The morning-after blues . . .
At five-thirty the next morning, Harek was sitting on the back verandah of Evermore, a historic Greek Revival home in the old Garden District of New Orleans—a home with a name, for cloud’s sake—watching as dawn emerged over the formal gardens spread out before him. Magnolias, lilies, dahlias big as saucers, roses . . . all contributed to the explosion of color.
His brother Ivak, who was renovating a run-down plantation in Terrebonne Parish known by the oxymoronic title of Heaven’s End, ought to see this; it would give him some good ideas for his own overgrown landscape. Not that Ivak didn’t have enough on his plate just removing snakes and kudzu and such.
This was the kind of place Harek would like to own. Old architectural details, but modern amenities. Understated elegance. Rare examples of antique Newcomb pottery made by eighteenth-century New Orleans artists were displayed throughout, but top-of-the-line appliances shone with stainless steel polish in the kitchen. The gleam of old patina showed in the grain on the mantels of many cypress fireplaces, even though the house boasted full-house air-conditioning. A home, or estate, with a name. He figured the house must be worth at least two million dollars, and if you added in some of its museum-quality oil paintings, double that.
Of course, a modern penthouse in a Manhattan skyscraper would be welcome, too.
Or a chateau in the French wine region.
But he would never get away with such blatant displays of wealth with Michael looking over his shoulder. If the archangel said once, he said a thousand times, “Poverty is next to godliness,” to which Harek usually replied, “I do not see the logic in that,” to which Michael usually replied, “Live with it!”
Truth to tell, Harek owned a discreet hideaway on a Caribbean island, which he’d managed to keep a secret for more than a year. It was only a matter of time before Michael found out, and Harek’s punishment would be immense. Betimes a pleasure was worth the pain, he had decided. Besides, it is a good investment, Harek declared to himself. He wondered if Michael would buy that defense.
He’d learned about the property from Zebulan, who was, of all things, a demon vampire, who happened to own a Caribbean island hideaway himself. Which was odd . . . that a devil would do a favor for an angel. The only thing a Lucipire gave a vangel under normal circumstances was trouble. Well, actually, Zeb was a double agent of sorts for Michael, but that was another story.
Harek held a mug of strong chicory coffee cradled between both palms. His laptop was open on a low table in front of his chair, along with a china plate holding a half-eaten beignet, still warm from the oven. He’d already eaten one of the delicious New Orleans confections. When he’d crept barefooted down the wide staircase of the silent house a short time ago, wearing only jeans and a white T-shirt, he’d fully expected to make his own cup of coffee, but there had been a servant in the kitchen already—the cook, Tenecia—preparing for what would be a busy wedding day in this household of the groom. In fact, there were several uniformed servants moving quietly about the house, polishing silver, dusting furniture. Although they didn’t refer to them as servants, or even “the help,” like that telling book of the same title a few years back. Too politically incorrect. They were household professionals.
The church wedding wouldn’t start until five p.m., and the reception was being held afterward at General’s Palace, right here in the Garden District, but there was still much activity that would be going on here. That was the reason for the early activity. Harek planned to be gone by then, and stay away most of the day. The less he was under the eagle eye of Camille’s mother, the better. Best not to raise too many questions about who, or what, he was. Besides, the woman annoyed him, especially the way she treated her daughter. It was none of his business, of course, but that didn’t mean he had to willingly expose himself to such condescension.
“You’re up early,” he heard a voice say behind him.
He half turned to see Camille standing in the doorway, holding a mug of coffee to her chest like it was the Holy Grail. Where was the beauty of last night? This creature was barefooted, like himself, wearing shorts with a matching tank top of a bright neon green color that hurt his tired eyes. No bra as far as he could tell, and he could tell things like that, not because he was a vangel, but because he was a man, a Viking man. Men had supersonic vision when it came to even the hint of a female nipple. Her makeup was smeared, creating a raccoon effect about the eyes and a smudged red, bruised effect on her lips. Her hair was a tangled mess, lopsided, where she must have been sleeping. She still wore one dangling silver earring. The other was in his suit pocket; she’d dropped it in one of the bars they’d visited in the French Quarter.
