Wedding Favors (13 page)

The music stopped, and the rest of the guests were invited to dance. Thomas looked for Madison, spotted her talking and laughing with girlfriends, her smile piercing his heart. Her scent, like orange blossoms, had filled him when he’d taken her arm, and it seemed to cling to him still.

He imagined hooking his forefingers into the off-the-shoulder dress and pulling down until he discovered whether she wore a little strapless bra underneath, a slash of lace on skin, or nothing at all. He’d teach her what he’d learned since their truncated relationship nine years ago—how to articulate her deepest needs and then beg for Thomas to fulfill them.

Someone blocked his view of her. Keith Girard, stopping to talk to Madison.
Damn.

Madison was obviously uncomfortable with him. She stepped back on one heel as he curved over her, but Keith kept leaning in, talking fast.

Thomas was across the room before his brain registered that his feet had moved. He slammed his drink to an empty table and reached Madison and Girard in time to hear Girard say, “You know you want to, Maddie.”

“Keith, not now,” Madison said.

Girard grabbed Madison’s arm. She glared at him, and Thomas’s animal rage roared to the surface. He shoved himself directly between them, breaking Keith’s contact with Madison.

Keith’s face flashed anger. “What the fuck are you doing, Dupree?”

“The lady, she don’t want to dance with you,” Thomas answered, his Cajun accent flowing out with his fury. “You leave her be.”

Girard sneered. “Can’t you talk right, Cajun boy?”

“I’ll talk better when you leave her alone.”

“Don’t make a habit of butting in to what you don’t understand, Dupree. I can make life hell for you.”

The man was an idiot. “I can make it a hotter hell for you, Girard.”

Madison had stepped to Thomas’s side, her wide eyes filled with anger. “Stop it, both of you. You’re like a pair of ... rutting goats.”

“Maybe you should take this outside, gentlemen.” Marc had moved to them and stood between Girard and Thomas now, speaking in a quiet voice. “Don’t fuck up Leon’s wedding.”

He was right. Thomas stepped back. “Marc has a point. This isn’t the place.” He held out his hand. “Will you dance with me, Maddie?”

She glared. “No, I will not.”

Damn it. “Madison.”

“Don’t ‘Madison’ me, Thomas Dupree. You ignored me for nine years, and now you push people around and want to dance with me so you can poke me for information about my house. Well, forget it.”

“I don’t think that’s the only way he wants to poke you,” Girard said. “You’d better watch him, Maddie.”

“I think she’d better keep an eye on
you,”
Thomas said. “I am.”

Girard’s gaze flickered at that, but he kept up the smile. “This isn’t the swamps, boy, where you act like animals.”

The trouble was, Thomas had animal in him, or at least an animal spirit, passed down from a shaman ancestor. Sometimes it did his thinking for him, and he had to shift and run, hunt, to let off steam.

“Both of you. Grow
up.”
Madison whirled, her tulle skirt floating. “I need some air.”

Girard took a step after her, but Marc was there, hemming him in with Thomas, and Madison strode out of the ballroom unimpeded.

Girard’s sneer remained as he straightened his cuffs. Thomas smelled fear on him. One Dupree brother Girard thought he could handle. He knew he wasn’t up to handling two.

“You’re not worth it.” Girard brushed off his coat, then deliberately turned his back and walked away.

Thomas let him go. As satisfying as punching the man in the mouth might be, he had more important things to take care of.

He started for the door. “I gotta run, bro.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Marc said behind him. He added, just loud enough for Thomas to hear. “Good luck.”

Tomas exited the ballroom of the old French hotel and hurried through the echoing tiled halls. The valet looked up inquiringly when he emerged from the front door, but Thomas didn’t need his car. He needed Madison. Needed her so much his body berated him for not simply taking her out of there when he’d had the chance.

The valet said he’d seen Madison walking away, up the block to the right. Thomas quickened his pace. His gaze darted everywhere as he walked one block, then another, but nowhere did he see a woman in a peach dress with a fluffy meringue skirt. Madison was gone.

“Stupid
men.” Madison stomped down the sidewalk, her spike heels catching in the cracks.

She hated Keith Girard, who assumed he was God’s gift to women, and who also assumed he could paw at Madison whenever they met. Keith was the kind of person who tried to bully others with his money and power, and he’d made it clear that he wanted to get his hands on the Lefevre mansion as well as Madison, last scion of the Lefevre family.

Tonight Thomas Dupree had smiled at her, made her skin heat and her nipples peak, made her remember she was a woman. Until he’d started prying about the house and had made that little macho scene with Keith.

Well, screw them. She’d live in her old house until she was too elderly for anyone to care about her, and she’d liven things up by getting herself a boy toy. A sleek Cajun male called Raoul or something, who would lounge around in a thong all day and slather massage oil on her whenever she wanted.

Except that boy toys liked rich women, and Madison was up to her ears in debt. Even her exclusive hat designs couldn’t cover both the loans and her day-to-day expenses, not to mention fixing the house that was crumbling around her.

Screw all men anyway.

The streets teemed with people, the French Quarter becoming one big party during the weekends. No one gave Madison a second glance in her frothy tulle and tight bodice, still carrying her bridesmaid bouquet.

Madison wanted peace and quiet. To go home. But her ride was Mrs. Dupree, and everyone in the wedding party would be spending the night in the hotel.

So she’d walk around, calm down, and head back. She’d sneak up to the room she was sharing with the other bridesmaids, take off her dress, and go to bed. Except the other two had planned to party on after the reception, and they’d probably drag Madison out on the town with them. Maybe she could pretend she was sick. She just wanted to be left alone.

