Leaving Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

  “Gabriel.” Angela Quinlan somehow managed to hold her surgically perfected nose in the air while looking down at him. Which should have been even more difficult since she was a good foot shorter than his six feet two. She was also so bony a stiff wind would blow her away. Which had him suddenly wishing for a hurricane. Or maybe a tornado.

  “Miz Quinlan,” he said politely, smiling as he imagined a house dropping out of a stormy sky onto Emma’s mother.

  “I was surprised you’d come back to Blue Bayou,” she said. If her tone had been any icier, there’d be frost all over the green, purple, and gold crepe paper strung across the ceiling. “Now that you’re so famous, or should I say infamous”—her teeth flashed like a barracuda’s as she layered the acid scorn onto the word—“there’s nothing here for you anymore.”

  “Mais, oui, there sure enough is,” he drawled, rocking back on his heels as he gave Emma a look hot enough to melt the metal rafters. He put an openly possessive arm around a shoulder he knew was sporting a little love bite from this morning when they’d gotten a little frisky in bed with the beignets.

  “Emma?” From her tone, Gabe figured that if it weren’t for the Botox keeping her forehead an expressionless slate, Angela Quinlan’s brow would’ve climbed into her perfectly coiffed blond hair. “What is this”—she paused, as if seeking some word allowable in public—“actor talking about?”

  Before Emma could respond, Nate was calling her name over the microphone, asking her to come present the elderly teacher with her award.

  Obviously torn, Emma’s concerned gaze moved from the stage to Gabe to her parents to Gabe again, then back toward the stage. Her green eyes reminded Gabe of the time a bird had gotten caught in the cabin, and had been frantically trying to find a way to escape.

  “You’d better go do your deputy mayor thing,” he said. “I’ll just stay here and chat with your maman and dad.”

  “I don’t know—”

  He pulled her up against him for a quick, hard kiss and was pleased when, even while her mother was emanating enough frost and ice to cover Jupiter, he could still make her blood heat.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said. He ran a hand down her hair, which she’d smoothed out before leaving for town, but was already breaking into those bright curls he loved. “I promise.”

  “Okay.” She breathed out a sigh.

  He caught her arm as she began making her way through the crowd, which had begun talking about that hot public kiss they’d just witnessed between Emma Quinlan and bad boy Gabriel Broussard. “When you get done with your speechifying, why don’t you call me up to give Mrs. Herlihy that plaque.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Her smile lit up her face. That lovely, generous face Gabe knew would still be able to make his heart turn over when he was an old man, retired from the movie business, sitting out on the gallerie at the camp, making love to his Emma in that wooden swing.

  “There’s somethin’ you both should know,” he said to her parents, who were still looking properly scandalized by that kiss as Emma walked to the stage. Mon Dieu, Gabe was enjoying pissing off these two! “I’m gonna marry Emma, me. Now, you can make things difficult, or you can go along with the program. Which I suggest you do, ’cause, if Emma agrees we’ll be making ourselves a lot of babies. Now, personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you ever visit your grandchildren or not, but I’ve got the feeling Emma will care. So, we may as well all just pretend to get along. For her sake.”

  “You haven’t changed, Broussard,” her father said. “You’re still a bastard coonass.”

  “Well, that may be. But at least I’m not doin’ time in prison like the dickhead.”

  Suddenly he heard Emma calling his name. Gabe had never heard it sound sweeter than when it came from her sweet lips.

  The elderly mentor blushed to the roots of her lavender hair as Gabe told the gathered crowd how every success he had in the movie business, he owed to his former teacher. Then he kissed her, a smack right on her scarlet tinted lips. The crowd cheered. Gabe didn’t care. All that mattered to him was the pride in those faded blue eyes and the love in Emma’s gaze as both women looked up at him.

  “I’ve got one more announcement to make,” he said. “And, lucky for us, we’ve got some esteemed members of the press, from the Enquirer, in the back of the room.”