The last he’d seen of her, she’d still been wearing the sexy red dress, and she’d been plastered face-first on her bed where he’d delivered her about two a.m. She’d been deep in what they called in the old days “alehead madness.” In other words, schnockered.
“You’re up early, too. I thought you’d stay in bed all morning. You’ve only had three hours’ sleep,” he replied, watching as she managed to sink down into the chair next to him with a groan, being careful not to spill her coffee. She eyed the half-eaten beignet on his plate with distaste, and groaned when a bird chirped in a nearby tree.
Can anyone say hangover?
“Pfff! I have to be at the dressmaker’s by eight to have a first and final fitting for my bridesmaid dress.” Her upper lip curled with disgust as she added, “It’s pink.” She informed him of the color as if that should have some meaning to him.
It didn’t.
“Actually, its color is described as blush, but it’s been my experience that blush is just a bridal shop’s way of luring a customer into a putrid pink bridesmaid-from-hell confection. They have a surplus of these monstrosities they’ve been trying to unload for a hundred years. Just like celery means baby-poop green, and tangerine means screaming Halloween orange.” She sipped at her coffee after expounding that bit of female wisdom, which meant absolutely nothing to him. “I think Inez has lost her mind, having such a big wedding. At one point she even wanted a Southern belle theme. Hoop skirts, mint juleps, the works. Really, weddings turn even the most intelligent women into dingbats. I told her that, if she thought my brother was suddenly going to morph into Rhett Freakin’ Butler, I had a plantation called Tara I could sell her. Luckily she saw reason. The wedding reception will still be a bigass extravaganza, but at least I won’t have to wear hoops. Just pink.”
Camille’s woozy spiel amused Harek. She was probably still a little bit drunk.
“Well, you could go back to bed after the fitting, couldn’t you?”
“Are you kidding? I intend to be out of here for the rest of the day. My mother has lined up hairdressers, manicurists, makeup artists, a masseuse, and God only knows who else coming to the house to prepare us for the wedding. Did I tell you there are three hundred invited guests for the reception? I could puke.”
“Please don’t.”
“I already did.”
Too much information. “Where will you go?” Maybe she has a hideaway, like I do.
“I could take you sightseeing in Nawleans or on a swamp tour.”
Her offer was made so reluctantly that he had to laugh. “No need to entertain me. I intend to go visit my brother at his plantation outside Houma. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in time for the festivities.”
She looked at him with such yearning that he asked, “Would you like to go with me?”
“Yes! Could you wait ’til after my fitting? I’ll be done before nine.”
He tried to school his face not to show his disappointment. He’d been looking forward to this time alone, away from her tempting, troubling floral aura. And, yes, the air reeked of roses now, and not from the gardens, either.
“You’ll probably be bored. My brother Ivak and his wife, Gabrielle, have a child, and all they talk about is Mikey-this, Mikey-that.”
She smiled. “I like children.”
“Why don’t you have some of your own?”
“Why don’t you?”
I did. Once upon a time. Not all it’s cracked up to be, fatherhood. But then, I was not a good father. I wonder if I would be different now. Hah! No use wondering about that. Vangels were sterile. Across the board, none of them could breed children. Except for Ivak, who was the exception. A mistake. A blessed mistake, Michael was always quick to add, especially since the child was named after him. Ivak ever was a suck-up, always had been, in Harek’s opinion.
But all he replied to Camille was “Touché!”
“I’ll let you drive my Benz convertible if you take me with you?”
“You have a Mercedes Benz?” This woman never ceased to surprise him.
She nodded. “A gift when I graduated from high school. In hopes, no doubt, that I would go to college and excel academically and make my family proud of me. Especially my father, the cheater, who has two families and sees no irony in dishonoring his wife, and my mother, who puts up with the insult. Great role models!”
Huh? He could tell Camille immediately regretted her words, and Harek wasn’t about to delve into that personal family minefield. Instead he asked, “Are they not proud of you for your military career?”
“Not even a little.”
He could tell that was a sore subject, as well; so, he changed it. Even Vikings could be sensitive when they wanted to be. “If you own a luxury vehicle, why are we driving a Toyota?”
