1

April Fools’ Day, one year ago

“FOLKS, THIS IS CAPTAIN Edwards. We’ve been dodging several severe weather cells, and control has instructed us that we won’t be landing in New Orleans as scheduled. Instead, we’re being diverted to Houston. We apologize for the delay and we’ll get everyone to your final destination just as soon as we can.”

A collective groan rose up from the passengers of flight 1281. Professor Reginald Franklin didn’t groan, but he did turn and look at his watch, his movements stiff and forced.

Maybe they’d still make it in time….

He hoped to hell they’d still make it in time….

He closed his eyes and gripped the arm rest, thankful he’d decided to cash in his air miles for first class. Because, frankly, he needed another drink, and he took his hand off the armrest long enough to press the call button.

He’d been traveling now for almost twenty-four hours, having left Oxford less than an hour after he’d received Jean Michel’s e-mail. He hadn’t talked to the antiques dealer in years, but now his old friend had said he’d found something—something important. Something Reg had given up searching for.

Something that might lead to ending this curse.

Reg hated traveling on such short notice, but he couldn’t risk taking the time to pack or plan. He needed to be on the ground on April 1. A Franklin at thirty thousand feet on April Fools’ Day was a bad idea—his brother Cam’s formerly reckless life had proven that.

Not that Reg’s planning had done any good. He’d arranged everything so carefully to ensure that he was safely on the ground well before 11:59 p.m. on March 31. He hadn’t, however, accounted for the weather. And now it looked like they’d be arriving into Houston in the wee hours of April 1.

He clutched the armrest tighter and hoped they didn’t crash. For the most part, the curse was personal. Surely his presence wouldn’t bring down—and injure or kill—an entire plane load of people?

A pretty, blond flight attendant with a brilliant white smile leaned over and clicked off his call light. “What can I get for you?”

“Scotch,” he said.

Her smile widened. “Rough flight?”

“The delay’s not helping.”

“We’re so sorry about that.”

“Nothing you can do,” he said, feeling the futile weight of fate pressing down on him.

“I can get you that drink,” she said, and headed off to do that. She returned momentarily with two tiny bottles and a fresh glass with ice. She winked at him. “I thought you could use a double.”

“You thought right.” He opened one of the bottles, poured it over ice and drank it down, feeling the Scotch burn his throat and numb his body. Good. If he was still in the air at midnight, he wanted to be numb.

There was no one seated beside him, and he leaned over to peer out the window at the scattered lights below. The clouds blocked most of the view to the ground, and the night further disguised their location. He assumed they were over Louisiana and moving now toward Texas, but he didn’t know for certain, which gave him room to imagine that they were in fact passing over their original destination—New Orleans.

She was down there.

Anne.

The thought sat like a stone in his gut, the simple knowledge that he would soon be physically closer to her than he had been in years.

Emotionally, though…

Well, they’d broken those ties three years ago.

He pulled away from the window, his motions feeling suddenly jerky. As a professor of archeology, he’d ostensibly taken the position at Oxford in order to be closer to the excavations on which his academic pursuits had focused. But the job had also been a symbol, a statement. There was no denying that much, especially not to himself. And the statement had said simply that he was abandoning his nonacademic research; that he was giving up the hunt for clues about how to turn off his family curse. He was moving on, letting it lie.

Being done with it and everything about it.

He hadn’t regretted the decision. His quest to end the curse had brought him almost as much misery as the curse itself.

Ruefully, he rubbed his thigh and the long, ragged scar that still ached in bad weather even though it had been thirteen years since the April first on which he’d tripped over a piling at a dig site and ripped the hell out of his leg on a steel post that had reinforced the dig’s earthen walls. Other years had brought different manifestations of the curse, ranging from inconveniences to physical horrors, none of which he wanted to repeat.

But a curse was a curse was a curse, and want or no, he and his brother and sisters were stuck with it unless someone could figure out how to lift it.

From the time he was a child, Reg had been the one to claim that challenge. And he’d tried so hard, finding clues in family papers and relics, but nothing that actually panned out to anything concrete.

Anne had helped at first. He’d been an assistant professor at the University of Texas when she was hired as a lecturer in the English department. They’d met on the West Mall one spring day when the seam had ripped on her bookbag. From the first moment he’d seen her, she’d done something to him. If they’d been living centuries prior, he would have said she’d bewitched him, because once he saw her, he couldn’t even see other women. She was all he wanted—to be with her, to work with her, to touch her and have her.

And the most amazing part of his infatuation was that she’d wanted him, too. Their romance had been intense and combustible, their bodies firing even without touch. And when they made love, he was certain that one day they would start a conflagration sufficient to rival the Chicago fire.

He closed his eyes and clenched his fists. He would not miss her.

But he did. Oh, how he did.

