In the Dark

by Judith Arnold

  “The guest insisted she heard a ghost, so security had to check it out and write a report,” Charlotte told her. “And you’re avoiding my question. Do you have a problem with Mac?”

  “Is my ‘look’ a problem look?”

  Charlotte grinned. “Actually, it’s more of a yearning look.”

  “Yearning?” Julie scowled.

  “He’s a handsome man, Julie. Those dark eyes of his, and that strong jaw… Surely you’ve noticed.”

  “I suppose,” Julie said vaguely. No need for Charlotte to know just how much Julie had noticed Mac Jensen’s dark eyes and strong jaw, his thick brown hair and his sinewy physique, and the amazing way a man as tall as he was could move so smoothly and soundlessly.

  Charlotte was still awaiting an answer. “I think…” Julie inhaled and pushed out the words. “Sometimes I think he’s spying on me.”

  “Spying on you?”

  Julie nodded. “I feel his eyes on me sometimes. Like he’s watching me and doesn’t want me to know it.”

  Charlotte let out a laugh. “For heaven’s sake, Julie—half the men in the city get whiplash from staring at you whenever you walk by.”

  Julie’s cheeks warmed. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration.”

  “Hardly. You’re a former fashion model. People can’t help noticing you.”

  “I was a lot younger during my modeling days,” Julie argued. “And a lot thinner.”

  “So now you’re older and curvier. It’s no surprise that you turn men’s heads. I just hope you aren’t a distraction to Mac. If you ever see trouble brewing here at the hotel, please run the other way so he can stay focused on his job.”

  Julie laughed along with her boss’s teasing, but as she left the office, she decided Charlotte was wrong. Mac Jensen didn’t ogle Julie. He studied her as if trying to pry loose her secrets.

  And he wasn’t going to do that, not if she could help it.

  Returning to her desk, she hit a key on her computer to kill her screen saver, then entered the URL for Roxanne Levesque’s Web page, which was printed on the top of her proposal. The mail icon in the corner of Julie’s monitor flashed, alerting her that she’d received e-mail.

  Ordinarily, she checked her e-mail only three times a day—as soon as she arrived at her office around eight a.m., at lunchtime and before shutting down her computer and locking up for the night. But she’d been awaiting word from her sister about their father’s recent bout with the flu, and Marcie generally e-mailed during working hours. They had learned that they were physically incapable of limiting phone calls to under an hour, so they saved their phone conversations for when they weren’t at work.

  She clicked on her e-mail icon, hoping for news that her father was on the mend and her mother was no longer running herself ragged taking care of him. The New York area seemed to be in the grip of a minor flu epidemic this winter, and although Julie’s parents remained youthful in their early sixties, she couldn’t help fretting about them.

  The e-mail that had set her icon blinking wasn’t from Marcie, however. The return address was “4Julie” and the entire message consisted of a musical staff with a single note on it, tailed by a long, rippling line that scaled from the low end to the high end of the staff: a glissando. And below it the words, “The song is over.”

  It took all of Julie’s considerable willpower to keep from screaming.

  IN HIS PROFESSIONAL LIFE, Mac had often been hired to keep an eye on someone. But rarely had he enjoyed that assignment as much as he enjoyed keeping an eye on Julie Sullivan.

  He was a professional, and his personal pleasures had no bearing on the way he did his job. But, hell, if an assignment entailed keeping tabs on a woman who could star in a guy’s wet-dream fantasies, he might as well enjoy it.

  Julie had to know she was a knockout. By her seventeenth birthday, she’d been doing magazine layouts. By nineteen she’d been chosen as the Symphony Perfumes girl, her big violet eyes and pouty lips featured in ads for Arpeggio, Grace Note, Sonata and Glissando perfumes. Mac had a file on her. He’d done the research.

  Back when she was modeling, she would never have blipped onto his radar screen—perfume had never held much interest for him. But now… She had him blipping nonstop.

