Magnolia Moon

by JoAnn Ross

  “How would I know that? I tell you, this is the house.” She walked into a back bedroom that had been painted black. Nate figured Josh would feel right at home here. “This was my bedroom. It was yellow with a pale blue sky. The sky had white clouds painted on it.”

  “That’s a nice memory,” he allowed, still certain she was confused.

  She didn’t respond. “She was killed in the living room. My bed was there, against that wall.” He was losing her; she was looking at things he couldn’t see. “It was covered with stuffed toys, but my favorite was a purple, yellow, and green elephant I got for my birthday.”

  “Mardi Gras colors.”

  “Yes. I still have him,” she surprised him by revealing. “Back in L.A. His name is Gabriel.” Regan’s brow furrowed. “I have no idea why I named him that.”

  “It’d be my guess your maman helped you name him after Longfellow’s poem about the lovers separated during the Grand Dérangement.”

  “I’ve never read it.”

  “It’s one of those typically tragic love stories. We had to memorize it practically every year in school. Evangeline Bellefontaine is an Acadian maiden who’s torn from her beloved, Gabriel Lajeunesse, on their wedding day. They’re separated, and she finds her way here to Louisiana with a group of exiles, only to discover that he’s already been here but has moved on. So, she keeps searching and years later, when they’re both old and gray, runs across him dying in an almshouse in Philadelphia. They embrace, he dies in her arms, she dies of a broken heart, and they’re buried together.”

  “That is tragic.” She sighed heavily. Wearily. “So many love stories seem to be.”

  “And a lot aren’t. One of these days, I’ll tell you about Jack and Dani. Dieu, they had a hard time, in some ways harder than Evangeline and Gabriel, but look how great things worked out for them.”

  “That’s nice,” she said a little absently. “That it worked out.” She was looking back at the door to the bedroom. “She died in the living room. I heard shouting and hid under my sheets because I was afraid the cauchemar had come to eat me.”

  “That’s an old Cajun folktale people used to tell kids to get them to behave. Be good, or the cauchemar will get you.”

  “It had crawfish claws for hands.” She shook her head. “Do you know, as many times as I had that nightmare, it never seemed odd to me that I’d know anything about a witch like that.” It had merely been part of her subconscious, a part of her. “There was a terrible crash.”

  She’d faded away again, into the past, leaving Nate feeling helpless. “I was too afraid to come out of my room. After a while I did, but Mama was gone. I went from room to room. I was so hungry.”

  He followed her out of the bedroom to the cheery leaf-green kitchen. “I climbed up on a chair and got some cookies out of the cupboard. And some bread.” She ran her fingertips over the door of one of the pine cupboards. “I think I slept. I must have.”

  She went out the back door, stood on the loggia beneath the gabled roof, and looked out at the small cottage that was now the garage. “I don’t know how long I waited for her to come back, but I just kept thinking what Mama had told me about never going outside onto the street by myself, or I’d get run over by a car. So I just stayed. For what seemed like forever.”

  He no longer doubted she’d lived here. Watching her face, he suspected she was reliving every moment. Not caring whether or not she came up with any clues, but understanding that she probably needed to get the memories out, Nate looped his arms around her waist as she continued to stare toward the garage. She leaned back against him, in what he took as an encouraging sign that she’d come to trust him.

  “A nice doctor gave me a lollipop. It was cherry, my favorite. And then another nice man with dark hair and kind eyes picked me up and took me home with him.”

  “That’d be my dad.” He learned that from his father’s notebook, but hadn’t wanted to tell her earlier; hadn’t wanted her to think he was trying to somehow take advantage of an act of kindness that would have been second nature for Jake Callahan.

  “I’m not at all surprised by that.” She turned within his loose embrace and looked up at him, her moist eyes shining. “Finn’s not the only Callahan brother who takes after his father.”

  When she lifted a hand to his face, Nate was lost.

