Raisonne Curse

Breaking her curse will cost him his heart...and possibly his life.

The Brothers Bernaux,
Book 1

For the past five years, Elita Raisonne has been on the run from a curse that started with her grandmother, and gradually reached out evil tendrils to kill her mother and her aunts. Now, healing from another nasty accident, Elita can feel the curse coming for her like icy breath on the back of her neck.

Her only hope: trek deep into Louisiana’s Atchafayala Basin and ask the mysterious Bernaux brothers for help.

Pryor Bernaux takes one look at the black smudge clinging to Elita like a shroud, and recognizes the work of a powerful hex worker. Together, all three Bernaux brothers could easily break it—if Mercer and Wyatt weren’t away.

As the curse sinks deeper into Elita’s soul, Pryor realizes time is running out for the beautiful redhead who makes him want things he and his brothers swore they’d never have. He has no choice but to help her. But the magical backlash is torture. And without his brothers’ help, it could even be deadly.

Warning: Keep a cold beverage on hand, because the bayou isn’t all that’s hot and steamy in this book. Deadly hexes, naked spellworking, mouthwatering
court-bouillon
, and sexy Cajuns will curl your toes…and maybe your hair.

Raisonne Curse

Rinda Elliott

Dedication

This dedication is going to two special editors. I’ve been very lucky to work with the ones I have so far—all of them. But this book is for Holly Atkinson because she didn’t even hesitate to swipe it up and I love the way she gushed. I knew it would be right up her alley and knew she’d give it her best. You rock, Holly! I hope we work on many more books together.

I’m also dedicating it to Mary-Theresa Hussey—the editor who worked with me on my Harlequin Teen young adult books. She left the company before our third book in the trilogy was released and it broke my heart. I missed her something fierce for that last book release. She also loved the proposal for this book! Matrice, you don’t know how much I hope you get snapped up by another publisher so we can do more books together! Thanks so much for your belief and support in my work.

Author’s Note

The French used in this book is a form of Cajun French and I’m sure that even with my research, there will be areas I got it wrong. I used several sources and even bought a huge dictionary of Louisiana French. The Cajun language of this area is a wonderful, fascinating thing that changes in the different sections of the bayou, so I mixed things up a bit. I hope that if I did mess it up in places, you can forgive and still enjoy the story.

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter One

“Don’t gotta choice. You hafta go see de brothers Bernaux.” Ma’man slid the metal bucket filled with brown shrimp across the wooden porch with a noisy screech.

Elita Raisonne eyed the full pail with resignation. First day back after five years in Massachusetts, and she should have expected this. She’d spent most of her childhood readying shrimp and mudbugs. She loved cooking with them, just not so much preparing them. Sighing, she lifted the first small creature, broke off its head and peeled the shell. Two more full buckets waited by Ma’man’s rocker—more shrimp than her grandmother could eat, but plenty to freeze. Shifting on the hard bench, Elita held back a wince as the movement pulled on the stitches across her lower back.

“Boston!” Ma’man curled her lip and shoved back the strands of snowy white hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead. She snorted. “Thought you could outrun de Raisonne curse. Silly child.”

Thirty, still called a child, and she knew she would be until the day she died. Elita shook her head, though her heart warmed just being in her grandmother’s presence. She had been running, and though Ma’man knew of the wounds, the recent hospital stay, she didn’t know about the new nightmarish addition to the spell.

Squinting into the sun, Elita took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of her childhood—fresh shrimp, wet vegetation and the ever-present boiled egg odor that came off the water. Her cousin, Ava, used to call this place hell on earth, but the over-stewed summer smells made Elita think of her mother and her childhood. Before their world had changed due to the fury of one evil man. Before her mother had grown unbearable.

Sweat dripped into her eye, stinging. She blinked rapidly instead of wiping it away because her hands had already reached a state of disgusting.

Ma’man used to murmur of summers like this one. Ghost summers, when the heat became a living thing that clogged the throat and sat upon the skin like wet spirits. She said that in the deepest part of the season, restless souls crept from the otherworld, drawn by the waves of misery. When Elita had been a child, the old woman’s mutterings had made her huddle under her sheets on even the hottest of nights. But her fear had been borne of imagination and local superstition, not the reality that had become her life now.

Her constant companion—the dark, slithering fear in her gut—uncoiled as the presence of another hovered just out of sight. Grief squeezed her heart, a sucking, all-encompassing agony that wasn’t hers.

They exhausted her, these spirits. She felt them as wraith-like caresses that brushed over the back of her neck, as sudden emotions that swooped in to swallow her own. She now wondered if the accidents she suffered actually came from the dead, but that for years, she just hadn’t seen their ghosts. Like old Rousalard had tied the Raisonne women to the deceased. She didn’t know of any curse like that—not that she knew all that much about them anyway.

But now, now there was something else. She didn’t know what it was. Some dark presence, murky with fury, that slinked in her peripheral vision. It carried more life than the others. She needed it to go away. Desperately.

