Chapter Seventeen

I expected an argument from Murphy, a demand to get the hell out of Dodge, but as usual he surprised
me.

“Let’s,” he said, and started to get dressed. “Have you seen the bokor?”

“No. They keep saying he’ll arrive when he does.”

“God, that’s annoying,” he muttered, and my lips curved.

Murphy stood, swaying a little. “Whoa. Head rush.”

“I wish I’d brought some food and water.”

“I’ll be fine.”

We stepped out of the hut and I scanned the area. No snake; I guessed we were on our own. I started off in the direction I’d come.

Murphy fell in beside me. I slowed my pace. He was paler than I liked. Several days in the heat without food or water—whether he’d had a fever or not—would make anyone woozy. If he passed out, I wouldn’t be able to drag him.

“Maybe I should go back and bring help,” I said.

“Because the people who left me here, the same ones who told you I didn’t exist, have been so helpful?”

I hated it when he was right.

“Just tell me if you’re faint,” I ordered.

“If I can satisfy a woman, I can certainly walk back to the village.”

“Oh, hell,” I muttered.

We were still in the land that condom forgot, and I’d forgotten one.

“I thought heaven m’self.”

Irish accent. I wasn’t charmed.

“Condom,” I said.

“Hell,” he repeated, and stopped walking.

“Too late.” I tugged on his hand. “Spilled milk.”

“Not milk, more’s the pity.”

England had returned. Poor guy. He looked a little green. I squeezed his fingers. “Timing-wise, we’re
good.”

“When you say ‘good,’ you mean—”

“For getting pregnant.”

He started to hyperventilate.

“Breathe!” I ordered. “I meant for not getting pregnant. We’re good for not getting pregnant.”

He nodded, taking a few more seconds before speaking. “A baby isn’t the only issue. But you shouldn’t worry… I mean, I’ve never done this before.”

I choked on surprised laughter. “You were not a virgin, Murphy. Even you can’t expect me to believe such blarney.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. I meant, I’d never had sex without a condom before.”

“In your entire life?” I also found that hard to believe.

“I swear.” He held up one hand.

“What got into you tonight?”

“You did.”

“I think it was the other way around.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” he admitted. “And usually I am. I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t, but I didn’t plan on telling him so. We were being adults here, I couldn’t admit that I’d needed him so badly I hadn’t been thinking, either. That was the quickest way to a broken heart, and I didn’t have much heart left to break.

“No harm, no foul,” I quipped.

“Mmm. It’s common courtesy to return the favor, sweet thing.”

“Huh?”

“I tell you my sexual history and then—”

“Oh!” Obviously I was no good at this; my grand total of men in my bed now stood at a whopping two.

“I… uh… haven’t been with anyone since…” My voice trailed off. He could figure it out.

“Your husband,” Murphy said. “What happened to him?”

I started to walk again, fast, any consideration of Murphy’s weakness forgotten. He caught up easily, though, grabbed my arm, and held on tight. “I think I deserve to know, Cassandra.”

He did, but that didn’t mean I had to be nice about telling him.

“Karl betrayed me, got our daughter killed, and is now in prison. May he rot in pieces.”

Murphy kept pace at my side. “What did he do?”

I didn’t want to talk about this. However, I’d just shared my body with this man; why couldn’t I share my past?

“He lied.”

“About what?”

“Who he was, what he did.”

Murphy didn’t answer at first. When I looked up, he looked away. “I don’t understand.”

“Karl was a businessman. I never asked what kind of business. He was successful. We had money—a lot of it. He paid the bills; I ran the house and took care of Sarah.”

My voice wavered and my steps slowed. Murphy took my hand. I’d never have figured him one for comfort, but I’d have figured wrong. I’d figured a lot wrong in my life.

“He wasn’t a businessman?” Murphy rubbed his thumb back and forth across my palm.

“He was the biggest drug dealer on the West Coast.” Murphy’s eyes widened. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it. I guess I just didn’t want to.”

“And Sarah?”

“Karl got in a dispute with a supplier. They took her and they killed her.”

“And then?”

Then I spent a lot of time in a quiet place drugged out of my gourd, but I wasn’t going to mention that.

Instead I skipped ahead several months. “Then the Feds came, and they wanted to know things.”

Murphy frowned. “But you didn’t know anything.”

“Not then. But I found out.”

