Page 9 of Cursed (Decorah Security 2.0, #14)

CHAPTER FOUR

Morgan woke, breathing hard and disoriented. Her body was flush with the aftermath of sexual release—a sensation she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

In the dark she felt her face heat as wisps of the erotic dream drifted through her mind.

Where was she? In a bed. She had been sleeping. Now she was awake.

Something had snapped her out of the dream. A sound.

It filtered into her consciousness—making the hairs on the backs of her arms stand up and tingle. It was a woman’s voice—chanting to the sound of a drum.

Out in the humid night.

Morgan strained her ears, trying to figure out the words. But she couldn’t make any sense of them, and finally she came to the conclusion that they were in some language that she didn’t understand. An ancient language that sounded rough and primitive and evil.

She shivered. Evil. Yes, the chant sounded like pure evil. Meant to do harm.

To her? Or to Andre Gascon?

Suddenly, Morgan was very glad that she was safe inside the house—not out in the midnight garden.

Slipping from the bed, she glided to the window, staying to the side as she peeked out. Moonlight silvered the garden. From the safety of her bedroom, she searched the grounds of Belle Vista.

She was in rural Louisiana, she reminded herself.

At the Gascon family home. She had come here because Andre Gascon had asked for a private investigator to figure out who was killing people in the swamp near his home.

Killing people and making it look like a big cat had done it.

And somehow that was supposed to be his fault.

She hadn’t quite figured out how that fit into the scenario.

But maybe he was doing something illegal with animals. Maybe he had a zoo out there in the bayou, and he was letting the residents roam around at night. She’d come up with that theory last week, and it made as much sense as anything else.

He had hired her to get to the bottom of his problem. Or so he said. Perhaps he had brought her here to use her in some way.

The thought was ludicrous. Use her for what?

But she sensed he might not have been entirely honest about his motives. And his having hired her didn’t restrict her to any limits he set. She would look for that zoo. But not now. Not out in the darkness, when her head was pounding in the same insistent rhythm as the drum she heard outside.

She pressed the palm of her hand against her throbbing temple. It only gave a focus to the pain.

As her eyes probed the shadows beyond the lawn, she froze. All at once what had looked like tree branches resolved itself into another shape. There was someone out there—the long, lithe figure of a woman. Chanting and banging on a small drum.

Morgan had been standing at the side of the window. Now she felt a strange compulsion to show herself. Stepping in front of the glass, she faced the darkness.

As if the strange visitor knew she was being watched, she looked up toward the window where Morgan stood.

They were too far away, and it was too dark for their gazes to meet.

But as she stared at the figure, her mind flashed back to the house on the edge of town—the one with the sign in the window that said Voodoo Priestess.

The one where she’d seen someone watching her.

Were they one and the same? It was impossible to tell in the dark. But Morgan was trained to take in the details of a person’s appearance. This individual seemed to be about the same height, weight and shape.

The voodoo priestess, if that’s who she was, tipped her head to one side. In acknowledgment? Or triumph?

Morgan didn’t know. But she felt a profound sense of relief when the woman picked up her drum and faded into the darkness under the trees.

Realizing she had the windowsill in a death grip, Morgan loosened her hand and pressed her forehead against the hard glass, thinking that she’d gone from arousal to terror in the space of a few minutes.

And the sensations weren’t all that different.

Her heart was still pounding. A film of perspiration coated her skin.

And the neck of the robe felt like it was cutting off her breath.

She opened the top two buttons, but it didn’t help. The whole robe felt like it was pressing too hard against her body, making her hot and edgy.

Striding to the bathroom, she filled a glass with water and gulped it down. But it hardly helped to calm her as she thought about what had happened.

She had gone to bed in the damn robe. The same one Andre had handed her in the SUV. When she’d first put it on after the flood, she’d slipped into a dream about a woman named Linette and a man named Andre—who looked a lot like the present owner of Belle Vista.

She’d seen him clearly. But she had been inside the woman’s skin. Inside her head. So, she didn’t know what Linette looked like.

