Obsession

13

JOSIE COULDN’T BELIEVE that someone had gained access to the back door…again.

She positioned a two-by-four diagonally across the closed doorway and took a nail out of her mouth, then hammered it in. She repeated the process with twenty nails until she was convinced that there was no way anyone was going to be coming through that door again until she could get the locks changed.

She looked over her shoulder at the brightly lit kitchen. She only hoped she had locked the intruder out instead of in.

After picking up the shotgun from the cutting-board table, Josie made her way back out through the courtyard and into the lobby, Jez following on her heels. She’d switched on all the lights so not a shadow remained, and had even gone through the rooms upstairs, although she was relatively certain whoever had gained access to the kitchen hadn’t made it up the stairs. She would have heard them.

She glanced down at the inexplicably friendly feline. “Have you decided to keep me company tonight?”

Jez rubbed Josie’s shin with her nose.

Josie picked her up with her free hand. “Good. I could use some.”

She’d already locked the front door and put a Closed sign in the window. While it wasn’t the first time she’d been alone in the hotel, that way, it was certainly the first time she was overly aware of it.

And if Drew returned?

For some reason she couldn’t explain, she knew he wouldn’t be coming back tonight.

And maybe not for any other night.

The possibility made her feel even lonelier.

DREW SAT BACK FROM where he’d been diligently working at the desk and glanced at his watch. After midnight.

Shit.

He’d been so engrossed with the information he was uncovering on his client, that he hadn’t realized how late it had gotten.

Josie…

His throat tightened. He was surprised that the first person who entered his mind was her. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so much surprise as a realization.

What he was coming to understand was that his connection to the exotic hotel owner involved more than just fantastic sex.

He got up from the chair, checking to make sure he had his wallet, cell phone and card key before leaving the room. He took the elevator to the lobby then stepped outside. He envisioned her sitting at the front desk of Hotel Josephine, cooling herself with that lacy fan he’d seen her use the first time he’d laid eyes on her.

Days had passed, but rather than the city giving itself over to autumn, it appeared to be getting hotter still. He didn’t know if that was the norm, but he did know that he was getting used to the heat, his body adjusting so that he didn’t find walks like the one he was taking now as taxing as he would have a few days ago.

Instead, what the heat did to him, especially since he’d just spent the day in an air-conditioned room, was make his body remember all the hot things he and Josie had done last night. He glanced down to make sure that his arousal-brought on by merely thinking about her dark, lush body-wasn’t having an obvious effect. While more unusual things had probably been seen on Bourbon Street, he was no exhibitionist.

This was a first for him, this incessant lust he felt for Josie Villefranche. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her, no matter how much sex they had or how often he was in her presence. In the year that had passed since his divorce, his social life had included a few select women, none of them making it far beyond the morning after. Hell, even with Carol, his ex, he couldn’t remember feeling this way. Perhaps he had, back in the beginning of their relationship, but what had transpired between then and now had sullied all that, making what he was feeling for Josie fresh and new and perplexing.

Never, ever had he turned his professional attentions toward helping a mark before.

He slid his right hand into his pocket, pondering that reality.

He was hired to do a job and he did it. That’s where his interest began and ended. Only this was no longer just a job to him. Not this one. Not Josie. So he’d begun digging. And he wasn’t so much surprised by what he’d uncovered as he was enlightened.

It seemed Rove had bought the two buildings to the right of Josie’s establishment, the private residence to the left, and also held the deeds to a warehouse behind the Josephine.

Obviously Dick Rove’s intention had never been to renovate the hotel and make a go of it. He planned to raze it and build a bigger hotel, something more befitting the Royal Emperor Suites family of hotels.

If Drew hadn’t been so distracted by how smalltime the job had been and so focused on the next job he wanted to win, he’d probably have picked up on that.

Then he’d let Josie into his life.

Or, rather, she’d sneaked into his mind and heart like a bewitching enchantress.

So Rove had a lot more riding on the outcome of this project than Drew had originally suspected. Which led him back to his earlier suspicion that Rove also had someone else working the case.

But who? And was he or she responsible for what was happening?

Drew neared the hotel, taking in the old place and her flower-decorated balconies and dark windows. Was the building on the city’s historical register? If it wasn’t, then Josie should take measures to make sure it was placed there immediately. Also, he needed to check into the laws that would prevent Rove from building something not in line with the architectural integrity of the area. Laws Drew’s client may have already bypassed by greasing a few of the right palms.

The Mississippi River wasn’t the only thing that ran crooked down here.

Drew stopped in front of the double doors. Closed. He cupped a hand and looked inside. Dark.

Damn.

Had Josie closed up and gone to bed?

He rang the bell he knew would alert her up in her private rooms.

Nothing.

He stepped back and looked up at the fourth floor. He thought he saw movement near the balcony to what he guessed was her room, but he couldn’t be sure.

What he could be sure of was that she wasn’t going to answer the door. And he realized it was no more than he deserved after deserting her.

He waited for five minutes, then wove his way through the tourists back toward the Marriott.

JUST AFTER DAWN, Josie locked the hotel after herself, leaving a note for Monique and Philippe that they should take the day off and that she’d call them later. She tucked her handbag under her arm and watched as Jez scampered down the street, surprisingly limber given her age. Apparently she was satisfied that her company was no longer needed and was off to do whatever it was she did between feeding times.

Josie glanced around the street before choosing a direction. At this time of the morning, the area looked like a ghost town. Stores and clubs and restaurants were closed up tight, discarded cups and litter dotted the curbs and sidewalks, and the stench of urine and beer was strong. At somewhere around ten, when everyone stirred to start the workday over again, employees would sweep and water down the sidewalks and street in front of their places of business. Until then, it looked like someone had held a party and left a helluva mess.

