by JoAnn Ross
Something was happening between them. Something more charged than mere sexual tension. All around Zach and Alex, the Mardi Gras festivities flowed, but the pair remained in the center of the celebratory throng of people, an isolated, private island.
"I'd like that," she said in a perfectly rational voice although her eyes displayed her own suddenly turbulent emotions.
"Terrific." He held out his hand. "By the way, I'm Zachary Deveraux."
"Alexandra Lyons." As she took his outstretched hand, the vibrations the seemingly casual handshake set off hummed inside her like a tuning fork.
The Jean Lafitte Hotel, named for the legendary New Orleans pirate and smuggler, was a restored eighteenth-century town house, a romantic place of courtyards filled with tropical plants and private, wrought-iron balconies, in the heart of the Vieux Carré. The walk to the Jean Lafitte from Bourbon Street normally took no more than five minutes. Tonight, with the crowds, it took almost half an hour.
"Would you like to come in for a drink?" Alex asked. She was unwilling to let him get away so soon.
Zach reminded himself that he was a married man. That these feelings he was experiencing for Alexandra Lyons were not only wrong, but dangerous.
Although his marriage was turning out to be a horrendous mistake, Zach never played around. Not that there weren't always available women, both married and unmarried, who let it be known they would not be adverse to spending a stolen afternoon indulging in illicit pleasures.
But Zach had always considered himself a man of his word, and marriage vows were exactly that. Vows. For better or for worse.
"I'd like a drink," he said, ignoring the nagging voice of caution in the back of his mind.
Not surprisingly the Jean Lafitte's All That Jazz bar, along with the l'Escale dining room and the Gazebo Salon were packed.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Telling herself she had no other choice, Alex said, "I suppose we could go upstairs and call room service." As she waited for his answer, Alex realized she'd forgotten how to breathe.
Zach knew it was wrong. He realized he would be treading on very thin ice. But at this moment, on this freewheeling, carnival night, with the sound of Louis Armstrong floating on the breeze, Zach felt his usually dependable self-control slipping away like grains of sand—or strands of her magnificent red-gold hair—between his fingers.
"Sounds great," he heard himself saying before he could come to his senses and change his mind.
* * *
While Zach struggled with his conscience, Miranda and a companion strolled arm in arm into a bar near the Mississippi River levee. Tucked away in Miranda's quilted Chanel bag was a lovely pair of suede gloves she'd lifted that afternoon from the Canal Street Maison Blanche.
Although from the outside, the dimly lighted cocktail lounge looked like any other in the historic Vieux Carré, the management catered to a unique clientele. After ordering Sazeracs, Miranda and her escort managed to squeeze, just barely, into a spot on the crowded, postage-stamp-size dance floor.
As she felt Marie Hélène's long slender fingers settle on her waist, Zach's wife smiled with anticipation.
Chapter Twelve
Alex's hotel room was actually a minisuite, with an alcove containing a couch and easy chair adjoining the bedroom, which allowed them to keep their visit on a proper plane even as unspoken feelings swirled around them.
Alex had never met a man who was more easy to talk with. She found herself telling him more about herself than she'd ever told anyone—about growing up with her mother and twin brother, about the way they never stayed in one town or even one state for more than a year, about the pain and loneliness she suffered at first David's, then her mother's death.
It was as if, once she started talking, she couldn't stop. She told him all about her dreams of becoming a designer. And about her time working in New York and more recently in Paris. She told him what she could about "Blue Bayou" without divulging the plotline, which Sophie guarded as ferociously as a mother bear protecting her cubs.
Alex did not mention her affair with Debord. It wasn't that she was ashamed of it. On the contrary, she was rather proud of the way she'd picked herself up, dusted herself off and started over.
She didn't mention it because looking back, it seemed as if the affair and its dreadful conclusion had all happened to some other woman. A far more foolish, more naive woman.
"Gracious," she said, when she finally ran down. "I've been doing all the talking."
