Bayou Heat

ONE
 
It was a perfect night for voodoo.
 
Erin McClure smiled at the fanciful notion. Adventures were supposed to be fanciful. To her they had always been magical, like exploring a previously untold fairy tale. This particular fairy tale was her most private one. The magic that awaited her the sort that most only whispered about.
 
Zombis. Conjo. Hoodoo.
 
If they spoke of it at all.
 
If only Mac were still alive. She finally had the funding for their dream expedition, the one death had cruelly snatched away from her father. But not from her. She had no right to complain about anything. Mac certainly wouldn’t have.
 
Yet, having spent most of her formative years romping in South American jungles, Asian swamps, African bush, and the Australian outback, she knew this trek into the wilds of southern Louisiana would be as sweaty and bug infested as it was exciting and magical.
 
She swatted at another mosquito as she climbed to the second-floor apartment she’d rented for the next three months. Actually, it was a refurbished loft in a mostly dilapidated row house. Still, it beat a lean-to or a tree house; she knew from personal experience.
 
A very unladylike bead of sweat dripped off the end of her nose as she bent to deposit her gear. She rubbed her face on the already wet sleeve of her Georgetown University T-shirt. Good thing she didn’t have to be ladylike anymore, not in the classroom or attending endless college and business functions. Teaching in the former, begging for money at the latter. In the end, it had all been worth it. Every sip of tepid tea with the dean’s wife, every soggy canapé eaten at another corporate we-have-money-to-burn-but-not-for-you dinner party, every glassy-eyed student dozing in the back of her botany class was worth it. Her dream had come true. She was jumping for joy.
 
On the inside.
 
On the outside, it was after two in the morning, she was over six hours late, and she had an eight-o’clock meeting with several professors at the local college who had agreed to work with her. Aside from providing a lab, computers, and access to their collected data, they would also be supplying her with a guide into the nearby backwaters and bayous. Without that important entrée into the notoriously closed voodoun society, her expedition could easily take two or three times longer than she’d planned. Longer than she had money to fund.
 
She dug in the back pocket of her gym shorts and extracted the apartment key that her contact at Southeastern University, Dr. Marshall Sullivan, had thoughtfully left with the landlord. Who had thoughtfully left it taped to his door. She smiled dryly. Bruneaux, Louisiana, was apparently not a hotbed of sin and crime.
 
It was just hot.
 
The moment she opened the door, she decided the sound of a humming window air-conditioner unit was the sweetest music she’d ever heard. It took less than three strides into the room to discover that said humming unit wasn’t doing its job. The room was suffocating.
 
She groped for a light switch, flipped it. Nothing. “Figures.” She let the moonlight guide her to the window, let out an uninhibited groan, and lowered her face to the blast of cold air chugging out of the air conditioner. Only after she’d fanned her underarms did she stop to wonder why the room was so hot.
 
A fluttering motion caught the corner of her eye. She turned toward what looked to be a small bathroom. “Aha.”
 
The thin gauzy curtains framing the open French doors in the bathroom swayed gently in the night breeze. Bathrooms had showers. Cold showers. She eyed the soft invitation of the small wrought-iron day-bed positioned against the opposite wall. Cold water won. She cranked the window unit to high and paused long enough on her way to the bathroom to drag off her T-shirt and sports bra, then hop out of her baggy shorts.
 
She stepped into the bathroom, got to the open French doors, and froze.
 
Something was smeared all over the bathroom tile. Blood. Even in the dim light it looked like blood. A lot of blood.
 
It wasn’t until she looked down and saw the dead man—the naked dead man—in the tub that she screamed.
 
Teague Comeaux flinched and made a half-hearted attempt to swat away the annoying sound. He wondered if the screeching banshee was heralding his welcome to hell. If so, then hell was really … well, hell.
 
He tried to open his eyes, managing only one narrow slit. Unless he was delusional as well as cursed to spend eternity roasting, that banshee looked a whole lot more like an angel. A naked angel.
 
He started to smile, then thought better of it. Ti Antoine had managed to get a pretty wicked left upper-cut to his jaw. Teague’s mind drifted from the disturbing replay of the night’s activities—after all, if he were really dead, he didn’t have to care anymore, did he?—back to his angel. His naked angel.
 
