The Seducer. Jule Mcbride
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Eldora?” Lily asked, using the name of one of the rental cottages on the water.
“That’s the one.” Pansy had started hoping Ned would be as sexy as he sounded on the phone. Not that a mere man could compare with the fantasies she’d had about her favorite ghost, of course. Pausing at the door, Pansy traced her fingers over the screen, a slow smile tilting the corners of her mouth when she saw Castle O’Lannaise in the distance. “Whoever won the lottery is going to buy that castle,” she announced, excited prickles of certainty washing over her skin.
“Well,” returned Vi pragmatically, “maybe you can marry him and buy it yourself. But not if you bore him with tales about your mystery lover who haunts the dunes.”
Lily mustered a fake French accent. “Jacques O’Lannaise,” she murmured, the name floating fluidly off her tongue.
“Don’t you think it’s odd the boat that exploded out there was called Destiny?” Pansy murmured.
“Explosions,” Lily returned darkly. “A bad omen.”
“I bet it was just a mechanical failure,” said Vi, glancing toward the ocean.
Pansy’s mind had filled with images of her ancestor, Iris Hanley, pacing the deck of a sailing ship, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, her long skirts swishing. According to family legend, she’d been sailing to distant cousins in New Orleans in hopes of meeting handsome suitors when pirates boarded the Destiny. Iris had trembled when one—a strapping man in tight breeches and a blousy white shirt with lace cuffs—stopped before her, his dark, unruly hair blowing wildly in the wind. But he didn’t rob her. Instead the man sheathed his sword, wrapped his arms around Iris’s waist and savaged her mouth, capturing her lips in a kiss like fire. A kiss that ruined Iris Hanley for marriage, since no other man’s kiss ever surpassed it.
Twelve years later, in 1822, when a mysterious Frenchman arrived on the island to build Castle O’Lannaise, it was said he was that same pirate, that he’d arrived under an assumed name, made rich by the spoils of his plunder, to claim a woman he’d seen only once but whom he’d already branded with his fire.
“Pansy?”
Vi’s voice startled her. “Huh?”
“Ned Nelson,” Vi reminded.
“Right,” Pansy whispered distractedly. Feeling whimsical as she pushed through the screen door, she fancied she wasn’t going to Casa Eldora but into the dunes beside the cottage to meet her dark dream lover, Jacques O’Lannaise, and as her sandaled feet touched the sandy porch, she felt the coiled power in the hard body that held her, the brush of bristling black chest hair that erupted between the laces of his blouse and then the rush of blessed, fiery heat as Jacques’s firm, wet mouth covered hers.
A second later, she found herself hoping—much more practically—that Ned Nelson would turn out to be cute.
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