Launching herself to her feet, Anna immediately caught herself on the side of the dresser with one hand while the world spun nauseatingly about her. Mary, mother of Jesus, what did he give to me? Something that put me out so fast I couldn’t scream or bang my legs against the side of the sleeper. How long have I been like this?
Slowly she began to feel better, and she shed the nightgown without pause. Anna looked down upon her body with apprehension, uncertain what she would find. There were more bruises on her arms. There was some soreness in her shoulder sockets from being in an unnatural position in the sleeper for hours. There was the huge blackened bump on her thigh. Her jaw ached a little from being hit in the face. Dan had caused her teeth to cut the inside of her mouth. Her body ached as if she had been running a high fever that had suddenly abated. But there didn’t seem to be anything else wrong. She forced her legs into her jeans and sat on the edge of the bed to lace up her Nikes.
As clothing went on, Anna began to feel an incredible amount of relief flowing through her body. All those twisted nightmares and hallucinations in the hours of her kidnapping were just that, nightmares. Then there had been the voices in her head, demanding her location, reassuring her. The same voice that was the one she dreamed about. His voice. His thought patterns. She paused in the process of yanking her tee shirt over her head. Only my subconscious playing tricks on me. Only that. Nothing more.
Anna finished pulling the T-shirt on and buttoned her jeans. She was standing next to the closet. Hesitantly she reached out and opened it. Maybe she had been expecting someone from a horror movie to leap out at her, but there was only men’s clothing hanging there. Work shirts, some were flannel and some were cotton. There was a large leather coat that wasn’t hers. And there was one that was hers. She almost smiled. Her coat was hanging sedately in the closet. She looked down. There was her backpack on the floor of the closet, next to three pairs of men’s shoes and one pair of steel-toed leather boots.
Yanking the coat off the hanger, she pulled the backpack out at the same time. She tried to pull her coat onto her arms while she tried to unzip the bag. One sleeve hung off as she found out that everything was still there. The Bible. Clothing. Even her battered sunglasses were present. She paused to clutch the backpack to her chest and closed her eyes momentarily.
Relax. It came to her as a gentle brushing against her mind. Soothingly probing. Seductive.
The whistling man. Her eyes rocketed open as the thought whispered sinuously through her mind. No, that’s not possible. An aftereffect of the drug. She held the backpack to her chest, and her lips flattened into a grim line. One step brought her close to the window. One trembling hand parted the curtains.
Anna dropped the backpack just as her mouth dropped open. One leather sleeve of her jacket was on her arm, and the other flapped across her back.
It was the lake. The black lake. It stretched far and away. Its surface was as dark as pitch. Cypress trees as large as Greyhound buses towered along its length. A flock of long-necked snow white birds took flight from one. A cloud of frosty wings obscured the blueness of the sky above. She went to the door of the bedroom.
Ignoring the tidy house, with a tiny living room and attached kitchen, she found the front door and stepped outside. There was a cinnamon-speckled spaniel with soft brown eyes that woofed quietly at her and then put his head down on his paws. She noticed him peripherally. She could only stare dumbfounded at the lake. It was bigger than her dreams. The other side was a dim shape of trees lost in a haze of clouds. But the deep color of the water made her want to step closer and closer until she could reach one hand out to touch it.
A fish jumped fifty feet out and Anna started. The leather coat slipped off, and she absently let it drop to the ground in a brown puddle. She walked across a green lawn, passed a bench that was positioned to look out upon the same lake, and came to the edge of the water. There was no beach here. Grass went to the edge and then there was tar-colored water that lapped with the movement of an unseen moon.
She knelt and touched her fingers to the water, dipping them under and bringing the liquid up to her face to study it closely. That close it didn’t seem so dark. Just lake water. The top layers were as warm as the winds, heated by the sun’s now-friendly light. Finally she looked away and saw a house a hundred yards to the side. There was a small dock there with a large fishing boat moored to it. The house was almost lost in the thickness of pine trees and oaks. To the other side was another house, a little further away. Small and trim, it had a small boat turned upside down on its lawn. Behind her was the house she had woken up in. Like the others, it was little with cedar flashing and a tidy lawn.