Zach refilled their glasses from the bottle of wine they'd ordered from room service. "I like hearing you talk." Her enthusiasm for life was contagious. And although she worked in Tinseltown, it was obvious she hadn't gone Hollywood. She was, he considered, the most natural woman he'd ever met.
The simple compliment shouldn't give her so much pleasure. But it did. "But I don't know anything about you," she protested. "Other than you should be wearing a coat of shining armor instead of that Brooks Brothers suit."
"I didn't own a suit until I graduated from college," he surprised himself by saying. Although he was not ashamed of his humble roots, he was not in the habit of sharing his past. Let alone with someone he'd just met.
"Ah." She curled up in the corner of the couch, tucking her legs beneath her flowing skirt. "A self-made man."
"With a little help from some friends."
Zach told her briefly about his life growing up in Lafourche Parish, of the early years fishing and trapping with his father.
"My father died when I was ten," he said when she asked about his parents. Alex murmured a sound of sympathy. She knew firsthand the pain of losing a parent as an adult. She couldn't imagine how she'd have survived if her mother had died while she and David were still children.
"Was yours a large family?" she asked.
"I was the oldest in a family of eight kids. One boy and seven girls."
"Gracious. You were definitely outnumbered."
"I didn't mind."
Imbued with a deep sense of duty and an even deeper sense of family, Zach had immediately stepped into the role of second parent. When his mother, desperate for additional funds to feed her family, went to work as a domestic in town, Zach took over the household chores, which made him not only an excellent cook, but the only ten-year-old boy in the bayou who could weave a French braid.
"When I was sixteen, I got a summer job working on the loading dock at the New Orleans Lord's," he continued his story. "The old one. A new one just opened today on Canal Street."
Alex nodded. "So I heard." She'd fretted some about running into Debord. When she arrived in town and saw how many thousands of people came to New Orleans during festival, she realized she'd been foolish to worry. The odds against seeing the horrid man again were astronomical. "I've always liked Lord's. Their buyers have a tremendous sense of style."
"Thanks. I'll pass the word along."
"It's a long way from the loading dock to the executive offices," she prompted, growing more curious about this unique man by the moment. "Are you manager of the new store?"
"Actually, I'm president of the company."
She wasn't all that surprised. Zachary Deveraux radiated power. "I'm impressed."
"I was lucky. I got some breaks along the way."
Alex liked the fact that he didn't have an enormous ego. Actually, she had a feeling this was a man who would succeed at whatever he chose. With or without any breaks along the way.
When she told him what she was thinking, he shrugged. "To tell the truth, my senior year of high school, the loading-dock manager offered me a full-time job after graduation. I wanted to take it."
"But?"
"My mother hit the roof. She wanted me to go to college."
"I think that's every mother's dream for her children. My mother scrimped for years so I could attend the Fashion Institute." She'd also vehemently protested when Alex had dropped out to take care of her.
"It wasn't a common goal in the bayou," Zach revealed. "
In my father's day, any young Acadian who considered college was considered lazy. But my folks realized times were changing. They knew my future lay working out among the Americaines."
"Americaines?"
"That's how Cajuns refer to non-Acadian Louisianans."
"Oh." Alex considered that for a moment. "It must have been difficult," she murmured. "When I first arrived in France, I might as well have landed on the moon, things seemed so different from what I was used to."
So she was insightful, as well as beautiful. That made her, Zach considered, even more dangerous.
"I got used to it," he said, purposefully understating what had indeed been a major cultural adjustment.
She took a sip of wine and eyed him with bright interest. "Where did you go to college?"
"I got a football scholarship at Tulane, right here in the city." Which had allowed him to continue to work part-time at Lord's, where he'd been promoted to the sales floor. The money he'd earned he'd sent home to his mother.
She envisioned him wearing shoulder pads and those tight white pants and decided he must have looked magnificent. "Were you any good?"
