“Dude, I was doing yoga. No phones. It blocks the process. Hey, I could get you in sometime. You three could use some serious introspection.”

  They’d have better “process” with another intern. “I need you to handle the calls at the office for a bit. Something’s come up on this trip, and we’re going to be away a few more days.”

  Kellan pulled into a parking space and gestured up the street, letting him know they weren’t far from her address. Tate bounded out of the car in an instant.

  Eric put a hand over the phone. “Catch him. He’ll run down the street, screaming her name like some Streetcar Named Desire impersonation.” Eric turned his attention back to his call the minute Kell closed the car door. “So I need you to go back to the office and grab the calendar on Belle’s desk.”

  “Dude, Belle and I already had this conversation. I’ve already done all of the stuff she told me to do. It’s a total bummer she quit.”

  “She did what?”

  “Yeah, she called a couple of hours ago and said she wasn’t coming back. Oh, and she faxed her resignation, too. I’m supposed to tell you guys that she found a new home and stuff. Do you think she’s going to want the yogurt in the fridge? I could use that tomorrow because work makes me hungry and it’s the only vegan thing in the office. You guys eat a lot of animal flesh. Do you really think that’s good for you?”

  She’d quit—and she’d done it by telling the goddamn intern. She hadn’t even had the courtesy to call them and tender her resignation. “Don’t touch her yogurt. No matter what she told you, she’s coming back.”

  He stabbed at his phone to end the call, then hopped out of the car, his heart pounding in his chest. Anger simmered in his veins, mixing with cold panic and encroaching dread.

  He jogged up the street, his dress shoes slapping against the concrete, heading for the other two. Kellan had managed to contain Tate, and the two of them stood in front of a three-story house set right against the street with a blue door. In the dark, he thought it might be connected to the little house around the corner, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Belle quit. She called Sequoia and told that pot-smoking fucker she wasn’t coming back,” Eric grated out.

  Kellan cursed. “That’s not a good sign. I really expected her to tell me off, then give me the cold shoulder until I groveled.”

  And just like this “move,” the fact that she hadn’t more than suggested she really didn’t intend to come back. This wasn’t just a snit. They were about to launch a battle to bring her back…but for the first time, Eric wondered if the war was unwinnable.

  Eric stared at the pale stucco house with its bent screen door. It might look a little rundown, but once it had a coat of paint and a few repairs, the place would shine and look like the mansion Belle’s paperwork suggested she’d inherited. In fact, in both location and historical significance, he was looking at pure New Orleans splendor.

  Restoring the house would be Belle’s dream project.

  “Shit.” Tate stood beside him, shaking his head as he studied the place in the streetlamp lit evening. “She’s never going to want to leave here. We have three bedrooms that she says need paint with ‘personality,’ whatever that means, and a game room she refers to as the man cave. She holds her nose when she walks in there. Do you think that means something?”

  “It means you should pick up your damn socks,” Eric groused.

  “I’d even be grateful for that,” Kell put in. “But you’ve heard her diatribe about your kitchen. Even if this house needs a lot of work, she’s going to be far more interested in redoing a historic charmer in New Orleans than some suburban abode in Chicago.”

  “We’re fucked. Our only saving grace might be that she can’t live here forever. This place is way too big for one person. I looked around for the front door. That guest house behind it is attached, but I didn’t find the main entrance. This isn’t it.” Tate pointed at the little blue door.

  Usually, Eric liked to be aware of the problems he faced. This time, the entire conversation just unnerved him.

  Kellan studied what they could see of the place. “The taxes will be a killer. I don’t think Belle has a ton of cash, unless that was part of her inheritance.”

  “Her grandmother left her some money,” Tate said. “But the amount wasn’t specified in the documents I saw. Those were about the house, but if her grandmother had a lot of money, would the place be in disrepair? Even if Belle sinks her whole bank account into the house, I doubt it will be enough.”

  “Before we can worry about the house or her intentions, we need to remember that she ran. Will she even let us in the door, presuming this is it?” Eric hoped there was a hotel nearby with rooms available. Even this late at night, tourists walked up and down the street. They all had to sleep somewhere. He and the guys did too, though he sincerely hoped it would be with Belle.

  He scanned the exterior of Belle’s new house, assessing the modest but colorful door flanked by shutters. The rusted screen door flapped a bit in the breeze. He didn’t see any light from the inside coming through the windows. Was she still awake or had she gone to sleep, blissful that she hadn’t had to talk to them all day?

  He’d played through about a hundred scenarios in his head, ranging from Belle running into his arms to the one where she found her inner warrior princess and went medieval on their asses.

  Now that he was standing outside her darkened house, he really worried. He wasn’t sure how the hell he would handle it if she told them to go to hell.

  “Why are the lights out?” Kellan stepped up to a little carriage-style fixture affixed to the exterior that should have illuminated the area.

  “The house hasn’t been lived in for months,” Tate explained. “She’ll be lucky if the power is still on.”

  Standing here in front of the place, a chill swept through him, much colder than anything the fall breeze had swept in. Just a couple of yards away, the street was lit, looking bright and elegant, but here, a deep gloom clung.

