Moonlight Scandals by Jennifer L. Armentrout

The only two devils Rosie sort of knew were the perfectly sugared beignets that were to blame for her rounded hips and a de Vincent.

But could this spirit be talking about a de Vincent? Or was it a de Vincent? That just sounded out of this world, but . . .

Clutching the bottle of wine, Sarah sat down next to Rosie on the couch. All the lights were turned on in her apartment, and Sarah had put the kibosh on any attempt Rosie wanted to make to communicate with whoever the hell it was that had come through. Sarah claimed the spirit was gone now, but as Rosie sipped from her wineglass and Sarah drank straight from the bottle, she wasn’t sure she believed her.

“Has that happened before?” Rosie asked as she pulled her leg up onto the couch.

Sarah stared straight ahead, her blue eyes focused on a pink-and-blue, bohemian-style wall tapestry hung behind the TV. “Yes. Not often, but sometimes a spirit will sort of . . . ride another spirit through the connection. I’ve done readings where complete strangers showed up and wanted to talk. I mean, sometimes the spirit knows the person, and the person just doesn’t realize that, but there’ve been cases where it was a random spirit hitching a ride.” She turned to Rosie as she lifted her hand to her neck. She began rubbing it again. “I think . . . I think he was trying to jump me.”

Rosie sucked in a sharp breath. “Are you serious?”

She nodded.

“That’s . . . that’s not good.” And it wasn’t. Jumping wasn’t the same thing as full possession, but it could still wreak havoc on a person’s mind, body, and environment. It occurred when a spirit jumped into a person’s body to communicate through them. People might find themselves saying things they normally wouldn’t, having odd accents and even mannerisms that were unlike them. When a person was jumped, they might even experience how the spirit died, and that could really mess with someone’s head.

And from her own experience with investigations, Rosie knew that only a very strong spirit or a very determined one could jump a living human.

“You know, I’ve let spirits in many times during readings, when they wait for permission, but this guy . . . he wasn’t waiting for permission. He wanted in and he was furious.”

Feeling guilty, Rosie touched Sarah’s arm and winced when the woman jumped a little. “I’m sorry. I—”

“This is not your fault. You don’t need to apologize, but I do need to tell you this, and not just because you’re my friend.” Still white-knuckling the wine bottle, she dropped her hand and twisted toward Rosie. “I’m pretty sure this spirit didn’t know you personally, but I got the feeling that he . . . he hitched a ride with you and not another spirit and it wasn’t a mistake.”

Rosie’s brows lifted as she nibbled on her lower lip. That wasn’t something anyone wanted to hear. Not even her.

“Do you have any idea of who that could’ve been?” Sarah asked and then took another big, healthy gulp of the wine.

Rosie could easily be a spirit beacon, especially considering all the investigations she’d taken part in with NOPE over the years, but she didn’t think it came from any of those cases. She looked away from Sarah, not sure if her suspicions were on point or not.

“What are you not telling me?” Sarah demanded.

Drawing in a deep breath, Rosie leaned forward and placed her wineglass on the coffee table. She hadn’t really allowed herself time to think about her brief meeting with Devlin, because there truly was no point, but she couldn’t help but feel like they’d had a . . . a moment, hadn’t they? That indefinable connection that even strangers could make in a short period of time.

“Okay, this is going to sound crazier than what just happened, but when I was at the cemetery today, I saw this guy drop his flowers in a puddle,” she told Sarah. “They were ruined and he’d tossed them, and I had more than enough flowers. I split the peonies and found the guy to give them to him, because that had to suck, you know?”

Sarah nodded slowly as she took another drink.

“I swear I had no idea who he was until I found him and he was standing in front of the de Vincent mausoleum. It was Devlin de Vincent.”

“The Devil .” Sarah let out a hard, short laugh. “That makes me feel better that he could’ve been referencing a nickname and not the actual devil.”

Rosie snorted at that.

“You know, literally everyone seems to know his nickname, but no one knows why they call him that or how it got started.”

She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. I guess the nicknames for all the brothers started when they were in college up north, but yeah, I would love to know why they call him that.”

“Ditto,” murmured Sarah. “What happened when you gave him the flowers?”

“We chatted for a couple of minutes and then I left. I thought he was there because of his father. You know, he passed recently.”

She blanched as she lowered her gaze. “Didn’t he . . . ?”

“Yeah, he killed himself. I said that I was sorry to hear about his father’s death, and he corrected me, said the flowers were for his mother,” Rosie continued. “I figured he just wasn’t ready to even acknowledge his father’s death, and I totally understand that. Anyway, that’s where the whole peony thing is from. I didn’t even tell Nikki about that when I saw her tonight and you know she works in the de Vincent household. Do you think the spirit was him—Lawrence de Vincent?”

