Bayou Bodyguard

Brian narrowed his eyes. “So then, how would you know if it was ghosts or people?”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Justine replied. “I don’t want either of them in my room.”

“People are more dangerous.”

“That’s what I’ve got you for, right?”

“Yeah, but I won’t be with you every second. Do you have your nine with you?”

Justine froze and set the salt on the dresser.

“I know you have a nine millimeter registered,” Brian continued. “You had to know they’d check you out.”

Justine blew out a breath. Of course they would. Olivia had been held hostage by a crazy man and almost killed. They had proof that someone aside from Wheeler was contributing to the problems at laMalediction and Olivia was married to a cop. It would be foolish to think she’d get involved with anyone concerning laMalediction without her fiancé running a thorough background check.

Which meant Brian knew everything about her, too. At least, everything they’d found. How deeply had they looked? Past her name change and into her childhood? Could they even access those records? Olivia hadn’t seemed to know anything about her mother when she’d mentioned her earlier. Maybe no one had made the connection to the person she was for the first eighteen years of her life.

“I have my gun,” Justine finally replied.

“Do you know how to use it? And I don’t mean just the basics.”

Justine nodded. “I took lessons at the shooting range, and I practice twice a month. I’m not going to win an Olympic event, but I can take a man down if necessary, and I’m not interested in shooting to injure.”

The hint of a smile crossed Brian’s face. “I’ll make sure I announce myself before entering rooms.”

Justine waved a hand in dismissal. “Oh, I promise to look before I shoot—for a second, anyway.”

Brian took another look at the salt and frowned. “Well, if you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to unload the security equipment from my Jeep before that storms gets going.” He pointed to the lantern on the nightstand next to her bed. “I understand the electricity around here is a temporary thing, especially in storms. There are matches in the nightstand drawer for when you need them.”

Justine glanced outside at the ever-darkening sky. “Thanks.”

Brian gave her a single nod and left the room. Justine watched as he closed the adjoining door then stepped over to the window. The black clouds swirled above the estate like angry pillars of smoke. Justine had seen those clouds often enough to know a heat thunderstorm was on the way and it was going to be a doozy. They were common this time of year, and usually nothing to worry about.

Until now.

Now, she was closed up in a creepy house with a hulking policeman, and in no time she would certainly be without electricity. She watched as Brian pulled a box out of the back of his Jeep, placed it on the front porch then went back for another. Rental houses, security systems, a bodyguard from her past…it was more than she’d bargained for, that was for sure, but then she hadn’t expected to feel so edgy, either.

She could blame the feeling on sharing close quarters with a cop, or on the fear that he’d remember her, but that wouldn’t be completely true. One thing Justine never did was lie to herself. Like it or not, her uneasiness came from knowing that Wheeler hadn’t been the lone gunman. That someone else had access to laMalediction and could still enter undetected.

And more importantly, that Olivia’s dreams continued.

She heard a creaking sound outside the bedroom door and stiffened. A single glance out the window confirmed that Brian was still unloading boxes. It could just be the house settling, but every instinct inside her screamed that it wasn’t. Silently, she eased her gun from the suitcase and crept to the door.

She peered into the hallway, but it was empty. Then at the end of the hallway, a shadow slid out of an open doorway. Tightening her grip on her pistol, she slipped into the hallway and inched toward the doorway. The shadow lengthened for a second, then disappeared back into the room. All thoughts of safety aside, she sprinted down the hallway and burst into the room, but there was no one in sight.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm her racing heart. A quick survey of the room told her nothing. A couple of cardboard boxes and a small table lined the far wall, but otherwise, the room was empty. She crossed the room and took a closer look at the boxes, even shifted the top one of the stack, but all she found was a thick layer of dust that caused her to sneeze.

