by JoAnn Ross
The moment the black car glided to a stop at the curve, the inn’s glass door opened and a man came down the stone steps.
A sudden, white-hot sexual craving zigzagged through her like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue summer sky, sending every hormone in her body into red alert.
Roxi recognized him immediately. She’d Googled him yesterday after talking with Emma on the Internet, and while on all those Web sites she’d visited he’d definitely appeared to be a hunk, up close and personal he was downright lethal.
His hair was warm chestnut streaked with gold she suspected was a result of time spent beneath the California sun, rather than some trendy Beverly Hills salon. He was conservatively dressed in a crisp white shirt, muted gray striped tie, and a dark suit, which looked Italian and probably cost more than her first car.
He opened the back passenger door. His eyes, which were as green as newly minted money, lit up with masculine appreciation as they swept over her.
“Wow. And here I thought the woman was fictional,” he murmured.
“Excuse me?” Her body wasn’t the only thing that had gone into sexual meltdown. Sexual images of herself and Sloan Hawthorne writhed in her smoke-filled mind.
She told herself the only reason she was taking the hand he’d extended was that the car was low, her skirt tight, and her heels high.
Liar. Not only wasn’t she sure she could stand on her own, she was actually desperate for his touch. Not just on her hand, but all the other tingling places on her body.
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. Sheepishly rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I tend to talk to myself when I’m bewitched.”
“I see.” He wasn’t just drop-dead gorgeous. He was cute. It also helped to know that she wasn’t the only one who’d been momentarily mesmerized.
The butterflies settled, allowing Roxi to pick up a bit of her own scattered senses. “Does that happen often?” she asked.
“This is the first time.” His gaze swept over her—from the top of her head down to her Revved up and Red-y toenails, then back up to her face again. “That is one helluva dress.”
“Thank you.” It was a basic black dinner dress. That was, if anything that was strapless and fit like a second skin could be called basic.
“Did you wear it to bring me to my knees?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, then.” He flashed a grin that would’ve dropped a lesser woman to her knees. As it was, it had moisture pooling hotly between Roxi’s thighs. “You’ll be glad to know that it’s working like a charm.”
Like so many of the fine old homes in Savannah’s historic district, the Inn had several steps originally designed to keep the dust and mud from the unpaved dirt streets outside the house.
Sloan put a hand on her back as they started walking up the five stone steps, hip to hip. Although the gesture seemed as natural to him as breathing, Roxi’s knees were feeling a bit wobbly as a doorman in a burgundy uniform with snazzy gold epaulets swept the door open for them.
She would have expected Sloan to stay at one of the modern brass and glass high-rise hotels that tradition-loving Savannahians loved to complain about. It would have made it easier to dislike him. Or at least keep her emotional distance.
But the minute she walked into the inn, which epitomized sultry Savannah, Roxi was charmed by the black and white marble floors, the mahogany paneling, the pink marble pillars holding up a ceiling that soared at least fifteen feet, and the grand, sweeping staircase that made Scarlett’s Tara look like a poor imitation.
“It’s stunning,” she breathed, gazing up at the ceiling that managed to have enough gold leaf to be elegant without crossing over to tacky excess.
“My family’s always been proud of it,” he said mildly, waving a hello at the concierge seated behind a cherry desk polished to a mirror sheen.
She stopped in her tracks. “Are you saying your family owns this inn?”
She’d known he was rich. His family, according to Google, owned one of the largest brick companies in the country. But having grown up with a shrimper for a father and a housewife for a mother, Roxi found herself a bit intimidated by the idea of old wealth.
“No. I’m saying an ancestor built it.”
“He was the architect?” Her heels clattered on the flowing black and white marble as they crossed the room.
“Actually, he laid the bricks. My family came from a long line of stonemasons. Which is how we got into the brick business.”
“Ah, Mr. Hawthorne.” The tuxedoed maître d’ at the open doorway to the restaurant bowed as if greeting foreign royalty. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“It’s good to be back, Randall,” Sloan said. “How’s the family? Didn’t my mother tell me your daughter was about to have another baby?”
“She gave her mother and I our third grandchild last week.” His chest puffed up with obvious pride. “A beautiful little girl. Seven pounds, three ounces. They named her Elizabeth Rose.”
“That’s wonderful.” Sloan’s answering smile was, Roxi noted, every bit as warm as the ones he’d been tossing her way. She’d read a quote from Nicole Kidman, who’d called him a rarity in Hollywood, a genuinely nice man who treated everyone, from grip to catering staff to star, with equal respect.
“Give the proud parents my best,” he said.
“I’ll certainly do that.” The maître d’ beamed. If he’d had a tail, he would have been wagging it. “If you’ll just follow me, we have your table waiting for you.”
The restaurant floor was carpeted and the walls draped in a rich Savannah green silk, both, Roxi suspected, designed to mute the noise. It seemed to be working. Although the dining room was crowded, quiet conversation was possible.
It could have been a dining room in any other five-star restaurant. The men were all wearing suits or black tie, the women, for the most part, dressed much as she was, though she did glimpse some cocktail suits, and quite a few floaty, flowered dresses in the pretty pastels so popular in the South.