“God.” Sarah leaned back against the cushion, lowering the bottle to her stomach. “You know, it’s possible. He could’ve been hanging around Devlin or the cemetery, saw you, and attached himself.”

“But why? I didn’t know him and I don’t know Devlin. That was the first time I saw him in person.”

“Sometimes the reason why a spirit attaches to someone is never known.”

Rosie’s lips pursed. “Well, that’s not cool.”

She slid her a dry look. “Most people would be more freaked out about that possibility.”

“Most people don’t hunt ghosts.” Rosie shrugged, but she was a little disturbed. Especially if this ghostie was an angry one. She wasn’t about that kind of life. “I mean, hey, if I’m going to be haunted by a ghost, I figure a de Vincent is like the gold standard.”

Sarah giggled and then smacked her hand over her mouth. “That’s not funny.”

“Yeah.” Rosie grinned. “It kind of is.”

Sarah let her head fall back against the couch. “But seriously, I don’t know if that was Lawrence or someone else, but I do know he was angry and . . . I think . . . I think he said something else, right before I closed down communication.” She exhaled roughly. “I don’t know if I heard him right. He was trying to jump me and I don’t need that, so I cut him off, but if he was Lawrence . . .”

“What? What do you think he said?”

She turned her head toward Rosie. “I think he said he was murdered .”

Not unexpectedly, Rosie had one hell of a time falling asleep that night.

Back at her apartment and in her bed, she stared up at the glow of the dark stars stuck to her ceiling. They didn’t glow green. They were a soft, luminous white, but yeah, they were still tacky.

Rosie loved them.

They reminded her of infinite space, and while that may be a weird thing to want to be reminded of, she sort of found it comforting that in the big scheme of things, she was just a tiny speck of flesh and bone on a giant rock hurtling around the sun.

The stars also helped her fall asleep. Usually. But not tonight. Tonight she could only think about the reading with Sarah and the question her friend had asked her before she’d left.

“Are you going to say something?”

Rosie snorted-laughed into the relatively dark bedroom. Was she going to say something? To who? Devlin? Yeah, that was not going to happen. Her reluctance had nothing to do with Rosie not believing Sarah. She totally believed her. Sarah had connected with someone who was very angry and quite possibly could’ve been murdered, but—and it was a big but—who in the world would believe Rosie if she came up to them and said something like that?

It was one thing for her to readily believe what Sarah told her, because Rosie had seen some bizarre shit, but someone who most likely didn’t believe in the supernatural, even if their house appeared to be haunted, probably wouldn’t be open to a virtual stranger walking up to them and dropping that kind of bomb.

Because it would, in fact, sound like she’d donned her crazy pants.

Groaning, Rosie rolled onto her side and her gaze traveled across the room, to the heavily curtained bedroom window. It was the only window in the room. She was grateful for investing in those blackout curtains, because none of the bright, flashing lights from the French Quarter seeped through that window.

Rosie sighed.

There was no way she could say anything about what happened tonight. She didn’t know the de Vincents well enough to approach them, but she could tell Nikki. Even though her friend believed in the supernatural, she seriously didn’t think Nikki would feel remotely comfortable telling any of the de Vincents what Rosie had heard, because again, it would sound a little insane.

Besides all of that, and all of that was enough for Rosie to keep her mouth shut, Sarah and she couldn’t be sure that it was Lawrence who’d briefly come through. Wasn’t like the spirit had entered with a name tag. Yes, it seemed like it was him. It made sense, after all. Rosie had been at the cemetery and given Devlin peonies. As creepy as it sounded, Lawrence could’ve been hanging around either his son or the cemetery and for some bizarre reason hitched a ride with Rosie.

Shifting onto her back again, she closed her eyes and blew out a ragged breath.

Anything was possible, which meant that spirit could’ve really been Lawrence and it also meant that it could’ve been someone totally unrelated to the de Vincents, and it was just a strange coincidence or it could’ve been another de Vincent other than Lawrence. For decades, that family had been plagued by deaths and all kinds of drama. They were cursed! Lots of their family members had died, many in weird and bizarre manners.

But what . . . what if it had been Lawrence? What if he had come through the reading and wanted it to be known that he hadn’t killed himself? That he’d been murdered ? That was a big deal. Wouldn’t they want to know that?

If the shoes were on her feet, she would want to know. She figured she had a unique perspective on things, but this wasn’t about her.

“Ugh,” she moaned, rolling onto her stomach and planting her face in the pillow.

“The devil is coming.”

Her thoughts kept turning, but finally, after forever, and after kicking half the blankets off her, she fell asleep. She had no idea how many hours passed before she was jarred out of dreams about lemon sorbet by the shrill sound of her phone ringing.