“How?”

I shuddered, and his fingers tightened. “I pretended to forgive him.”

“And then?” he repeated.

“I learned all I could, then testified and put him away forever.” I hop e.

Prolonged silence made me glance at Murphy. I couldn’t read his expression.

“You’re amazing,” he said.

“Don’t you mean vindictive?”

“I’ll think twice before crossing you.”

Though the words were flippant, his expression wasn’t. I couldn’t say I blamed him for being worried, but what did a guy like Murphy have to hide?

“How did you get involved in voodoo?” he asked.

“I dreamed of a snake, over and over and over again.” At his blank expression, I continued, “Dreaming of a snake, of Danballah, means you’re destined for the priesthood.”

“In Haiti!”

“Actually, anywhere if you’re studying to be a priestess. Danballah is a very powerful loa. My teacher was impressed.”

At first I’d gone through the motions, wanting something from’ my new religion without giving anything back. Believing in voodoo hadn’t been easy for a rich Catholic white girl from the land of sun and surf.

After Danballah had appeared often enough I’d come to believe I was doing the right thing, the only thing that I could do.

“I was lost,” I explained. “Confused, uncertain, alone. I went searching, and I found something to hold on to. I’ll discover a way to bring Sarah back. I know it.”

“Cassandra, that’s insane.”

“Is it? I guess we’ll see.” I took a deep breath. “At the least, I needed a new identity, and Priestess Cassandra was a doozy.”

Murphy shot me a quick glance. “You’re in witness protection?”

“Did I say that?”

Even if I had just taken this man into my body and done things with him I’d never done with anyone else, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about witness protection.

I’d been drilled in the rules. The only way to disappear was to leave my past behind. Of course I wasn’t completely able to do that because of Sarah.

But I could follow every other rule—namely, never tell anyone I was a witness, never share my real name. Not even with the people I dated, not even with my new husband, should I remarry. Since I didn’t plan on doing either, it had been easy to agree to those conditions.

“What’s your real name?” Murphy pressed.

“Nothing half as wonderful as Cassandra.”

“I don’t like sleeping with a woman whose name I don’t even know.”

“We didn’t sleep.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“For a man who wears beads in his hair and a ring in his ear you’re very closed-minded.” He stared at me without any lightening of his expression. “My name is Cassandra, Murphy, and it always will be.”

“Devon,” he said. “What?”

“The name’s Devon. You’d think after we did the tongue tango you could at least call me by my given name.”

“I’m not sure I can.” He cursed in what sounded like French. “How many languages do you know?”

Murphy shrugged. “A few.”

I’d bared my soul, or what was left of it; now it was his turn. “Why do you change accents all the time?”

“Because I can.”

“And why can you?”

He didn’t answer, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“You’d think after we did the tongue tango you could at least tell me where you’re from,” I repeated.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d really like to know,” I said quietly.

He remained silent so long, I didn’t think he was going to tell me; then the words tumbled out, as if he couldn’t say them fast enough. “I was born in Tennessee. The mountains. I’m a gen-u-ine hillbilly.”

He said the words just like Jethro Bodine, but something in his eyes kept me from laughing.

“You’re American.”

“As coal, which is what my daddy mined. Ten kids. We had nothing. Then the mine closed and Momma died.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. I left the next day.”

“At fifteen?”

“Why not? I was practically on my own already. I wasn’t going down in those mines, even if they hadn’t closed. I figured I could be a model.” His lips quirked. “At home I was considered mighty nice looking.”

I could imagine. He was still mighty nice.

“All of my life I’d dreamed of being rich.”

“It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I muttered.

“Try being dirt-poor and hungry, then choose.”

He was right. I had no idea what it was like to have nothing to eat, no j ob, very little education.

“Sorry.”

I had to wonder if the beads and feathers, the hoop and the thumb ring, were an unconscious rebellion against his childhood. Or perhaps he just liked pretty, shiny things, having had so few of them.

“Never mind.” He took a deep breath, let it out. “I get riled up sometimes.”

While talking about his past he’d reverted to a soft, country accent that flowed over my skin like warm water. He shifted his shoulders and cleared his throat.

When he spoke again, it was with the flat, unaccented tones of a nightly newscaster.

“I made my way to New York with high hopes, but in the big city I wasn’t all that. Pretty faces, dime a million. So I wound up on the streets for a while, did some things I wasn’t proud of.”