  He glanced around the back of the house, looking for any sign of life. Total darkness. There was a thin alley between Belle’s house on one side and a neighbor’s fence on the other. Just enough for a man to lay in wait. Belle wouldn’t see anyone creeping through her yard. No one from the street would see a thing either.

  If they couldn’t persuade her to come back to Chicago with them in the morning, they would so be getting some lights to brighten up the alley and exterior tomorrow. And whether it lacked charm or not, he’d make sure the perimeter had a sturdy fence.

  “I don’t like it,” Tate said. “It’s too dangerous. This is just two blocks from that woman’s murder yesterday, the one we heard about on the radio.”

  The death of Karen Ehlers had made a huge news splash across New Orleans. It had been all over the radio as they’d driven into town. The fifty-nine-year-old socialite had been discovered in her New Orleans mansion, strangled by unknown intruders.

  She’d been one of the toasts of the city, known for her philanthropy and love of her home town. Turned out that she’d also been known for something else.

  “Belle’s not a hooker,” Eric reminded him.

  “She won’t be turning tricks for strange men so that will reduce her odds of being strangled significantly,” Tate added. “That’s true.”

  The big guy hadn’t factored him in. Eric was still really mad. And yeah, he hadn’t done the best job of letting Belle know that he would treasure her virginity. Not as bad as Kell, but even so…she shouldn’t have run off.

  “But technically, Karen Ehlers wasn’t a hooker. She was a madam.” Tate was always so fucking precise. “Should we knock on the door or something, even if it’s not the front? You two constantly tell me I can’t just hang out around her house and look like a pervert stalker or the cops will arrest me.”

  Kellan was still fiddling with the light fixture. It came on suddenly. The old, dusty bulb bathed the door in a hazy, yellow glow. “The bulb was out of the socket. That’s odd.”

  At least they could somewhat see now.

  An odd banging sounded from somewhere around the house. Eric’s instincts went on high alert. He dashed around the side of the building and looked down the alley. The illumination from the street didn’t penetrate this far back. In fact, it was eerily dark. If anything, the neighbor’s interior lights behind him blinded him just enough to make seeing anything almost impossible.

  Still, he could swear he saw a shape moving in that alley in the distance.

  He was just about to run after the asshole when he heard a scream from inside the rundown house that made his whole body freeze in terror.

  Belle.

  They had to get to her.

  * * * *

  Belle woke from her dream, certain that she was no longer alone in the house. Her hands shook. Her heart drummed in her chest. Pure fear threatened to choke her.

  Move! Don’t just lay here.

  As quietly as she could, she kicked the covers away and swung her feet, moving slowly so the wooden floors wouldn’t creak. Belle shivered with every step, but forced herself to keep moving. When had the room gotten so cold? She wrapped her arms around herself and she could practically see her breath, as though the air around her was freezing. She’d turned the ancient heater on a few hours ago. Had it stopped working?

  In the short time she’d been in this house, Belle had quickly realized that she had plumbing, electrical, and flooring problems. Now she could add the HVAC unit to that long, expensive list. That was before she tackled updating the décor.

  Something loud banged downstairs, startling her. She shrieked. Her hands shook in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. Fear iced her veins. Someone was in the house.

  Where the hell had she put her cell phone? Sir was suddenly right at her heels, yipping up at her. Did he think it was play time?

  “Keep quiet,” she hissed under her breath as she remembered she’d left her new cell phone on the charger downstairs since that seemed to be one of the few electrical sockets currently functioning. She’d decided to find the fuse box in the morning and see if she could trip the breakers and get some of the upstairs sockets operational. She’d been too tired to deal with it before going to bed.

  The moment her head had hit the pillow, she’d fallen into a deep, thick slumber where she’d had horrible nightmares of dead women swinging from the rafters of her house. Different girls in different eras, but all hanged in the same room from the same beam. Creepy. She’d let Gates’s warning get into her head. Even now, Belle tried to shake away the vestiges of the dreams. They had seemed so real to her.

  The lawyer had said young women committed suicide in this house. Her dream had clearly shown a murder. Belle really hoped she hadn’t gotten her grandmother’s gift. She hoped even more fervently that she hadn’t dreamed about her own violent end.

  Was someone really in her house or was she just freaked out? Who would have broken in? Squatters? The place had been vacant so long maybe some of the homeless thought they could just move in. Despite what Mr. Gates had suggested, it couldn’t really be ghosts.

  She tiptoed through the bedroom and toward the stairs, trying to control her runaway breathing. Until she reached her phone, she didn’t have a way to call 911. Right now, she didn’t even have a weapon to fight off an intruder. What the hell was she going to do? What time was it? She wished she knew if there was any chance that there were still people on the street outside to hear her call for help.

  Belle paused, trying to decide if she should risk going for her phone or just get out of the house. Then she realized that everything around her had gone quiet. She didn’t hear footsteps, per se. She didn’t see shadows or movement, but every creak and groan of the stairs brought fresh terror. Was someone here?

  Maybe she really was just overreacting because the dreams had provoked her imagination. They’d started as soon as she closed her eyes. One vivid nightmare bled into the next in a terrible montage.