Groaning, she smacked around on her end table, blindly reaching for her phone. Her hand hit an empty plastic glass, knocking it to the floor.

“Damn it,” she muttered, lifting her face from the pillow. Blowing a thick curl out of her face, she stretched over and snatched up her phone. Squinting, she saw Nikki’s smiling face on the screen. It was a god-awful time in the morning; the kind of time that wasn’t even really morning in Rosie’s opinion.

She answered as she let her head fall back to the pillow. “Hello?” she croaked, and then winced. She sounded like she’d inhaled fifty packs of cigarettes.

“Rosie? It’s Nikki. I know . . . it’s early and I’m sorry,” Nikki said, and even half-awake, Rosie thought her voice sounded weird, like her words were mushy. “But I need your help. I’m in the hospital.”

Never in her life had Rosie woken up so quickly. The moment she hung up the phone, she all but flung herself off the bed. Fear had twisted up her stomach as she found a pair of black leggings that looked somewhat clean. She pulled them on, along with her oversized Got Ghosts! shirt. Her hair was way too much of a mess to even begin to do something with it, so she grabbed a scarf, shoving the curls out of her face.

Thank God and every deity she could think of that she kept a stash of those disposal toothbrushes in her Corolla. She brushed her teeth on the way to the hospital and when she got her first look at Nikki’s bruised and battered face while she was waiting for her outside just as sun crested the sky, Rosie heart cracked wide open.

She couldn’t believe what she saw as she ushered Nikki into the car or what she’d learned, and it wasn’t until after she finally got Nikki settled in her bedroom that she sat down and really tried to process what had happened.

No one should have to go through what Nikki Besson had been through.

“God,” she whispered, staring at her mug of untouched coffee. Scrubbing her hands down her face, she exhaled roughly.

Nikki could’ve died—she was almost murdered.

Hands shaking, she lowered them to her knees and looked over her shoulder, to the beaded curtain that separated the bedroom and living room. Last night, while Rosie was doing a ghost tour in the Quarter, one of her closest and nicest friends in the whole wide universe had been fighting for her life.

And in the process of fighting for survival, she had killed the man who attacked her.

Rosie shuddered.

Slowly, her gaze drifted back to the open laptop sitting on the coffee table that had once been a chess table. What had happened was already breaking news on the local news website. Luckily, Nikki’s name hadn’t been mentioned, thank God, but that couldn’t last for long.

“Parker Harrington. . . .” Rosie shook her head in disbelief. She didn’t know Parker personally, but she knew of him. The Harringtons were just like the de Vincents. Extremely wealthy with a long bloodline rooted in New Orleans and Louisiana. The Harringtons were so much like the de Vincents that Parker’s older sister was engaged to Devlin de Vincent.

The man she’d met less than twenty-four hours ago in the cemetery.

The man whose father might’ve possibly come through Sarah and told them he was murdered.

And now his fiancée’s brother had tried to kill Nikki—Nikki, who was possibly the sweetest and kindest person, who spent her weekends volunteering at the local no-kill animal shelter.

Nikki had defended herself with a . . . a wood chisel.

Another shudder rolled through Rosie as she leaned forward and picked up her mug. As far as Nikki knew, she couldn’t return to her apartment for some time. It was a crime scene, and if Rosie knew anything, she knew the police would simply leave. They’d remove the body, but they wouldn’t do any cleanup. Nikki would be left with that. Just like Rosie had been left to deal with that after Ian took his life.

There was no way she would let Nikki handle that. No way.

Guilt churned as she stared down at her light brown coffee. She liked it sweet with lots of sugar and cream. Actually, it was basically sugar with a dash of coffee. But right now, the coffee still tasted bitter. Rosie had been at Nikki’s apartment for hours earlier in the day, and from what she could gather from Nikki, Parker had showed up an hour or so later. If Rosie hadn’t left . . .

Being haunted by all the could’ve, would’ve, should’ve was worse than an honest to goodness ghost.

She took a sip of her coffee and was about to put the mug back down when there was a sharp knock on her door. She drew in a deep breath.

Call it a sixth sense or whatever, but Rosie had a good idea of who stood on the other side.

Gabriel de Vincent.

Nikki had told her he’d been at the hospital and she’d all but snuck out. From that very second, Rosie figured Gabe was going to ferret out where Nikki was and where Rosie lived. Standing, she stepped around the coffee table and crossed the short distance to her door. Throwing the dead bolt, she cracked the door open.

And she was right.

There stood Gabe, in all his hot, long haired de Vincent glory. Her gaze drifted over his shoulder and her heart jumped into her throat at the same time her stomach dropped. Gabe wasn’t alone.

Devlin was with him.