Looking back at the deep dark waters, she thought about it. Anna wasn’t positive, but she didn’t think that Shreveport had lakes like this near to the city. There was a river. The Red River. She knew that. But she wasn’t sure about bayous and lakes near there. This wasn’t just a lake; it was a huge bayou, looking as old as if God had created it on the sixth day. No one had come to cut the cypress trees, to crop them to the level of the water where they would remain as ghostly remnants. No one had built casinos on its shores. There were only the people who loved its visceral wildness, whose homes blended into the forest, who relished the quietness.
It’s breathtaking, she thought. It’s everything I dreamed of, and yet, it’s like nothing I ever imagined.
“Why did you wait so damn long?” came an intrusive voice that disrupted Anna’s train of thought. She spun around so quickly that the world started to tilt on its axis. The man reached out to steady her, but she waved him off.
Anna’s vision settled down, and she looked at him. Not Dan Cullen. Perhaps five years older than her, he was about the same number of inches taller than she was. Wide shoulders braced his torso, a worn T-shirt showed off muscles used to hard work. He had a flat belly and strong legs encased in faded Levis. Boots covered his feet. Every inch of him vibrated with nameless emotion. It was his face that drew the most attention. Framed with black curly hair, it was a substantial face with expressive features, a long jaw line, and a straight nose. It enthralled her. This man had some kind of energy behind the façade that drew her into his physical presence, making her forget everything else.
But it was the eyes that froze her into place. Those gold eyes. Piercingly gilded, they stared at hers in turn. A color Anna had only ever seen in a mirror. We could be related, she realized. We could be…brother and sister?
“You’re not my sister,” the man snapped. He reached out to grasp her shoulders, and he jerked her toward him, leaning into her at the same time. She saw his head duck toward her, and her eyes shut automatically as he ground his mouth against hers. Anna couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. There was a weight on her chest that seemed to sink into her body cavity, threatening to carry her away with its heaviness. It was a feeling that she didn’t dare identify. An eternity passed, and the man let go of her shoulders, reaching around to press against her back, pushing her against his chest, as if he wanted them to forget where one started and the other one ended.
Anna’s eyes tore open. She brought her hands up and shoved the man away from her. He jerked backward, and his gold eyes burned at her.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shrieked at him. Then with all of her strength, she pulled her leg back and kicked him on his shin. His eyes opened wide with the sudden pain in his leg, falling backwards onto his butt with a grunt. Then he toppled into the lake.
* * *
Gabriel knew the moment she woke up. There was a waxing sense of black fear that gurgled ever upward to full wakefulness. He was stripping the teak deck of the Belle-Mère with steady strokes of an orbital sander. Just because she was unconscious and lying in his cabin didn’t mean he had to dance attendance on her motionless form.
“She’s been that way for three days,” he’d hissed at Camille this morning.
Camille had rolled her eyes. She sat with the young woman for several
hours while Gabriel took care of his business, but today there were no tours, no one to guide, and as Christmas speedily approached, the tourist industry began to lull.
“But I have work to do,” Gabriel had protested, grumpy from having slept on his undersized couch for the last three nights.
“So do I,” Camille had snapped back. “Children to raise. House to clean. Another job, mon frère. And she’s your problem.”
Mutinously, Gabriel had stayed in the house for precisely two hours before he’d fled to the comforting security of the Belle-Mère, a half-mile away at its dock near Benoit’s General Store. Two more hours of working on the deck had settled his mind. He hadn’t even paid much attention to Sebastien Benoit wandering out of the store every fifteen minutes to stare at him as he worked.
“Anh,” Gabriel had ducked his head down to steadfastly ignore the unsaid message. She’s unconscious. What the hell am I supposed to do? Hold her hand and whisper that nothing else will harm her? He hadn’t realized that he had let his guard down when the thought came flying into his mind, as smooth as silk, as soft as a bebe’s behind. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do.
Get out of my head, Cammy.
Don’t want to be there, Gabe. You left yourself wide open.
