by Cindy Dees
“Flabbergasted.”
“Umm, as in good?” he asked.
“Not good—great. Fantastic. Spectacular.”
He chuckled and kissed the tip of her nose. “Glad to hear it. And yeah. You’re all of that.”
She let out a long, slow breath. He thought that of her? Really? She had to let that sink in for a minute. Eventually, she murmured, “Thank you for enlightening me.”
Bass leaned to one elbow and used his free hand to push her hair back from her face. “It’s not usually like that for you?”
“Umm, no,” she replied vehemently.
He frowned. “Why not?”
“Lousy taste in guys. Rotten past. Low self-esteem. Too shy to let go and enjoy. Trust issues. Take your pick.”
“Wow. Good thing I’m a brave man or that list might send me running for the hills.”
Yikes! The last thing she wanted to do was to spook him now. “Good point. Never mind,” she said quickly.
“No. Not never mind. I want to know you. All of you.” He gazed down at her searchingly, as if he would, indeed, peel back her emotional armor and discover all her most closely held secrets.
She waited for the panic to come, the need to run from him and keep running until he couldn’t possibly find her. Except it didn’t come, tonight. At all.
Flummoxed, she stared up at him. What was so different about this man that she might actually contemplate revealing everything about herself? Heck, she barely did that inside her own mind. Surely it was more than the amazing sex that made her want to tell all to Bass.
The answer was obvious, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to admit to herself how far and how hard she was falling for him.
In a bid to shift the subject to safer territory, she said, “What are you thinking, right now?”
“I’m thinking that I’ve never met a woman like you.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Definitely good.”
That earned him a smile from her. She wriggled a little beneath him and his eyes widened as she felt him stirring where their bodies were still joined.
The humor faded from his eyes as he stared down at her and he spoke quietly. “I think it’s time you told me your real name.”
Chapter 9
He’d had some great sex in his life, but nothing—nothing—compared to what he and Carrie had just shared. The deep vulnerability she brought to his bed, her genuine surprise, and then that shattering explosion of joy from her had brought a level of emotion to the lovemaking that he’d never experienced before. It was a revelation. And here he thought he knew a lot about sex. Hah! Turned out he knew zilch about making love. Until now.
“I beg your pardon?” Carrie stammered up at him.
“Your name. Your real name. If you’re willing to share your body with me, willing to let me see inside your soul, and willing to make love with me like that, the least you can do is let me know your name.”
“My name is Carrie Price. Carrie Ann Price.”
“So you legally changed it, then? From what? What name were you born with?”
She shook her head, looking panicked that he would force her to tell him.
He spoke more aggressively. “You’re a suspect in a criminal investigation. You need to answer my question.”
“So this is an official conversation, then?”
He nodded grimly, once, just the tiniest dip of his chin.
“Then you should probably not be in bed with me. Unless of course, it’s standard police interrogation procedure to have sex with the people you’re questioning.”
Dammit. Her tart words stung with barbed truth.
She frowned and pushed at his shoulders. He propped himself up on his elbows to stare down at her earnestly, but he didn’t release her lower body from beneath his. She didn’t get to evade the question or run away from him this time like she had every time he’d brought up her past so far. He was being an ass, but he couldn’t help it. He was so damned frustrated that she wouldn’t tell him something as simple as her real name.
“Look, Bass. I have a past, and I want to keep it in the past. I swear I’m not a criminal and I’ve broken no laws. If you want to be with me, the deal is you have to accept me for who I am now and move forward.”
She didn’t trust him. The realization was a cold bucket of water on his libido and he rolled away from her and sat up. An urge to swear and throw something came over him. What the hell was it going to take to get through to her? If she wouldn’t tell him herself, he was going to find out some other way.
He muttered, “I’m going to go check in with the guys.” He got out of bed and went hunting for his clothes. “I want to see if they found any tracks for the guy in the tree outside your room.” He jerked on his jeans and bent down to tie his shoes. “Stay here. My room faces the courtyard, and I’ve got two guys sitting down there on watch. No one’s coming in through my window to get you.”
He yanked on a T-shirt and left without a backward glance, grabbing his laptop off the desk by the door on his way out.
It took him about ten minutes to visit the six men lurking in various corners of the bed-and-breakfast. After the excitement with the person outside Carrie’s window, all had been quiet. Perhaps whoever was sniffing around her had finally figured out Bass was serious about keeping her safe. Or maybe the bastard had merely retreated to call in reinforcements.
Time was not only running against Gary Hubbard, but the longer it took to figure out why Carrie was in danger too, the more time the bad guys had to organize themselves and become combat effective. He had to figure out what the hell was going on with Carrie and her boss, and fast.
To that end, Bass found a desk in the library on the ground floor, turned on a small lamp, and sat down at his computer. It took him only a few minutes to find the court case where Jane Doe changed her legal name to Carrie Price. It had been filed in the State of Idaho three years previously. Idaho? That was a long damned ways from upstate New York. What was she running from?
