by JoAnn Ross
A weekend he’d planned to give her a promise ring. The diamond had been merely a chip, but he’d gone without lunches and worked double shifts on the docks for three months while going to college to pay for it. His anger building, Michael stabbed a forkful of golden fried potatoes and shoved them into his mouth to keep from telling her exactly how much her behavior had hurt.
“What letters?”
“Geez.” He put the fork down again, took a long drink of chicory coffee, then dragged a hand through his hair. “I might not have written every day like we promised, but I did write.” Which was more than she’d done. “A lot.”
“But, I never...” Her voice drifted off. “It must have been Julie.”
“Who’s Julie?”
“My roommate in the sorority house. Her mother and mine were Tri-Delts together. They must have cooked up a plan to keep me from getting your letters.”
Actually, that suggestion didn’t come as all that much of a surprise. It made him angry as hell, but Michael could easily see Maureen Longstreet stooping to such subterfuge.
“You still didn’t return my calls when you came home for Thanksgiving vacation.”
“I didn’t get them,” she insisted.
Okay. Since one of her parents, or the housekeeper had answered every time he’d called, until her mother had finally coolly explained that Lorelei didn’t want to see him, Michael was willing to buy that, too. However...
“I guess you were too busy with all your sorority sisters, and all your new pals to write to me,” he said with far more casualness than he felt. He took another swallow of coffee and wished it were something stronger.
“But I did!”
Her eyes were wide, a white line circled the lush full lips he could still taste, and her hand, as it pressed against her chest, was trembling. Michael had interrogated enough suspects to know when someone was lying. Lorelei was not.
“Aw, hell.” He leaned his head against the back of the chair and shut his eyes. The answer, striking like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, was not a pleasant one. “Mom must have ditched them.”
“Your mother? But I thought she liked me.”
“She did.” Michael dragged his hand down his face, then opened his eyes. The hurt expression on her too pale face caused something elemental to move deep inside him. It was at that moment, when he wanted to calm more than he wished to conquer, that Michael knew he was sunk.
“But she never made any secret of the fact that she thought we were too young to be so serious about each other. She was always afraid that you’d get pregnant. And I’d have to drop out of school to support you.”
“In order for me to get pregnant, you would have had to have made love to me. Which you constantly refused to do.”
Despite the seriousness of the conversation, Michael laughed as he watched her pique overcome her hurt. “I was trying to stay on the straight and narrow for your sake,” he insisted. “Hell, if you had gotten pregnant, you would have had to give up all your dreams of becoming an actress. If you’d ended up getting married at sixteen, you sure as hell wouldn’t be a big star today.”
He was undoubtedly right. She probably would have stayed in Louisiana, married Michael and raised a family. And daydreamed about what might have been.
“You never would have forgiven me,” he insisted.
Lorelei knew he was right about the possible regrets. Then again, how could she explain that there’d been times over the past years, when she’d think about the family she’d once dreamed of having with Michael, and suffer an entirely different set of regrets.
“We’ll never know,” she decided reluctantly.
“You’re probably right.” The buzzer at the door sounded.
“That’ll be Shayne. I forgot to call him and tell him that I was going to take the day shift.” Michael tossed the damask napkin on the table, stood up and answered the door.
“How are you feeling?” Shayne asked Lorelei as he sat down at the table and filched a piece of his brother’s tasso.
“I’m fine. Really,” she insisted when he gave her a long look that could have rivaled his brother’s for intimidation tactics.
Despite his easygoing attitude and expensive clothes—he was wearing custom-tailored linen slacks and a cream linen collarless shirt today—Lorelei understood that Shayne O’Malley wasn’t the carefree playboy he appeared to be at first glance. In fact, in his own way, she was sure Shayne could be as dangerous as his older brother. Which made her even more interested in meeting the woman capable of holding her own with the former secret agent.