She slowly walked around the room, feeling the walls, looking for an entry point, but the plastered walls looked seamless in every aspect. The single window in the room was closed and locked, and when she attempted to open it, it held fast, glued into place by ancient paint. Frustrated, she blew out a breath. Building construction and hidden passageways were not her forte. Justine had never set foot in a place so grand that it housed servants, much less provided them hidden passageways to conduct their daily work while remaining invisible to visitors. Still, for someone to have disappeared so quickly, shouldn’t she see a sign somewhere?

She walked back to her bedroom, trying to put this latest occurrence into perspective. Maybe something blowing in the wind had passed the window in the room, casting a shadow into the hall. Okay, so the window was at the completely wrong angle and there hadn’t been even a breath of wind when she looked outside, but wasn’t that just as plausible as a disappearing person, or even worse, a ghost?

Or maybe her overactive imagination played a trick on her. She wasn’t given to fancy, but it wasn’t impossible. A lot was riding on her work at laMalediction. That, coupled with Olivia’s unnerving behavior earlier and the unwanted introduction from her past, was certainly enough to put her on edge.

She crossed her bedroom and looked out the window in time to see Brian locking his Jeep. He didn’t look even remotely disturbed or alerted to anything out of order. Sighing, she slipped her gun back into her suitcase, disgusted that she’d allowed herself to be so easily spooked.

And that’s when she noticed the piece of folded paper on the nightstand.

Her breath caught in her throat. That paper hadn’t been there before, but now it sat perched on the thin layer of salt she’d poured earlier. She knew she shouldn’t touch it. She should call for Brian. Let him do his cop thing with fingerprints and such, but she couldn’t stop herself from reaching for it, opening it.

She gasped as she looked at it. Tears stung her eyes at the picture of her mother, secured in a straitjacket, locked behind bars, her face still fresh with bruises from the “helpful” law-enforcement officers who had dragged her away.

“I know who you are.”

The words were written just above the photo.

She crumpled the paper and tucked it in her pocket. She’d burn it at the first opportunity.

But no matter what, she wouldn’t be scared away from laMalediction. Whoever had left the paper was brazen, especially with the cop right outside, and that told her one of two things: he was either crazy or desperate.

Either could work in her favor.

BRIAN TOSSED HIS GUN and keys onto the bedroom dresser, then stepped into the tiny bathroom to turn on the water in the bath, wishing like hell someone had thought to update the antiquated bathrooms in the main house to include showers. Taking baths in a relic of a house in the middle of nowhere and babysitting angry women with a fear of cops—he’d reached an all-time low. Granted, this job gave him the opportunity to take a much-needed break from police work, and for that he was grateful, but it came with other complications that he was usually able to avoid.

Like angry, beautiful women with a fear of cops.

He tensed for a moment and rubbed the two-day growth on his jaw. Where had that beautiful part come from? Granted, when Olivia had told him she’d hired a historian, he’d been expecting the gray-haired-librarian sort. A dark-skinned Creole beauty with green eyes, miles of black, wavy hair and a body that was toned to perfection had never entered his mind. Not to mention there was something familiar about her. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it would come to him eventually.

He stepped back into the bedroom and grabbed some clean clothes from his duffel bag just as a huge bolt of lightning struck outside. The lights flickered twice, then went out completely, leaving him in total darkness. He took a couple of steps to his right, trying to feel for the lantern in the inky, black room, and banged his knee on the nightstand. Mentally cursing himself for doing the very thing he’d warned Justine to be prepared for, he located the matches and lit the lantern.

He placed the lantern on the center of the nightstand and tossed his clean clothes on the bed. It was probably a bad idea to submerge yourself in a tub of water during a thunderstorm. Pulling the heavy drapes to the side, he peered outside at the rain that poured from the sky. These blinding-heat thunderstorms that blew in off the Gulf of Mexico were nothing new to him, but while normally he could ignore the storm and go to bed, being at laMalediction spurred his thoughts to all the things a storm this bad implied.

Communication would be nonexistent, and if there was an emergency, he wasn’t certain they’d be able to make it down the path to Cypriere, even in his Jeep. It was also far easier for someone to hide in a blinding rainstorm, both their movements and the noise they made, so he needed to be more alert than ever.

