Page 1 of Cognac Secrets
PROLOGUE
Sandrine…
The music was loud, the lights flashing, and the dance floor packed with gyrating bodies to the rhythm and the beat.
I loved it. Lived for it. It was my favorite escape to just get lost in the music and the bass and forget whatever the hell was bothering me. Moving my body to the song and letting my heart open up and spill all its heavy contents onto the dancefloor to be trampled underfoot.
I’d been finding myself in the French Quarter more and more often in whatever bar would offer me my dance therapy on any given night. I would just walk down either Bourbon or Decatur until I heard something that suited me and would duck into that particular bar, look for the dance floor, and just getlostin it.
That’s how I’d found myself in some no-name hole-in-the-wall crammed on the dance floor with a bunch of bikers on a Friday night. But I didn’t mind at all, especially when the short one, who was exactly my height, danced up to me, a glass of what smelled like cognac in his hand, and smoothly joined in my rhythm.
I smiled and delighted in how nicely we fit together, and how he didn’t hesitate to thrust his knee between my own jeans-clad legs, pressing the top of his thigh against the most intimate part of my body, like it was a perfectly natural thing to do. I mean, I knew, given my past with overbearing men in my life, that type of shit shouldn’t turn me on and make me melt, but it was just a different kind of vibe, you know?
I liked it when he slid his hands around my body, slipping them beneath the hem of my cropped tee against my skin. It felt good, and I mean – itdefinitelydidn’t hurt that this guy was easy on the eyes.
He kept his beard neat and cut close, his eyes dark and sharp, and he just had this sexy, broody kind of demeanor.Shit,I liked it!
I didn’t know how lit he was, or how long we danced, but I just stuck to water. I didn’t want to mess with my already fucked-up brain chemistry any more than it already was – because I hated feeling crazy. I mean, I was – but I wasn’t at the same time. That was neither here nor there on the dance floor. That was why I came here. So that I could be free, and let loose, and be unapologeticallymefor a little while before it was back to reality and the slog called life.
The liquor flowed, the beat went on, and with every song, we grew closer, more familiar. He grew downrightdaring,his lips grazing the side of my neck in this almost ethereally light touch that sent a wave of gooseflesh sweeping over me, my skin rising and pebbling beneath his touch in an almost physical manifestation of longing.God,how I wanted to be touched like this. How lonely I’d been, and how I would have givenanythingfor a man tosee me… but I knew it wasn’t likely to happen. That was just my lot in life. Be a good daughter. Be a good sister. God has a plan for you. That plan was to make me into a good and obedient wife to a man I could and would never love. Be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, struggling to make ends meet and to watch my blue-collar husband drown himself in alcohol while our kids and I went hungry to pay for it – and you know what?
No fucking thank you!
I didn’t want it. I watched how my mother, my brothers, and I suffered, while my dad drank like a fish. How he’d quote scripture and shackle us all with his Bible verses and how the church bullied my mom the one time she’d tried to escape him into staying with him. I didn’t want that life.Fuck that life…but it was a different way my people had out on the edges of the swamp in their small community. I knew if my father or brothers ever found me that I’d be dragged right on back and put up in front of the preacher with the likes of Tommy Boudreaux across from me. Dim-witted and mean as a cotton mouth, and I didn’t want any of it.
Hell, the only way ol’ Tommy would get married is with a shotgun pressed to the woman’s back – not his.
I worried about my little sister. Mamma had had Stormy late in life, and she was her last behind me – only thirteen and pretty as can be. I wouldn’t put it past the lot of them to try an’ marryheroff to Tommy, who was two years older than me at twenty-eight.
It was a backwoods little place where religion had twisted folks’ minds and made them rotten to the core. I would have and did doanythingto get out. I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had to hang on and get my high school diploma first, and I did. Only one out of my generation to do it, and Mama had been so proud of me.
Neither one of my brothers had made it much past the ninth or tenth grade, but I knew that diploma was my ticket outta town. I would need it to keep and hold any kind of job once I made it out to the city – andboy,had that been an adventure. Scary as hell.
I didn’t have a penny to my name, hardly anything but the clothes on my back, my backpack from school, a few of my favorite books, cheap costume jewelry, and that diploma, my birth certificate, and social security card on me when I climbed out my bedroom window on my eighteenth birthday.
It was hard sneaking out, harder still running. Running ‘til my lungs burned, my legs ached, and the sweat poured off me, soaking me from the inside out. I didn’t know how long I walked, thumb out, hoping to hitch a ride. Hoping it wouldn’t be someone from town to pull up and drag me back to my daddy’s house.
Fuck, I’d been scared. I knew what happened to girls like me who hitchhiked. I could be raped and have my arms chopped off with a hatchet, like that one girl who survived the awful attack in California. I’d read her survivor’s story from a battered paperback I’d found left on the bench at the gas station.
Still, I’d rather her fate than to stay in that awful Podunk little town just across the state line in Mississippi.
Better to wind up dead in a swamp somewhere than live the life waiting for me back there.
Still, any time I needed to forget, any time I needed to feel free from anything and everything – be it the shackles of my past, or the prison of my own heart, mind, and loneliness – for a time I could escape them on the dance floor. Wouldn’t you know it? Tonight was one of those magical nights where I’d fallen into the arms of a wonderful dance partner and the magic of the beat suffused our souls and the liquor lowered our inhibitions enough that I couldalmost pretendwe made some kind ofrealconnection.
An illusion that was shattered pretty quickly when he groaned into my ear, “God, I’ve missed you, Mia…”
Mia?
Shit. He was so drunk he thought I was someone else.Well, damn.
“My name is Sandrine,” I told him. He shook his head and mumbled something like“Tonight I need it to be Mia…”and woof, did I understand that.
How many times had I found myself in this same situation, but different? How many times had I found myself in so much pain, so achingly lonely and scared, that I needed someone,anyone, to just be there for me for a night and chase back the nightmares and all the heavy feelings with their touch? How many times had I used guys for the same comfort that this man was seemingly pleading for now?
Well, shit.
I guess Karma really was a thing. She was going to be one hell of a bitch tonight, serving me up the way I’d partaken in a lot of ways. It was a complicated story – that.