  Unfortunately, Julie represented only one of his jobs—the real one. His second job—his cover—was as the Hotel Marchand’s new head of security, and it didn’t exactly suit him. The security office was a tiny, windowless room down a back hall, right next door to the housekeeping department. He missed having a window. Sitting in that ugly little cubicle made him feel like a mole.

  At least he was able to pop his head aboveground at regular intervals throughout the day. There were always reports to deliver to Charlotte—he could easily e-mail them, but he grabbed any excuse to emerge from the dungeon office—and rounds to walk. He liked to circulate through the hotel, checking on things, making sure emergency exits weren’t propped open, window screens weren’t torn and loiterers weren’t hanging around the lobby, behaving suspiciously. He liked to remain visible to the guests; he figured they’d find his presence reassuring. And he liked to keep tabs on Luc Carter, the concierge. Luc seemed helpful and energetic, but something about him rubbed Mac wrong. He wasn’t sure what, but he’d been trusting his instincts all his life, and those instincts hadn’t let him down yet.

  In addition to his rounds, he had to respond to emergency calls, of which there were several every day. A guest experiencing chest pains. A guest who’d lost her traveler’s checks. A guest who’d befriended a sweet young thing on Bourbon Street last night and brought her back to his room, only to awaken the next morning and discover his wallet missing. A guest who’d heard a ghost prowling the upper floors of the hotel. Mac located errant children, arranged tows for rental cars with mechanical problems and discreetly escorted folks who’d consumed one too many in the bar back to their rooms.

  Escorting drunks and warning toddlers away from the pool’s edge didn’t exactly satisfy him, and he was grateful that hotel security wasn’t his life’s work. At least all those emergencies and quasi-emergencies, all those torn screens and missing wallets, gave him the perfect excuse to keep Julie Sullivan within his sights.

  Carlos was manning the office when Mac returned from the second floor. It was barely big enough for two people, and Mac ought to be grateful that he didn’t spend as many hours in it as Carlos did. Actually, the kid seemed to enjoy sitting in that cubicle, viewing the large flat-screen monitor that sat on a shelf above the desk and flashed pictures from the many closed-circuit cameras placed around the hotel. A glance at the monitor informed whoever was posted at the desk of what was going on in every corner of the lobby, the back halls, the bar, the courtyard, the event rooms and the elevators.

  Judging by Carlos’s bland smile, nothing much was going on anywhere. Carlos had been working security at the hotel for more than a year, but Charlotte had considered him too young and inexperienced to take over the head job when Gerard Lomax had retired last fall. Mac would have been grateful to get Carlos’s job—anything to place him close to Julie. But Charlotte had hired him for the top slot.

  Just as well. Being the director of security gave Mac more freedom to move around the hotel.

  Entering the security office, Mac nudged Carlos’s shoulder and said, “Go take a break. You look like you could use some fresh air.”

  Carlos, thin and boyish, spun in his chair and grinned. “Fresh air, sure,” he said, patting the pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his beige uniform. Unlike Mac, who dressed in civilian clothes, Carlos and the rest of Mac’s staff wore apparel identifying them as security personnel to the hotel guests.

  “You ought to quit that habit,” Mac said, not for the first time. “You’re too young to let nicotine get the better of you.”

  “My girlfriend gets the better of me all the time,” Carlos said with an amiable shrug. “If I can figure out how to quit her, maybe I’ll quit smoking, too.” Grinning,
he hooked his walkie-talkie to his belt, then shambled past Mac and out of the office.

  As soon as he was gone, Mac sank into the chair. The computer sat idle; no message lights flashed on the desk phone. A bulletin board running the length of one wall was covered with advisories, notices of public events and recent crimes in the neighborhood, and hotel schedules. File cabinets held folders on every employee at the hotel, complete with the extensive background checks they’d had to undergo to prove they could be trusted entering guest rooms. A wall rack held spare pagers and two-way radios. The monitor above the desk displayed rotations of photos: the lobby, the bar, the elevator empty in one shot and empty again in the next.