The door had slammed shut and the connection vaporized. Gabriel had shoved so hard against the orbital sander that the motor started to whine and smoke with the pressure being applied to it.
Then she had woken up. They didn’t even know her name. She didn’t have a wallet. Nothing was written on the label of her jacket. There wasn’t a name on the Bible inside her pack. There was pretty much nothing. Just the girl herself. Short black hair, skin the color of an antique ivory cameo, and her eyes as gold as their own. A face that was as close to the most beautiful he’d ever seen and a figure that made his flesh groan for relief.
Gabriel paused, his mouth a grim line. The little handcuff key had been on the key ring in the truck’s ignition. When he had stuck his head in the back of the sleeper he thought for a moment she was dead, and he clearly remembered the thought that went skittering through his head. She can’t be dead. And there had been an instantaneous echo of thoughts bolstering him. Not dead. Not dead. Not. Dead.
Carrying her out of the semi, Gabriel couldn’t even see the rise and fall of her chest. She had been cold and still in his arms, virtually the next thing to being dead. It had only been hours later when Dr. Quenelle had left Gabe’s bedroom with a sigh and a smile that Gabriel had relaxed, and that interior wall had gone back up to protect his psychic being from the rest of the family.
“Drugged. Only drugged. Probably have some side effects. No need to counteract the drug. Her pulse is strong. Her injuries are minimal.” Michel Quenelle’s words filtered back to Gabriel as he had picked up on her state of alertness. He paused as he perceived the unspoken question in Gabriel’s mind. “No, not that. But she’s going to be afraid. We know what that means.”
So at the moment that she had woken up, Gabriel picked up on that fear. He had turned off the sander, reluctantly waved at Sebastien, who had immediately stuck his head out the door of the store, and trotted off in the direction of his cabin.
Five minutes after that he had watched her as she stared at the lake. He had previously examined her face while she lay unconscious. But when she was awake and standing in front of him, there was a significant change in his attitude. He studied her shapely form. Alive and animated, she was as enthralling to him as the lake obviously was to her. Silently he willed her to turn around.
Then it came to him. It’s breathtaking, she had thought. It’s everything I dreamed of, and yet, it’s like nothing I ever imagined.
She’s never seen it before? It was curious. Gabriel had dismissed it with a growl, “Why did you wait so damn long?”
She spun around and clearly the effort cost her. Her face was the color of salt, and her body wavered on its feet. One of his hands shot out, but she motioned him off. Her face was a thousand times lovelier when she was awake. The curiosity in her gold eyes, the curve of her bow-shaped lips, the lively rush of half-concealed thoughts that roared across her consciousness, all made her breathtakingly gorgeous.
Then came the thought that really rattled him. We could be related, she thought. We could be…brother and sister?
“You’re not my sister,” Gabriel snarled before he had really screwed up.
He watched her run into the house while bobbing in the waist deep water. One hand rubbed his throbbing shin under the water’s surface. For someone who was probably as weak as a newborn kitten, she had clocked him good. “Well, merde,” he said to himself. “That’ll show you what that gets you.”
Phideaux the spaniel watched the young woman slam the door and then looked interestedly at his master climbing out of the lake. Gabriel hopped around on one foot while he simultaneously rubbed his shin with one hand and glared at the house. Water dripped from his flesh. He abruptly put his foot down and stood up straight when he clearly heard her throw the deadbolt on the door. “That’s my house,” he protested. He looked down at the dog, which sat in a sunny spot with his speckled head up and his eyes big. He hadn’t bothered to move from his assigned location. “Some guard dog. You can’t keep a little woman like that out of my house.”
Phideaux woofed and put his head down.
Gabriel approached the door and hoped she hadn’t found his shotgun in the back of the bedroom closet. He hadn’t thought that she would think he was some kind of twisted pervert like the one who had her handcuffed in the back of a semi-truck. Consequently it hadn’t occurred to him that he would need to protect himself from her. His shin pounded like the devil had come up from the Gulf for a bit of crawdaddy gumbo and play the steel drums until he got what he wanted. Slowly he came to the door and rapped on it. “Girl?”
