The Taking (7 page)

Regan woke up in her hotel room with a start. Glancing at the clock glowing on the nightstand, she tried to quiet her racing heart, her inner thighs throbbing with unsatisfied desire. 6 A.M. She had been dreaming.

It had been the most vivid one she’d ever had, placing her in the point of view of someone else, which was odd. In her dreams, she was usually still Regan, sometimes in her body, sometimes watching herself, but invariably herself.

In this dream it wasn’t that she was Camille, in the truest sense, but she had been watching her, privy to all her thoughts. She had felt every emotion, every physical sensation, including Camille’s desire.

Regan shifted her hand off of the front of her damp panties, evidence of her unmistakable arousal. Strange. Though not surprising, considering it had been months since she’d had sex. Maybe it was just a very imaginative sex dream. Pushing a sweaty clump of hair off her forehead, she felt under the pillow next to her for the journal she and Chris had found in the chest of drawers. It was still there, safe.

She had checked into a hotel right around the corner from her house the day before. She’d had no intention of staying in her new place without a bed to sleep on. Chris had offered her a couch to crash on for the night, but he lived Uptown and she wanted to be close to her house so she could meet the movers at eight in the morning. When she and Chris had called it a night and parted ways at one in the morning, both more than a little drunk, she had grabbed the journal before catching a cab, not wanting anything to happen to the one-hundred-plus-year-old book.

Maybe she should have stayed with Chris, because alone in the dark hotel room she was disturbed at the tenor of the dream, the manic desperation of it still clinging to her. She wasn’t sure what it said about her psyche that she could take the scraps of what she’d read in that journal and spin them into such a clear scene of the event, that she had made the woman even a little more nutso than she had appeared in the later journal entries they had read.

And that she would masturbate along with her dream. That was a first.

Where the name Camille had been plucked from in her subconscious, she had no idea either. She’d never known anyone by that name, and while the author of the journal had the initial C, she had never written her name in any of the entries Regan had read, so she had no explanation as to why her brain would ascribe that name to the dream figure.

Dreams were random, that was all. Nothing more, nothing less.

Flicking the lamp on next to the bed, she sat up against the pillows, her fingers running over the black leather cover of the journal, over the embossed initials CAC. While Camille might be random, it didn’t surprise her that she had inserted Felix’s name into her dream as that of a voodoo priest.

He tripped around the edges of her thoughts chronically since she’d met him, and he had grown more attractive with time than he probably was in reality, if she wanted to be honest with herself. The months since their brief meeting had been harsh and emotional for her, and as she tried to stay strong in her fight against Beau, and look down a future that might result in her never marrying again, the idea that there would be men like Felix, men she could feel desire for, intrigued her. At some point a year or two from now, she would date and have sex again, or at least Lord, she hoped she would. It was nice to know that fundamental spark in her still existed, because despite the circumstances of that awful night she’d met Felix, and the strange conversation they had shared, Regan had been attracted to him.

She would never date Felix. Men like him didn’t have interest in plain, politically correct women, and given the fact that their worlds were wildly different, she doubted that they would have a whole lot in common. Yet the one thing she didn’t doubt was that he would be amazing in bed. It was the eyes, the way they had met hers without ever wandering away, the intensity in them, the focus. Eyes like that had to belong to a man who would give and demand a dedication to pleasure.

Not surprising then, that in her dream she would cast him in the role of voodoo priest and forbidden lover, when she was clearly undersexed.

And she would like to see him again, just once.

Regan tried to close her eyes, but the image of the fictitious Camille, features indistinct, down on the cobblestones in front of her carriage, muddied and covered in sweat, full of triumph, kept her from relaxing back into sleep. It was unnerving, disturbing, the vividness reminiscent of a nightmare more than a casual dream, the clarity of the event not the usual mishmash of random thoughts, but purposeful.

She had been under a lot of stress and had restructured her entire life. A graphic dream was normal.

But that didn’t erase the unease she felt at the memory, nor did it settle her back into sleep. What if it was some horrible metaphor for her life, her marriage to Beau? The feelings of entrapment, the desperate urge to flee, the yearning for freedom . . .