  Hearing the outer door click shut behind Carlos, Mac propped his feet on the desk, next to the phone console, and pulled his cell phone from an inner pocket of his jacket. He didn’t want any record of the calls he made to his own office from the hotel.

  Sandy answered on the second ring. “Crescent City Security, can I help you?”

  “Hey, sugar,” Mac greeted her. “Do you miss me?”

  Recognizing his voice, she laughed. “Not for an instant. When the hell are you coming back?”

  “When this job is done. Even though every day I’m away from you breaks my heart.”

  Sandy laughed again. She was the wife of his partner and best friend, and the flirting was just a game between them. When Mac and Frank Romero had started their private security business five years ago, they could barely afford to cover their rent. Hiring a receptionist had been out of the question, so Sandy had volunteered to help out. She wasn’t a volunteer anymore, but she was still answering their phones.

  “Frank’s up to his eyeballs with that nasty insurance case,” Sandy reported. “He still hasn’t been able to trace the missing money past an account in Costa Rica that’s now empty. He could really use your help.”

  “Sorry,” Mac said, though he honestly wasn’t. Keeping tabs on a woman as gorgeous as Julie Sullivan was a hell of a lot more fun than tracing embezzled funds through a labyrinth of offshore accounts for an insurance company.

  “Doesn’t it bother you, double-dipping?” Sandy said. “You’re getting paid to watch that woman and you’re getting paid to run security at the hotel.”

  “I earn every penny,” Mac said.

  “Right.” Sandy’s sarcastic tone signaled disbelief. “I don’t know, Mac. It’s been more than a month. It just doesn’t feel right to me that the hotel is paying you to do a job and you’re doing something else.”

  Maybe the setup wasn’t exactly kosher, but in the private security business, clients cared less about pristine ethics than results. “If I’d known you were going to give me grief, darlin’, I wouldn’t have called,” he said, his gaze drifting to the monitor above the desk. Someone had entered the elevator. A middle-aged couple conferred with Luc in the lobby. The hall outside Julie’s office was empty.

  “All right. No more lectures. Collect two incomes. See if I care.” Sandy’s tone was one of fake resignation. “We could use you back, though. Try to tie this one up before Christmas, would you?”

  Given that Christmas was nearly a year away, Mac believed he could manage that. The camera outside Julie’s office picked up something new: Julie. There she was on the monitor, stalking down the hall, her arms wrapped around her as if she were hugging herself, trying to stay warm.

  He sat straighter and frowned. Her face was naturally expressive, especially her eyes, big and thickly lashed and a color that reminded him of amethysts. Right now her eyes were giving her away. She looked petrified.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said abruptly, all playfulness gone. “Tell Frank all’s well on this end.” Before Sandy could say anything more, he flipped his phone shut and leaned forward, watching the monitor intently.

  On the screen Julie moved from one frame to another as she yanked open the doorway to the back stairwell. He didn’t like her using the service stairs, which were more isolated than the public staircase down to the lobby, but at least the back stairwell was also monitored by closed-circuit cameras. She wore a suit in a color somewhere between turquoise and gray, and the neatly cropped jacket and skirt looked so good on her, Mac could only wonder how much better she’d look if she took them off. But when she turned at the landing and he saw her face, he forgot about her body, spectacular though it was. Her eyes were glassy with worry, her lips pinched with tension.

  He pressed the base of the two-way radio and punched in Carlos’s number. “Carlos? How soon can you get your ass back here?” he asked.

  “I’m on my way,” Carlos said. He must have heard the urgency in Mac’s tone.

  “I won’t be at the desk,” Mac said, shoving away from the desk and shrugging to adjust his jacket over his shoulders. “I’ve got to check something.” Not bothering to listen to Carlos’s response, he swung out of the office, slamming the door behind him. The fear in Julie’s eyes told him not to wait.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE FOUND HER in the hotel’s central courtyard. A square patio furnished with chairs, tables and planters around a distinctive teardrop-shaped pool and enclosed within the buildings that formed the Hotel Marchand, the courtyard lent a European flavor to the place. Centuries ago, what was now the hotel had been a group of separate town houses, along with a carriage house and some slave quarters. Previous owners had broken down walls and turned the entire block of buildings into a hotel with the courtyard at its center. Mac was no expert when it came to architecture, but he was intrigued by the way different buildings united to create a single entity.

