by JoAnn Ross
Her smile could have lit up the entire city of New Orleans for months. She stood up, plunked herself down on his lap, cuddled close and kissed him. A long, sweet kiss that made Michael’s head swim with hunger and desire coil in his gut.
He ran his hand down her hair then played with the pale ends that were brushing the tips of her breasts. Tips that tightened to the hardness of rubies beneath his touch. “Maybe I’ll read the script later.”
She laughed again, marveling that she could feel so carefree after what had happened yesterday, linked her fingers with his and lifted their joined hands to her smiling mouth. “Read the script now.” She brushed her lips over his knuckles. “After last night, I need to recoup my strength.”
He loved looking at her. Loved touching her. Loved just sitting around with her. Hell, Michael realized suddenly, he just plain loved her. The thought, which once would have been enough to strike terror in his bachelor’s heart was eminently satisfying.
“Are you saying you can’t keep up with me?”
She trailed her free hand down his chest, toying with his buttons as her expression changed before his eyes. She was no longer Lorelei, the young girl he’d loved and lost. Nor was she the woman he’d come to love again. She’d suddenly become every dangerous femme fatale in every movie he’d ever seen—Bette Davis in Jezebel, Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara, Kim Novak’s enigmatic siren in Vertigo, Lorelei’s sexy cat burglar in Hot Ice. Michael stared, transfixed at the metamorphosis.
“Believe me, darling,” she purred, nipping playfully at his earlobe, “the question is not whether I can keep up with you. But whether—and how long—you can keep up with me.”
Looking at her, Michael feared that just might be true. “Never let it be said that Michael O’Malley backed down from a challenge.”
Lorelei’s answering laugh was at first low and sultry, then slipped into silvery delight as she fell out of her siren character. “I love you, Michael O’Malley.” Before he could respond, she pressed her fingers against his lips.
“No,” she said quickly, “you don’t have to say anything, Michael. Not now. I understand that you’re a man accustomed to thinking things through, and this has all happened so fast. I also realize that you’re undoubtedly going to point out that danger is a potent aphrodisiac, but that truly isn’t responsible for the way I feel.
“I do love you,” she insisted. “Maybe I never stopped loving you. But I’m willing to wait until you’re sure about your feelings for me.”
That said, she gave him another quick, heartfelt kiss, then ran from the courtyard, leaving him alone. Michael considered going after her. But as he caught sight of the bound screenplay she’d left on the table, responsibility reared its head. He’d check it out, he decided. Then there’d be plenty of time to tell Lorelei how he felt, all night to show her how much he loved her, too.
12
LESS THAN TEN MINUTES after Lorelei had fled the garden, the phone rang. Michael picked up the cordless extension he’d taken outside with him on the second ring.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Mike, how’re things going?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” Then Michael thought about the way Shayne looked whenever Bliss was in the room, the way he mooned about her whenever she went out of town on her antique buying trips and decided that his brother probably would understand.
“Actually, I might surprise you,” Shayne said cheerfully, unknowingly seconding his brother’s opinion. “And I hate to be the one to break up your stolen day with Lorelei, but there’s a storm front coming in tonight that could bring a lot of wind and rain.”
“So?”
“So Taylor decided he couldn’t skip work today after all. The shooting’s back on schedule.”
“Hell.” Michael glared down at the pages he’d read so far. Lorelei was right. The script was too close to real life for comfort. He’d wanted to make a few calls. To check things out.
“No problem,” Shayne said when Michael told him his problem. “I can take her to the warehouse. After all, I’m supposed to be handling days anyway.”
It was, Michael thought, a practical solution. But...
“I’ll take good care of her, Mike,” Shayne said, displaying an uncanny ability to read his brother’s mind. “I’ll watch her the same way I would Bliss under the circumstances.”
It was, Michael admitted, all that he could ask. Besides, Shayne wasn’t exactly an amateur. Although he hadn’t shared a great deal about what he’d been doing the past decade, Michael knew that during his years working as a secret agent, or spy, or whatever the hell his brother had been, Shayne had certainly survived more than his share of dangerous situations.
“I worry about her,” he admitted.
“I know. That’s the down side of love,” Shayne said. “But all the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
Remembering how Bliss had almost been killed not so long ago, Michael knew that his brother did understand. All too well.
“You’re not a bad kid,” he drawled. “For a baby brother.”
“And you’re not so bad, either. For a big brother,” Shayne said with a laugh. “I’ll be over in about ten minutes.”
Ten minutes, Michael thought as he hung up the phone. He considered waking Lorelei up and making quick furious love to her, but as much as he wanted her again, the idea of Shayne walking in on them was not an appealing one.
“Later,” he promised himself as he entered the bedroom and was struck by the provocative sight of her lying on her stomach in his bed. Hell. She looked even better than in his fantasies.
“Later,” he repeated fifteen minutes. later as he kissed her goodbye.
“Later,” she agreed.
And then she was gone. Michael looked up at the sky, viewed the thick pewter clouds rolling in from the Gulf, and damned the weather system that had screwed up his romantic plans for the day.