He wrote up an official request for the file to be unsealed and sent it to the court in Idaho. Then he went hunting for a girl matching Carrie’s description in the news in New York State. Without her real name, it was hopeless, though. Hell. She might not have been telling him the truth about being from upstate New York, anyway. Whatever had happened to send her across the country and ultimately to change her identity could have taken place any time in the past decade or so, more or less anywhere in America except the deep South. She bore no hint whatsoever of a Southern accent in her voice. For all he knew, whatever had happened to her hadn’t made the newspapers anyway.
Frustrated, he went looking into Gary Hubbard’s past and found nothing to indicate why anyone would find the guy kidnapping-worthy.
Of interest was the fact that Gary had lived in Albany, New York, for some years before moving to New York City and launching his television career. Maybe that New York connection explained why Gary had hired Carrie to be his camerawoman.
Too wired to sleep, he checked in with the SEAL unit and was surprised to hear that the translation of the old French diary had just come back. One of the night watch guys emailed it to him.
Bass spied a printer across the room and went over to check it out. While dated, the thing looked operational, and a stack of blank paper filled the feeder tray. He downloaded the proper drivers for it to his laptop, and then hit print for the file of the diary translation. Fifty-plus pages later, he sat down with the results.
He was maybe a dozen pages into it, when the library door opened, causing him to look up sharply. Carrie stood in the doorway. Memory slammed into him of her body beneath his, her internal muscles clenching him sweetly, her arms holding him close—
He swore under his breath and his brows came together in a frown. “I told you to stay in the room. It’s not safe
for you to wander around this place alone.”
“Why? Worried the ghost is going to get me? I’ve been filming spookier places than this for years and have never been attacked by a ghost. Heck, the young woman who haunts this house isn’t even supposed to be hostile.”
He huffed. “This place is a maze. If an intruder got in, they’d have no trouble hiding. You shouldn’t be strolling around unaccompanied, especially at night. I want one of my men with you at all times when you’re out of your room.”
She looked crestfallen. Had she been hoping he would personally play bodyguard to her going forward? That would’ve been a great idea had she bothered to trust him enough to tell him the truth about herself.
As it was, his emotional detachment was ruined, and he was angry enough with her to make a fatal mistake. Better that his men babysit her for now. His expression hardened and he looked away from her, staring down at the pages in his lap without seeing the words.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The translation of the diary came through. I just printed it out.”
“Can I see it?”
His first inclination was to refuse her, but he knew that for the knee-jerk reaction it was. She’d been working with Gary on this supposed treasure hunt for months. Maybe she would recognize something in the diary that he wouldn’t. He sighed. “Yes, you can see it. It’ll go faster if we split it up.” He held out a wad of pages to her. “Look for anything that could explain what the hell Gary’s been up to that got him kidnapped.”
She sat down in the chair beside his and dug into the pages. Her mere presence within arm’s reach of him was distracting as hell. He could barely focus on the pages before him, let alone make out words and absorb meaning. The curve of her cheek in the lamplight, the way strands of her hair caught the light and shone gold—
Focus, for crying out loud.
Whoever had translated the diary had written directly onto an enlarged photocopy of the original, mostly translating word for word with notes in the margins about possible alternate translations and the occasional grammar notation.
He found it tedious going and wasn’t particularly interested in the passionate romance between the female author, who referred to herself only as M., and her wealthy patron, P.C.
Carrie, however, seemed fascinated. He even caught her dashing away a tear from her cheek at one point.
“What’s so tragic?” he broke down and asked.
“She loved him so much, and he couldn’t be with her because his job was too important to walk away from. It’s sad. Such a loss of what they might have had.”
The words resonated deep in his belly. Was Carrie talking about him, or about the dead guy in the journal? He shook off the sensation. Of course she was talking about Pierre. But a niggling feeling remained.
A voice spoke quietly in his earbud. “I’ve got movement in the upper hallway heading toward the main staircase.” Bass leaped to his feet, scattering papers on the floor, and turned off the lamp quickly.
“What’s happening?” Carrie asked, her voice quavering in the sudden dark.
“Intruder.” He thought fast. “You and I are going to stay put and take cover behind the desk while my guys check it out.”
He heard Carrie fumbling around and moving toward him. He reached out and his hands brushed her skin. She gasped, which helped him locate her in the dark. Throwing an arm around her shoulders, he drew her down beside him behind the desk.
Chagrin roared through him that he wasn’t armed and equipped with night vision gear. The only saving grace to being caught out like this was that he trusted his teammates completely. They would deal with the intruder as efficiently as he could.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a blood-curdling scream ripped through the house.
Carrie lurched against his side. She whispered, “I’ve never heard a ghost make a sound like that.”
Neither had he. That was a human, and a female if he wasn’t mistaken. He tightened his arm protectively around her.
One of the other SEALs’ voices spoke in his ear, dripping with disgust. “We caught the intruder. You gotta come see this. We’re on the front stairwell.”
“C’mon,” he muttered to Carrie, standing up.
“Are we running away?” she asked nervously.
Oh, right. She didn’t have an earbud to hear his guys. Must get her one. “Nope. Intruder’s been apprehended, and you and I have been asked to join my teammates to see who it is.”