Disturbing. Plain and simple. And she didn’t want to think about the past, or the damage her marriage might have somehow done to her. Wide awake and tense, after another five minutes of staring at the ceiling, dream rewinding and rolling over and over in her head, Regan gave up and threw the covers back. If she wasn’t going to sleep, she might as well get some coffee and shake off the last remnants of the wine.

Ten minutes later, she was dressed and checked out of the hotel, the doorman hailing a cab for her as she waited on the curb, the journal tucked in her overnight bag. The street was quiet in the shadows of the early morning, or the late night, depending on your perspective. They were only a block from Bourbon Street, after all. She pulled her sweater a little tighter around her against the chill and glanced down Royal Street, pleased to be back in the Quarter despite the tension the dream had created.

Beau had disliked the French Quarter, thinking it was noisy and dirty and filled with undesirables. She would have never been able to convince him to live here. Yet she loved it for its authenticity, for its acceptance of all kinds of people, its tolerance of the unusual. It had always felt like home to her, though she’d never had the courage to live here before. Her parents would have found it odd, her friends would have raised eyebrows at her.

But since she had left what they all considered the perfect husband after little more than a year of marriage, a few more raised eyebrows meant nothing at this point. So she had bought her house, and she was excited to fill it with furniture and make a home for herself.

Jumping in the cab that pulled up in front of her, Regan tipped the doorman and settled on the seat, mouth dry from the wine the night before. She needed coffee. “Café du Monde, please,” she told the driver. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and she relished the thought of sitting there in the morning quiet having her coffee and a beignet.

She was supposed to meet Jen, an early riser, at seven to go over some details for the fund-raising party, and she decided to text her to meet at Café du Monde instead of her house. After typing the message and hitting SEND on her phone, Regan glanced up. They were about to pass her house and she wanted to just take in the view of its grand gray façade.

It was a ridiculous purchase for a single woman, she knew that, and Beau and her parents and grandmother had told her over and over in no uncertain terms how stupid it was to have six thousand square feet to wander around in by herself. But this house had always excited her imagination with its majestic beauty and its grand courtyard that faced the cross street. The Juliet balcony jutted out over the foliage like a feminine curtsy before racing in either direction in the more traditional New Orleans gallery.

“Can you turn right here?” she asked the driver as they approached the front of her house on its corner lot.

“Sure.” He turned, and they passed the side of the house, where the Juliet balcony and courtyard were.

Regan realized her bedroom light was on. She and Chris must have left it on in their preoccupation with picking up used plastic cups and the empty wine bottle. The angle made it impossible to see into the windows, but she knew the light would only show her empty bedroom to the curious passerby, so it wasn’t anything to worry about anyway.

So why was it bothering her? She frowned and looked at the courtyard gate, suddenly doubting if she had locked it.

“Can you stop a second?”

She leaped out as soon as he braked, not waiting to answer the question on his lips. Testing the gate, she was reassured to see that it was locked. No one could possibly get in. Climbing back into the cab, she mentally scolded herself for getting paranoid.

“Lady, you can’t just pull on gates like that. It’s someone’s house, not a museum,” the driver said, giving her a frown.

That lightened her mood considerably. She felt both pride of ownership and pleasure that a cabdriver would be looking out for her property. Locals had a love-hate relationship with tourists. Everyone loved the business and the influx of revenue, but it was hard not to be irritated when drunken revelers were scaling your gallery poles or hitting you in the face with beads they’d scooped up off the ground. And every local knew you never touched anything that had landed on the streets.

“It’s my house,” she told him with a smile. “I just bought it and I’m moving in today.”

He shot her a look of disbelief, his bushy gray eyebrows rising to meet his hairline. “You bought this big old house? Where are you from?”

Regan realized she’d distracted him, and she started to wonder if he had any intention of pulling back out into traffic. She could really use her coffee. “I’m from here. I grew up in the Garden District.”

“Then why were you staying in a hotel?”

“I’m moving in today and I stayed in a hotel so I’d have a bed to sleep on.”

He still looked suspicious, but he seemed to relent short of asking to see her settlement statement from the title company. “Well, it’s a big house, but you won’t be alone in it.”