The Listener in the Loft

For three years I carried my secrets into a church I believed was empty and spoke them where I thought no one could hear.

The presence in the choir loft felt like loneliness inventing company.

Then a stranger touched me and turned up dead.

The building I lived in changed hands, and my key stopped working.

A gold necklace was waiting on my pillow. It fit, closed around my throat, and would not come off.

Lucien Delacroix knows the state of my money, the hospital bed where my mother lies, and the words I was sure belonged only to me.

He has bought my father’s gambling debt, the roof over my head, and what little security I had left.

He does not court me. He sets the terms of a midnight wedding and a guarded house, after three years spent learning exactly how to make me want him.

I should be planning an escape. Instead I listen for his footsteps.

Becoming a Delacroix reaches farther than a ring.

In New Orleans his family’s power runs from candlelit churches to the black water of the Mississippi, and behind locked doors are old debts, dangerous loyalties, and people ready to treat his obsession with me as a weakness.

He has already made certain I have nowhere else to go.

His enemies have yet to learn how far he will go to keep me, and I still have to decide which frightens me more: the man who has been watching all along, or how much I want him to stay.