The walls were lined with banquettes covered in a rich burgundy tapestry, and as they walked across the room, she caught sight of several floor-to-ceiling draperies which seemed to close off private alcoves.
Were these rooms, she wondered, where the assignations took place?
As they followed the man toward the kitchen, she was thinking that for all the bowing and beaming, the old guy hadn’t given Sloan a very good table, when he opened a door leading to some steep stone stairs.
“I’d thought we’d have dinner in the wine cellar,” Sloan explained as Roxi looked up at him. “Given that the place tends to be packed on Friday night, I thought it’d give us more privacy.”
He paused just a beat, long enough to let that idea and all its implications sink in. “But if you’d like to eat in the dining room—”
“The wine cellar will be fine.” She hoped.
What did she really know about Sloan Hawthorne, after all? What if he was some sort of crazed sex fiend? What if the cellar was a secret S&M dungeon where members chained women to the wall and whipped them for their own sadistic gratification?
God. What on earth was the matter with her? Although Savannah, which Margaret Mitchell had referred to as “that gently mannered city by the sea,” was well-known to possess an erotic, sensually adventurous side, it certainly didn’t have S&M dungeons hidden away in five-star restaurants.
Besides, Emma, despite her uncharacteristic mistake with the dickhead, was a very good judge of character and never would have hooked her up with a sex maniac.
Although the walls and floor were made of the same stones she’d seen all over the city, stones that had arrived in Savannah as ballast in the holds of ships, there were no chains. No whips that she could see.
A single table had been draped in a snowy cloth, and set with gleaming crystal, china, and heavy silverware. Wall sconces cast a soft light over the room and a candle in a hurricane glass glowed. The damask napkin the maît
re d’ had placed in her lap with a flourish had been lightly scented with lavender. Smooth and sultry jazz flowed from hidden speakers.
Perversely, although she certainly wasn’t into masochism, after their drink orders had been taken—a summer melon martini for her, beer for him—Roxi experienced a twinge of disappointment that he appeared to have been telling the truth about having chosen this room solely because it allowed for more private conversation than the upstairs dining room.
“Did your ancestor lay these stones, as well?”
“He did. The cornerstone was set a hundred and sixty years ago and you’ll note the place is still standing. I’m not sure how many modern-day buildings we’ll be able to say that about.”
“I love old buildings.”
“Me, too, which is one of the things I miss in California, where it seems all the great old houses are being bulldozed down and replaced by megamansions. When I was a kid I used to have my birthday parties down here and show off to all my pals.”
“That’s nice.”
It also took away the idea of the house being used as a sexual pleasure palace. From what she’d read of his family, his parents were respectable Episcopalians who attended Savannah’s first church, which since 1733 had been designated as “Georgia’s Mother Church.” His father was CEO of one of the largest brick suppliers in the South, while his mother owned an antique shop on Bull Street across from the gold-domed City Hall. They did not sound like people who attended orgies. Nor would they, she suspected, appreciate their son dating a witch.
“My friends always wanted to go to my grandmother’s shop,” she revealed.
“Was she into magic and spells and such, too?”
“She was a traiteur—that’s Cajun for a healer. But she also had some Caribbean heritage, so she was active in the voodoo religion, as well.”
“Religion?”
“Despite the way it’s often depicted in movies, what with people biting heads off chickens, making blood sacrifices, and dancing naked, voodoo is a very structured religion.”
“Damn.” One brow lifted. “And here I was, really looking forward to that naked dancing part.”
Arousal stirred in her belly. And lower. “Oh, I’ve been known to go skyclad. When there’s a full moon.”
She combed a hand through her hair, a time-proven gesture that lifted her breasts appealingly. Unsurprisingly, his gaze followed.
Ha! As she’d always told Emma, men were easy.
Unfortunately, despite having always insisted on maintaining the upper hand, she was proving every bit as easy. She wanted him. Here. Now. In every way there was to want a man.
“I don’t happen to have a calendar,” he said hoarsely. “Would you happen to know when, exactly, the next full moon will be?”
Hanging onto her ebbing control with her fingertips, she managed a coy smile as she trailed a languid scarlet nail down her throat. “Not tonight.”
“Well, damn. There goes that moonlight fantasy, shot to smithereens.”
He might not believe in magic and spells and things that went bump in the night, but Roxi Dupree definitely had him bewitched and as bothered as hell.
The thought of those sexy, red-tipped fingers curving around his cock was all it took to give Sloan a massive hard-on.
He was debating just ditching the Southern manners he’d been taught in the cradle and jumping her luscious, sexy bones, right here and now, when the waiter showed up with their drinks, giving him time to drag his rampant libido back into check.
Chapter Seven
“So you were sharing a religious experience with your friends by taking them to your grandmother’s shop?”
“No.” Her laughter was rich and warm and curled around him like satin ribbons. “To be perfectly honest, they just wanted to see all the gator heads and teeth.”
“I imagine gators beat foundation rocks any old day when you’re a kid.”
