Hexed by the Outlaw

Chapter 1

JOSIE

The heat, heavy humidity, and sudden rainstorms were easier to predict than the man I had been living with for the past four years.

You could read the weather, even in a place like New Orleans…

eventually. With Casey, I never got a storm warning.

It just hit when it hit, and I had learned to ride it till it passed.

He was four bourbons deep and getting louder, gripping my ass, and looking around for trouble.

Bourbon Street was a wall of noise. Brass and bass and screaming and laughter all competing to be heard. Bodies moved against me from every direction. Sweating strangers with beads around their necks and drinks in plastic cups, howling at the balconies above like wolves at the moon.

Casey loved it. Any place that rewarded men for being loud and aggressive and drunk was his natural habitat.

Back home he had his daddy's name to hide behind.

Landry Offshore Services. Half the parish worked for his father or worked for someone who did, and in Terrebonne that bought you more than any title ever could.

A Landry was a Landry, and Landrys did whatever the fuck they wanted.

Here, he didn't need the name, he just needed the crowd.

"Show's up there, babe." He pointed to the second-floor balcony where three girls were leaning over the railing, lifting their shirts for the roaring mass below.

"I can see," I said.

"Yours are better," he said. "Flash the puppies I paid for."

There it was. The thing he always came back to. Like my body was a storefront he'd renovated and wanted to show off.

I'd been eighteen, flat-chested and insecure, and stupid enough to think a man offering to "fix" me meant he loved me.

An hour or so on a table in Baton Rouge, six days in his apartment where he brought me soup and painkillers and looked at me like I was a project coming together, and five more weeks before I had recovered fully.

He was pleased with how I looked. Me? Not so much.

I was no longer flat. Instead I felt fake.

Somewhere along the way, between agreeing to the surgery and seeing the final results, I had more CCs than I was sure I'd signed for. How the fuck that happened I would probably never know. What a Landry wanted a Landry got.

"Not happening, Casey.”

The grin that said, We'll see, had me worried.

The crowd surged. Bodies pressed closer and I couldn't get a full breath.

"What's that?" Casey said.

I looked up to where he was pointing. Beads rained down on me and I instinctively held my arms up to shield my face.

The roar was instant. Every face in my periphery turned. Mouths open, phones out.

He had pulled my tube top down to my waist and I was standing in the middle of Bourbon Street with nothing but the heavy wet air on my bare chest.

I knew this game. You were supposed to catch them, laugh and play along. Girls flashed, the crowd threw, everyone cheered, and it was all just harmless fun between consenting strangers.

I hadn't consented to this.

Men screamed and whooped as I ducked sideways bringing my hands to my chest.

I pushed through the bodies and pulled my top up with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. I pressed my back against the nearest wall.

I ripped off the beads still tangled in my hair and hanging from my arms like cheap chains.

Casey was behind me somewhere, laughing. I could hear him even over the crowd. The laugh that said he'd won something.

I pulled the last strand from my hair and let it drop. My hands were still trembling so I pressed them flat against the wall behind me to stop the shaking.

Then I looked across the street. Standing under the green awning of a bar, with a bottle in his hand and his back against the doorframe, was a man.

Bigger and taller than Casey. Dark skin and sharp features and ink that crawled from his knuckles to the black tee stretched across his chest and arms. He wasn't moving, cheering, or reaching for a phone to take photos.

He was just looking at my face.

Not the body Casey had put on display. Not the chest everyone else was still hollering about. My face, like that was the only part of me that existed.

And his expression…

Nothing. Not pity, or lust, or amusement. Not even anger on my behalf.

Stillness.

The kind of stillness that made it impossible for me to look away.

The street was a river of bodies flowing between us, but for a moment we were the only two people standing still in the whole goddamn place. The noise faded to a hum. The neon blurred, and his eyes held mine.

Something happened in that look. I didn't know what it was.

Then Casey's arm landed across my shoulders.

"There you are, babe. Shit, you were a hit. Did you see how many?—"

He stopped and followed my gaze.

His body changed. The loose, drunken posture went tight. His chin lifted and his chest puffed the way a dog's hackles rose before the bark came.

"The fuck…" he muttered.

Then louder: "Well, well."

He stepped forward, off the curb, into the street with his arms spread wide like he was welcoming an old friend. But his voice was a blade dressed as a joke.

"Baby, look who it is. Lucien fucking Baptiste." He turned to me with that performer's grin. "What sort of name is that anyway? Like fucking Lucifer got baptized?"

I shook my head. "Stop it, Case. Just stop."

"You know who this is?" He jabbed a thumb back toward the bar. "Half-breed from back home. Used to steal shit off my daddy's property till he got run out of the parish."

I didn't know who he was. And I didn't trust a word of Casey's version of anything.

The man across the street — Lucien? — didn't react.

Casey took another step forward.

"What're you doing out here, boy? Polishing shoes? Tap-dancing for tips?" He looked back at his two friends who'd materialized from the crowd, Bo and Vince, laughing on cue like they always did. "Or did somebody finally give you a real job? Bouncer at a titty bar, maybe. That's about your speed."

Lucien lifted his bottle and took a slow pull, then set it on the windowsill beside him without looking.

Then his eyes found mine again and I was sure I could read his mind.

Why him?

He didn't need to say the words. It was there in the look. The way he bypassed Casey entirely, like the man didn't exist.

Then he turned slowly and stepped through the door of the bar behind him, disappearing into the dark.