Brian released the drapes, but as the heavy curtain slipped back into place, he saw a flash of white across the courtyard. He yanked the drape back again and focused on the area behind the fountain where he’d seen the white object, but there was nothing there.

He waited a couple of seconds and was just about to chalk it up to debris blowing in the storm when he saw it again, this time clearer. It was a tall figure wearing a long, white robe. He couldn’t see a face, but he had no doubt the object was human. The person stood just at the edge of the woods, motionless in the storm as the white robe whipped around him.

Brian dropped the drape and reached for his gun. No way was someone standing out in that rainstorm to bring a housewarming gift. After his conversations with John and Olivia, he’d anticipated trouble, but not necessarily so soon. He shoved his gun into the waistband of his jeans, grabbed a flashlight and knocked once on the connecting door before entering Justine’s room. She sat in a chair at a writing table and stiffened as he entered the room, her expression both aggravated and indignant.

“That wasn’t much notice,” she complained. “What if I’d been dressing?”

“There’s someone outside in the storm, standing across the courtyard. I’m going to check it out. I need you to lock both doors to your room and do not come out until I tell you it’s clear.”

Justine’s eyes widened and she glanced out the window into the storm. “Someone’s out there in that? But that’s crazy!”

“Exactly my point,” he said as he opened the door to her room and slipped into the hallway. “Stay put until I get back.” He pulled the door closed and rushed out of the house and into the storm.

Chapter Three

Justine rushed to lock doors as soon as Brian left, then pulled her gun from her suitcase and checked the clip. Placing the gun within easy reach on the writing table, she took a breath and tried to process what Brian had told her. It was so unbelievable, she was still having trouble wrapping her mind around it.

She knew that standing in front of the window during a lightning storm was a dangerous thing to do. Not only because of the lightning, but because she’d left the drapes open earlier to watch the storm, and the lantern would cast her silhouette onto the window. Even the most amateur of shooters would find that an easy target.

Not that she had any reason to believe that someone was trying to kill her, but she had every reason to believe that someone was trying to scare her. A well-placed shot through a window would be a good way to scare someone, but could also result in disaster with the high winds of the storm. Edging across the room, she stopped just before the window and leaned over to peer outside.

The storm was raging and she had to strain to make out Brian as he slipped behind the automobiles in the courtyard. After that, the fountain came into clearer view and she got her visual bearings. Scanning the courtyard, she looked for anything out of place…like someone standing in the middle of a torrential downpour just asking to be struck by lightning.

Across the courtyard, just beyond the woods, she saw what had sent Brian running outside. She dimmed the lamp to barely an ember to remove the glare from the window, and looked outside again. The figure was still there, wearing a white-hooded cape that whipped around in the storm. She strained to make out a face or even to tell if the figure was a man or a woman, but the head was bent, as if staring at the ground.

Suddenly the figure raised his head, and Justine would have sworn on everything holy that whatever was out in the storm was looking directly at her. Two red eyes glowed inside the white hood and her heart began to race. Her skin tingled and her hair stood on end as a wave of fear like she’d never experienced before washed over her.

She drew back from the window, her body flat against the wall, and struggled to breathe normally, her heart pounding so loudly she thought it would burst. What in God’s name was out there? And where was Brian? She hadn’t seen him at all. Had that…that thing gotten him?

You’re panicking. Get a grip. It has to be a trick.

She sucked in a deep breath and slowly blew it out, then leaned over and peeked outside again. But this time the courtyard was empty. No white-hooded figure. No red eyes.

No Brian.

She scanned beyond the courtyard, past the caretaker’s cottage and the storage shed and into the woods. Surely Brian wouldn’t have gone into the woods. He was armed, but if someone was playing a trick on them, they were obviously prepared, and Justine had to assume, better equipped to disappear, even in the storm. What Justine had seen required planning and setup and careful deliberation. Certainly not the sort of thing kids would pull off, as the sheriff had suggested to Olivia.