Wait! She did. She had seen the miniature portrait. The woman’s hair had been long, not cropped to chin length. But her eyes had been blue, like Morgan’s. And her features had been similar—as much as she could tell from a tiny oil portrait.

Something else flitted through her mind. What had Janet said? Her hair was too short. But her eyes were the right color. Did Janet know about the woman in the portrait? Had she seen it?

Morgan’s pulse was pounding, and she ordered herself to calm down. She was always cool and collected in the face of danger. Since the flash flood, she’d lost her equilibrium.

But she had a right to be off balance. A voodoo priestess or someone like that had awakened her with a malevolent chant. The woman had been outside in the shadows, working some evil spell.

Evil spell ! She snorted. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing. Not at all, she assured herself. But the chanting and drumming had definitely affected her.

Even if the magic wasn’t real. Of course, the woman certainly wanted it to be real.

And for whatever reason, twice now, something strange had happened to Morgan.

She’d dreamed of people she didn’t know.

People who seemed to have lived around here—because they had mentioned Belle Vista.

Apparently, it was only a short ride from the cabin where Linette had lived.

Morgan pulled herself up short. If there was any magic involved, it came from the damn robe. Had the voodoo priestess cursed it? Or had Andre infused it with magic?

Yeah, right.

That her mind was taking this direction appalled her. She had been hired for a specific job that had nothing to do with a voodoo priestess. Or maybe it did, come to think of it, since Andre had carefully neglected to put anything about the woman in his report on the town.

She was going to ask him about that. But not until morning—when she knew where to find him.

The robe felt like it was burning her skin, and she couldn’t stand to wear it another nanosecond. Even if she had to wrap herself in a sheet, she had to get the damn thing off.

With fingers that were almost frantic, she worked the buttons, restraining the impulse to simply rip the garment down the front. When she was free of the straitjacket, she tossed it onto the small upholstered chair in the corner of the bedroom.

Naked, she breathed out a sigh of relief, then began prowling the room.

She hadn’t thought to look for anything else to wear. Now she started opening drawers. In one she found a man’s dress shirt, soft from many washings.

Earlier she’d shied away from the idea of wearing anything that might belong to Andre Gascon. But necessity made her slip into the shirt. As he’d warned, it was much too long. But when she rolled up the sleeves, she decided it would make a good enough night shirt.

Clicking the light on her watch, she saw that it was too early to get up. And she was reluctant to prowl around a strange house in the dark—dressed like a ragamuffin.

So, she lay back down, knowing that the possibility of sleep was a distant one.

In fact, her mind was whirling with too many ideas.

She tried to think about the mystery of the woman outside, chanting.

But she kept coming back to the mystery of Andre Gascon.

And the other man named Andre whom she had met only in two very vivid dreams.

The long-ago Andre had stirred her senses. Made her aware of hot, sexy feelings that she hadn’t experienced since she’d been in Trevor’s arms. And dreaming of him had brought her to orgasm, if she were honest.

Damn him. He wasn’t Trevor. He wasn’t her husband, the love of her life.

The man who had taught her about sex. Taken her skydiving and spelunking and to the Ritz in Paris.

Deliberately she brought back the feelings she’d experienced when she’d learned of his death. The aching sense of loss and despair.

He had been so much a part of her life that she had hardly known how to cope.

Luckily for her, an old friend from her law enforcement training days now worked for Decorah Security and had persuaded her to join him there.

He’d gotten her a job with Frank Decorah there, when she would have spent her days lying in bed in the dark, mourning her loss.

The friends she’d made at her new job had rallied around her, too, and helped pull her through the worst of it. They were the most amazing group of men and women she had ever encountered. They had all been through dangerous and frightening experiences.

Hunter and Kathryn Kelley had fought off a government conspiracy.

Knox Marshall had come back from a drug-induced stupor.

And Mac Bradley had returned from an adventure no one would believe.

In fact, once the men and women of Decorah had gotten to know and trust her, they had shared secrets about themselves that were hard to believe

They were strong. They had lent her their strength. And she had told herself that if they could survive what life had thrown at them, she could too.