Haunted Seductions Read online

  She took a long swallow of the wine, letting some fill her mouth as she finished off the liquid.

  She tossed the bottle aside and it thumped against the wooden floor.

  Lowering down, her hair fell back to her sides and covered their bodies in a blanket of black curls. Their flesh met in a wet blend of sweat and wine. She slid up Louis’s chest and to his face. With a deep kiss she let the wine trickle to his mouth, quenching part of his thirst.

  She reached her damp hand to his eyes and brushed them closed.

  All Louis could feel was the moisture of their skin melting together. His cock was throbbing and he strained not to explode. His mouth opened and a gasp left his body as she lowered her tight sheath down the thickened shaft of his cock.

  Paradise wasn’t far away.

  Louis breathed out and tugged his arms forward, trying to grab some control. She had him tied and locked inside her vise. The inner walls of her body caressed his skin with each plunge in. The lips clung tight and dared him to leave as she rose up. He felt her hair falling against his skin and pulling off as she rode him.

  This was torture and Louis was about to break. Everything she was doing was what he’d dreamed a woman would do to him. The dark hair, the wine, the ties around his wrists—everything that made him crazy, she was doing, except for one thing.

  When she did it, he lost control.

  Leaning back, she stretched the opening of her pussy tight against the stiffness of his pulsing cock. She moved her hand behind her and flicked her fingertips against the tight, rough skin of his balls sending him over the edge.

  “Sir. Sir, please wake up. You’re scaring some of the other passengers.” The flight attendant tried to be as polite as possible even though she was clearly observing the rather large protrusion straining into the fabric of Louis’s black slacks. “Perhaps you’d like a pillow or a blanket?” She leaned in and whispered low in his ear.

  Louis turned twelve shades of red and sat up straighter in his seat. Fortunately, the plane was more than half empty given the odd timing of this red-eye flight to Louisiana.

  “Er…thanks.”

  Returning with a blanket in a plastic bag, she knelt down and handed him a small piece of paper. “I’m in town for the weekend. A layover.” She giggled. “If you don’t have a room, well, after listening to you moan like that, I thought you might—you know—need some company?” She smiled and Louis watched her walk away.

  Nice ass. He read the phone number, then slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  Now that was a dream!

  *~~*~~*

  Cory Lavalle pressed her hand to her forehead in an attempt to push away the headache that had been threatening her all day. It was mid-afternoon, her spirits were as heavy as the clouds that roiled overhead and she seriously considered indulging herself in a nice long cry.

  She had no clients for the rest of the week. Not one. Zippo. Nada. Not a solitary soul wanting to know their future, their past or their present.

  Truth be told, Cory wasn’t a very good psychic. She knew it, and apparently most of her customers knew it. Or rather the people who would have been customers if she’d been any good, knew it.

  Whatever. She shut her desk with resignation. The tiny corner in the darkest end of her friend Eileen’s clothing store wasn’t exactly the choicest location on Bourbon Street. But then again, neither she nor Eileen could afford Bourbon Street rents.

  At least they were company for each other when it was quiet, like now, but unlike their usual banter, Cory and Eileen were both somber and disinclined to chat. Eileen was getting over the latest in a long series of dating disasters. And Cory?

  Cory was flat-out depressed.

  Lavalle women had been possessed of second sight for as long as she could remember. There had always been one woman in every generation who was in touch with another world, one unseen by regular mortal eyes.

  Her elderly Aunt Carolina had been the last, and also the one to stare at Cory and pronounce her the next in the line of succession. It was a moment that had scared the crap out of Cory, who was all of thirteen at the time and wanted a real boyfriend and breasts a hell of a lot more than some weirdo psychic gift.

  But she hadn’t argued, since she knew—had known for some time—that her Tante Carolina was right.

  Cory could see. Sometimes little more than a faint coloration in the air surrounding somebody. Most times, nothing at all.

  But other times—those were the times when her hair stood on end all over her body. When visions of the past mingled with the present, when voices long dead whispered secrets into her brain and when her nights became journeys into times and places unknown to her.

  She’d gone to college and majored in history, learning a lot about Louisiana, its past and its people. She’d planned to teach, but found there was no major in one very essential part of that career—patience.

  So after a brief stint in a library doing research for a novelist, Cory decided to cash in on her gift and the Lavalle name, which was not unknown in New Orleans. Several people had become clients, most of them relatives. For some reason, Cory had much better luck with her “sight” when she was related, albeit distantly, to these people.

  She often wondered if it had more to do with inherited genetic memories than a gift of psychic abilities.

  Whatever it was, it served her reasonably well and she had eked out a living for the past six months giving readings and making predictions. The latter made her uncomfortable, since the future was—in her opinion—as yet unformed. She never hesitated to tell her clients exactly that.

  Today, though, she wasn’t going to be able to tell anybody anything, since there was nobody on her appointment schedule at all. It was distressingly blank.

  The rumble of thunder echoed around her skull and she winced. “Eileen, I’m outta here. Okay with you?” She emerged past the blue-black velvet draperies and into the store.

