Mimosa Grove

Washington, D.C.

L
aurel Scanlon was in love. Had been for more than four months now. It was what got her through the days and filled her lonely nights. Knowing the tenderness of his touch, the patience and passion of his lovemaking, and the fulfillment of dying bit by bit each night in his arms as he took her to a climax that left her breathless and often trembling, was more than she’d ever hoped to have in her life.

And tonight was no exception.

After another mindless and seemingly endless night of playing hostess for her father, federal prosecutor Robert Scanlon, it had been all Laurel could do to get undressed before crawling into bed.

She wanted her lover with a need that made her shiver. Longed for the mindless, weightless feeling of coming apart beneath him. Yet even in the deepest part of her soul, she was sorry for the fact that she saw him only in her dreams.

But how could she regret someone who, nightly, was breathing life into her heart and reminding her why she’d been born a woman? She needed him as much as she needed oxygen to survive, craving the freedom of his touch, getting lost in his kisses and ultimately experiencing the mind-numbing shock of sexual release. No one knew he existed, and she would not admit, even to herself, that he was not real. Tonight was no exception.

It was with eagerness that she crawled into bed, rolled over on her side and wearily closed her eyes, waiting for consciousness to subside—waiting for him.

And as she waited, her subconscious slipped into that state between cognizance and sleep, bringing back to her the joke of her existence, wondering why she’d been born different from other women and always the butt of jokes—tolerated only because of her father’s status in the upper echelons of Washington politics.

She rolled onto her other side and plumped the pillow beneath her head, trying to block out the pain, but it was with her as surely as the blood that flowed through her veins.

People smiled to her face, but she knew they talked when her back was turned. She knew what the people in the elite circle of her father’s life thought about her. They said she was unbalanced. Some even called her crazy. The kinder ones thought she was just given to high flights of fanciful imagination, but nearly all of them figured she would end up in an expensive but distant institution, just as her mother, Phoebe, had done before she had taken her own life.

No one gave credence to the provenance of Laurel’s family, or to the legend that the oldest daughter in every family directly related to Chantelle LeDeux, who had disappeared from her family plantation in Louisiana in 1814, had the gift of “sight.”

Laurel’s so-called gift had been an embarrassment to her father since the day she learned to talk. It had ostracized her during her school years and made her something of a cult oddity in college. Her reputation became the source of amusement at parties, as her so-called friends urged her to “see” into their future. But the day she “saw” one commit a crime before it happened was the day her popularity came to an end.

Trying to hide her disability, as soon as she graduated college, she got a job at a local newspaper, but that, too, soon ended, along with her three-month engagement to the editor’s oldest son. Her second engagement to a stockbroker occurred two years later and lasted until he began urging her to give him tips on the market.

For Laurel, it was the last straw. Having to face the fact that he’d believed in her only enough to further his own goals had soured her on ever supposing she would find someone who could ignore the gossip and love her for who she was. Now, at twenty-eight and sick of the vicious cycle that had become her life, she was ready for a change.

Unknown to her father, she was planning to leave D.C. But until she could decide what she wanted to do and where she wanted to go, having an affair with a man who existed only in her mind seemed like a damned good idea. For now, sleep had become her escape.

And so she waited with expectation, praying for sleep to come. She took slow, deep breaths to clear her thoughts from the meaningless chitchat she’d endured throughout dinner, then exhaled softly. Moments later, she was asleep.

And, just as she’d hoped, he came to her. In her dream…in her head…in her heart—slipping into her thoughts without warning. One moment she was alone and dreamless, and the next thing she knew, his hands were on her body, caressing her shape. Then his mouth touched her skin, leaving a thin, wet trail on her breast as he traced its shape with the tip of his tongue.

Laurel moaned and then sighed as she unconsciously rolled over onto her back and parted her legs. She felt his hand sliding across the flat of her belly, pausing just long enough above the juncture of her thighs to make her moan with longing.

She wanted more.

She wanted him.