“I keep my car here. Can you imagine how I would be razzed back on the base if I rode around in a seventy-thousand-dollar vehicle? Actually, there are four Benz out in the garage. Mine, my mother’s, my father’s, and Alain’s. And probably his other . . . never mind. Suffice it to say, we’re a Benz family.” She waggled her eyebrows at him.
More examples of a wealth he yearned to have once again. And he wouldn’t even need a Mercedes Benz. A BMW would do.
“You might want to shower and change before your fitting.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “We’ll have to leave in an hour.”
She put a hand to her unruly hair and grimaced. “What? You’re embarrassed to be seen with me?”
“No. You can stagger along looking like you barely survived a longship ride on a stormy North Sea, for all I care, but if you run into your mother, she will never let you leave the house.” Actually, he was really glad that she looked so bad this morning. It took the edge off the dangerous attraction he’d been feeling toward her. Life mate? Hah!
“Oh Lord! You’re right. And I probably smell, too.”
“That you do,” he said. “Like a rose. A vomity rose.” He smiled at her to lessen the insult and did a mental high-five. Vomity roses held no appeal. He’d escaped a bullet this time, and he knew it.
The laughter he heard then probably came from some distant place in the house. Not in his head.
The ghosts of brides past . . .
The bridesmaid dress wasn’t as bad as Camille had expected and it hadn’t required much in the way of alterations. Definitely blush-colored, not pink-pink, it was a short-sleeved, figure-hugging silk gown, much like that worn by Pippa Middleton in the royal wedding. Unlike the notorious Pippa gown, Camille’s had a deeply scooped neckline, exposing some cleavage, not a draped one, and there were lots of tiny buttons in back, but instead of leading from the neck, Camille’s started mid-back and ended mid-butt. That’s all she needed, folks staring at her butt, not that she didn’t have a great butt, thanks to all those forced crunches. The finished product would be delivered to Evermore this afternoon. She could have done without the matching blush-colored high heels, but all in all, she felt as if she’d dodged a bullet.
Now she had to face the other bullet in her life. The chocolate-scented one that was screwing up her hormones and turning her brain to mush. Why else would she have invited herself along on his trip to visit his brother? And even worse, she’d almost jumped the man’s bones last night, and she couldn’t even blame it on the alcohol.
Time to put the skids on this out-of-control train of temptation. You’d think after three near-marriages she would have learned, but she was a pathetic romantic at heart. What she needed more than anything was to get through this wedding and concentrate on her WEALS work, not necessarily in that order. Instead of cruising off to the bayou, she was going to suggest to Harek that they find a quiet place to go over the Deadly Wind mission details.
He was waiting for her down the street at the Roux on Orleans Restaurant in the historic Bourbon Orleans Hotel, where he said he would have a cup of coffee and check e-mails. Camille loved New Orleans and all its history, but she hated this particular hotel with a passion because of its very history. It was close to the bridal shop, though, and it would have taken too much of an explanation if she’d urged Harek to wait for her somewhere else.
He stood when he saw her. “Finally! I just got an e-mail from Ivak. They’re expecting us to stay for lunch.” He was already closing his laptop and putting it, along with some paperwork, into his carry bag.
So much for her plan to get out of a day together. “Um . . . I was beginning to think maybe we should just go to a library or the park or something and go over the mission details. You know, like the CO recommended.”
He gave her suggestion serious thought, his head cocked to the side, and she noted, once again, just how attractive Harek was. Even today, wearing faded jeans and a ratty old gray T-shirt with the logo “Mensas Do It Smarter,” he was sex on a stick. Add to that the subtle scent of chocolate, and she was facing a sexy Fudgsicle.
“No. Let’s put the top up on the Benz, and you can drive while I grill you on mission details. That will give us roughly an hour going and an hour coming back. And, actually, it’s a good idea for us to do some ‘homework’ today. I just got some alarming updates that you’ll want to know about.” He glanced meaningfully down at his laptop case.
How could she argue with that? She nodded and they walked out of the restaurant side by side. As they approached the ballroom, which was set up for some kind of formal reception with floral centerpieces on the round tables and silver flatware bracketing china plates, she stiffened, as she always did, and a wave of nausea swept over her.
“Hey! What’s the matter?” Harek asked, taking her by the forearm to prevent her keeling over.