She scanned the courtyard once more, looking for any sign of Brian, and her hands clenched involuntarily as every square inch she could see turned up empty. How long did she wait? Hours? All night? What if he needed help?

Justine was an excellent tracker, but in a storm like this, even she would have trouble determining whether the telltale signs of a presence in the woods were due to a man passing or the winds and rain of the storm. Footprints wouldn’t remain for long in the downpour.

Frustrated and antsy, she blew out a breath and paced the length of the room. On the second pass, her nose wrinkled and she stopped to sniff the air. Something was different…acrid.

Smoke!

Blood rushed to her head and she clutched the desk to remain steady. The room went out of focus for a moment, then seemed to tilt. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing, on regaining control.

Think.

But there was little to think about. There was only one way out of the second floor that she knew of, and that was down the main stairwell. She shoved her keys into her pocket then lifted her pistol from the desktop and crossed the room to the door. She ran her hand across the surface of the bedroom door to check for heat, but felt none.

This is it.

She stared at the dead bolt and took a deep breath. Finally, she slid it back and eased the bedroom door open to peer into the hallway. The smell of smoke was much stronger in the hallway, but she couldn’t see smoke or hear any sign of fire. More importantly, she didn’t see anyone with red eyes wearing a white robe.

Her best option was to get out of the house, even if the road to Cypriere was unpassable. The house was old and huge and the fire could be anywhere below or above her. Either could create a collapse, so her car was the safest place to be, assuming there was nothing in the courtyard that was more dangerous than fire.

Not allowing her mind to dwell on that possibility, she hurried down the hall toward the stairwell and rushed downstairs to the entry. Stopping short at the front door, she peered out the narrow side windows to ensure the courtyard was clear. As she reached for the doorknob, she heard something behind her, but before she could turn around and take aim, something hard struck the back of her head and she dropped to the floor, everything fading to black.

THE RAIN CAME DOWN in blinding sheets and soaked Brian completely before he’d even made it twenty feet from the house. He wiped the excess moisture away from his eyes, wishing he’d thought to grab his ball cap on the way out. He skirted around the edge of the courtyard, moving from one hiding place to another without using the flashlight, trying to limit his exposure. When he’d made it completely across the courtyard, he hid behind the storage shed near the caretaker’s cottage and then slipped into the edge of the woods just beyond.

He looked back at the house to get his bearings, and saw the dull glow of the lantern light cast from the windows of the bedrooms that he and Justine occupied. He looked across the courtyard from the windows and estimated the location where he’d seen the figure. The area was empty now, but if someone had been standing out in this storm, they would have left footprints in the thick, gummy Louisiana mud, even in the downpour.

He moved steadily through the edge of the woods toward the spot where he’d seen the figure, then scanned the courtyard and the woods beyond for any sign of movement. Nothing. He waited a couple of seconds, but nothing moved except the storm.

Finally, he left his hiding place in the woods and walked to the ground where he’d seen the person standing. He turned on the flashlight and shined it on the ground.

No way.

He shined the light back and forth across the muddy ground, looking for the trail that had to be there—the trail that should indicate how the person arrived or where they’d gone. But the ground held no prints at all. He turned around and shined the light across the ground where he’d walked and saw the outline of his footprints in the mud.

Even with the intensity of the rain, there wasn’t enough time for footprints to have washed away—not in a matter of minutes. He walked to the edge of the woods and shined the flashlight along the perimeter, looking for any sign that someone had entered or exited the courtyard through the woods.

His frustration grew with every step he took. He hadn’t imagined the figure, and he knew he was looking in the right area. But no one could have walked across that ground without leaving a trace.

No one but a ghost.

And that just wasn’t possible. He’d never believed in that sort of thing before, and regardless of what Olivia thought she’d seen when Wheeler held her captive, and the huge amount of respect he had for her, he wasn’t about to start buying in to it now. There was a logical explanation for everything happening at laMalediction.