By the time he’d skimmed through the rest of the screenplay, Michael was even more worried. He drove the few blocks to his office, where the computer Shayne had installed had begun kicking out reams of paper that gave him an intimate look at the finances of all the crew members who’d come to New Orleans for the location shoot.
Knowing Nelson’s gambling problems, Michael wasn’t surprised that the cameraman didn’t have any savings accounts or that his credit cards were all in default. Other than a paid off five-year-old Mustang, Dennis the prop guy had no credit history. Taylor seemed to spend money like it was water. Then again, Michael decided with a mental shrug, the director obviously had it to spend.
He skimmed through the pages listing the checks Wilder had written over the past three months.
“Interesting,” Michael murmured as one particular item caught his eye. He’d just reached for the phone to call a local real estate office when he heard the jangle of the bell on the downstairs door.
Since it was Monday, the day Bliss closed the shop, and since he knew from Shayne that she would be in Houma at an estate sale until late afternoon, Michael tensed. Then he pulled the gun from his shoulder holster, slowly opened his office door and began creeping down the stairs.
SHAYNE PARKED OUTSIDE the building where today’s filming was to take place. The warehouse had been rented for the week. Michael had checked the place out two days earlier, and although he’d professed concern that there were too many blind corners, they’d both agreed that as long as they didn’t let Lorelei out of their sight, it should be okay.
After last night’s so-called accident, Shayne didn’t feel nearly as sanguine about the location as he had earlier.
He opened the door with the key Taylor had messengered over to his office, and led the way down an aisle between stacks of boxes and crates. “Hey,” he called out, “where is everyone?”
When the only answer was the echo of his own voice in the cavernous building, he realized they’d been set up.
“What’s wrong?” Lorelei asked, her eyes widerting as he pulled
the pistol from the back of his linen slacks.
“Don’t ask any questions,” he said under his breath. “We’re going to leave the way we came in. And if anything happens to me, I want you to run like hell and call Michael from the car phone. Whatever you do,” he stressed, “don’t stop to look back.”
“I don’t understand. Where is everyone?” Comprehension came crashing down on her as the unmistakable retort of a gunshot rang out. She heard Shayne’s vicious curse, watched him stumble, saw the blood spurting out of his shoulder. “Oh, no.” She dropped to her knees beside him.
“I told you, dammit, get out of here.” Shayne’s words were slurred, his voice sounded as if it were coming from a very long way away. “It’s not safe.”
“I can’t leave you.” Heedless of the blood, she put her hands beneath his armpits and began dragging him along the concrete floor.
“Go,” he insisted, with the dazed look of pain in his eyes. “Call Michael...he needs to know...”
“It’s okay,” she assured him, ducking as another shot from somewhere up above them whizzed past her ear. “It’ll be all right, Shayne.... It’s only a few more feet to the door....”
Shayne, who’d fallen unconscious, couldn’t hear her. Limp as he was, he seemed to weigh a ton; her heart was pounding and her breathing grew labored as she struggled to get this man who’d become like a brother to her to safety.
She was less than six feet from the door when a man jumped down from a tower of crates in front of her. “What’s the hurry, sweetheart?”
Lorelei stared at the man she’d thought was her friend. “Oh, please, don’t let it be you!”
“Sorry.” Brian Wilder’s grin was as dashing as ever. But there was a maniacal look in his eyes that terrified her. “You were expecting Eric, perhaps? Or John? Or Dennis?”
“Despite what Michael said, I honestly didn’t suspect any of you.” At her feet, Shayne groaned. To her horror, the screenwriter aimed the gun at the unconscious man’s chest. “Please, Brian,” she implored, “I’ll do whatever you want. Go wherever you please. Just don’t hurt Shayne any more.”
“You don’t understand.” His smile was that same horrible friendly one that was at such odds with his murderous behavior. “You’re going to go wherever I want, anyway, Lorelei. And do whatever I want. You have no choice, you see. But I can’t afford to leave witnesses.”
Lorelei heard a bloodcurdling scream as he pulled the trigger and realized it had been torn from her own throat. Then, remembering what Shayne had wanted her to do, she fled the warehouse.
Brian, who’d been on the verge of ensuring that the detective was dead, cursed as he realized she’d taken off.
“Bitch!” he roared. Then, having no choice but to abandon the man he’d just shot point-blank through the chest, he began running after her.
Lorelei had almost reached the car when he caught up with her. Grabbing hold of her flowing silver hair, he yanked her off her feet, making her fall. Lorelei felt her head slam against the blacktop. Then everything went dark.
MICHAEL CAME AROUND the corner of a display of stuffed teddy bears and found himself aiming his gun at a man who could have been a mirror image of himself. In twenty year’s time.
“What the hell?” He stared at his father in disbelief. His tone was not the slightest bit welcoming.
“What’s the matter, Michael?” Patrick O’Malley asked casually, as if it hadn’t been fifteen years since the last time he’d visited his son. “Don’t you recognize your own father?”
Michael cursed and put the pistol away. “I could have shot you.” The situation was too much like the recent one with Shayne and he hated knowing that his father—whose photographer’s eyes never missed a thing—could see his hands shake.