She wanted it now.

As if he’d sensed her thoughts, he moved from beside her to on top of her. She thought he whispered something shameless as he slid between her legs, but she couldn’t quite hear the words. For a heart-stopping moment, he held himself poised above her; then she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him in, arching uncontrollably toward the hard, pulsing length of him as he began to rock her world.

Moonlight filtered through the pale blue sheers of the second-story bedroom, bathing the room in an eerie light, but Laurel didn’t know and wouldn’t have cared. She felt nothing but the impact of their bodies in the ebb and flow of making love.

Her climax came without warning and in the form of a belly-deep moan, shattering Laurel’s dream, leaving her awake and shaking and trying to reconcile the loneliness of her existence with the intimacy of where she’d just been.

With a stifled sob, she thrust her fingers through her hair, swept the dark red curls away from her face and then rolled out of bed. She stumbled as she got up, then staggered to the bathroom, hoping to salvage her sanity with the shock of a cold shower.

Same time: Bayou Jean, Louisiana

Justin Bouvier woke with a gasp, then sat straight up, searching the shadows in his room for a glimpse of the woman who’d been in his bed. When he realized that, once again, it was nothing but the same dream he’d been having for months, he rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes and cursed. How was this happening? It had seemed so real. He inhaled sharply, then frowned, imagining he could still smell the scent of her in the room.

With a muffled groan, he got out of bed and strode to the bathroom, flipping on lights as he went. Within seconds he was in the shower and standing beneath the stinging jets of cold water, and yet no matter how long he stood, the feel of her was still on his skin.

Half an hour later, Justin was still up, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was having a love affair with a phantom. Not even the sturdy walls and cool, bare floors of the home that had been in his family for three generations were enough to ease his frustration tonight. Finally he took a cold can of beer from his refrigerator and walked out onto the back porch.

The Louisiana night was still, the air warm and sluggish. Beyond the perimeter of his house, the racket of tree frogs and crickets almost masked the less-prevalent sound of a nearby bull gator’s boom. This was his world—the world in which he’d been raised. But not even the bayou and all it concealed was as frightening to him as the last four months of sleep had been. He was no high school boy having wet dreams about sex. Whatever was happening was locked into his soul. He didn’t know why, or if it would ever happen again, but he knew, as well as he knew his own name, that if she existed, he had to find her.

And so he stood, staring off into the darkness as a fresh layer of sweat beaded on his skin, reminding him of the heat they had generated while making love. Finally, he laid the cold can of beer against the back of his neck.

“God give me strength,” he said softly, then popped the top on the beer. Lifting it to his lips, he tilted his head and drank until it was gone.

Robert Scanlon was just finishing his breakfast when Laurel entered the dining room. He frowned as he watched her walk straight to the sideboard and pour herself a cup of coffee.

“You overslept,” Robert said. “Are you ill?”

Laurel took her coffee and moved toward the table.

“No. I’m fine.”

There was no other answer she could give him. He already thought she was crazy. Telling him she was losing sleep over a love affair with some phantom from her dreams would send him over the edge.

“It’s almost nine,” he said, persisting in pointing out the fact that she was late coming down to breakfast.

Laurel lifted her cup, looking at her father over the rim as she blew across the hot surface, then took her first sip. She knew it infuriated him that she had yet to give him a satisfying answer, and while it was somewhat childish, she savored the small rebellion. After a second sip, she set her coffee cup down and smiled at the woman who was coming into the room.

“Good morning, Miss Laurel. What would you like for breakfast?”

“Good morning, Estelle. Please tell Cook I’m only having coffee this morning.”

Her father’s frown deepened as the housekeeper left.

“You should eat something, Laurel. It’s not healthy to—”

“Father, for heaven’s sake. I’m twenty-eight, not eight. I know whether I’m hungry or not. Besides, I’m having lunch with Mr. Coleman at one o’clock.”