And he was going to get to the bottom of it.

He entered the woods just behind the area where he’d seen the figure and scanned the ground for any sign of passage. There was some broken foliage along the edge of the woods, but the force of the storm could have caused that as easily as a man. What a storm couldn’t do was leave footprints and there had to be footprints somewhere.

He covered at least a hundred-foot stretch of woods, ten feet deep into the brush, but turned up nothing. Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d been gone from the house for over thirty minutes. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Justine in there alone, especially not at night and during a storm.

He glanced back at the house and his heart began to beat faster. The light from Justine’s room barely showed through the window, when earlier it had been bright. Abandoning his investigation, he ran straight across the courtyard to the house, his mind racing with a multitude of possibilities, none of them good.

No way had she turned off the lamp and gone to bed and he’d made sure it was full of oil when he checked on her earlier. If she was afraid of someone seeing her, she could have drawn the drapes, but he could still make out the dark lines of the heavy fabric drawn to the sides of the window.

He burst through the front door, prepared to dash upstairs, but his foot connected with a solid object in the dark and sent him sprawling across the marble floor of the entry. He directed his flashlight to the floor and a single glance back confirmed his worst fear. He scrambled over to Justine, who lay across the entry.

Leaning in, he watched her chest and saw it rise and fall. A quick check of her pulse showed a somewhat elevated heartbeat, but nothing alarming. “Justine,” he said and patted the sides of her cheeks, trying to wake her. “Justine.”

His pulse quickened as he failed to get any response. He slipped his arms underneath her and carried her into the sitting room where he placed her on the couch. A lantern sat on a table next to the couch, so he lit it to cast more light on the situation. As he placed the lantern on the coffee table closer to Justine, she stirred.

And that’s when he saw blood on the couch pillow.

He froze for a moment, then knelt down and gently lifted her head, trying to see what was causing the bleeding. The gash was immediately visible, and he let out a sigh of relief as he realized that the cut wasn’t deep or large, and was probably made by something with a fairly sharp end, rather than the marble floor, as he’d originally feared. She must have slipped and hit her head on something. But what?

There was nothing in the center of the entry where he’d found her, so the only other logical explanation was that she’d hit it somewhere close by and staggered to the center of the entry where she’d passed out. He stepped through the other side of the sitting room and into the kitchen. He’d noticed clean dishtowels in a drawer earlier, so he grabbed one and soaked it with cold water. Justine still hadn’t wakened when he returned to the sitting room, so he placed the cool cloth across her forehead.

She stirred a bit and her eyes fluttered. Then all of a sudden, she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide with fright. He grabbed her arms as she tried to strike him.

“Justine, it’s Brian. You’re safe. Stop struggling or you may injure yourself.”

Justine locked her gaze on him and he could see the panic in her eyes begin to diminish. She gasped for air, then blew out a huge breath and swung her legs around so she was in a sitting position.

“What happened?” she asked.

Brian shook his head. “I found you passed out on the entry floor. You’ve got a gash on the back of your head. I figure maybe you fell in the dark and hit your head on something.”

Now that the initial crisis had passed, Brian felt irritation begin. “Things like this are exactly why I told you to stay put. You can’t just walk around in the pitch-black in a strange house. You’re going to be lucky if you don’t need stitches.”

“There was a fire,” Justine argued. “I smelled the smoke in my room, and stronger in the hallway.”

Brian frowned. “I don’t smell anything, and if there was a fire we’d see it by now. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Do you think I would risk leaving the room with that…that thing outside if I didn’t have a good reason? I know you’re here to protect me, but I didn’t exactly grow up in Mayberry. Survival is something I’m very familiar with.”

Brian sat on the coffee table and sighed. “So what happened after you left the room?”

Justine stared at the wall behind him, her brow scrunched in concentration. “I figured the safest place to go was my car. I checked the bedroom door before opening it. It was cool, but the smell of smoke was stronger in the hall. I hurried downstairs and looked out the entry window to make sure the outside was clear.”