  Heads spun around. The two reporters, thought Gabe, though those words were stretching what they did for a living, looked uncomfortable. And more than a little nervous. Which vastly added to his enjoyment of the situation.

  “There’s been talk about my getting engaged recently, and I’d like to go on record saying that some of that story’s true.”

  There was an audible gasp.

  “I’m lookin’ to get myself married.” He reached out and took Emma’s hand, knowing that she’d truly trusted him when it didn’t turn cold at the unexpected remark. “If the lady will accept me.”

  Her eyes filled with moisture as she flung her arms around his neck. “It’s about time you asked that question, Gabriel Broussard.”

  There was more cheering. As he carried his Emma past Nate, his friend looked nearly as pleased with himself as Gabe was feeling.

  “What about Every Body’s Beautiful?” Emma asked.

  “Roxi says she’ll be happy to run it while you open up a western branch. What do you say, Emma? There are a helluva lot of ladies out there who could use a place where they can feel pretty and pampered. Even if they haven’t dieted themselves down to skin and bones. And believe me, their menfolk will be real happy with the idea, too.”

  “I love it.” She snuggled into his arms as he marched past the reporters. Wanting to make sure the entire world knew that this story was true, Gabe made a point of pausing to kiss her again. Their cameras snapped. Busy kissing him back, Emma didn’t seem to notice.

  “There’s just one thing,” she said as he buckled her into the seat of the truck.

  “What’s that, chère?”

  “Are you sure you can keep a woman of my vastly voluptuous hungers satisfied?”

  He laughed, feeling, for the first time in his life, as if he’d come home.

  “I gau-ran-tee it, mon coeur.”

  LOVE POTION #9

  One

  A full moon rode high in the southern sky, casting an unearthly white light over the Lowcountry, illuminating the woman who moved through the marsh with the sleek grace of a swamp panther.

  The thick air, pregnant with the disparate scents of salt, decaying Spartina grass, and night-blooming jasmine, dripped with moisture.

  Herons glided on wide blue wings while an alligator slid silently across water the color of burgundy wine. Fireflies glowed amidst the branches of old growth cypress, which stood like silent sentinels over the watery world, silvery moss draped over their limbs like feather boas discarded by ghostly belles.

  Bullfrogs croaked; cicadas whirred; somewhere in the dark a lonely owl hooted for a mate.

  The familiar scents of the southern Georgia marsh reached deep into the woman’s soul; the night music stirred the wildness that dwelt in her heart. It was music from an ancient time, a time when primitive man trembled with fear against the unseen denizens of the dark.

  A time when her people ruled with wisdom and power.

  A time of magic.

  Her hooded black cape blended into the shadows as she made her way through the swirling mists of fog. Upon reaching the sacred grove of live oak she knelt and plunged her hands into the inky water. When she brought them out again, her long, slender fingers glowed with green, phosphorescent ghostfire.

  Sparks fell back into the water, like a shower of stars, as she lifted her hands—palms turned upward toward the midnight velvet sky—offering a blessing to her mother, the moon.

  Her exquisite face bathed in a shimmering light, the woman began chanting the words taught to her while she was still in her cradle. Words from before time passed down from
woman to woman through the generations, words that flowed warmly through her veins, along with the blood that made her who she was.

  What she was.

  A witch.

  After completing her invocation, she untied the hooded cape and let it fall to the ground. A zephyr blowing in from the nearby Atlantic caught her freed hair, whipping it into a wild jet black froth around her face. The black bodysuit she wore beneath the cape fit like a second skin, revealing every lush curve. Black leather boots, polished to a glassy sheen, encased her legs to midthigh, while a metal breastplate shaped her breasts into two glistening cones.

  A silver amulet, dating back to medieval times and suspended from a hammered silver chain, nestled between her gloriously voluptuous, magnolia white breasts.

  She took a small vial from the amulet. The scented oil—which she’d blended herself on Midsummer Night’s Eve—was a dark and sultry concoction of scarlet rose petals, black dahlia, belladonna, dragon’s blood, and, of course, wolfsbane. Best known for its properties of protection against werewolves, few were aware that Medea had embraced the selfsame deadly plant in her many works of vengeance.