Zach shrugged. "My sack statistics weren't bad." Actually, they'd been so impressive he'd garnered the pros' attention. "But my junior year I injured my knee in the final game of the season, which quashed my dreams of NFL stardom."
"You must have been terribly disappointed." Alex knew all too well the power of youthful dreams.
"For a while. But if there was one thing life had taught me, it was how to punt."
Another thing they had in common, Alex mused. If she was keeping score. Which she wasn't.
Hell. Of course she was.
"So, to make a long story short, I graduated with degrees in business and marketing—" he didn't mention those degrees had been cum laude "—and moved into management. In a few months, I went back to business school for my MBA."
That had been Eleanor's doing. Six months after he'd begun work full-time, he'd suggested a new inventory system that had garnered her attention. Recognizing potential when she saw it, Eleanor offered to pay his tuition to Harvard Business School.
Although he'd refused her charity, Zach did accept the money as a loan, payable on installment when he graduated.
"Then I returned to work at Lord's L.A. headquarters." He spread his hands. "End of story," he said, leaving out his meteoric rise to vice president and finally president.
Alex suspected there was a great deal more to the story than he was telling.
"Your wife must be very proud of you," she murmured, wishing she could ignore the gold band on his left hand.
"I suppose so." His lack of enthusiasm was in direct contrast to his earlier tone.
"Is she in town with you?"
"Since Miranda's in charge of setting up the Debord boutiques, she came for the opening." He'd been neither surprised nor disappointed when his wife had opted to spend the evening with the designer and his iceberg of a sister, rather than with her husband.
Since returning from their honeymoon thirteen months ago, Zach doubted if he and Miranda had spent more than five consecutive days together. Their work was demanding. And it required a great deal of travel. But, he'd asked himself time and time again, if they truly loved one another, wouldn't they make the time to be together?
Unfortunately whenever his wife did deign to join him at the French Normandy-style manor she'd convinced him to buy in Brentwood, it was as if a dangerous wind had swept into the house, disturbing the calm, predictable routine of his existence.
Alex watched the scowl darken his features. "Your wife is Miranda Smythe?" Try as she might, she could not envision this man married to the mercurial Lady Smythe. She knew the old adage about opposites attracting, but Zachary Deveraux and Miranda Lord Baptista Smythe had to be the mismatch of the millennium.
"That was her name," Zach allowed. "Do you know her?"
"I've seen her picture in the magazines." To reveal any more would bring up her time with Debord, and Alex refused to allow that bastard to ruin a wonderful night. As if to remind himself that he was married, Zach spent the next half hour telling Alex what he could about his wife.
He told her about the success of the Debord boutiques. He did not mention Miranda's recreational shoplifting. Hardly a week went by that Zach didn't receive a discreet bill in the mail for some item his wife had not been able to resist taking.
Fortunately, after that experience in Rio, Miranda had stuck to stores where they had an account. Apparently she wasn't willing to risk incarceration over a Hermès scarf or a bottle of Obsession, both of which she could easily afford.
He lauded Miranda's inspired remodeling job at the London Lord's. He did not mention the glacier that had begun creeping inexorably over their marriage bed after their return from Rio.
Nor did he admit the truth that sex had been the coinage of his and Miranda's odd-couple relationship from the beginning. And now, having just recently celebrated their first anniversary on separate continents, that relationship was already approaching bankruptcy.
He expressed, with honest admiration, his wife's unerring sense of style and her ability to draw British society to the store's special events, thus increasing customer loyalty.
He left unsaid that these days her conversation skills, when she did trouble to speak to him, seemed limited to clothes and parties and race horses, and gossip about face-lifts and tummy tucks and what wife had run off with her karate instructor and what yacht club member of the Newport-Palm Beach crowd was committing adultery with what married princess of some European pocket principality he'd never even heard of.
He also didn't relate his belief that Miranda was so busy going places, seeing and being seen with the right people with the most money, she had precious little time for normal, everyday activities.