  “Sure thing, Cory-honey. Wish I could go too.” The pale blonde-haired figure of Eileen Morrisey emerged from a rack of dresses to a flash of lightning and a louder rumble of thunder. “Isn’t likely we’ll get many customers for the rest of this day.”

  Cory grimaced. “Yeah. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, chère.” She left Eileen with the traditional Creole endearment and pushed the door open into a torrent of rain. “Sheeeeit.”

  It was the ultimate insult. Her waist-length black hair would frizz something fierce if she got it soaked and didn’t dry it right away, and her shoes—hah. These tropical downpours flooded the sidewalk in seconds.

  They were new leather mules. Cory narrowed her eyes, removed her shoes and tucked them under her arm. Barefoot, she paddled her way down to the end of the street, carefully watching where she stepped and trying to stay under the shop awnings as much as possible.

  She was wet, miserable, had a headache and didn’t have a dime to spare. Life was about as much fun as this thunderstorm and just as grey.

  She had no idea that before too long the blinking light on her answering machine would signal the beginning of possible salvation. Nor could she see that she was about to embark on an adventure that had been two hundred years in the making.

  For the sad thing was, Cory couldn’t see for herself at all. When it came to her own personal aura and future, she was totally and completely blind.

  It didn’t worry her one bit, however. There were much more pressing things in her life, like how she was going to meet the next rent payment without dipping further into her cherished savings account, and whether the water had spotted the leather on her new shoes.

  And overriding all those considerations was the question of whether she had any of her headache pills left. A migraine was walloping up a thunderous roll of pain behind her left eye and she wanted nothing more than to curl up someplace dark and silent and sleep it off for about eight hours.

  Creeping onto her bed and ignoring the pile of wet clothes on the floor, Cory reached for her bedside table and found
her pills. Thankfully there were several left, and she took one, swallowing it down with a grimace.

  She left the bottle out as a reminder to herself to refill the damn thing before she ran out, then surrendered to the drum solo in her skull and lay down closing her eyes.

  There was nothing worse, in Cory’s opinion, than a goddamned migraine.

  Chapter Three

  The dream crept over her like snowflakes, kissing various parts of her skin awake. Or sort of awake. The sort-of state that isn’t really awake, but more than sound asleep and snoring. An odd in-between world where the unreal seems real.

  And the kisses seemed soooo real.

  They began at her toes, little brushes of something that might have been lips and by the time they reached her thighs she was thrumming with delight. She parted tried to part her legs in eager anticipation, only to feel the pressure firming and moving higher, heat spreading low in her belly as her navel was explored and the kisses lingered just beneath her breasts.

  As is so typical in the surreal world of dreams, Cory couldn’t move. She wanted to, badly. She wanted to grind her hips in invitation. She wanted to reach for whoever it was that peppered her skin with tiny licks, flares of fire from a tongue that never stayed in one place long enough.

  And when that tongue and those lips found her nipple, she wanted to scream and leap with pleasure. But she could not—she was held captive by her imagination and her desires. She couldn’t even open her eyes.

  She could only feel.

  And there was so much to feel. A warm weight, moving, sliding over her prone body, arousing every single inch of skin with just the right combination of pressure and heat. Firm lips parted onto to expose hard teeth, allowing nibbles and nips to drive Cory even higher along this wild and wonderful path.

  For some reason her dream lover seemed enchanted with her left breast. Time and time again the kisses returned to the exact spot that magnified every single shiver and shudder that coursed through her. A tiny congregation of nerve endings right below her left nipple that so few of her past lovers had ever bothered to explore. But this dream of hers…well, who or whatever it was, it knew.

  It knew to the millimeter where to stroke, to suckle the sensitive skin. It knew precisely how hard to bite, and where to soothe. And when it finally retreated from her breast and slithered down over her body to settle between her legs, Cory wanted desperately to sob out a breath of eager desire.

  But it caught in her throat, rendering her mute. Again she was restrained, again she was forced to rely on her other sense—the sense of touch.

  And the first touch she felt was breath—warm breath—dusting across the hairs on her mound and dappling over her pussy enticingly.

  Strangely, she wanted more. Cory had no objections to oral sex, but in the past had preferred to get straight down to business. Her lovemaking technique was pretty simple—put the right thing in the right hole and repeat as often as both deemed necessary.

  She’d never even imagined that foreplay could arouse her so explosively. That every iota of her being would resound with the need to be sucked, to be fucked. There was no escaping the inexorable climb. The tongue wandered erotically around the hills and valleys of her pussy lips, pausing in some spots and caressing others with a wet heat that flooded through her veins.

  She felt her juices welling free, dripping over her skin in a wave of lust, of need. Her ass clenched fiercely and little electric tingles began to ignite her spine. She was going to orgasm, to come against the face of this dream lover with the oh-so-skilled mouth.

  With a mighty effort, Cory opened her eyes on her dream. For the fraction of a second before waking, she stared at a face between her legs. The features were indistinct, the hair a blur. But the eyes…

  One was blue—the other was grey. And they were staring at her over her own pussy.

  She snapped into awareness, wet and poised to climax. Her bedroom was dark and empty, and her bed a tumbled mess where she’d kicked the sheets away. She had no choice—her desire was too intense to go unrelieved.