  She sprinkled the pungent oil over the rowan branches she’d gathered earlier and stacked in a circle of white angel wing seashells.

  With the powers of midnight vibrating through her, the woman known as Morganna held her hands out over the wood, causing it to ignite in a sudden whoosh of wind and flame.

  Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the faces of her life-sworn enemies, those who would use the darkness of the night to cloak their wicked ways.

  She envisioned them melting like candle wax amidst the dancing flames. Felt the fire crackle in the very marrow of her bones. Heard their agonized, bloodcurdling screams. A lethal heat suffused her, fire flashed along her every nerve; suffering the evildoers’ every torment, the witch swayed.

  But she did not flinch. Nor did she cry out.

  Any spellmaker who dealt in the dark side did not escape such acts unscathed, but given that her fate was both preordained and inescapable, Morganna bore her pain in silence.

  And when it was finally completed, when a cooling, benevolent rain began to fall to drench the scorching flames, she lifted her pale white arms again and offered a prayer of thanksgiving to the goddess moon for having allowed her to survive.

  “It is done.”

  Then, drained from the torturous burdens she’d willingly undertaken, Morganna, Mistress of the Night, folded to the damp ground and surrendered to the darkness.

  Two

  “I cannot believe you allow garbage like this comic book in your shop.”

  Roxi Dupree, owner of Hex Appeal, glanced up from stirring crushed lavender into a love spell potpourri at the book the older woman was holding up between two fingers, as if afraid of contamination.

  “It’s actually a graphic novel.” She sprinkled a handful of scarlet rose petals over the mixture. “And I like Morganna.”

  “She works the dark arts.”

  Roxi shrugged and refrained from pointing out that the Morganna stories were, after all, fiction. Fiction she’d grown up devouring. Stories that had fed a young girl’s imagination.

  Another thing she’d only ever shared with one person—her best friend Emma—was that Morganna had been a childhood role model. Oh, Roxi hadn’t grown up to turn cheating boyfriends into toads (though there had been one or two who deserved it), or burn alive wicked people who harmed children, but she had taken Morganna’s independent spirit to heart.

  “All of us, witch or not, have our dark and light sides.” Given that patience was not her strong suit, Roxi had to work at the mild tone. “Isn’t all life about striving for balance between the two?”

  “That may be,” the older woman reluctantly allowed, even as her narrow face remained as pinched as a prune that had been left to dry too long in the sun. She tossed the book back onto the shelf.

  “But Morganna, Mistress of the Night, certainly doesn’t spend a great deal of time on the light side,” she sniffed. “She’s an angry, vengeful creature who embarks on a crusade of blood and brimstone in every book.”

  Roxi found it interesting that a woman who’d proclaim the popular Morganna stories garbage seemed to be so familiar with the stories.

  “Not exactly brimstone,” she murmured, thinking how that very word played into detractors’ misguided view of pagans as devil worshipers. “And that particular crusade, by the way, is against undead spirits of the underworld who have infiltrated the bodies of humans.”

  Wiry wisps of steel gray hair surrounded the woman’s frowning face. Her thin lips firmed as she skimmed a finger around the rim of a hammered silver chalice. “That couldn’t possibly happen.”

  Closed-minded old biddy. “There are those who don’t believe it’s possible to draw down the moon, either.”

  The mention of the ancient rite brought to mind last night’s x-rated dream where she’d been in the sacred grove drawing down the moon when a stranger, clad all in black, had appeared from the shadows and fiercely ravished her beneath the midnight sky. Just remembering the way his teeth had tormented her nipples was enough to have heat pooling between her thighs.

  “She gives witches a bad name.”

  Martha Corey’s grim accusation had Roxi reluctantly dragging her mind from her dream of a wild, midnight sexual tryst back to their conversation.

