimpse of their ghost, I wasn’t on vacation. I was working.

  I glanced at the sky. While I’d been listening to the music, the sun had fallen down, leaving dusk in its wake. I’d lost an entire day and gotten very little accomplished. Nevertheless, I really should check in with Frank.

  As I e
xited Jackson Square, headed for Royal Street, I pulled out my cell phone. Before I could dial, I caught a glimpse of a familiar face walking toward me. I froze.

  How did one greet a dead man?

  Chapter 18

  My stopping in the middle of the sidewalk had screwed up the flow of people, but since this was New Orleans no one shoved or cursed me. Most of them had drinks in their hands, and at this time of the day were mighty mellow.

  Except for Charlie, who took off like the drug dealer had only a moment ago.

  I wasn’t much for running, but I leaped into the narrow street, dodging cars, horse-drawn carriages, and people who’d gotten sick of stumbling along the crowded, broken cement.

  I might have been mistaken about the identity of the last dead man I’d seen walking. Him I hadn’t known personally. Besides, why would Charlie run if he didn’t have something to hide?

  And being a zombie? Big secret.

  I couldn’t believe I was even considering such a thing, but hey—this was New Orleans and he was a dead guy.

  As I ran, I reached for my zombie-revealing powder, sending up a murmur of thanks when I found it in my pocket. Now all I had to do was catch him.

  Easier said than done. My chest tight, my lungs burned. I might be able to kick ass in a self-defense class, but jogging I sucked at. Charlie was pulling away from me. He turned a corner several blocks ahead. By the time I got there, he was gone.

  I’d chased him out of the touristy section and into a slightly run-down area where small jazz clubs lined the street. Mostly empty now, a few stood open as employees prepared the places for the evening. They all had interesting names like The Spotted Cat.

  A thin, elderly black man swept dust out the front door of a building. As I passed he nodded, smiled, and murmured, “Ma’am.”

  “Did anyone run through here just now?”

  He shook his head but kept his eyes on his broom. I frowned. He had to have seen Charlie. Unless my quarry could just up and disappear.

  I retraced my steps to Jackson Square, where the party continued. I no longer had any desire to linger. The sun was completely gone.