Her delayed arrival at breakfast and the fact that she wasn’t eating properly were forgotten as he absorbed the fact that she was having lunch with their family lawyer and he hadn’t known about it.

“Coleman? Why? And why didn’t he let me know?”

“Really, Father, it’s not like I’m doing anything illicit. He called. I agreed to lunch. I supposed it might have something to do with Mother’s trust fund, which is my business, not yours.”

“Still,” Robert muttered, “one would have thought he’d contact me, not you.”

“Why?” she challenged.

“Well, because…”

“I’m not my mother,” Laurel snapped, her voice rising with each word she spoke. “I’m not disturbed. I’m not unbalanced. I’m not crazy.” Then she shoved her chair back from the table and stood abruptly. “Have a nice day at the office, Father. I have some letters to write…and some spirits to channel,” she added, knowing the last shot would infuriate him even more than he already was.

She walked out with her head held high, refusing to let him know how badly she hurt.

“Damn him,” she muttered as she took the stairs back up to her bedroom. “Damn all men to hell and back.”

But the moment she said it, she thought of the man from her dreams and knew that unless she found him in someone real, she was the one who would be forever damned.

Albert Coleman was, for all intents and purposes and except for the Scanlon family, retired. He would have given them up, too, had it not been for Phoebe’s daughter. If he abandoned Laurel the way Phoebe had, then she would be standing alone against the world, because her father certainly wasn’t taking her side. More than once, Albert had been a witness to Robert’s coldhearted treatment of Laurel. In a way, he understood a bit of why Robert was so stringent. He’d been helpless to stop his wife’s self-destruction, and it was fear that drove him to ride Laurel so hard. But Albert knew something about Laurel that Robert didn’t seem to get. Laurel wasn’t Phoebe. She was strong, self-assured, and more her father’s daughter than either one of them realized.

He fiddled with his napkin as he waited for her to arrive, while wondering what his latest bit of news was going to do to the very fragile balance of her world.

Then he looked up, saw the tall, beautiful redhead walking his way with her father’s attitude and Phoebe’s smile, and felt his heart skip a beat. He laid down his napkin as he stood to greet her.

“Laurel, darling, it’s been too long,” he said, then kissed her cheek and seated her at their table.

Laurel smiled at her old friend and, not for the first time, realized that the older he got, the more he resembled Abraham Lincoln, sans beard.

“It has been a while, hasn’t it?” She reached out and patted his hand as he sat down beside her. “We must remember to do this more often.”

Albert signaled their waiter that they were ready to order. As soon as the waiter was gone, Laurel put her elbows on the table and leaned toward him in a confidential manner.

“So, what’s up, doc?” she asked, expecting to see a smile break across the somberness of Albert’s face. Instead, he frowned.

“Albert?”

He cupped her hand, then patted the side of her face.

“I have some sad news for you, dear. Your grandmother, Marcella, has passed away.”

Laurel’s smile faded. She had only vague memories of her maternal grandmother, but what she remembered was all good. Going to Louisiana—to Mimosa Grove, the family estate where her mother had been born and raised—had been like going to Disneyland, only without all the rides.

The country had been hot and green and wet, and, to her, somewhat like a jungle. And it was the first time she’d ever felt completely accepted. No one minded that she “saw” things others didn’t, and no one chided her for her flights of fancy. It had been one of the most memorable times of her life.

But after Phoebe’s disintegration, Laurel had never seen her grandmother again. To her shame, she realized that she’d never considered going back on her own after she’d become an adult.

“When’s the service?” Laurel asked.

Albert shook his head. “Again, I’m sorry, but it’s over. Marcella Campion was buried in the family plot at Bayou Jean over two weeks ago.”

Regret hit hard, followed by shame.

“Oh, no,” Laurel muttered.

“That’s not all,” Albert said.

Laurel waited for the other shoe to drop.

“She left everything to you.”

Laurel was still wrestling with indecision when Robert came home from work that same evening. And she could tell by the look on his face that he was geared to continue the argument they’d started that morning.