I could imagine that, too.

“I discovered I had an ear for accents and languages; there are plenty of them to be heard in New York City. I found a j ob and got off the streets, but I was always just one step away from winding up there again.”

Considering he’d left home at fifteen, Murphy hadn’t turned out so badly. To have picked up so many accents and languages, to be as savvy and articulate as he was, he had to be extremely intelligent.

“How did you wind up in Haiti?”

“The j ob was construction, and after that last hurricane kicked the crap out of the Caribbean I was asked to come down and help out.”

“For free?”

He lifted a brow. “Do I seem the free type? Government subsidized.”

“The last hurricane?” I frowned. “That was a year ago.”

“Job ended; I stayed.”

“Why?”

He glanced into the trees. “I like it here.”

For someone who professed to love money, Murphy had come to the wrong place.

Suddenly he stumbled and I reached for him. Luckily he recovered on his own, because otherwise we’d have both ended up on the ground.

“You’re weak,” I said. “Hungry.”

He straightened. “This isn’t hungry. I’ve been hungry. Hell, I could run a few miles yet before I pass out.”

“Let’s just keep walking, skip the running, shall we?”

Murphy’s smile made me smile, too. I don’t know what it was about him—maybe the great sex—but he made my spirit lighter.

He was honest about who he was, what he wanted. No secrets or hidden agendas with Devon Murphy.

For a woman whose life had been ruined by secrets, who now lived in hiding, a man like Murphy was too novel to resist.

Though the snake had led me to the abandoned hut, I was having no problem finding my way back. My feet seemed to be drawn along a path no one else could see. I figured we’d reach the village in a few minutes; then we pushed through a particularly dense band of trees and into a clearing I’d never seen before.

As I’d said, my sense of direction was shit.

The fading moonlight filtered through the trees, turning to silver tiny bits of new growth dotted here and there throughout the recently tilled field. In less than an hour the sun would rise. I couldn’t believe I’d been wandering about all night.

“What’s that?” Murphy asked.

On the opposite side of the clearing stood a hut.

Murphy took off, skirting the edge of the overturned earth, and I hustled to catch up.

I reached him just as he pulled back the curtain on the door and ducked inside. I tensed in expectation of an outcry. We might be in the boonies, but that didn’t mean you just walked into someone’s hut uninvited.

When I heard nothing, I crept closer. “Murphy!”

“You’d better get in here.”

After glancing around uneasily, I did.

Inside was a bed, furniture—handmade, but a chair was a chair and those were few and far between around here—bookshelves with real books, an altar. The hut must be the property of a very wealthy Haitian.

A leopard skin hung on the wall. Not just a cape but also the head, mouth open and snarling, yellow- green eyes bright, shiny; they looked almost alive.

“What’s that for?” Murphy asked, never taking his eyes off the thing.

“Decoration?”

“It’s not a voodoo costume?”

“Not one that I’ve ever seen, although that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be. Still…” I shook my head.

“Voodoo symbolism leans more toward inanimate obj ects—rocks, trees, hearts, crosses. If we really want to go wild, there’s thunder, lighting, the rainbow, or a snake. Large, vicious animate—not so much.”

However, something he’d said tickled my memory. “Remember when I felt fur and a tail in the cave and you said—”

“Maybe someone was wearing fur.”

We both returned our gazes to the leopard skin.

“That’s weird,” Murphy murmured.

I had to agree. “We should probably get out of here.”

If someone was strange enough to wear a leopard skin around for whatever reason, I really didn’t want to meet him or her.

“Just a minute.” Murphy began to search the place.

“What are you doing?”

“You never know what you might find.”

“This is breaking and entering!”

“The place was open.”

“It’s a hut, there is no closed.”

He ignored me and continued with his search. I was drawn to the altar. Next to it lay an ason, a rattle used in voodoo rituals. Made from a gourd, an ason was filled with snake vertebrae and decorated with brightly colored strands of beads.

“What’s that?” Murphy reached for the rattle.

“No!” I grabbed Murphy’s hand before he could touch it. “An ason is only to be touched by the priest or priestess it belongs to. They’re the sacred symbol of our service.”

“Priest?” Murphy stared over my shoulder with an odd expression, and I suddenly realized what the ason meant.

“Mezareau,” I said.

“Were you looking for me?”