Tossing a naked shrimp into another bucket, Elita sighed. “Guess I thought some distance would, I don’t know, stretch the connection, make it less potent.”

“Dat old Rattrap, he know’d how to make a curse stick.”

Rattrap Rousalard had cursed all the Raisonne women when her grandmother turned down his marriage proposal, but Ma’man believed he’d screwed it up. It didn’t seem to affect her the way it did the rest of them.

“I cain’t break it, Elita.”

Shock stilled Elita’s hands. Her grandmother never admitted to failure when it came to magic.

Ma’man squinted. “What de curse feel like now?”

Should she explain the ghosts? The new, sick dread that rode her back like a drug? Elita couldn’t bring herself to share that much. She knew Ninette, knew the old woman would go against her own fears and try darker magic on her own. Elita tried to play it off. “Remember that time I ate too much boiled okra and tomatoes and threw up all over your favorite quilt?” She pointed to her stomach. “Kind of feels like that. Clings full.”

“Don’t play me for a fool, child.”

Sighing, Elita looked at her hands. “Ma’man, it does scare me. And it is getting worse.”

The curse was making any kind of normal life impossible. It had started small, with silly, inexplicable accidents like her pencil catching on fire in the middle of a fourth-grade spelling test, but it grew worse the older she got. Or it had. The curse had eased up for a few years after her mother died, but five years before, it had slammed back into her life with a series of mishaps that sent her running north. Distance hadn’t made a damn bit of difference. She’d lost her last waitressing job after tripping one too many times. Customers didn’t appreciate third degree burns from spilled coffee.

Keeping a job had become impossible. It had been that way with her mother. And the longer her mother had failed, the more she’d given up and just let the bad things happen to her. To this day, Elita swore her mother had stepped right in front of the truck that had appeared out of nowhere in New Orleans.

She’d never shared that detail with her grandmother. Instead, Elita and her two cousins had all been trying to either dodge or break the curse. Last Elita heard, her cousin, Audrey, had sought out a shaman in South America.

“Rousalard! Stupid shrimper dought I’d jump all over dat. And him being twenty years older. Slow in de head, he was—but he sure know’d how to mix a spell.”

Biting back a smile, Elita shook her head. Her grandmother admired magic skill. Probably because she wanted some of her own so badly. She tried, she did. But her skills lay in cooking and unfortunately, staying youthful, pretty…and kind of open with her favors. Food wasn’t the only reason shrimpers steered their boats up this part of the Atchafalaya Basin.

“Did Cousin Ava give you that short summer dress?”

Ma’man smoothed shrimp-gooey hands down the blue material. “Give? Not de term I’d use.” She rubbed one bare toe over her other foot to scratch.

This time, Elita snorted. She’d lost many a fun outfit to her grandmother once she began filling out her own dresses. The old woman believed in the “flaunt if you got” style of dress, which sometimes meant going naked. Like really naked. Like…dancing on the pier in the nude naked.

Something big plopped into the water behind Elita but she didn’t bother to look. Could be a duck or a gator. Ma’man lived in what most called a bayou camp, a small, wooden house on stilts. Her porch stretched into a rickety dock with old tires tied to it as bumpers. She always had a pot of something good going in May and June, the months when most of the shrimpers stayed out on the bayou for days at a time. It had become a tradition to stop by Ma’man Raisonne’s for a big bowl of some seafood dish and a generous helping of dewberry cobbler. Elita and her cousins had spent more hours than she could ever count gathering dewberries and preparing them for the freezer. Ma’man probably had a healthy stash even now without her granddaughters’ help.

When the plop came again, Elita turned and caught sight of the tail end of a gator disappearing into the water. But she turned too fast and was unable to hold back a wince this time.

Ma’man paused her lightning fast movements, true concern darkening the piercing, light green eyes that had made more than one Cajun ask for her hand. “It’s time. You go see de brothers. Maybe dis time, it’ll stick.”

“This time? Maybe what will stick?”

“I went to de last ones after your mama—” Ma’man swallowed hard. “Two of dem tried to break it. But dat old Rattrap had sneaky magic.” She leaned forward, her tanned and wrinkled skin pulling as she tightened her lips. “Don’t gotta choice, child. Cain’t hurt to ask again.”

“I don’t see how they can help. They didn’t put the curse on us, after all.”

“Dat’s just it! Rattrap done croaked, so you need full magic to get it off. And if de brothers find a way, maybe Audrey’ll come home too.”

Elita didn’t tell her grandmother she didn’t plan to stay. She couldn’t. Watching this way of life dying so fast broke her heart. Every single day, big chunks of land disappeared into the water at a rate so terrifying, she worried constantly for her grandmother and this old house.

But she didn’t know where she’d go either. Unless she could get this curse removed, her dream of creating authentic Louisiana dishes in her own restaurant up north would never happen.