The screaming stopped. Naked Angel stepped cautiously closer. He tried to speak, but could manage only a low groan.
 
Bad move, Comeaux. He flinched, moaned again, and let his eyes slide mercifully shut as she screamed once again. It was a short blast, but enough to make his head ring. Through the throbbing tattoo playing on his eardrums, he could have sworn he heard her whisper “zombies.”
 
A second later hell went fluorescent.
 
Wincing, he closed his eyes tightly. He’d survived again. He doubted hell had megawatt lighting.
 
Just his luck.
 
“You’re alive!” It was more accusation than relief. He could hardly blame her. Although most people got to know him first before wishing him dead.
 
“Who are you and what are you doing bleeding all over my bathroom?”
 
Well, he amended, maybe angel was too presumptuous.
 
After several seconds, he managed to crack open one eyelid. At least she was still naked. A small favor. As few and far between as they came, he made it a point not to pass on a single one.
 
At least in one area, they were starting off on equal footing. He was as naked as she.
 
“Hey, mon tout nu ange,” he managed to get out with a voice that sounded as if he’d been drinking gravel instead of beer. “Join me?”
 
“You have about two seconds to explain yourself, mon coquin voleur,” she said in a dead-on imitation of his Cajun accent. “If I believe you, chèr, I’ll call an ambulance.” She dropped the accent, her voice turned hard and flat. “If I don’t, I call the police.”
 
Under other circumstances, Teague would have come up with a charm-them-out-of-their-pants smile and a toss-away line. Right now breathing, not to mention seeing straight, was enough of a challenge. Besides, she was already out of her pants. And he doubted his angel would fall for any line. Even his.
 
“Coquin voleur?” he repeated. “I may be big, ange, but I’m no thief.” He watched as she took a bold step forward, stopping just short of being able to see over the high sides of the claw-foot tub.
 
“And I’m no angel,” she shot back. “Time’s up.” She turned immediately for the door, offering him another favor he didn’t pass up: the view of a sweetheart derriere.
 
And she was wrong about being in control.
 
“No police, chèr,” he warned softly. The very last thing he needed was Frank Bodette, Boudry Parish’s sorry excuse for a sheriff, stumbling around in his business. He was already doing a damn good job of screwing it up on his own.
 
“Too late.” She had one hand on the door.
 
“Now see, ange, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said quietly. “It’s never too late.” Not true. It had been too late for him years ago. But the lie rolled off his tongue with the ease of too much practice.
 
She turned back to him, still holding the glass doorknob. “You’re naked, bleeding, and barely conscious. I hardly think you’re in any condition to stop me.”
 
Teague made the same tsking sound he’d heard all his life from his grand-mère Comeaux. And she thought he’d never learned anything from her. “Naked? Were you peeking, chèr? If I’d known, I might have thought that coquin comment was a reference to something other than my … height.”
 
Color filled her cheeks and moved downward with the slow, sensual blush of heat. It surprised him. Other than the initial scream of surprise, she’d been facing down a bloody stranger, buck naked, with all the cool disdain of a debutante discovering one of the servants dipping into the caviar.
 
“Coquin, in this case, meaning the same as voleur. ‘Thief,’ ‘crook.’ Not ‘big.’ ” She paused. “Though I imagine that derivation could be applied to your ego.”
 
“Because if you had peeked,” he went on, ignoring her, “you’d have noticed I’m not totally naked here.” He winced even as his lips slid into a wide, unrepentant grin. “Unlike yourself.”
 
She glanced down, obviously startled.
 
“Tout nu, ange,” he repeated helpfully. “Meaning stark naked. Angel.”
 
It was then he realized her flush hadn’t been a brief attack of feminine modesty. It had been anger. Even caught badly off guard by her state of undress, she barely let it show. Relaxing, meeting his eyes once again.
 
Intriguing, his angel was. He’d spent his first two beers earlier that evening wishing there was some way out of the predicament Marshall had unknowingly put him in. And the last two wondering what in the hell an ethnobotanist would look like. The one certainty he’d had was that whatever the answers, she meant trouble for him.
 
He realized now that he’d underestimated the situation on all scores.