Josie was used to it. This was where she’d grown up. She knew which corners the homeless preferred for sleeping. Knew which puddles not to walk through. Which alleys to steer clear of.

Of course, trying to focus on her surroundings was a diversionary tactic that wasn’t quite working. She’d gotten little sleep last night. Not just because of her mysterious back-door visitor. But also because all she could see was Drew’s somber face as he’d stood on the street below, waiting for her to open the door.

For some reason she couldn’t define, she’d simply peered through the balcony doors at him, leaving him standing there. Perhaps it was an instinctual reaction designed for self-protection. Not from physical harm. But from emotional devastation.

She’d never have expected that she would come to feel what she was for the striking, grinning stranger from Kansas City. She’d had great sex before without attaching herself to the individual. But with Drew…

With Drew, all she had to do was think his name and her pulse thickened and her heart gave an off beat.

If pressed to point at any one reason for her uncharacteristic behavior, she couldn’t have done it. It was the way he put his hands on her and the way he didn’t. It was what he whispered into her ear and what he left unsaid. It was the way he slept with his arm protectively encircling her, as if he didn’t want to let her go. It was the way he did release her without her saying a word, seeming to understand her need for freedom and independence.

It was everything. It was nothing.

And she had as much control over it as she did her own heartbeat.

A trombone player was already setting up on a corner, using his case as a chair while he polished his instrument, a small cigar box at his feet for change. He spotted Josie and smiled.

“Morning, Miss Villefranche.”

“Good morning, Harry. How’s life treating you?” She tossed a dollar bill into his box.

“Better all the time.”

She smiled and continued down the street.

It took her about twenty minutes to walk to her destination. Thankfully the caretaker had already opened the gates, which were closed at night because the voodoo queen Marie Laveau’s grave had been looted one too many times by tourists and locals alike. She passed the aboveground tomb in question, which was decorated with all sorts of mementos and voodoo icons, walking silently between the narrow rows until she reached the far wall. She paused for a long moment, unmoving, then touched the plaque engraved with her grandmother’s name.

In the past year, it seemed only this place was able to give Josie a sense of peace she’d lost along with Josephine Villefranche. Her mind cleared of all thought and her body relaxed, the act of being there giving her a sense of life’s cycles. Her, her mother, her grandmother and her mother before her. Each woman different yet with the same blood running through their veins.

Even her cousin figured in there, as part of a long line of strong Villefranche females.

“Granme, I need your help,” she said quietly, the raised lettering defined under her fingertips. “I’ve fallen in love.”

She hadn’t been aware that’s what she was going to say when she’d opened her mouth, but there it was. Two women had been murdered at the Josephine, and she was in danger of losing the hotel altogether, but it was her conflicted emotions for Drew Morrison that had drawn her here, searching for some of her grandmother’s no-nonsense advice.

Although, she understood that even her grandmother hadn’t always been the wise woman she remembered. Josie’s mother and aunt stood as clear reminders of that. When Josephine Villefranche had been younger than Josie was now, she’d fallen for a man. A brush salesman traveling through town. A handsome white man whose name Josie had never learned, although he had been her grandfather.

“Beware of love, Josie.” She heard Granme’s voice as clearly as if she’d been standing right beside her. “Love is the one thing over which you have no control. It can make you stronger or it can destroy you.”

Josie had been all of ten at the time and had knocked on her grandmother’s door during one of her “spells,” short periods of time when she’d withdraw from hotel duties and stay in her rooms, shut off from the world.

“Which did it make you, Granme?” she’d asked, settling into an armchair across from where her grandmother sat staring toward the windows. Windows that had been covered by sheers, blurring the scene beyond.

“Both.”

Josie opened her eyes and stared at the plaque.

If you didn’t have a choice in who or how you loved, did you then not have a choice in how that love affected you? Could you decide whether it made you stronger or destroyed you?

And therein lay the danger she suspected her grandmother had been trying to make her aware of.

Here she was with problems piled on her doorstep, and rather than seeking ways to save a hotel that was as much a part of her heritage as her grandmother had been, she was instead searching for answers to questions that had no practical relevance.

“Men are the devil, Josie. Especially white men. They mean no harm. They saunter in with their natty clothes and charming grins and make you feel like the most beautiful woman on earth. But then they’ll leave you behind like a bag of garbage at the curb.”

“How are white men different from black men, Granme?”

She’d pointed a gnarled finger at Josie. “Because you expect the black men to stay.”

So had her grandmother expected, or at least hoped, that her white lover would stay and marry her? Had he even known their brief affair had produced a child?

And had Josie’s mother decided not to make the same mistakes her own mother before her had? Had she seen her chance to get that forever and sacrificed everything in order to get it?

Were there days she regretted her decision? Or was she even now completely happy and content?

Josie dropped her hand from the plaque.

“This place, this hotel, it will never betray you, girl. It will never take up with another woman, or leave you pregnant, or move on to the next town without you. Remember that. Respect that.”

Josie opened her purse and fished inside for a silver dollar, which she placed on a small shelf below the plaque. She left her fingers on top, pondering the many words her grandmother had imparted. The advice, the warnings, the wisdom. Never had she considered the possibility that much of it was born of a woman scorned.

She squared her shoulders. “I’m going to save the hotel, Granme. Of that you can be sure.”

Then she turned and made her way back through the graveyard, a new resolve filling her.