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Regan.” He covered her hand with his own, turned his head, and pressed his lips against her palm. “And I’m honestly not trying to take advantage of your emotional situation here, and I’ve been tryin’ to do the gentlemanly thing and give you time—but I don’t know how much longer I can wait.” He skimmed his hand over her hair, down her neck, her spine, settling at the small of her back. Then he drew her to him, letting her feel his need. “I want you to come home with me.”

  Her remarkable eyes gave him her answer first. Then her sweet-as-sugarcane lips curved, just a little. “Yes.”

  22

  Regan had accepted the idea that Linda Dale had been her mother. She’d even begun to suspect that the terrifying events that had haunted her sleep for years were more memory than nightmare. But being in the house had triggered images long buried.

  “It was pink,” she said as they drove down the two-lane road along the bayou. “The house,” she explained when he glanced over at her. “It was painted pink. Mama said it was a house just right for two girls to live in.” She pressed her fingertips against her forehead, where a killer headache threatened. “At least I think it was pink. I can’t separate real life from the nightmares.”

  “Seems in your case, they’d be pretty much the same thing, chère. It could have been pink. Creoles tended to like their colors, and a lot of people replicate the original look.”

  “If I can remember the color of the house, and the clouds on the ceiling, you’d think I could picture who my mother was having an affair with.”

  “The trick is probably not to push it.”

  “I suppose not.” Her laugh was short and humorless. “Boy, Callahan, what is it with you and amnesiacs?”

  He was wearing sunglasses to block out the bright midday sun, but she could sense the smile in his eyes as he glanced over at her again. “I guess I’m just lucky.”

  He returned to his driving, and a strangely soothing silence settled over them. He was a man comfortable with silence, which she suspected was partly due to having grown up in a land as hushed as a cathedral. They passed a cemetery, built aboveground as she remembered them in New Orleans, to prevent the bodies from floating to the surface during floods. Sunlight glinted off a broken angel’s wing.

  “This is like another world,” she said as a pair of giant herons took flight from the bayou in a flurry of blue-gray wings.

  “I’ll bet, before you came to Blue Bayou, if anyone had mentioned the word swamp, you’d think of snakes, mosquitoes, and gators.”

  “You’d be right.”

  “Tourists come down here from New Orleans and go out on the commercial boats—which I’m not knockin’, since everyone’s gotta make a living, and it’s better than not seeing the swamp at all—but they watch the guide toss some chicken to a gator from a fishing line, down some boiled crawfish and oysters with hot sauce, hear a little canned zydeco, and think they’ve been to the bayou.

  “But they’ve got it all wrong. You can’t roar down here from the Quarter, snap a few pictures, then go racing off on a plantation tour. It’s a wandering kind of place. It takes time to soak in.”

  They came around a bend onto what seemed to be a small, secret lake. On the bank of the lake, perched on stilts, was a single-story house with a low, overhanging roof and a wide porch that appeared to go all the way around it.

  “It looks as if it just sprang naturally to life from the bayou.”

  “It’s a West Indies–style planter’s house. It’s designed for hot climates. The roof line and the porch allow air to flow from open windows through all the rooms.” He flashed a grin. “
I can also fish from bed, which is a plus.”

  She smiled at that, as he’d intended.

  “Did you build it yourself? Or refurbish it?”

  “From scratch. I was hoping to keep the original, but carpenter ants and termites had been using it for a smorgasbord, so it’d been condemned. I mostly kept to the original footprint and tried to replicate it as close as possible, including pegging the timbers instead of nailing them.”

  “I’m impressed.” But not surprised, having seen the work he’d done at Beau Soleil.

  He shrugged. “I told you, bein’ mayor is pretty much a part-time thing. Building’s what pays the bills.”

  “You didn’t choose to restore old houses for the money,” she said, remembering his saying he’d rather be happy than rich. Though he could probably make a fortune if he moved to a wealthier area. “It’s important to you. And this house was undoubtedly a labor of love.”