“Good,” he said finally. He turned to Michael. “I finished running all those names you gave me through every computer data bank I could hack my way into. Everyone came up as clean as a whistle.” He handed the manila envelope to his brother. “I’ve got something for you, too,” he said to Lorelei. “It was waiting downstairs at the desk. I had to open it,” he said apologetically.
“I understand.” Wondering if this would ever be over, if she’d ever have her privacy back, she opened the envelope. “It’s a screenplay,” she told Michael, who was watching her carefully. “From Brian.” She read the note clipped to the top page. “He says that he knows he’d promised to wait, but since I wasn’t going to be doing anything today, he thought I might like to pass the time reading it.”
“Interesting he’d assume you wouldn’t have anything to do today,” Michael drawled.
Although she no longer had any secrets from either of these men, Lorelei felt her cheeks burn. “I think he meant since the shooting was called off,” she murmured.
Michael chuckled and Shayne pretended sudden interest in the remaining fried potatoes which he succeeded in polishing off. “Well,” he said, pushing back away from the table, “since it seems you have everything under control, Mike, I’m going to dig a little deeper. I left a program running that should be into the mainframe at Bank of America. By the time I get back, I should have a better picture of everyone’s cash flow.”
“You broke into the crew’s bank accounts?” Lorelei asked, appalled at the idea of Michael condoning such a thing. “Isn’t that against the law?”
“It’s skimming on the edge,” Shayne argued. “After what happened to you yesterday, if we had any idea who the guy might be, it’s possible the L.A. cops could talk a friendly judge into issuing a search warrant. But we’re still working in the dark. And time’s running out. Time we don’t have.”
“Still...” She looked up at Michael, who was standing beside the table, arms folded over his chest. “I have to admit I’m surprised you’d stoop to such an unethical thing.”
His jaw firmed, his expression turned as stony as she’d ever seen it. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Lorelei.”
The idea that this man, whose integrity had always been as unyielding as the Rock of Gibraltar, would go against everything he’d always believed in for her sake stunned her.
“I think I’m beginning to understand why you left the police force.”
“Are you suggesting I was a dirty cop?”
Knowing him as well as she did, loving him as she did—and probably always had—Lorelei refused to be intimidated by the steely glare.
“Of course not. But you care, Michael. Sometimes, perhaps, too much.”
She thought of what she’d managed to get out of Shayne during their afternoon conversations, how Michael blamed himself for Desiree’s nearly being killed because he’d followed police guidelines against his better judgment.
His only answer was a shrug and grunt But watching him carefully, Lorelei saw the chagrin in his eyes and realized that although he had saved Desiree’s life by shooting her attacker, he’d always consider himself responsible for having allowed the man to get so close in the first place.
She considered suggesting that he couldn’t save the entire world. Then realized he wouldn’t listen. “Desiree was fortunate to have you in her corner,” she said simply as she stood
up and walked the few steps to where he was standing, statue still. “So am I.”
She went up on her toes and kissed him. As their lips clung, Shayne cleared his throat. “Gotta go,” he announced. “I’ll be at the office if anything comes up.”
He let himself out. Neither participant in the lingering kiss heard his pleased, knowing chuckle.
MICHAEL’S HOUSE WAS in the part of New Orleans known as the Faubourg Marigny Historic District. Although it was a little more than a minute’s walk from the French Quarter, the distance could have been a hundred years. The neighborhood, which had been established in 1806 as a residential area—the word faubourg was French for suburb—had originally been settled by French and Spanish Creoles and des gens des couleurs libres, or “free persons of color.”
Succeeding decades brought immigrants from Italy, Ireland and Germany to the working-class neighborhood. Lorelei recalled from her schooldays that there’d once been so many people of German descent living in the little wedge of land between Esplanade and Elysian Fields that for a time the neighborhood had been known as Little Saxony.
“This must be convenient to your office,” she said as he drove past worn frame and brick buildings now housing jazz clubs and restaurants.
“It is. But that’s not why I chose it.”