He finished off the second Scotch and almost called for another before stopping his finger as it hovered over the call button. No. He was about to step into April 1. He needed to keep his wits about him.

That, of course, had been another thing that he had loved about Anne: her utter acceptance when he’d told her about the curse. She hadn’t told him he was imagining things, hadn’t suggested that he speak to a counselor. She’d simply kissed him and told him that she’d help him break it.

“My family’s from New Orleans, too,” she’d said, when he told her that he believed the historic city was the source of the curse. “Most of them moved away long ago, but I’ve heard enough stories to believe in voodoo and magic and hexes and curses.” She’d taken his hand on a Friday night. “Let’s go this weekend and see what we can dig up about yours.”

They hadn’t been able to dig up much, just vague references to an “angel’s amulet” that one of his eighteenth-century ancestors referred to circumspectly in a journal. From what they could gather, the amulet had been stolen by Timothy Franklin (the most ignoble of the then-ignoble Franklins), and although the value of the thing should have brought the family wealth, instead they suddenly found themselves wallowing in trouble, “which is as the witch had said,” Olivia d’Espry, Timothy’s wife had written in her journal. Olivia and Timothy Franklin were the only Franklins to have children, and Reg could trace his lineage back to them. He was grateful that Olivia preferred to write in her journal rather than do needlework as so many women of that time had done.

But even Olivia’s journal revealed little. A few weeks after acquisition of the amulet, she’d written that one of Timothy’s brothers had sought to dispose of the thing, but soon learned that it had gone missing.

He had hoped that the amulet’s departure would be the end of their bad luck.

It wasn’t.

Anne and Reg had spent the little spare time they could carve out of their teaching schedules to come to New Orleans and plow through whatever records they could locate. But try as they might, they found nothing. Nothing that could lead them to the missing amulet, or even describe it. All they knew was that it had the image of an angel carved upon it—Olivia Franklin had written that it was ironic that an angel could cause such harm.

They hadn’t found the source of the curse or a solution, despite years of looking. The wasted time dragged Reg down, but Anne had squeezed his hand and reminded him that, at least, they’d found each other. And they had. They’d fallen in love.

And that simple fact about broke Reg’s heart.

“That’s silly,” Anne had said, when he’d told her that they couldn’t get married, that even their relationship put her at risk.

“Anne,” he’d said. “I’m standing in a hospital. You’ve got a broken arm, a broken leg and a nasty gash in your hip.” All of which she’d sustained trying to keep him from sliding down into a quarry when the ground beneath them had suddenly given way. On April 1, of course.

“You think that would make me not want you?” she’d argued. “Do my broken bones mean that you don’t want me?”

“You know I do,” he’d said. “Desperately. But I’m not going to stand by and watch you get hurt because of me.”

Tears had streamed down her face. “If you leave me, I will be hurt because of you.”

“But you’ll be whole,” he said.

She closed her eyes. “No. I won’t.”

Her words had almost weakened his resolve, but he knew he was right. Knew it. A cursed life was no life. Until he was able to remove the curse, he wasn’t going to get married. Before Anne, marriage had been an abstract principle that didn’t much bother him. Once he fell in love, though, his principles hurt him as much as the curse did.

She’d fought him on it, pointing out that most Franklins survived the curse, though she had to concede when he reminded her that some had died and many had been injured. And the injuries sometimes slid over onto spouses, too. Marriage, after all, would make her a Franklin.

“Isn’t it enough that I don’t care?” she’d asked. “That I’m willing to take that risk?”

He’d squeezed her hand, wanting so badly to pull her toward him and kiss her, to bury himself inside her and let passion fight the curse. Instead, he’d spoken calmly and evenly. “It’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

After that, she hadn’t tried to persuade him anymore. Instead, she’d quietly applied for other jobs, and ended up moving from Texas to New Orleans. They’d fought about it, of course, so loud the neighbors had complained, but in the end, they were both stubborn, and she left, her last words—that she loved him—hanging in the air.

Those words had cut him like a knife, and for the first time he could remember since childhood, Reg Franklin had cried.

He heard she’d moved into an old family property in the Garden District and now worked as a professor at Tulane. He’d fought the urge to get in his car and race to New Orleans. He needed to stay away, he knew. He’d made the right decision—that she was better without him—and he was afraid that if he saw her again, his resolve would fail.

Now he was going back to New Orleans, and he wasn’t certain if he wanted to see her, or wanted her to stay far, far away.

Once again he looked at his watch. One minute past twelve. His stomach clenched, fearing a crash, and his gaze went automatically toward the window and the lights below. In his mind, he could see Anne down there. She’d always said that she’d catch him if he fell.

He doubted that this was what she meant.

He squeezed his eyes shut and told himself to sleep. If he was going to be sucked into a disaster, the best thing to do was sleep during the worst of it.