  Without conscious thought she slid her hand to her mound and beyond, finding the soaking and hot folds of flesh. It took less than a moment to brush her fingertips delicately across her aroused clitoris.

  And less than a heartbeat for her to come.

  Quite a bit more time had to elapse before Cory realized her migraine was completely gone.

  *~~*~~*

  Sitting on a red-eye with a hard-on wasn’t Louis’s idea of fun. His recurrent dream was getting more and more intense. It had started after the death of his grandfather and had been going on for several weeks.

  He had been closer to his grandfather than to his Army father. Louis grew up moving from country to country but had settled in with his grandfather at the age of twelve. His grandfather Franc was a shrewd but honest businessman and had made his fortune in real estate. He told Louis tales of his childhood, one that had been spent traveling up and down the Mississippi River. Each time Franc told the stories to Louis, the boy eagerly promised his grandfather he would go there one day.

  After finishing up his latest home restoration project in Chicago, he rushed to his grandfather’s side in New York, and was there when he passed away. After the funeral he called his job foreman and told him he would be gone for a while. He trusted the guy to clean up all the loose ends of Louis’s business in Chicago. He also told him not to set up any more jobs until he heard from Louis.

  He was going to honor his vow to his grandfather and was thrilled to discover that the will contained a very personal bequest—quite a lot of money and a parcel of land with an old house and all its outer amenities in the depths of Louisiana.

  Louis was wide awake now after his nap, and a glance at his watch told him there were still about two hours left on his flight. Since the seat beside him was empty he tugged his briefcase from the overhead compartment and opened the thick stack of papers the lawyer had loaded onto him after he’d signed the final deed to the land and the house. For a moment or two, he wished his parents could have lived to join him. But he was pretty much the last of his line.

  Love Alley? That’s a weird name for a house.

  He sorted through papers, bypassing the boring ones that had nothing to tell him and going for the ones that might give him an idea of what he was going to find waiting in Louisiana.

  Ahh. A Surveyor’s Report. Louis felt optimistic, then sighed as he realized he was holding something that must be at least a hundred-odd years old.

  Concerning the lot of land bounded easterly by Bayou St. Jacques; to the northerly and northwesterly by Bayou St. Gilles; to the southwesterly by the toll pike road to New Orleans; to the westerly by the Emperor Bayou. Said lot comprised of approximately 40 hectares, containing one large dwelling and associated smaller dwellings. Quarters for housing up to 50 slaves are located to the south of the main dwelling and separated by sufficient distance to ensure privacy.

  This dwelling is commonly known by its nickname—“Love Alley”.

  There it was again. Love Alley. The survey told him nothing he could use and the names of the bayous meant nothing to him at this point. They might not even exist today, since Louis knew that a lot of Louisiana was a swamp that was changing almost daily.

  He continued his investigation of the paperwork, thumbing through endless legal documents, some old, some more recent. Apparently the fact that Louisiana still followed the Napoleonic legal code meant that twice as many papers had to be filed.

  He sighed again, ready to give up, when the title of one sheet caught his attention.

  A Brief Recounting of the History of Love Alley. It was a reprint of an article by a local historian.

  Louis settled down to read.

  Deeded to the Lavalieres family in the last part of the eighteenth century, the property was developed by Emile Lavalieres into a thriving estate. Shipping interests, made feasible by the network of navigable bayous leading to M. Lavalieres, provided much of t
he income necessary to keep the family well financed, and it wasn’t until Emile’s death in 1792 that events took a downturn for the Lavalieres.

  Emile’s son, Georges, died within months of his father, a victim of the annual outbreak of yellow fever. Other Lavalieres family members also succumbed, and eventually the title reverted to Osmonde Lavalieres who lived long enough to deed the property to his daughter Claudine on his death.

  Louis glanced out the window of the plane but barely noticed the clouds and the dawn sky, since his thoughts were in the past. He figured it was probably unusual for a woman to inherit property. It must have been quite a valuable estate. Otherwise Osmonde Lavalieres would never have considered trying to preserve it by making such a dramatic move. He returned to the story, his interest caught.

  By this time (approximately 1805), there was little money left, and Claudine set about maximizing her investment in order to survive. She converted the estate into a brothel, and capitalized on both its proximity to New Orleans and its private location. Within a few short months, her clientele was established, the money rolled in and the estate quickly became known locally (and affectionately) as Love Alley in a salute to its new role within the community and a corruption of the French surname of its current mistress.

  At around this time, unusual events occurred, giving rise to the so-called Mystery of Love Alley. Claudine Lavalieres was, allegedly, a sharp and responsible madam, running a well-organized brothel. She was acutely aware of financial matters and invested her profits with an eye to the future.

  At some point during 1808 Claudine Lavalieres disappeared.

  Louis sat up straight and reread the words. A smart and clever woman had disappeared, leaving a profitable venture behind her. He narrowed his eyes. It didn’t feel right to him. He read on.

  There were many rumors within the community surrounding Love Alley. Some said she had died in childbirth, others that she had been murdered by a disgruntled customer. Still others averred that she had fled with a lover, possibly a slave, to the greater freedom and acceptance of the North.