“Don’t worry about it. I have this reaction every time I enter this hotel, and pass that room.” She waved a hand toward the ballroom.
He frowned with confusion.
“This hotel—that ballroom, in particular, the Orleans Ballroom—has a lurid history. It was the scene of the famous Quadroon Balls where free women of color entered into a sort of servitude to white men of that time. One of my ancestors—my grandmother, about ten times removed, another Camille; I’m named after her—stood on this very spot and became a sex slave to a man who was a sugar planter. She was fifteen years old.” Truth to tell, Camille had come to love James Bellefleur and bore him two bastard children, joyfully. Probably some Stockholm syndrome kind of thing, or another emotional aberration psychologists would have a name for today.
“You know all this from history books?”
“Not exactly. There’s plenty of historical detail on the Quadroon Balls and plaçage, but my ancestor’s story I know from her diaries,” she explained. “I swear, though, that I have a genetic memory of the event. Or maybe it’s true that the ballroom is haunted. The ghosts of all those slave brides, who weren’t really slaves or brides.”
“Slavery!” he muttered. “A thousand years, and I am still being harangued over my sin.”
Harek’s reaction was not what she had expected. “What? What did you say?”
“Nothing of import. I do not understand by half what you said. Are you a quadroon?”
“Hardly. A quadroon is one-quarter black. I do have a minuscule amount of color in my blood, though. Does that bother you?”
“No. Why should it?”
She shrugged. “Bothers some men, believe me. I know from experience.”
“Your ex-fiancé?” he guessed.
“One of them. Not Julian. He’s Creole himself.”
Harek still seemed confused.
“Anyhow, plaçage was a recognized practice here in the South long before the Civil War,” Camille said, and gave Harek her short lecture on the subject. “Woman of color, the lighter the better, would enter into an agreement with a white man she met at one of the Quadroon Balls, essentially becoming his common-law wife—his placée—for life, or as long as he wanted her. In the best of circumstances, the women were given homes, usually on Rampart Street, money to live on, and their children would be free. Meanwhile, he had his own family back on the plantation and legitimate children.”
“They were mistresses, then?”
“No!” she said, more vehemently than was warranted, she supposed. “They called themselves concubines, not prostitutes, but to me, it was slavery pure and simple. The women did it for survival, not by choice, and it was a despicable practice.” She looked at him. “You don’t seem shocked.”
He shrugged. “Camille, thralldom has been around since the beginning of time. Even the Bible mentions slavery, and there were certainly such practices in Viking times,” he said, his face oddly red, as if he had a personal interest in the subject.
“Are you defending slavery?” she spat out.
“Whoa!” he said, putting up his free hand. “I never said any such thing. I was merely pointing out that slavery was a part of many cultures at one time. Yes, it was a sinful custom, but it must be judged through a historical prism.”
“Bullshit!”
He laughed. “You are right, of course. My boss would certainly agree with you, though he would use a different word.”
“Your boss? At the security company?”
“No, a higher-up boss.”
They had arrived at the car; he handed her the keys and she used a remote button to put up the soft top. Then she slid into the driver’s seat, and Harek arranged himself on the passenger side, after sliding the seat back as far as it would go, with the laptop on his raised thighs.
“So, what’s the big news?” she asked as she eased the car through downtown traffic and then onto I–10.
“Boko Haram has taken an entire village. Killed a hundred adults, men and women, and abducted fifty girls and a dozen boys.”
Camille’s face took on a grim expression. “Slaves. They’re going to make those poor children into slaves.”
“That’s why it’s so important to you to be part of this mission, isn’t it? The slavery aspect?”
She nodded, banking down the emotion that would have her either weeping with sorrow or shouting with outrage. WEALS learned early on to keep personal feelings at bay lest they act irrationally and satisfy those chauvinists who still felt women didn’t belong in the military.
He reached over and squeezed her right hand, which was on the steering wheel. “We will conquer these terrorists and bring back the kidnapped children, that I promise you.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I have insider information,” he told her, “or you could say, higher information,” he added, under his breath.
“Higher than what?”
“Higher than hell,” he said, which made no sense at all.
“Sometimes you are really weird,” she commented.
“You have no idea.”