“Why did you?” She was surprised by the revitalization of the neighborhood that had been going downhill when she’d left the city. “When the Quarter’s even closer.”
“The Quarter’s changed a lot since you left,” he said. “In a scramble for tourist dollars, it’s turned into the Theme Park from Hell. In fact, when you get right down to it, even the lofty environs of your parents’ Garden District now has tour buses clogging the streets and fouling the air. The way I see it, this neighborhood is one of the last remaining antidotes to the town’s chronic case of the cutes.”
Thinking about the way the landmark Jax Brewery had been turned into a glitzy shopping mall, and how the ubiquitous tacky souvenir T-shirt shops seemed to have sprung up like weeds, Lorelei decided he had a point.
“Besides, I like the pace here,” he said as he turned off Frenchmen Avenue and pulled into a crumbling brick driveway. “People still walk instead of drive, and although things admittedly get a little juiced up outside the clubs after the sun goes down, during the day there are two speeds—Stop and Mildew.”
She laughed appreciatively. Laughter that died off as she studied the house he’d parked beside. “This is yours?”
“It mostly belongs to the bank. But they let me live here.” He cut the engine and pocketed the key.
“It’s darling.” The quaint, Easter egg bright five-sided cottage had been built to conform to the quirky wedge-shaped lot. Such lots were not uncommon in the neighborhoods outside the original French Quarter grid since engineers had been forced to adjust their street schemes to the winding curves of the nearby river.
The house, set French-style against the banquette, or sidewalk, and constructed of stuccoed brick, had been painted in traditional Creole colors of putty, French red, and Egyptian blue.
“I’m still in the processing of remodeling,” Michael apologized as he unlocked the narrow wooden hurricane doors covering the entrance to the historic cottage. “I figure, what with all the work that needs to be done, and my budget, it’s undoubtedly a lifetime project.”
“A labor of love,” she murmured, taking in the interior living room wall that revealed the pink handmade bricks. The ceiling featured wonderful hand-cut beaded cypress ceiling beams. It crossed Lorelei’s mind that her mother, who’d never been a fan of Michael O’Malley, would definitely approve of his home.
He shrugged. “That’s on the good days. There are times when I think I must have gone mad the day I cashed out my pension plan to buy it.”
“It’s probably a better investment than the usual IRA.” She edged past the sawhorses holding a plank oak door he’d obviously been sanding and went through an arched doorway that led to the back of the house.
“The courtyard was one of the reasons I bought the place,” he said at her sharp intake of breath.
“I’d be tempted; too.” Her appreciative gaze drank in the triangle-shaped space filled with lush green subtropical plants. Although they appeared to be growing wildly, the mood—enhanced by a bubbling fountain and redbrick patio shaded by the leafy, spreading black limbs of an oak that had to be nearly three hundred years old—was that of a calming oasis. “It’s like a secret garden.”
Lorelei had grown up in this city renowned for its hidden courtyards. This, she decided, was one of the most magnificent she’d ever seen.
“I’m glad you like it,” Michae! mumbled, feeling suddenly like a tongue-tied teenager again. It shouldn’t matter so much that she like the house he’d fallen in love with at first sight. He shouldn’t even care what she thought.
But he did, dammit.
“I adore it.”
Accepting his offer of a tour, Lorelei oohed and aahed as they moved from room to room. The octagon-shaped room that shared an interior door with the master bedroom, which he was currently using as a study, would be perfect for a nursery, she thought idly. When the unconscious thought struck home, Lorelei realized that the idea of raising Michael’s babies in this darling Creole cottage was more than a little appealing.
As she ran her fingers over the hand-carved headboard of the yellow pine poster bed he’d been born in and that his mother had given him the day he’d closed on the house, Michael found himself envisioning making love to Lorelei in this bed. Imagined her giving birth to their own sons and daughters, pictured a lifetime of lazy Sunday breakfasts in bed.