  Helplessly, Belle had watched pretty young women being pulled through the house, screeching and pleading and fighting with every step. Each had been utterly helpless to stop a noose from winding around her neck before a dark figure hauled them high up the stairs. Finally, the assailant tightened the rope around the poor women’s throats and shoved them over the banister, leaving them to dangle to their death.

  As the last had been pushed, her neck broke. A jarring crack had jolted Belle awake.

  Except that noise hadn’t been a byproduct of her dream. Had it? She’d heard another sound awfully like it since she crept from her bed.

  Even if the noise had been real, that didn’t mean someone had broken in. Old homes shifted and groaned. She had to get used to that fact. Her newish apartment in Chicago hadn’t been noisy until the middle school kid living with his single mom above her had taken up the sax.

  At the top of the stairs—the very stairs she’d seen in her dream—was a small umbrella holder. She’d noticed her grandmother’s canes stashed there earlier in the day and she inched one out of the little bucket triumphantly. At least now she had some kind of weapon.

  Sir barked again.

  “Shh.” She tried to shush him, but if she died because her puppy couldn’t stay quiet, she was going to kill Kinley. She just was.

  She managed to sneak to the first floor, wincing with each step down. Just another few tiptoes, and she would have her phone in hand. If she was simply hearing things, who cared? She was terrified, and if the police laughed at her, so be it. She wasn’t going to put off calling for help just because she wasn’t absolutely positive she was about to be killed.

  As her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light filtering into the house from outside, she made out the small table in the kitchen where she’d stashed her phone. Ten steps to the table, then she could dash out the servant’s door and call for help. It didn’t matter that she was in her nightgown. This was New Orleans. Surely they’d seen freakier things than a woman in her PJs emblazoned with martini glasses and shoes all over it, decorated with the words Girls Night In across her boobs.

  Once she was on the street, she wouldn’t be alone, she prayed.

  She was almost to the phone when the light over the back door flickered on, pouring light through the big kitchen window and blinding her for a moment.

  Then she felt something—or someone—brush past her. Not around her ankles. Sir couldn’t stir the air like that. No, this had been done by something terribly near her torso.

  Belle screamed, the sound coming from deep in her gut. There was another loud crash, then something that sounded like metal wrenching, then a splintering sound. Sir barked madly, placing his little body in front of hers with as much of a menacing growl as four pounds of canine could manage.

  Acting on pure instinct, Belle swung out, hefting the cane and trying desperately to whack whoever was coming after her.

  “Belle, baby, stop,” a familiar masculine voice commanded. Suddenly, warm, strong arms wrapped around her. “It’s all right. It’s just me.”

  Tate? When had he gotten here? How had he found her? Belle didn’t care. She threw her arms around him, taking in his familiar scent, his comfort. His big body was warm and safe against hers.

  “Let’s go check the rest of the house to see if there’s any sign of an intruder.” Kellan brushed past her, leading Eric along. “Tate, don’t take your eyes off her. If you see anything out of place, beat the shit out of it.”

  After a moment of fumbling against the wall, light flooded the L-shaped kitchen, and she could see again.

  Tate’s arms tightened around her. “Baby, what happened? You screamed, and we could hear you from outside.”

  “I think someone might have been in the house.” Her words shook. Now that she knew she was safe, the adrenaline bled from her veins, leaving her weak with relief. “We should call the police.”

  Though she didn’t know what they could tell her at this point. Whether there’d been some forced entry and where? Maybe she could hope for prints. Or maybe they would tell her there was no sign of anything other than her overactive imagination.

  Kellan walked back in the room. “It was just the screen banging open and shut with the wind. Looks like it’s bent and the latch is broken. The door itself was locked but the screen made a hell of a lot of noise. I’ll jimmy it so it will stay secure for tonight.”

  “All the downstairs windows are locked,” Eric said a minute later. “I checked. Are you sure someone was actually in the house?”

  “I felt someone run past me.” It had been a light touch, a stir of the air, then nothing.

  Kellan looked around the room. “Did you do a thorough search of the premises when you got here?”

  Why was he using his lawyer voice on her? She’d heard him use that quiet tone on many a skittish witness. “I checked a couple of rooms, but it was getting late and I was too tired to look everywhere. I focused on the office and master bedroom since I’m using them.”

  “What is this?” Eric picked up Sir, frowning. “Is this one of those puppies from the wedding?”

  She grabbed her dog and held him close, crooning, “Don’t you mind him.”

  “It’s possible you’ve had squatters here, Belle,” Kellan pronounced. “This place has been abandoned for months, right?”

  “Yeah. I thought of that.” She winced. Tate would remember that she’d inherited the house. They’d done their research—fast.

  “We’ll search every room before we go to bed, open every door and every closet. Tomorrow morning, we’ll improve the security. We’ll make a comprehensive list of everything that needs attention and break it out.”

  Kellan was in charge. It should have annoyed her that he thought he could just walk into her house and take over, but his authoritative voice calmed more than irritated her. Still, she couldn’t let them stay here.

  “Are you okay, Belle?” Tate asked, inching close again.