A gate on the street stood half open, beckoning her into a narrow lane and a quiet, dark garden. The garden stood next to a hotel and looked to belong to it, but it also looked inviting and deserted.

Madison ducked inside, breathing a sigh of relief as the street noises died behind her. The air felt cooler in here, the humidity receding and a fresh breeze touching her skin. Someone had lit hanging lanterns around the place, the soft glow soothing.

She heard the trickle of a fountain, likely why the air felt nice. She followed a path through the overgrown garden, moonlight picking out lush green leaves and colorful flowers, the scent of night-blooming jasmine in the air. Her heels sank into the earth between the stepping-stones, everything damp.

Madison found the fountain in the middle of the garden. The bowl was round marble, old, streaked with age. The pedestal in its center held the curvaceous figures of three women. As old as it was, water still trickled through the fountain, the sound relaxing.

An inscription ran along the lip of the bowl. Madison walked slowly around the fountain, reading the simple line:
Tout quoi vous voulez.
She didn’t speak French as well as her grandmother had, but she thought she understood the gist: “All that you wish.”

She felt her limbs grow heavy and warm as she circled the fountain a second time. Tension drained from her, though somewhere in the back of her mind, anger wound on.

The story of my life thus far
. Only granddaughter and last surviving relation of Felice Bouvier, the famous beauty. Felice had descended from a Creole family who’d been living in New Orleans long before the 1803 purchase brought in the upstart Americans. Rumor had it that a Bouvier ancestor had been a friend of Jean Lafitte, that perhaps Madison’s great-great-ever-so-great-grandmother had once been his mistress.

Rumor also whispered that Madison’s grandmother, Felice, one-quarter black, was a voodoo witch. How else had she landed Pierre Lefevre as a husband? Felice had married Pierre, himself of mixed American and Creole ancestry. Pierre had inherited a grand old house in the Garden District, and the two of them had moved in. Already the place had been falling apart, the Lefevre fortunes having dwindled. But because the two were so popular and came from two of the oldest families in New Orleans, they’d thrown the wildest parties in town, knew all the stars of early Hollywood and the wealthy and the great.

Photos of Madison’s grandmother as a young woman showed her in flapper garb, with large, dark eyes and a short bob of black hair. The photos did not disguise the wicked sense of humor that had never left her, even into old age. Madison’s fondest memories of childhood were the summers she’d spent in the house with her grandmother.

Before her grandmother had died last year, she’d told Madison that the rumors were true—Felice did have magic and her own grandmother had been one of the most powerful voodoo practitioners in the bayous. Felice had infused the house with magic and inferred that the magic would make sure Madison would always be safe and well.

Madison, inheriting not only the house but its tax liens and unpaid second mortgages, hadn’t seen where magic had helped her much.

The Lefevre money was all gone now, so the investors and bankers told Madison. Madison’s parents had died suddenly the summer before Madison’s last year in high school, killed on the road between Fontaine and New Orleans during a bad storm. There had been nothing for Madison to do but move in with her grandmother.

When Madison’s grandmother died, loneliness had descended on her. She’d had a few boyfriends during and since college, but no relationship that lasted. She assuaged any horniness with fantasies of Thomas Dupree. Even now, as annoyed as she was with him, she wanted him there to peel off her dress and lick his way down to her clit, which was swelling at the thought. She wanted him to drink her, and she wanted to unzip his pants, to go down on her knees and explore every facet of his penis with her lips and tongue.

He’d be big and luscious, long and dark. She wanted to learn his taste, smell his skin, know the feel of his head gliding into her mouth.

Her nerves tightened, her nipples pulling as though they anticipated the nip of his teeth. He’d say her name in his deep, Southern voice, the Cajun lilt rippling over her senses.
Madison. Cher.

All that you wish
. The fountain seemed to beckon to her.

Madison fished in the little purse that dangled from her arm and pulled out a quarter. She took a deep breath and thought a minute, trying to find the right words.

“I wish for one night of over-the-top sexual ecstasy that reminds me why I love being a woman. With the hot-bodied Thomas Dupree. And no talk about my house. Just one night, that’s all I ask.”

She tossed the coin. The quarter made a soft plop in the dark water, the sound spreading through the quiet.

Her words died off into a sigh. The garden was still, the breeze barely moving the leaves. If she expected magic, she had to be crazy. She’d finish the wedding weekend, go home, and be lonely, horny, and worried.

Anger surged through her. She was sick of worry, sick of watching other people’s happiness while she fought to keep body and soul together, sick of people trying to use her, thinking they could manipulate her because she was desperate.

She slammed her small bouquet into the fountain’s bowl. The petals broke apart, floating on the water like sparkles of light.

“No, wait, I wish for a sex god to come down and teach me all there is to know about sex. There. How do you like that, fountain? I want sex, sex, and more sex. Pleasure so pure it makes me scream.”

The fountain gurgled, and Madison drew a long breath, relaxing into a laugh. “Hey, if you’re going to wish, why not go for it?”

Her anger slightly sated by her absurdity, she walked back out of the garden and glided into the street. A bar called Les Bon Temps beckoned her from across the street, and she crossed to it with a surge of people, a drink suddenly sounding wonderful.

In the garden behind her, a male figure stepped out of the shadows. Moonlight gleamed on what might be horns on his head, or it might be a trick of the light. His name was Alexi, and he was the son of Eros, the god of love and sexual joy. The desperate plea pulled at his heart, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, he’d at last found the means to his own redemption.

 

 

Thomas
finally spotted Madison, her tulle skirt swirling as she strode into Les Bon Temps. The bar overflowed with people, laughter and music spilling out into the street. Thomas’s heart beat faster at the thought of her in there alone, with drunk males eyeballing her in her off-the-shoulder satin that vividly showed the poke of her nipples.