Her grandmother sighed. Elita knew she was lonely without her three granddaughters. “You know, Ma’man, if you won’t share your secret étouffée recipe with me, I won’t be able to make things work up north. What if you came with me, helped get my restaurant together?”

Ninette just shook her head.

It was a stupid question anyway. Elita didn’t have enough money saved and nothing outside of her house sinking into the waters would make the old woman leave Louisiana.

“Elita, I miss my daughters and I don’t wanna be missin’ you. You go see de brothers.”

The Bernaux brothers still lived in their eighth-generation family plantation, deep in the bowels of the Atchafalaya Basin. Elita could have driven, but the fastest route was by water, so she hitched a ride with her Ma’man’s latest man friend, Tooter, on his twenty foot fishing boat.

Tooter. Her grandmother was dating—or rather, having sex with—an old fisherman named Tooter. Elita couldn’t stop grinning about it.

The old man eyed her from underneath a baseball cap stained dark brown from the swamp. Long, scraggly, salt and peppered hair stuck out from underneath the hat, blending in with the beard that ended mid-chest. His two boys, both in their twenties, already showed matching signs of gray and their skin was swarthy from too much sun. They welcomed her aboard but didn’t offer small talk. Not that they needed—or even could—talk when Tooter chattered non-stop.

Miles down the marsh, Ma’man’s gumbo kicked in and Elita understood the old man’s nickname. She stayed upwind for a good hour, baking in the sun and hoping for stands of giant oaks for stolen moments of shade.

She pulled out her cell phone to try and find a number for the brothers, but frowned at the lack of signal bars.
Stupid, cheap phone.
Before she could put it back into her pocket, the boat abruptly slowed and her phone went flying. Right into the swamp.

“Sorry,” Tooter yelled.

He didn’t stop so she could find it. Would have been a pointless endeavor, anyway. Once the swamp took something, it rarely gave it back.

Gritting her teeth, Elita eyed the approaching dock. It looked like someone had been working on it because tools and a stack of replacement boards were on the end next to a mud-covered, camouflaged airboat.

Now that she was here, the craziness of her situation made her want to turn back around. What was she thinking just showing up at this house to ask for a hex removal?

Tooter brought the boat to a stop and both his quiet boys jumped onto the pier and held out their hands to help her. One handed over her black sling purse. She smiled her thanks and turned to their father. “Do you mind waiting here a few minutes while I see if they’re here?”

“Pryor’s here. Usually is.” Tooter tugged on the bill of his cap. “We’ll swing back by later and pick you up.”

His sons got back onto the boat and started untangling fishing line.

“Wait!” She stepped closer to the edge of the dock. “How much later?”

“Hours. Dropped folks off here ’fore and un-hexin’ takes time.”

She frowned. “I don’t even know if this Pryor will help me.”

“He will.”

With that, Tooter restarted the noisy motor and steered the boat away. Elita stood, mouth hanging open. She was stuck. Thoroughly. Without even a cell phone to call for a damned cab.

She turned, swung the sling of her purse over her head, and looked at the old plantation, taking in the French colonial house built on brick pillars for floods. Small, leaning outbuildings dotted a gravel path that led all the way up to the Bernaux’s back door. She knew one of the buildings had probably been a milk house, another a blacksmith. Two or three would have been slave houses. She frowned, hating that part of history. One building sat pretty close to the pier. It had a nice, wide front porch with huge oaks shading the building. Wild honeysuckle dotted bushes to the sides.

This had been a hell of a place in its time.

From the looks of the scaffolding lining the back of the house, the brothers were restoring it. Fresh white paint covered a good fourth of the walls.

Walking up the path, Elita was breathing in the thick, citronella scent of magnolias when she tripped on a thick root that seemed to come out of nowhere. She hit the ground hard. Sun-scorched gravel bit into her palms and dug into her knees. She tried to sit up fast, to get her burning hands off the ground, and felt the pull along her wound just as something wet soaked the back of her T-shirt. She rolled onto the cooler grass. Reaching back, she felt along the four-inch stitched gash over her right kidney.

Blood covered her fingers when she brought her hand back around.

Gravel crunched and she looked up, then nearly swallowed her tongue when she saw the man headed her way. Lean and shirtless, he walked toward her with long strides. Sweat glistened on one of those ripped abdomens she’d only seen in movies, and colorful tattoos started on the right side of his chest, cupped his shoulder, and wrapped his muscled right arm. Sandy brown hair, short and spiked, showed blond highlights in the glaring sun. He wore small, dark sunglasses.

“Bienvenue, chez nous.”

His voice, deep and melodious, sent the oddest shiver down her spine. Then she focused on his words. He’d said welcome home. Like she lived here, which was just weird. Or maybe it was
welcome to our home
, she wasn’t sure which. Surprise lifted her eyebrows. He was most definitely under forty—possibly younger than she—so the French was a shocker. The older people around here always peppered their speech with French, but the younger generation had mostly dropped the habit.