The reflection made her overly aware of the man next to her. Of how tall he was. Of the subtle scent of starch and fresh cologne.
“First time in New Orleans?” she asked quietly.
She felt his gaze on her. “Yes.”
She nodded, going silent again as a group of young men who stumbled by apparently weren’t holding their first beer. They hooted at a group of women half a block up, too young to realize the loud attention would get them nowhere. Too old to be indulging in such juvenile behavior.
“You?”
Josie looked at Drew. She wasn’t prepared for the intensity in his eyes.
“Are you from here or a transplant?”
She felt the man next to her so completely she nearly couldn’t draw a breath. “Fifth generation New Orleanian.”
“Where was your family from before then?”
Josie had never been asked that question before. She supposed because her answer was usually all that the other person needed.
“ Carrefour, Haiti.”
“Ever been?”
She shook her head, keeping to herself that she’d never really traveled outside the city and its surrounding bayous.
She considered him for a long moment, trying to ignore the slow thud of her heart at being this close to him. “Anyone ever tell you that you ask a lot of questions?”
His grin was slow and wide. “All the time.”
“Part of your job?”
There was an almost indistinguishable stiffening of his limbs although he hadn’t moved. “You could say that.”
It seemed that the man liked to ask questions, but he didn’t like answering them.
Josie cleared her throat and turned her attention back to the street. Most men she crossed paths with were the same. It was almost as if they wanted to adopt a different persona while in the decadent city. Live out some kind of anonymous fantasy. Many of them forgot that she and the natives were just like everyone else. That they hadn’t been placed there strictly for their amusement or as players in whatever fantasy they’d concocted on the plane ride down.
If it was disappointment she was feeling that Drew was just like every other man who visited the city, she told herself she was being stupid.
JOSIE VILLEFRANCHE WAS A RARE and unusual beauty.
And the faint line that marred her lovely brow told Drew he’d just said something to upset her.
The mellow almost longing sound of a saxophone drifted out of the open door of the club across the street, lending a certain moment-outside-of-time element to the atmosphere.
When he’d decided to come downstairs to try again to connect with the exotic hotel owner-both to further his business intentions and to combine a bit of business with pleasure-he would never have expected her to stand next to him, inviting conversation. During dinner earlier, she’d disappeared into the kitchen, sending out a dark-haired young man, who’d smiled at him too widely, to handle him for the rest of his meal.
Now…
Well, for a moment he’d been lulled into a false sense of normalcy. Into thinking for a dangerous moment that he was there for no other reason than to enjoy her company, instead of her company being a bonus on top of something more important.
He slid his hand from his pocket and gestured to the hotel. “You work here long?”
A faint smile that seemed inspired more by irony than by humor. “You could say that.” She looked at him.
It didn’t take a NASA scientist to know that she had just turned his words back on him.
Intriguing.
“Do you like it?”
That seemed to catch her off guard. As if perhaps she’d never really stopped to think about the enjoyment factor of her responsibilities. He, of course, knew she outright owned the place. He also knew she had a female cousin who was breathing down her neck trying to extort money from her. And that she had a tax bill that was accumulating more penalties and interest on a daily basis. Not to mention that she hadn’t had a full paying guest before him since the murder that had taken place in the hotel a couple weeks ago.
Now what was there not to like about that?
She gave a small shrug that drew his gaze to the golden, damp skin of her bare shoulders. “That’s like asking me if I like my right arm. Or my toes.” She turned her whiskey eyes on him. “It’s so much a part of me that I don’t much think about it beyond it’s always been there.”
Drew had to look away. Her words hit a chord with him he was loath to dwell on.
“So the place is yours, then.” It was a statement more than a question.
She lightly bit on her plump bottom lip and nodded. “My granme, my grandmother, left it to me when she passed away last year. It’s been in my family for generations.”
Drew knew that. He also knew that her grandmother had been a shrewd old woman who’d also refused to sell. He wondered if shrewdness ran in the veins of the Villefranche women. And he referred to women because as far as he could uncover during his extensive investigation, there were no Villefranche men.
Drew pretended to look around. “Is it always this quiet?”
“No. It’s been a bit less busy than usual lately.”
A couple walked by in front of them.
“Hey, Frederique,” Josie greeted.
The overly made-up woman with a stretchy, low-necked top and short skirt smiled at her. “Hey, yourself, Josie girl.” She looked between them to the hotel lobby beyond. “How’s business after, well-” her gaze flicked to Drew’s face “-you know?”
Josie smiled. “Fine. It’s fine. Back to normal for all intents and purposes.”
“They catch…the person?”
Josie said they hadn’t.
The Quarter Killer. That’s what the murderer of the woman two weeks ago had been called by the local paper, the Times-Picayune. Drew hadn’t thought much of it. He’d reviewed the info he could get his hands on and suspected that the police had arrested the right man to begin with, and that Claude Lafitte had been released only because his older brother had married the daughter of a rich New Orleans businessman.
The woman stopped, nearly causing her overweight male companion to run into her back. “I think we’ll stop here,” she said.
The man pushed up his glasses, a nearby streetlight glinting off his balding head. “I thought we were going to your place?”
The prostitute Josie had called Frederique smiled and smoothed back the tufts of hair over each of his protruding ears, giving him a loud kiss. “I can’t wait that long, baby. I want you now.”
She kissed him again, then edged him between Josie and Drew into the lobby.
“My regular room,” she whispered. “Oh, and he’s got money, so don’t worry about overcharging, if you get my drift.”
Josie’s gaze met Drew’s and he wondered if she would raise the room rate for the drunken john.
“A regular?”
“You could say that.”
Then he watched as Josie left him to go check in her latest guests, and just like that Drew lost his tentative connection with her.
“Mr. Morrison?”
He jerked to look at Josie, who had stopped halfway to the desk. He was so taken off guard that he didn’t think to tell her to call him Drew.
“Would you like a nice, ice-cold glass of tea?”
Drew smiled. “Yes. Yes, I’d like that.”
4
ONLY DREW HADN’T GUESSED he’d be drinking that tea alone.
He lay back in his double bed staring at the whirling fan and the shadows playing across the ceiling. It was somewhere around 3:00 a.m., and in the room next to his the squeak of bedsprings had finally stopped along with the moaning he suspected was faked, but he couldn’t be sure.
What he was sure about was that the sound of a couple having sex, albeit it professional sex, ratcheted up his own growing desire for the elusive hotel owner.
He rubbed his forearm draped over his brow then sighed. It was hot. Hotter than he could remember it being for a long time. Or perhaps his keen awareness of it was due to the lack of air-conditioning.