“Josie.” She briefly took his hand and then turned around to put the money into some sort of lockbox. He noticed her feet were bare and that she wore a chain of tiny shells around her left ankle. “Josie Villefranche.”
Drew was mildly surprised she was the owner. His target.
He picked up his hat from the counter. Maybe this one last crappy job before he moved on to bigger and better things might not be without its fringe benefits.
2
DREW LET HIMSELF into room 2C, put his suitcase on the wrought-iron bench at the foot of the matching double bed, then crossed to the open French doors. He stepped out onto the narrow balcony and gripped the ornate railing, Bourbon Street spilled out like a strand of black pearls before him. He’d never actually stayed in the Quarter before. He might entertain his clients there, but he’d always stayed at the better hotels on the fringes of the famed district.
There was something almost…decadent about being there now. Although it was Sunday afternoon, he made out the sounds of a jazz band warming up in a bar across the street, watched as a few teenage girls, apparently on vacation, shopped for beads in a place a couple doors up, the faint smell of decay and beer and Cajun spices filling his nose.
A homeless black man wearing a crocheted African hat and holding a trumpet case walked by the hotel, raising his hand to wave inside, presumably at the alluring owner, Josie Villefranche.
The view Drew took in was worlds away from the cityscapes he usually saw outside his hotel-room window. For that matter, it was certainly worlds away from the trailer park he’d grown up in outside Kansas City. In KC, being poor meant to the bone, no romance in the situation as families and single parents tried to make the rent and put cheap food on the table. Here…well, here poor seemed to be worn as a badge of honor. It didn’t appear to be something you were, but a state you just happened to be in. In the French Quarter, strippers mingled with CEOs of large corporations, while in KC, most of the strippers would be lucky to meet a guy who worked at the Midland factory.
The contrast interested him. How would he have ended up had he been raised in a place like this, rather than the only son of a diner waitress in Missouri? A woman who’d smoked and drunk too much and had never let him forget where he came from? Who’d ceaselessly told him that his father was a useless, good-for-nothing deadbeat who had probably died when Drew was three to get out of paying child support?
Then again, you could change the story’s setting, but the characters would still be the same, so Kansas City or New Orleans, it likely wouldn’t have made a difference.
He stepped back into the room and looked around. It wasn’t bad. Not too big. Not too small. The high ceilings helped, even though the ceiling fan did little more than stir the heat. The carved woodwork and cornices were original if painted over and chipped. The walls needed a fresh coat of paint, and he made out what looked like a water stain in one corner, but overall the structure looked solid. He ran his finger along the top of the dresser. It was also clean. A double wrought-iron bed, two matching nightstands and lamps, and the bench were the totality of the furnishings, although the room was large enough to accommodate a desk and a couple of chairs. He moved toward the bathroom and switched on the light. The black-and-white mosaic tile that might date back at least a century needed re-caulking, and the claw-foot tub could use some attention. The cloudy mirror needed to be replaced and the sink held iron stains. He switched the light back off. The entire hotel would need a complete renovation before it could even be considered as part of the Royal Emperor Suites empire.
Then again, that wasn’t part of his job, questioning his clients’ motives. It was how to get them what they wanted. And this particular client wanted Hotel Josephine.
The black, rotary phone on the nightstand rang. Drew stared at it, then crossed to pick up the receiver, idly wondering when the last time was that he’d seen such an old phone.
“Hello?”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Morrison.” He recognized Josie’s sexily husky voice. “I just wanted to let you know that our hotel offers a full menu and room service should you be interested.”
Drew sat down on the bed, listening as the bedsprings squeaked. “That’s nice to know. I might just take you up on that.”
“Room service, then?”
He shrugged out of his jacket, hung it on one of the iron posts of the footboard, then began rolling up his sleeves. “Do you offer service downstairs?”
“Yes. In the courtyard.”
“Then that’s where I’ll take my meal.” After all, there was no time like the present to begin convincing the lovely Miss Villefranche that her life would be much easier without the hotel…and along the way perhaps entice her into sharing his bed while he was there.
“I NEED YOU TO RUN to André’s and get an order of crevettes and filet de truite amandine,” Josie said to Philippe as she swept through the swinging door into the kitchen.
The cook-slash-waiter-slash-busboy-slash-assistant manager sighed and began to undo the ties of his apron. “Couldn’t talk him into only the gumbo and a salad?”
She took a twenty out of the amount Morrison had given her for the week’s stay and handed it to her only staff member on duty at the moment. At any other time it took five to ten people to run the establishment. “Unfortunately, no.”
She’d hired Philippe three months ago when Samuel, the hotel’s assistant manager for the past fifty years, had died suddenly from a heart attack. Philippe had been a godsend at a time when Josie had been ill equipped to handle the loss of two very important people in her life so close together.
“Who’s going to eat all this gumbo?”
Josie didn’t provide an answer because Philippe didn’t need one. The two of them would be eating the large pot of the New Orleans staple, with Philippe taking some of it home with him to his mother, although he was thirty and should have long since moved out on his own.
“Fine.” He began moving toward the door that would take him through the back where their only guest wouldn’t see him. “He is a looker, that one, isn’t he?”
Josie frowned at him. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Hadn’t noticed, my narrow behind. He could charm the paint off the walls, that one could.” He crossed his arms in an exaggerated way.
“I don’t think he’s your type.”
“Of course, he’s my type. He’s male, isn’t he?”
Josie smiled. “Yes, but I don’t think he’s gay.”
Philippe sighed. “Pity. Why does it seem like all the good ones want women?”
Josie shook her head as the door slapped closed behind his retreating back. She readied a sparkling glass along with a pitcher of water, put a basket of day-old bread into the microwave to warm it and therefore make it seem fresher, then went back out into the courtyard to serve Mr. Morrison.
“Ah, thank you,” he said as she filled his glass. “Tell me, is it always this hot down here?”
It was a question Josie was asked often by tourists. While most seemed irritated with the thick heat, Morrison seemed merely to be asking a question. “It will cool down some soon,” she said, glad he hadn’t commented on the emptiness of the eating area.
“It doesn’t even get this hot in the summer where I’m from,” he said.
Josie removed the other three sets of silverware and wineglasses from the table. “Where’s that?”
“ Kansas City.”
She didn’t say anything as she moved to a cabinet near the kitchen door and put down the extra place settings. She’d never been outside the city. Had never had any cause to go anywhere else. While she’d heard somewhere down the line that her mother had ended up in Chicago, the northern city on Lake Michigan couldn’t have seemed farther away from Josie had it been across the ocean.