Despite his discretion, Alex had no difficulty reading between the lines. From what Zach didn't say about his marriage, she realized that all was not well in the Deveraux household.
Which was, she told herself firmly, none of her business. As attracted to Zach as she was, she had no desire to get involved with a married man. Feeling the pall settle over the room, Zach returned the conversation to Alex's reason for being in New Orleans in the first place. For nearly nineteen months, she'd lived, eaten, slept and dreamed "Blue Bayou." It was, quite literally, the most important thing in her life.
And on this long Mardi Gras night, it didn't take much encouragement for her to talk about the show and, more specifically, her costuming.
Pink fingers of dawn began creeping above the wrought-iron railing when Alex finally ran out of steam.
"I can't believe we've been talking all night," she said.
"Time has a way of flying during Mardi Gras." Zach knew he should get up from his chair, thank her for a lovely evening and return to the Royal Orleans, where just perhaps, his errant wife may have returned by now.
They fell silent, Zach sprawled in the chair, Alex curled up in the corner of the flowered sofa, watching as the rising sun streaked the sky over the courtyard in a dazzling display of gold and ruby rays.
During their hours together, he'd come to realize that Alexandra Lyons was a warm and caring, talented and special woman. Zach found himself unwilling to say goodbye just yet.
The effect she was having on his body was considerable—and not entirely unexpected. After all, he'd been celibate for months, and Alexandra Lyons was a ravishing woman. As a normal, heterosexual male, Zach was not immune to attractive women. What was coming as a distinct surprise was what Alexandra was doing to his mind. He wanted her, he realized. And for a helluva lot more than an adulterous roll in the hay.
Quicksand, Zach warned himself. Take one more step and you're in deep, deep trouble.
"My mother's getting married today," he revealed. "I don't suppose you've ever been to a Cajun wedding."
She briefly thought of a time when she'd been foolish enough to think she'd be planning her own Paris wedding.
"No. But from what you've said about Cajun parties, I'll bet they're special."
"They are. How would you like to experience one firsthand?"
Yes, yes, her unruly heart called in reply. "With you?" she asked cautiously.
"I'd like your company." Although his tone remained matter-of-fact, his eyes were unnervingly intimate, setting off warning bells.
"What about your wife?" she had to ask.
"Miranda's not going. She's not exactly wild about my humble rural roots."
Before their marriage, Miranda had displayed a burning fascination with everything about Zach: his Louisiana childhood, his family, his hardscrabble, pull-himself-up-by-the-bootstraps success story, his work at Lord's.
These days, she found everything about their life together boring. Santa Barbara was boring. Los Angeles was boring. California. Constant sunshine. All were so, so boring. Even Zach, she'd accused on more than one stormy occasion, screeching at him in a voice high enough to risk shattering her precious collection of crystal, had become bloody, bloody boring! In Miranda's eyes, her husband had committed the cardinal sin.
It hadn't taken Zach long, after they were married, to discover that he'd never really known Miranda at all. His wife reinvented herself every day in the mirror. Everything Miranda did, everything she said, was another brush stroke in that carefully drawn self-portrait.
If he was disillusioned with his marriage, which he most definitely was, Zach knew that he had no one to blame but himself. He'd understood from the beginning that Miranda led life in the fast lane.
The only problem was that during this past year Zach had begun to feel more and more as if he were standing all alone in the roadway, facing the fatal rush of oncoming traffic.
"If you're worried about not getting any sleep," Zach said, unreasonably unnerved by her hesitation, "the ceremony's not until this evening. I thought I'd return to my hotel, then meet you back here around two or three."
Before putting her feelings on such a restrictive rein, Alex had not been a woman to guide her emotions. More often, she allowed them to guide her. And although such behavior might be considered foolhardy, especially when it led her into the type of trouble she experienced with Debord, in the balance, her life had been rewarding.