“Perhaps. But wasn’t it in Savannah that that fictional pirate gave Billy Bones the map of Treasure Island?”
“Yeah. Some of the background for that novel supposedly came from the Pirate’s House restaurant, where pirates supposedly hung out.”
“Maybe they hung out here, as well,” she mused.
As she glanced around at the gray stones, he imagined her a captive, chained to the wall, naked. Hot. Wet. Forced to do his every bidding.
He wondered what she’d do if she knew that the cellar had been originally built to hide smuggled pirate treasure. And stories persisted of Blackbeard having spent several weeks hiding out here with a woman he’d taken prisoner who’d become one of his fourteen wives.
“So, your family’s from Savannah originally?”
“No, they landed in New England in 1630.”
It was proving harder and harder to carry on a civilized, getting-to-know-you conversation when in his mind, she’d climbed onto his lap, her dress up around her waist as she straddled his thighs and gave him the lap dance of his life.
“About sixty years later, a group who didn’t exactly buy into Puritanism broke off and moved south. And immediately became known as the black sheep branch of the family tree.”
That was putting it mildly. Though, to his mind, building brothels was a lot more respectable than hanging women falsely accused of witchcraft.
“My family’s story was much the same,” she said. “Oh, not the Puritan thing. Which would have been unlikely, given those people’s attitude about the only good witch being a dead witch.”
So, here’s your chance, a little voice of reason in the back of his mind counseled as she picked up the tasseled menu and began leafing through the pages of listings. Tell her. Now. Before you get in over your head.
Don’t be a damn fool, said another voice, which seemed directly linked to his hopeful dick. You think she’d be willing to go to bed with you if she knew the truth?
Trying to ignore them both, he took a long drink of Guinness.
“Your name’s French,” he said, shifting the conversation away from his family heritage.
“Acadian.” She put down the menu and took a sip of her martini. “My father’s people were kicked out of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century for refusing to convert to Anglicanism.”
“And ended up in the bayou because they figured it’d be the last place in the country anyone would want, so they’d be left alone and finally allowed to settle down,” he said.
“That’s right.” She sounded surprised.
“I had to read that Longfellow poem about Evangeline and Gabriel back in high school.” He did not mention the family lore about Longfellow having been inspired to write the poem about the Acadian maiden and her lover torn apart on their wedding day, by a story told to him at a dinner party at author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home. “I’ve always thought the story would make a great movie.”
“There have already been two made, back in the 1920s,” she divulged after their orders had been taken. “In fact, Delores Del Rio, who starred in the second one, had a statue made of herself and placed on the site where Evangeline’s supposedly buried.”
“But she wasn’t real.”
“Try telling that to some of the people down in the bayou. The Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville is actually the third oak designated as the site where Evangeline and Gabriel were united. Tourists continue to flock there, decade after decade, which is why I strongly doubt moviegoers would enjoy having the heroine find the hero in an almshouse after years of separation, then the two of them dying in each other’s arms.”
“That could present a problem,” he agreed. “Given that moviegoers these days mostly prefer their love stories to come with a happily ever after guaranteed ending.”
“Fiction always sells better than truth,” she said knowingly.
He arched a brow. “Sounds as if you don’t believe in happy endings.”
“I suppose it depends upon your meaning of happy.” Her tone definitely closed the door on that topic.
Not wan
ting to press, Sloan switched gears. “What about the other side of your family?”
“They came over on the coffin ships from Ireland about a hundred years later and ended up in Louisiana building the levees.”
“With all those Catholics in your background, it’s interesting you’d decide to become a witch.”
“I didn’t decide anything. Other than to practice the Craft. I have Druid blood from my mother’s side of the family. And, as I said, my father’s great-grandmother was a Haitian voodoo priestess, which carried through the women’s side of his family.”
“Which makes you a two-fer.”
“I suppose you could put it that way.”
“Are you into voodoo like your grandmother?”
“No. I suppose I’m more like your ancestors in that way.”
“My ancestors?” His gut clenched. And not in a good way.
“The ones you told me didn’t make it as Puritans? The religious aspects were just too structured for me, which is why I’m not Wiccan, either.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Wicca is a neopagan religion. Not all witches are Wiccan, and not all Wiccans practice magic,” she explained as the waiter delivered their dinners and discreetly disappeared.
“Anyway, though I’d been drawn to the Craft all of my life, I’d never thought about actually earning a living with it until my grandmother Evangeline died and left me her voodoo shop. I gave away all the gator heads and teeth and was planning to dissolve the business entirely, but people kept showing up at the day spa I’d opened up with Emma, wanting spells like they’d bought from Grand-mère.”
She took a bite of crab cake and closed her whiskey-hued eyes, looking like a woman in the throes of ecstasy. Actually, Sloan realized, she looked exactly the way the witch had in his dream, when he’d ridden her hard and fast beneath the icy winter moon.
Although the stone walls kept the cellar insulated, and additional cooling kept the room at an optimum temperature for wine storage, air-conditioning going full blast, his internal temperature spiked.
Sloan pulled at the starched collar of his shirt and was seriously considering yanking off his tie when another, equally provocative image flashed in his mind.
