Bayou Bodyguard. Jana DeLeon

the courtyard once more, looking for any sign of Brian, and her hands clenched involuntarily as every square inch she could see turned up empty. How long did she wait? Hours? All night? What if he needed help?

      Justine was an excellent tracker, but in a storm like this, even she would have trouble determining whether the telltale signs of a presence in the woods were due to a man passing or the winds and rain of the storm. Footprints wouldn’t remain for long in the downpour.

      Frustrated and antsy, she blew out a breath and paced the length of the room. On the second pass, her nose wrinkled and she stopped to sniff the air. Something was different…acrid.

      Smoke!

      Blood rushed to her head and she clutched the desk to remain steady. The room went out of focus for a moment, then seemed to tilt. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing, on regaining control.

      Think.

      But there was little to think about. There was only one way out of the second floor that she knew of, and that was down the main stairwell. She shoved her keys into her pocket then lifted her pistol from the desktop and crossed the room to the door. She ran her hand across the surface of the bedroom door to check for heat, but felt none.

      This is it.

      She stared at the dead bolt and took a deep breath. Finally, she slid it back and eased the bedroom door open to peer into the hallway. The smell of smoke was much stronger in the hallway, but she couldn’t see smoke or hear any sign of fire. More importantly, she didn’t see anyone with red eyes wearing a white robe.

      Her best option was to get out of the house, even if the road to Cypriere was unpassable. The house was old and huge and the fire could be anywhere below or above her. Either could create a collapse, so her car was the safest place to be, assuming there was nothing in the courtyard that was more dangerous than fire.

      Not allowing her mind to dwell on that possibility, she hurried down the hall toward the stairwell and rushed downstairs to the entry. Stopping short at the front door, she peered out the narrow side windows to ensure the courtyard was clear. As she reached for the doorknob, she heard something behind her, but before she could turn around and take aim, something hard struck the back of her head and she dropped to the floor, everything fading to black.

      THE RAIN CAME DOWN in blinding sheets and soaked Brian completely before he’d even made it twenty feet from the house. He wiped the excess moisture away from his eyes, wishing he’d thought to grab his ball cap on the way out. He skirted around the edge of the courtyard, moving from one hiding place to another without using the flashlight, trying to limit his exposure. When he’d made it completely across the courtyard, he hid behind the storage shed near the caretaker’s cottage and then slipped into the edge of the woods just beyond.

      He looked back at the house to get his bearings, and saw the dull glow of the lantern light cast from the windows of the bedrooms that he and Justine occupied. He looked across the courtyard from the windows and estimated the location where he’d seen the figure. The area was empty now, but if someone had been standing out in this storm, they would have left footprints in the thick, gummy Louisiana mud, even in the downpour.

      He moved steadily through the edge of the woods toward the spot where he’d seen the figure, then scanned the courtyard and the woods beyond for any sign of movement. Nothing. He waited a couple of seconds, but nothing moved except the storm.

      Finally, he left his hiding place in the woods and walked to the ground where he’d seen the person standing. He turned on the flashlight and shined it on the ground.

      No way.

      He shined the light back and forth across the muddy ground, looking for the trail that had to be there—the trail that should indicate how the person arrived or where they’d gone. But the ground held no prints at all. He turned around and shined the light across the ground where he’d walked and saw the outline of his footprints in the mud.

      Even with the intensity of the rain, there wasn’t enough time for footprints to have washed away—not in a matter of minutes. He walked to the edge of the woods and shined the flashlight along the perimeter, looking for any sign that someone had entered or exited the courtyard through the woods.

      His frustration grew with every step he took. He hadn’t imagined the figure, and he knew he was looking in the right area. But no one could have walked across that ground without leaving a trace.

      No one but a ghost.

      And that just wasn’t possible. He’d never believed in that sort of thing before, and regardless of what Olivia thought she’d seen when Wheeler held her captive, and the huge amount of respect he had for her, he wasn’t about to start buying in to it now. There was a logical explanation for everything happening at laMalediction.

      And he was going to get to the bottom of it.

      He entered the woods just behind the area where he’d seen the figure and scanned the ground for any sign of passage. There was some broken foliage along the edge of the woods, but the force of the storm could have caused that as easily as a man. What a storm couldn’t do was leave footprints and there had to be footprints somewhere.

      He covered at least a hundred-foot stretch of woods, ten feet deep into the brush, but turned up nothing. Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d been gone from the house for over thirty minutes. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Justine in there alone, especially not at night and during a storm.

      He glanced back at the house and his heart began to beat faster. The light from Justine’s room barely showed through the window, when earlier it had been bright. Abandoning his investigation, he ran straight across the courtyard to the house, his mind racing with a multitude of possibilities, none of them good.

      No way had she turned off the lamp and gone to bed and he’d made sure it was full of oil when he checked on her earlier. If she was afraid of someone seeing her, she could have drawn the drapes, but he could still make out the dark lines of the heavy fabric drawn to the sides of the window.

      He burst through the front door, prepared to dash upstairs, but his foot connected with a solid object in the dark and sent him sprawling across the marble floor of the entry. He directed his flashlight to the floor and a single glance back confirmed his worst fear. He scrambled over to Justine, who lay across the entry.

      Leaning in, he watched her chest and saw it rise and fall. A quick check of her pulse showed a somewhat elevated heartbeat, but nothing alarming. “Justine,” he said and patted the sides of her cheeks, trying to wake her. “Justine.”

      His pulse quickened as he failed to get any response. He slipped his arms underneath her and carried her into the sitting room where he placed her on the couch. A lantern sat on a table next to the couch, so he lit it to cast more light on the situation. As he placed the lantern on the coffee table closer to Justine, she stirred.

      And that’s when he saw blood on the couch pillow.

      He froze for a moment, then knelt down and gently lifted her head, trying to see what was causing the bleeding. The gash was immediately visible, and he let out a sigh of relief as he realized that the cut wasn’t deep or large, and was probably made by something with a fairly sharp end, rather than the marble floor, as he’d originally feared. She must have slipped and hit her head on something. But what?

      There was nothing in the center of the entry where he’d found her, so the only other logical explanation was that she’d hit it somewhere close by and staggered to the center of the entry where she’d passed out. He stepped through the other side of the sitting room and into the kitchen. He’d noticed clean dishtowels in a drawer earlier, so he grabbed one and soaked it with cold water. Justine still hadn’t wakened when he returned to the sitting room, so he placed the cool cloth across her forehead.

      She stirred a bit and her eyes fluttered. Then all of a sudden, she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide with fright. He grabbed her arms as she tried to strike him.

      “Justine, it’s Brian. You’re safe. Stop struggling or you may injure yourself.”