  “There are still a lot of things I want to do to it. It’s taken me the last five years, workin’ on it part-time between other jobs, but I figure if there’s one thing I’ve got plenty of, it’s time.”

  “Now I really envy you.” She sighed as she thought of her never-ending stack of murder books, then decided that she wasn’t going to dwell on them. Not here. Not now.

  The inside of the house was rustic, but warm and inviting and surprisingly neat. The wood furniture was sturdy enough for generations of children to climb on, the upholstered pieces oversize and overstuffed, obviously chosen more for comfort than style. The floor was wide planks, and the open ceiling beams appeared hand-hewn.

  Another of those little silences settled over them, this one not nearly as comfortable as the last.

  Regan had always thought of herself as a courageous woman. Now that the moment they’d been leading up to since Nate Callahan had appeared in her squad room had arrived, she was beginning to lose her nerve.

  Nate was backlit by the sun, making him appear to be cast in gleaming bronze. She remembered how he’d looked with his shirt off, his muscled arm swinging that hammer. He’d been as close to physical perfection as she’d ever seen. She was not.

  “You’re going to hate me.”

  “Impossible.”

  She dragged a hand through her hair, appalled at the way it was trembling. She had the steadiest hands of anyone she knew; she always made the top score in marks-manship. “This is impossible.”

  His lips curved slightly at that. “Nothing’s impossible, chère.”

  “It can’t go anywhere.”

  “It already has.”

  He didn’t exactly sound any more thrilled about that idea than she was. “You don’t understand.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I have these scars.”

  “No one can get through life without a few scars, chère. Jack has ’em, so does Finn, and even me, as perfect as I am,” he said with a slight smile that turned what could have been arrogance into humor, “have picked up a few over the years.”

  “No.” She pulled away. Turned away. Unreasonably nervous, she went over to a window looking out over the water and wrapped her arms around herself. “I mean real ones.” She closed her eyes to shut off the image of the flawed body she’d taught herself not to study in the mirror. “Physical ones.”

  Nate knew that if he was going to stop this from becoming emotionally heavy, the time to move away had come. If he wanted to prevent himself from falling into a relationship he hadn’t asked for, hadn’t wanted, all he had to do was to back off. Now.

  A very strong part of him wanted to do exactly that, to prove to himself, and to her, that he still could. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of a woman whose life was turning out to be more complicated than even she could have imagined. But he wanted Regan.

  Whatever was happening to him—to his mind, his body, and his heart—was beyond his power to stop. Which was why, instead of retreating to safer emotional ground, he crossed the room. “Where?”

  “All over.”

  He took hold of her shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Here?” He skimmed his fingertips over the crest of her breasts. They fit so perfectly into his hands, Nate could almost imagine she’d been created solely for him and him alone.

  With her eyes on his, she nodded.

  Every other woman he’d ever been with had approached this moment with a casual air of experience, expectancy. Regan, who was proving to be the strongest of them all, trembled when his thumbs brushed her nipples, which hardened beneath the light touch.

  Need hammered at him, along with a previously unfelt fear that he wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—gentle enough. His body urged him to ravish; his mind counseled restraint. His heart, which was expanding in his chest, opted for a middle ground.

  “How about here?” His caressing hand moved downward, fingers splayed over her torso.

  “Yes.” As if not wanting to see what he might be thinking, she closed her eyes. Her usually clear voice was barely a whisper.

  Her stomach. “How about here?”

  “Yes. Dammit, Nate…”

  “And here?” Down her thigh.

  “Everywhere. And they’re ugly.”

  “Now, I wouldn’t want to be accusing you of stretching the truth, sugar, but my maman used to have this saying, about pretty is as pretty does.”

  “I’ve heard it.”

  “I ’magine you have. So I’m having a hard time believing that there’s anything about you that isn’t downright, drop-dead gorgeous.” She didn’t resist as he drew her closer. When she sighed and rested her head against his shoulder, he brushed a kiss atop her shiny cap of hair.