“I imagine there have been times when you’d have been glad to do precisely that,” Patrick agreed.
Michael didn’t answer. There was no need. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t Roarke tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I called him last month to assure him I’d be home for his wedding.”
“He probably didn’t mention it because he figured you’d miss it. Like you did all his birthdays.”
“Actually, I was there for his sixth,” Patrick argued. “I remember because it was a bitch getting a flight out of the Sudan. And I made his eleventh.”
“It was his twelfth. And you were a week late.”
Patrick shrugged shoulders as wide as Michael’s own. “Close enough.”
Even if he hadn’t been worried about Lorelei, Michael wouldn’t have been in the mood for reminiscing with the man who’d abandoned his family, leaving his eldest son to take over the role of man of the house.
“Look, Dad, I’m sure Roarke’s going to be tickled pink that you showed up.” Actually, Michael wasn’t certain about that at all. Although the middle O’Malley brother might not dislike their father with the intensity Michael did, he’d never exactly been a fan of the guy, either. “But right now I’ve got work to do, and—”
He cursed as the phone in his office started ringing. Turning his back on his father, he took the stairs two at a time. “Blue Bayou Investigations,” he managed to answer on the third ring. “Yeah, Dirkson,” he said as his former partner at the NOPD identified himself. “What’s up?”
Michael felt all the blood leave his face. “I’ll be right there.” He slammed the receiver down and took off running.
“What’s happened?” Patrick, who’d followed him into the office shouted as he ran after his son.
“Shayne’s been shot. They took him to Tulane. And Lorelei’s missing.”
“Shayne’s shot? How is he? He isn’t—”
“I don’t know, dammit.”
Michael’s hands were trembling as he tried to unlock his car door. It took three attempts before he managed to get the key into the lock and by then his father had caught up with him. He didn’t want to deal with old childhood hurts while his heart was ripping apart. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this man who’d made his mother cry for so many years.
But unable to leave his father alone on the sidewalk after having just informed him that the son he’d never bothered to get to know was lying in a hospital, possibly dead, Michael threw himself into the driver’s seat and reached across to unlock the passenger door. He gunned the engine, peeling rubber as he roared away from the curb before Patrick could get his seat belt fastened.
“Lorelei?” Patrick asked as they tore through the streets at a speed that didn’t even approach the legal limit. “Is that the little Longstreet girl you had a thing for?”
Michael shot him a look. “How do you know about that?”
“Your mother told me all about it in her letters. Including how she’d kept you from receiving the letters the girl sent from college. I never approved of that,” Patrick divulged.
It was one more stunner in a day that had already had more than its share of shocks. “Mom wrote to you?”
“Nearly every other month.”
“For all these years?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” Michael shook his head. “I don’t imagine you wrote back.”
“Whenever I could.”
Michael cursed as he looked up into the rearview mirror and saw flashing lights behind him. He had two choices. He could make a run for it. Or he could pull over and talk his way out of the ticket, which after all his years on the force, he had no doubt he could do.
Not wanting to get involved in a potentially deadly police chase, he pulled over, leaped out of the car and headed back to the patrol car. Fortunately, the cop recognized him immediately, Michael explained the problem and was promptly on his way again, this time with a police escort.
“I’m impressed,” Patrick murmured. “But not surprised. Your mother told me that you were well thought of in the department.”
“Mom seems to have been a font of information all these years,�
�� Michael said through clenched teeth.
“Since you’ve never been married yourself, I don’t think you’re in any position to judge any other couple’s relationship,” Patrick said mildly. “I love your mother, in my own way. She always understood that”
Michael’s response, as he pulled up outside the emergency room doors of Tulane Medical Center, was another rough curse.
LORELEI AWOKE to find herself on a bed in a room that at first seemed as dark as the inside of a tomb. As her eyes gradually adjusted to the lack of light, she realized that a kerosene lantern set atop a heavy stone pillar was making flickering shadows on the brick walls. Shadows that resembled demons dancing. Her head was pounding. Her arms, most particularly her wrists, ached. She tried to rub her aching temple, heard a metallic jangle and belatedly realized she’d been chained to the wall behind the bed.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a calm, all-too-familiar voice offered. The rusty bedsprings creaked as Brian sat on the edge of the bare mattress. “You’ll only succeed in bruising your wrists even more.”
Although his tone was mild, his eyes were not. In the stuttering lantern light Lorelei saw the fever and the madness.
She forced her whirling, pain-fogged mind to concentrate on what was most important: getting out of this horrendous situation alive. Of course he’d never be able to get away with this. The trick was to make sure she was still alive when Michael arrived to rescue her.
“Where are we?” she asked. The windows were covered with heavy wooden shutters. Lorelei had no idea how long she’d been unconscious, no clue as to whether it was night or day.
“My secret place.” He smiled down at her.
“That’s not very illuminating.”
“It’s not important for you to know. Since you’re not going to be leaving here.”
She’d been afraid of that. Tamping down her icy terror, she managed to soften her expression. Her eyes became wide and guileless.
