eISBN : 978-0-515-14462-8

JOVE®
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Dedication

For the city of New Orleans and all my friends there

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to the following:

Christy Carlson, for helping me fill in plot points over French baguettes on Royal Street, and for reading along as I wrote. I truly appreciate your encouragement and your friendship.

Michael, for Chopin.

Kathy Love, for being the friend that’s there every day, in every way. This book wouldn’t exist without you.

Prologue

NEW ORLEANS, 1849

Anne Donovan would do anything for John Thiroux.

She would die for him.

Sitting in front of the cracked mirror Madame had provided for her in the tiny, shabby room that was hers based on the fact that John paid to keep her available, Anne brushed her auburn hair. Embracing the familiar tingle in her body, the heaviness in her breasts, the ache between her thighs that always arose when she thought of her lover, she sighed with contentment, anticipation. John was everything to her, an absolute angel of a man, and she was completely and utterly in love with him. He had saved her from the steady stream of anonymous men she’d previously had to endure in various bawdy houses to stay off the streets, and his favor allowed her to send money to her cousin for her daughter’s upkeep. It was true she’d had a private benefactor prior to John, but that one had been an oddity, and Anne had been grateful to exchange him for the beauty and passion of her current lover.

The knock on her door cut through her lazy daydreaming and had her pushing her chair back and hastily dropping the tarnished hairbrush down on the vanity table next to her rouge. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t have John’s tray set with his drink poured, pipe out, his favorite spoon lying next to the bottle. Panicked at the thought of doing anything less than pleasing him entirely, Anne was yanking at the bodice of her gown to adjust it and rushing across the room when Madame popped her head in. Relief flooded her for a brief, glorious minute, until she heard the woman’s words.

“I’m sending a gentleman in to see you.”

Fear slid overtop of her relief, as Anne stared at Madame’s round, fleshy, dissolute face. The phrase felt foreign, unheard for months, familiar in the sick pit it created in the depths of her stomach. “What? You can’t mean . . .” Her heart pounded at the thought of pleasuring another man besides John. Touching a stranger, taking him into her mouth and body, enduring the strain of humiliation, revulsion. She had thought that behind her. “John . . .”