There was nothing but silence from the other side. He knew what Camille would say. She was frightened. She had woken up in a strange place with only a strange man around, someone who had immediately tried to maul her. Gabriel took a deep breath. He’d never had a problem keeping his hands to himself before. “Girl?” he repeated. “I know you’re scared. You got nothing to worry about now. That man. Well, he’s not going to hurt no one for a long time, least of all any little girls.”
Silence.
“Or big girls,” he added inanely. Gabriel opened his mind up. Nothing answered there except a red rippling sense of anger. Anger could be an effective block. Just as fear opened the mind like a sinkhole, anger could shut it down like the heaviest metal doors on a bank vault. Anger was good. Anger was better than stinking fear. He ran a frustrated hand through black hair and looked around. Spotting her leather jacket on the lawn, he limped over to pick it up. He returned to the porch and hung it over one of the Adirondack chairs sitting there. “Girl,” he said louder. “You want to call your maman? She might want to know that her bebe is all right. I know I would want to know if my child was okay. It’s been three days since you came here. The docteur said something about side effects. He didn’t know what that the truck driver had given you…”
“Three days?” came her insistent voice full of disbelief, muffled through the door.
Gabriel sighed with relief. “Oui. You slept for three days.” He crossed his arms over his chest and thought about what a fool he felt, standing on the outside of his own house while the impertinent young thing stood inside, questioning his motives. “I will call le docteur again. Then maybe you’ll feel…”
“Call whoever you want,” she growled. “But I’m not staying here. Not with you.”
“Oh Christ,” he swore fluidly. Camille! Dammit! Get over here right now!
Oh for the love of le diable, Gabriel! What have you done NOW?
Chapter 7
Wednesday, December 17th
If one wishes to protect their family, a priest should take a Bible and circle the house thrice, waving the Good Book while it is open, and loudly entreating the Lord to wat
ch over those who dwell within.
Sebastien Benoit knew that business was poor in the days immediately preceding Christmas. Shrugging, he didn’t really care. He stocked what the family needed and novelty items for the tourists. His was the only general store within twenty miles. In fact it was the only convenience store within the same area, and the money was consistent. He didn’t need the Christmas rush. So his only amusement had been going out to see the predicament that Gabriel Bergeron found himself in.
The boy had worked on his boat for two hours, producing a sheen of sweat that Sebastien could see all the way from his door. An hour into Gabriel’s enforced labor, a labor that was obviously a concerted effort to forget about the pretty young mam’selle lying in his bed, Gaspard came into the store.
The eldest son of Sebastien, Gaspard closely resembled his father. Six feet tall, he was as broad as any man in Unknown, and he worked hard to maintain his welding business in a slowing economy. Often he traveled to Shreveport and Bossier City for work. These were irregular jobs that kept the bankers at bay. His hair had the same raven’s wing luster as many of the other family members and his eyes the same burnished shade of gold. His features were a duplicate of his father’s. A squared face with high cheekbones attested to Indian ancestors.
On his way to a job in LaValle, Gaspard had motioned toward Gabriel systematically going over the wooden deck with the orbital sander. “Maman says that he’s in for a rough ride with the jolie femme.”
His father had moved his shoulders noncommittally. The entire event had been troubling to everyone in the family. There had been anxious calls from as far away as New Orleans from those who had felt the unchecked fear bursting forth from her. No one was looking for a pretty young thing hitchhiking her way east. No one knew her name, but the word had gone forth to check with others out of the immediate area for the by-blows, and the distant relations who might have recessive genes coming to light.
Sebastien himself had searched her belongings. The Bible in her backpack had looked so familiar to him that he was disappointed there was no family name inscribed there, perhaps denoting a relationship to one of the many family names that populated the area and therefore solving the mystery. Le docteur had pronounced her fit, but recommended that she sleep off her anxiety as long as someone stayed nearby, someone being Gabriel, of course. But Gabriel, like many men in that situation, was digging his heels into the sandy soils with the fierce determination for which he was known.