  “I believe witches had a PR problem long before Morganna came on the scene.” The Spanish Inquisition and the Salem hangings were two that came immediately to mind.

  The woman abandoned the chalice, moving on to the iron cauldron Roxi had filled with fragrant purple and white lilacs for Beltane. “Did you hear that some Hollywood hotshot director is going to make a movie based on the comic books?”

  “Graphic novels,” Roxi repeated. Her frustrated sigh ruffled her dark bangs. “And yes, I believe I heard something about that.”

  Not only had she heard, Emma’s husband, Gabriel Broussard—a former hometown bad boy who’d been named Sexiest Man Alive—was going to costar in the movie as Damien, a rival witch who just also happened to be Morganna’s lover.

  Actually, the dark and dangerous male witch was the reason she’d begun reading the Morganna stories. He’d certainly fueled fantasies of an entirely different sort. Ones she hadn’t even understood at the time. Now that she thought about it, the man in her dream resembled Damien with his ebony hair and piercing blue eyes.

  “I also read in People magazine that it’s going to be filmed right here in Savannah.”

  “Imagine that.” Having not seen Emma and Gabriel since their wedding six months earlier, Roxi had been looking forward to them coming to Savannah while Gabe was on location.

  “Naturally, the coven is planning demonstrations.”

  Oh, hell. This was all she needed. Hex Appeal had only been open a few months. She’d established the original shop in Louisiana, but after Katrina blew the building away, Roxi had decided that as tragic as Katrina turned out to be, in her case the ill wind had offered an opportunity to spread her wings beyond Blue Bayou, the provincial Cajun community in which she’d spent the first twenty-five years of her life. Savannah, with its haunted and magical undercurrents, had seemed the logical choice.

  “Well, that should certainly liven things up.”

  Practically biting her tongue in half, Roxi took a pink candle she’d made last night down from the shelf, infusing the wax with essential oils of lavender and ginger. Both powerful love forces by themselves, recent studies had shown that the combined scent of lavender and pumpkin pie increased blood flow to the penis by forty percent.

  The spell she was packaging for her customer might technically be a love spell, but any woman, witch or not, knew that lust was the fast way to get any male’s attention.

  That idea had her unruly mind flashing back to the way her dream lover had feasted on her hot and needy body.

  “Of course you’ll be there.”

  “Be where?
” In her mind his roving mouth had clamped hungrily over her breast and his wicked hand was creating havoc between her legs.

  “At the demonstration.”

  “The demonstration?” Roxi repeated absently, trying to keep her mind in the here and now while her body, which was on the verge of melting into a hot puddle of need, desperately kept returning to last night.

  She placed the small linen bag containing the potpourri into the opening of a conch shell she’d picked up on the beach just last week.

  “We’re creating our schedule now.” Martha radiated impatience; a dark, muddied red aura of seething anger surrounded her. “The plan is to disrupt shooting so if those damn movie people insist on making their anti-witch pro-poganda, they’ll at least have to move to another city.”

  “Perhaps Salem.”

  “That would be more suitable.”

  Given that the irony had flown right over the older woman’s head, Roxi tried again. “Why don’t you just cast some go away spells?”

  Although he was now a married man, Roxi suspected that once the local witches got a look at Gabriel Broussard up close and in person, they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to send him away.

  “We plan to.” Martha had moved onto a group of unicorns, lifting up a crystal one to check the price sticker underneath. “The demonstrations are merely our backup plan.”

  “Don’t you think you’re jumping the gun just a bit?” Once again, Roxi tried to remind herself that patience was a virtue. “Perhaps if you were to read the script—”

  A sharp chin shot up. Faded blue eyes turned as stormy as her aura. “I don’t need to read any script to know that we’d hate it. As any true witch would.”

  Ah. Here it was. What she’d been waiting for. The challenging of her credentials, which somehow managed to come up in the conversation whenever the old witch visited the shop. Just because Roxi chose to be a solitary witch, rather than join Martha’s illustrious coven, she was considered suspect.