  They remained that way for a long silent time. Outside the house, clouds gathering for an afternoon rain shower moved across the sun, casting the room in deep shadows. As he felt her trembling cease, Nate thought how good she felt in his arms. How perfect.

  “I’m afraid,” she admitted.

  He drew back his head. “Of me?”

  “I could never be afraid of you.” She trailed a fingernail along the top of his lips. “I’m afraid of what we’re getting into.”

  “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. Since this seems to be a day for surprises and sharing secrets, want to know what I’m most afraid of?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m not going to be able to make love to you as well as a woman like you should be made love to.”

  She surprised—and pleased—him by laughing a little at that. “Now, that may be the only thing in my life I’m not worried about.” She went up on her toes. Her lips brushed tantalizingly against his, then clung. “Take me to bed, Nate,” she said, her words thrumming against his mouth.

  He didn’t need a second invitation. He swept her into his arms, feeling a lot like Rhett carrying Scarlett up that staircase, but wanting to pleasure more than ravish. Ravishment, he thought with a flare of hot anticipation, could come later.

  “Oh, it’s like sinking into a cloud,” she murmured as he laid her with care atop the mattress of the roomy bed he’d made with leftover pieces of cypress from the house. “I smell flowers.”

  He lay down beside her. She turned toward him, her eyes shining like a pair of the pirate Lafitte’s gold doubloons. “It’s stuffed with Spanish moss and herbs.”

  Her rich, throaty laugh started a thousand pulses humming beneath his skin. “I’m never buying an innerspring mattress again.”

  Nate knew he was in big trouble when he almost suggested she stay here with him. In Blue Bayou. In his house. His bed. He wasn’t prepared to share those thoughts with her yet, not when he hadn’t figured them out for himself, but there was one thing he wanted, needed, to get straight before they moved on.

  He framed her face between his palms. “You’re different from any other woman I’ve ever known.” He could hear a sense of the wonder he’d tried to ignore in his tone, and suspected she could hear it, too. “This is different.”

  “I know.” When her gorgeous eyes gr
ew suspiciously bright, Nate felt something inside him move that had nothing to do with sympathy, or lust. “It’s the same for me.”

  Because he’d been raised to be a gentleman, Nate felt obliged to give her one last chance. “We can still stop this. Before things get out of hand.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Me, neither.”

  What was the matter with him? Taking a woman to bed had never been this complicated. This important. Frustrated with the situation, even more frustrated with himself for giving in to these sudden self-doubts, Nate decided if he was going to be this lost, he damn well wasn’t about to take the long fatal fall alone, and took her lips.

  She tensed again when he pulled the T-shirt over her head, and instinctively covered her breast with her hand.

  “It’s okay.” He kissed her again, his tongue dipping in to seduce hers into a slow, sensual dance. “I want to see you, chérie.” He caught her lower lip between his teeth. “All of you.”

  Her body softened in a silent, submissive way he knew was deceptive as he undressed her slowly, deliberately, taking time to kiss each bit of uncovered flesh, just as Antoine had done in the erotic story he’d told her on the phone. He smiled when he got down to her panties, which were practical cotton woven into a barely there red bikini, just like the one he’d imagined in his fantasy at Cal’s. Contrasts, he thought, as he drew them slowly down long legs, firm and sleek as a Thoroughbred’s from daily running.

  “I told you,” she said, as he cupped the weight of her breast in his hand and pressed his mouth against a long jagged line snaking from her dusky pink nipple to the wall of her chest. What in the hell had happened to her?

  “The plastic surgeon was the best in L.A. You can’t go to a movie or watch television without seeing his work. He couldn’t exactly make me look the way I had before the accident, but he used tiny stitches on my face, and special dressings, and hid the stitches beneath my hair as much as possible. But with all the surgeries to put me back together again, I just got tired of operations, so my body—”