Such thoughts, Michael decided, were not only dangerous, they were definitely premature. Right now his responsibility was to keep Lorelei safe. His mind needed to be sharp and clear, which meant he couldn’t allow himself to indulge in romantic fantasies. No matter how pleasing.
“You’d probably like to read that script Wilder sent over,” he said. He’d watched her sneaking peeks at it on the short drive from the hotel.
“If you wouldn’t mind. Although I’d planned to take some time off after this film, Brian will undoubtedly keep asking me if I’ve looked at it.”
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint the guy,” Michael agreed dryly. For some reason he didn’t like the screenwriter and although that alone would have given him reason to suspect the guy, Michael couldn’t ignore the fact that he was jealous of Wilder’s easy friendship with Lorelei, not to mention his aristocratic blond good looks, which he figured any woman would find appealing.
“If you’d rather I didn’t—”
“No.” Now he was being petty, which wasn’t at all like him. What the hell was Lorelei doing to his mind? “Go ahead. I’ve got some reports I should finish up, anyway.”
“If you’re sure.”
Her eagerness to please made him feel guilty. He smiled reassuringly. “Positive.”
They spent the next hour in the courtyard. Michael heard Lorelei sigh as she finished reading the screenplay.
He glanced up from his paperwork. “Not up to his usual standard?”
“Oh, it’s good.” She traced the title with her fingernail, as if trying to choose her words carefully. “Actually, it’s very good. But I think perhaps we’ve made too many movies together. He seems to be getting in a rut.”
“I see,” Michael said, not really seeing anything at all.
“It’s another woman-in-jeopardy script. Set here in New Orleans.”
Although he understood her concern about being typecast, Michael liked the idea of her work bringing her back to the city. “I read in a New Orleans magazine that we’re becoming a hot locale for films.”
“True. But this one’s so dark.” She frowned down at the computer-printed pages. “And after what I’ve been going through, the idea of being held captive in some former slave quarters is not exactly my idea of a fun flick.”
“I can see why you might be hesitant t
o agree to the part,” Michael said carefully. He felt as if he were out in the bayou, treading on unstable ground.
He wanted to simply tell her that she belonged here in New Orleans with him, that somehow they could work out their schedules to allow a life together. But then he remembered other women—Desiree in particular—chiding him for possessing an overabundance of male chauvinism. He was hesitant to begin offering advice for fear Lorelei might think he was pressuring her.
Trying to become a modern man of the nineties sure as hell wasn’t easy, Michael considered blackly.
Lorelei watched his expression darken and wondered at the cause. She’d thought she’d convinced him that she and Brian were merely friends.
“There’s another problem.” She gave another soft sigh. “I’m afraid he’ll take it personally if I turn it down. It’s obvious that he wasn’t kidding when he said he wrote this screenplay with me in mind.”
“It fits you that well?” Modern male or not, Michael didn’t like the idea of any other man knowing Lorelei’s inner thoughts and feelings.
“Actually, she’s more of a victim than I would be,” Lorelei said. “And a lot more innocent But he kept making a strange mistake. He kept typing my name instead of the character’s.”
Michael felt the hairs at the back of his neck stand up in a way he’d learned to trust. “Can I read it?” he asked mildly, not wanting to upset her unnecessarily. After all, so long as she was with him, she’d be safe.
She smiled, obviously pleased that he’d want to share her work. “Of course.” She handed it over. “Meanwhile, if you don’t mind me borrowing your bed, I think I’ll take a nap. For some reason—” her eyes sparkled with humor “—I didn’t get much sleep last night”
“You’re welcome to anything I’ve got. Including my bed.” He glanced down at the screenplay he was holding, torn between conflicting needs. “Want some company?”
“The offer’s more than a little tempting. But I don’t think I’d get any sleep.”
He studied the pale purple shadows beneath her remarkable eyes. “Why don’t we compromise?” he suggested. “You get some rest, I’ll read the script and then—” he waggled his eyebrows in a theatrically seductive way that made her laugh “—I’ll come wake you up.”