He turned on the desk lamp, and he and Carrie made their way to the door. It was a quick walk down the main hallway to the foyer, where three of his guys clustered around one of the craziest sights he’d ever seen.
Amelie Reigneaux was wearing a tattered, once-white ball gown with a giant hoop skirt. It was an off-the-shoulder affair she was far too old to pull off decently. But more bizarre was the pale blue-white pancake makeup covering all of her exposed skin. Her eye sockets had been darkened with charcoal makeup, too. The overall effect was of an elaborate Halloween costume gone terribly wrong.
“Oh, dear,” Carrie muttered.
As soon as Amelie spotted Carrie she squawked. “Why did these men scare me to death? Why aren’t all of you in your rooms? I thought you would enjoy me making an appearance as the ghost! Shouldn’t you go get your camera and shoot me?” The woman shook her left arm free from the SEAL gripping her elbow, declaring in a ridiculous Southern accent, “Take your hands off me, you rude young man!”
“We won’t shoot the actual show until Gary gets here,” Carrie explained.
“Then why is your crew traipsing all over my house in the middle of the night?” Amelie demanded.
Bass dived in, throwing as much charm at their irate hostess as he could manage. “We thought we saw an intruder earlier. When we heard you moving upstairs, of course, we immediately jumped to rescue you.”
“Well, I never.” Amelie fanned herself with a ratty lace fan that all but fell apart under her vigorous swishing of it.
“Can I make you a cup of tea, Miss Amelie?” Bass asked solicitously. “Your nerves must be rattled.”
More fanning. “They’re shattered!”
“Why don’t you gentlemen take Miss Amelie into the parlor and sit with her while I go to the kitchen and make her a nice cup of tea?”
His men looked at him like he’d completely lost his mind. None of them were Southerners, let alone native New Orleanians. They didn’t get how encounters like this worked. There were rules for moments like these.
Carrie made as if to follow him to the kitchen, but he muttered to her, “You need to go sit with her. Calm her nerves and let her rant. See if you can get her to talk about something she’s interested in and get her mind off my guys scaring her half to death. And for God’s sake, don’t comment on her crazy appearance.”
Carrie flashed a quick grin at him. “You forget. I spend my life filming people who sincerely believe in ghosts. I’m good with crazy.”
Thank God for small favors. He rushed off to the kitchen to make Amelie’s tea. He knew without even having to ask the woman to load it up with enough sugar that a teaspoon would practically stand up in it.
* * *
Carrie headed thoughtfully for the parlor and their hostess in her ridiculous ghost outfit. Honestly, Carrie had seen worse. This outfit was elaborately decorated with festoons of ruffles, lace and ribbons. It actually would look good on the show if...no, when...Gary returned and they resumed filming.
She stepped into the parlor, where Amelie was currently suffering an attack of the vapors. Probably had as much to do with her overtight corset as it did with the three good-looking men hovering around her. Poor guys looked completely flummoxed by their red-faced, panting hostess.
Taking pity on them, Carrie picked up Amelie’s fan. “Lie back and let me fan you, Miss Amelie.”
<
br /> It took a minute or two, but she began to breathe more normally.
“If you’re feeling better, perhaps you could tell us about the history of this house? When was it built?”
“Oh, it was built before 1800. It’s one of the oldest standing homes in the city. That’s because it never burned down in any of the great fires.”
Carrie followed up. “Do you know who the original owner was?” She’d just been reading the diary of a woman who’d lived in New Orleans in 1800 and who might have known the person who built this home. It was pretty cool to think about, actually.
“Oh yes. Louis de Parais built it.”
Carrie jolted. The woman who’d written the diary Gary’d hidden was named de Parais. “Was Mignonette his wife or his daughter?”
“His daughter.”
“And she’s the ghost?” Carrie confirmed.
“Correct. This is a replica of the dress she’s seen wearing when she appears.”
The SEALs all frowned. “There’s an actual ghost?” one of them asked skeptically.
Carrie murmured to him, “Just go with it.”
The SEAL clammed up but continued to look incredulous.
Carrie turned back to their hostess. “Tell me more about Monsieur de Parais.”
“He was a merchant and owned a ship. He sailed it up the Mississippi River to buy furs from traders, and then sailed to the Caribbean to trade the furs for spices and silk from France.”
“Why didn’t French traders bring silk directly to New Orleans?” Carrie asked.
Amelie waved a vague hand. “Oh, well, there was all that trouble between the English and the French. English privateers laid in wait for French ships that were trying to make the port of New Orleans. It was far too dangerous for the French to sail here directly. But we New Orleanians—we had to have our little luxuries—like French wine and fashion.”
And French mistresses, if the diary was accurate and Mignonette had really been the girlfriend of the governor of Louisiana.
“What do you know of Mignonette?” Carrie asked.
“You’ve seen her diary, yes? I lent it to Gary Hubbard a few months back, and I’m a bit vexed that he hasn’t returned it to me, yet. Nothing’s happened to it, has it?”