But sleep wouldn’t come. Anne was on his mind now, though in truth she’d never been far from his thoughts the last two years.

He’d left Texas soon after she did. For over a year, he’d pursued any lead he could find on the curse with an insane frenzy, desperate to find an answer and get her back.

Then he realized there was no answer to be had. He wanted her still, so desperately, but he couldn’t bring himself to put her in harm’s way. Even the fact that Cam and Devon were happily married by then couldn’t sway him, because as much as he loved them, he thought they were putting Jenna and Chance in horrible danger.

Now, of course, he had to admit that Jenna and Chance were fine. Even Darcy had been engaged now for almost a year, and Evan was as healthy as a horse.

Reg, however, kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it did, he didn’t want it dropping on Anne.

He’d left, because he knew he’d never solve the curse, and being on the same continent with her was just too damn painful.

He’d stopped trying to track down the amulet, because every blocked path reminded him of her and of what they couldn’t have together.

He’d gone to England to escape her, and now he was coming back against his better judgment because Jean Michel had sent him an e-mail. An e-mail he had never expected to get, but which had such a solid clue that he felt like he had to take the chance.

If this worked, he’d crawl to Anne and beg forgiveness. But until then, he couldn’t see her.

Seeing her and not having her would hurt too damn much.

He realized with a start that the plane had started its descent. The other first-class passengers around him seemed fine with that. Reg, of course, was terrified, and he clung to the arms of the seat, feeling clammy and unsure, his heart pounding in his chest, not even breathing until, finally, the wheels touched down. The overhead compartment above him popped open, and his carry-on bag came flying out, slamming hard into the aisle and startling the woman sitting one row up. He heard the crash of glass and was certain his shaving mirror had splintered.

Seven more years of bad luck, however, was a small price to pay for surviving the landing. If that was the worst of it, this would be his best April first ever.

Of course that wasn’t the worst of it.

The airport was essentially empty, and the airline rep lined them all up to hand out hotel vouchers and give them tickets for the first plane to New Orleans in the morning.

No way was he getting back in a plane on April first.

He headed to the car rental counter, found the girl about to shut the gate and spent thirty minutes convincing her to rent him the last car on their lot, which turned out to be little more than a small box on wheels.

The drive from Houston to New Orleans took less than six hours without traffic, and he wasn’t crazy about making it in a sardine can. He had no choice, though, and so he set off down Interstate 10, the traffic in the middle of the night light and the road free and open…for the first five miles.

After that, the traffic settled in.

Apparently the states of both Louisiana and Texas believed that the middle of the night on April Fools’ Day was the best time to undertake road construction.

It took him eight hours to get to the French Quarter, and when he finally pulled his car into the valet area at the Chateau Vieux Carre hotel he was hot (the air conditioner in the car went out near Baton Rouge), tired and definitely grumpy.

“Franklin?” the clerk at the desk said, tapping the keys on her computer. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t show a reservation.”

He resisted the urge to bang his head on the polished granite counter. “How about we forget the reservation and set me up for a room now.”

“Of course, sir. No problem.” She tapped some more and then smiled at him. “All set.”

“Great. The key?”

Her eyes blinked owlishly. “I’m sorry, sir. Check-in isn’t until three, but I can get you early check-in at eleven.”

He looked at his watch. That would give him just enough time to walk over to Royal and meet Jean Michel at his antique shop. “Perfect. Can I leave my luggage?”

“No problem at all.” She rang for a bellman who came over with practiced efficiency, then tagged Reg’s bag and spirited it away.

He would have liked the chance to change clothes and splash some water on his face, and he considered waiting the forty-five minutes in the lobby. But he was also anxious to talk to Jean Michel. The antiques dealer had said he’d found something that Reg would want to see—something he didn’t want to discuss in an e-mail—but something that Reg had been looking for.

Considering Reg and Anne had gone to Jean Michel back when they were trying to track down the amulet, Reg was hoping that was what his friend had found.

If so, he didn’t want to wait a moment longer than necessary.

He rubbed his hands over his face to wake himself up, though the adrenalin of the search was easing the exhaustion from the long flight and drive.

Then he stepped through the front door onto Bourbon street, already bustling with tourists. He turned right, walked one block, then turned right again and continued on to Royal. He followed the street toward Canal, the route as familiar to him as breathing. When he was a block away, he saw the sign announcing “Michel Brothers, Antique and Estate Sales.” He smiled, looking forward to seeing the wiry old man.

As he pushed through the doorway, however, his smile faded and his heart stuttered in his chest.

Jean was already at the counter, talking with another customer. They both turned as he entered, and Reg found himself staring into the fathomless brown eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved.

“Hello, Reg,” Anne said. “I think you’re going to want to see this.”