LITMIR.BIZ

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here’s your chance, a little voice of reason in the back of his mind counseled as she picked up the tasseled menu and began leafing through the pages of listings. Tell her. Now. Before you get in over your head.

      Don’t be a damn fool, said another voice, which seemed directly linked to his hopeful dick. You think she’d be willing to go to bed with you if she knew the truth?

      Trying to ignore them both, he took a long drink of Guinness.

      “Your name’s French,” he said, shifting the conversation away from his family heritage.

      “Acadian.” She put down the menu and took a sip of her martini. “My father’s people were kicked out of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century for refusing to convert to Anglicanism.”

      “And ended up in the bayou because they figured it’d be the last place in the country anyone would want, so they’d be left alone and finally allowed to settle down,” he said.

      “That’s right.” She sounded surprised.

      “I had to read that Longfellow poem about Evangeline and Gabriel back in high school.” He did not mention the family lore about Longfellow having been inspired to write the poem about the Acadian maiden and her lover torn apart on their wedding day, by a story told to him at a dinner party at author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home. “I’ve always thought the story would make a great movie.”

      “There have already been two made, back in the 1920s,” she divulged after their orders had been taken. “In fact, Delores Del Rio, who starred in the second one, had a statue made of herself and placed on the site where Evangeline’s supposedly buried.”

      “But she wasn’t real.”

      “Try telling that to some of the people down in the bayou. The Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville is actually the third oak designated as the site where Evangeline and Gabriel were united. Tourists continue to flock there, decade after decade, which is why I strongly doubt moviegoers would enjoy having the heroine find the hero in an almshouse after years of separation, then the two of them dying in each other’s arms.”

      “That could present a problem,” he agreed. “Given that moviegoers these days mostly prefer their love stories to come with a happily ever after guaranteed ending.”

      “Fiction always sells better than truth,” she said knowingly.

      He arched a brow. “Sounds as if you don’t believe in happy endings.”

      “I suppose it depends upon your meaning of happy.” Her tone definitely closed the door on that topic.

      Not wanting to press, Sloan switched gears. “What about the other side of your family?”

      “They came over on the coffin ships from Ireland about a hundred years later and ended up in Louisiana building the levees.”

      “With all those Catholics in your background, it’s interesting you’d decide to become a witch.”

      “I didn’t decide anything. Other than to practice the Craft. I have Druid blood from my mother’s side of the family. And, as I said, my father’s great grandmother was a Haitian voodoo priestess, which carried through the women’s side of his family.”

      “Which makes you a two-fer.”

      “I suppose you could put it that way.”

      “Are you into voodoo like your grandmother?”

      “No. I suppose I’m more like your ancestors in that way.”

      “My ancestors?” His gut clenched. And not in a good way.

      “The ones you told me didn’t make it as Puritans? The religious aspects were just too structured for me, which is why I’m not Wiccan, either.”

      “There’s a difference?”

      “Wicca is a neopagan religion. Not all witches are Wiccan, and not all Wiccans practice magic,” she explained as the waiter delivered their dinners and discreetly disappeared.

      “Anyway, though I’d been drawn to the Craft all of my life, I’d never thought about actually earning a living with it until my grandmother Evangeline died and left me her voodoo shop. I gave away all the gator heads and teeth and was planning to dissolve the business entirely, but people kept showing up at the day spa I’d opened up with Emma, wanting spells like they’d bought from Grand-mère.”

      She took a bite of crab cake and closed her whiskey-hued eyes, looking like a woman in the throes of ecstasy. Actually, Sloan realized, she looked exactly the way the witch had in his dream, when he’d ridden her hard and fast beneath the icy winter moon.

      Although the stone walls kept the cellar insulated, and additional cooling kept the room at an optimum temperature for wine storage, air-conditioning going full blast, his internal temperature spiked.

      Sloan pulled at the starched collar of his shirt and was seriously considering yanking off his tie when another, equally provocative image flashed in his mind.

      A mental image of Roxi Dupree, naked, his discarded tie lashing her ankles to the legs of the chair, holding her legs open for him as he knelt on the stone floor, painting those smooth, taut thighs with his tongue, lapping up the warm cream flowing from her cunt, taking her engorged clit between his teeth…

      “What?” she asked when she opened her eyes again and found him staring at her.

      In his unbidden fantasy, she’d been writhing against his mouth, her screams bouncing off the stones.

      “Nothing.”

      He hadn’t creamed his jeans since he’d been sixteen and Danielle Davenport had dry-humped him in the backseat of his Dodge Charger one steamy summer day they’d been parked out on Tybee Island. But he’d just come damn close to a repeat performance without this woman so much as laying a hand on him.

      “You were telling me about after your grandmother died,” he reminded her.

      She gave him a look that let him know he wasn’t getting away with anything. Then shrugged her bare shoulders.

      “I didn’t want to turn the people down, so I dragged out all my grandmother’s shadow books—they’re sort of like a witch’s cookbook—learned the ones she’d been doing for her clients, then started blending up her recipes for the various lotions and oils, which fit in nicely with the spa concept.”

      “But you don’t have the spa anymore?”

      “No. Katrina did it in. As Margaret Mitchell might say, it went with the wind.” She took another bite. “Oh God. This is so amazingly delicious.”

      He’d never before realized that the ordinary act of swallowing could be so fucking sexy. “Randolph, the chef here, has always had a deft hand with seafood.”

      She cut off a piece and held it out to him. “You have to try it.”

      She might as well have been Eve, holding out that shiny red apple. Like Adam, Sloan found himself unable to resist temptation.

      “May as well. Given that you’ve already got me eating out of your hand. But I gotta tell you, sugar, pan-fried crab is sure as hell not what I’m hungry for.”

      He curved his fingers around her wrist and, with his eyes on hers, he closed his mouth over the fork’s tines.

      Watching her closely as he was, he didn’t miss the way her eyes darkened at the movement in his throat as he swallowed. Beneath his thumb her pulse had trebled its beat.

      “Good,” he decided. He kissed her knuckles. “As far as appetizers go.” He trailed his fingers up her arm, allowing the back of his hand to brush against the side of her breast. “Makes me anticipate dessert all the more.”

      She licked her lips, which had his mutinous penis leaping in response. “I hear the key lime pie’s to die for.”

      “It’s

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