Still standing with his back to her, he stared down at the ruined flowers. His shoulders were tense as he turned in the other direction. His pace was brisk as he took the flowers over to an old oak tree festooned with Spanish moss. There was a small trash can there, one of the very few in the entire cemetery. He tossed the flowers and then pivoted, quickly disappearing down one of the numerous lanes.
Oh man, that sucked.
Feeling for the guy, she sprang into action. Carefully, she pulled half of the stems free and then leaned forward, placing the remaining in the vase in front of the Herpin tomb. She picked up her keys and as she rose, she slid her purple-framed sunglasses on. Hurrying down the worn path with patchy grass, she turned down the lane she’d seen the guy go down. Luck was on her side, because she saw him near the pyramid tomb. He hung a right there, and feeling a wee bit like a stalker, she trailed behind him.
Of course, she could yell out to him and just hand him the other half of the peonies, but shouting at a stranger in a cemetery just seemed wrong. Shouting in a cemetery at all felt like something her mother would side-eye her over.
And no one side-eyed quite like her mother.
The man made another turn and then stepped out of her line of sight. Holding on to the flowers, she walked passed a tomb with a large cross and then her steps slowed.
She found him.
He was standing before a massive mausoleum, one guarded by two beautifully erected weeping angels, and he was just standing there, as still as those angels, his arms stiff at his sides and his hands closed. She took a step forward as her gaze drifted to the name on the mausoleum.
de Vincent.
Her eyes widened and she blurted out, “Holy baby llama.”
The man twisted at the waist, and Rosie was suddenly standing within mere feet of the Devil.
That was what the gossip magazines called him.
That was what most of her family called him.
Rosie liked to refer to him as in her wildest dreams .
Everyone in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and probably more than half the country knew who Devlin de Vincent was. Besides all the photos of him and his fiancée that were constantly posted in the Living and Leisure section of the newspaper, he was the eldest of three remaining de Vincent siblings, the heirs to the kind of fortune Rosie, along with most of the world, couldn’t even begin to wrap their heads around.
What a small world.
That was all she could think as she stared at him. Her friend Nikki worked for the de Vincents. Well, she worked temporarily for them and currently had something going on with the middle brother. That whole situation was an absolute mess at the moment, and Gabriel de Vincent was currently on the Boyfriends Who Needed to Get Their Shit Together list.
But the de Vincents’ notorious fame or her friend’s on-again, off-again relationship with Gabe weren’t the only reasons why she knew more about them than the average bear.
It was because of their home—their land.
The de Vincent estate was one of the most haunted locations in the entire state of Louisiana. Rosie knew this because she had been a bit obsessed with all the legends surrounding the land and the family, one that included a curse . Yes. The family and the land were supposedly cursed. How cool was that? Okay, probably not cool to those involved, but Rosie was fascinated by the whole thing.
From the research Rosie had done eons ago, it all stemmed from the land itself. New Orleans had been plagued with many virulent outbreaks in the late eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds. Smallpox. Spanish influenza. Yellow fever. Even the bubonic plague. Thousands of people died and many more were quarantined. Often, the dead and the dying were sent to the same place, left to rot away. The land that the de Vincent home sat on was one of the areas popularly used throughout many of the outbreaks. Even once the house was originally built, lands near the property were still used in the later outbreaks. All that sickness and death, mixed with heartbreak and hopelessness, were going to leave some bad vibes behind.
And boy did the de Vincent land have some bad vibes.
The house itself had caught fire multiple times. The fires could easily be explained, but all the strange deaths? There was the stuff her friend Nikki had told her. Then there was the de Vincent curse, and even more crazy?
Ley lines.
Ley lines were basically straight lines of energy that traveled all over the earth and were believed to have spiritual connections. The very line that extended from Stonehenge, moved across the Atlantic, and passed through cities like New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans. And, according to her research, straight through the de Vincent property.
Rosie would do bad, terrible things to get inside that house and investigate.
But that was unlikely to ever happen. When Rosie had mentioned it to Nikki, she was shot down faster than her running after freshly baked beignets.
She’d never met a de Vincent before and definitely not the Devlin de Vincent, but she’d seen enough pictures of him to know that Devlin just . . . well, he just did it for her.
That indefinable thing that got her hormones revving like a 1967 Impala. Wide-shouldered and narrow at the waist, the man was tall, well over six feet. His dark hair was coiffed and styled short. He had the kind of face that was universally handsome. High, broad cheekbones and a straight, aquiline nose paired with a set of full lips that came with a perfect Cupid’s bow. He had a square, hard jaw and a chin with a slight cleft in it.
The man was stunning, yet there was something cold about him, almost detached and a bit cruel about how he was pieced together. To anyone else, that might’ve dampened his attractiveness, but to Rosie? That only made him all the more beautiful.
Oh God, Rosie remembered something in that moment. How she could’ve forgotten? She wasn’t sure, but his father had died recently. Lawrence de Vincent had died the same way the de Vincents’ mother had—the same way Ian had.
By his own hand.
Lawrence de Vincent hadn’t used a gun, though. He’d hung himself. Or that was what the gossip section of the paper claimed.
Her heart all but broke for him, for all the brothers in that moment. To have experienced what they did not once but twice? Good God. . . .
Devlin hadn’t turned fully in her direction, but he was staring at her and she was staring at him, and this was so not how she expected her trip to the cemetery to go.
“Can I help you?” he asked, and goodness, his voice was as deep as an ocean.
“I saw you back there, when your flowers fell into the puddle,” she said, inching closer to him. “I have extra. I thought you could use them.”
The sunlight glanced off his cheekbones as he tilted his head to the side. He didn’t respond.
So, she extended her arms, holding out the peonies. “Would you like them?”
Devlin still didn’t respond.
She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth and decided if she was in for a penny, she was in for a pound. Stepping around the stone curb, she walked up to Devlin. My word, the man was tall, and she had to tip her head back to meet his gaze.
Those eyes.
Thick, heavy sooty lashes framed eyes the color of the gulf, a stunning blue-green.
His eyes didn’t meet hers. No, he appeared to be . . . staring at her mouth.
A flush of warmth cascaded over her. He has a fiancée. Or at least she thought he did. That’s what she told herself, about three different times, as she stopped worrying her lower lip and tried to converse again with him.
“Peonies are my favorite,” she explained, because why not? “The ones that have a scent, that is. Not all of them do, did you know that?”
His head straightened and he finally lifted his gaze to hers. She almost wished he hadn’t, because she had never seen such intense, serious eyes before. Eyes that didn’t hint at humor. A gaze that was definitely troubled.
Then again, was she surprised? His father had died and she’d sworn that there’d been something else recently in the papers about their family that was all kinds of dramalicious, but anyway, he was standing in a cemetery, before his family’s tomb, so yeah, he was probably troubled.
Wasn’t she also troubled?
“I didn’t know that,” he replied.
A tentative smile tugged at her lips. “Well, now you do.”
He was quiet for a moment. “What do they smell like?”