  Given the cool, overcast January morning, he wasn’t surprised to find the courtyard vacant. Almost vacant. He spotted Julie through one of the French doors that opened from the lobby into the courtyard. She sat beside a table and a planter of geraniums in a corner of the patio, near the restaurant. Her posture was slightly hunched, her arms still wrapped tightly about her, her knees pressed together and her face angled down so her dark hair spilled forward.

  He couldn’t let her know he’d been watching her on the security monitors. Better to approach her as if he were making his rounds and they just happened to include a stroll through the courtyard. He levered the polished brass door handle and pushed open the French door.

  Julie glanced up, then lowered her face again. Even with twenty-twenty vision, Mac couldn’t tell from this distance whether she was crying. He strolled closer, and about halfway across the courtyard he could see the rise and fall of her shoulders as she took deep, slow breaths.

  “Hey,” he said when he was just a few feet from her.

  She lifted her face and managed a pathetic little smile. Her eyes were dry, at least. No telltale tracks of moisture on her cheeks. “Hello, Mac,” she said.

  Wintry clouds drifted across the sky. The gray morning light emphasized the absence of color in the elegant hollows of her cheeks. If she was trying to hide her distress, she wasn’t trying hard.

  He settled into the chair across the table from her and asked, “Something wrong?”

  “No,” she said, forcing another feeble smile.

  “Anyone ever tell you you were a lousy liar?”

  “Anyone ever tell you you were nosy?”

  He grinned. “All the time, darlin’.”

  She relaxed her grip on herself and let her hands come to rest in her lap. Her fingers were long and silky-looking. He wondered how they’d feel on his skin, then shut down that thought before it could take hold.

  “I’m not really nosy,” he said. “But when the assistant to the hotel’s general manager looks like her cat just got hit by a car, I need to know if you want security to mop up the blood.”

  “I don’t have a cat,” she said.

  The hell with her hands. Her mouth, he thought. What would those full, soft lips feel like? What would they taste like? “I figured you for a cat person,” he said, just to keep the conversation going.

  “Tropical fish,” she told him, then laughed. “If I had
enough time and room for a real pet, it would be a dog. One of these days, if I ever own a house with a yard, I’ll get one.”

  A vision of her in old shorts and a baggy T-shirt, racing around a grassy yard with a big, slobbering mutt, sprang up in his mind, taking him by surprise. He’d never seen Julie less than impeccably groomed. But the vision of her with her long, dark hair in an unraveling braid and her feet bare was so vivid, so natural, he needed a moment to bring himself back to the reality of the polished woman seated across the table from him.

  “So,” he drawled. “No cat. I take it that means no blood for security to mop up.”

  “No blood. Really, Mac, I’m fine.”

  Really, she wasn’t. Her usual proud bearing was nowhere in evidence, and her lower lip trembled slightly. He found it much more difficult to picture her weeping than romping with a dog, yet she seemed a lot closer to weeping right now.

  “Something personal?” he guessed. “Something back in New York?”

  She flinched. “How did you know I was from New York?”

  “I’m head of security. We’ve got files on everyone who draws a paycheck here.”

  “Of course.” Her suspicion faded. “Well, it is personal. I mean, nothing is wrong, but if something was wrong, it would be personal.”

  He chuckled. She must have realized how much she’d revealed, because she allowed herself a small laugh, too. “If you need help, Julie,” he said, earnest despite his smile, “I’m a pro when it comes to helping.”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine. Honestly.” He must have looked skeptical, because she relented. “I got an e-mail that upset me, that’s all.”

  His brain switched gears. No more thoughts about her lovely hands and shimmering violet eyes. This was business. This was why he was here. “An e-mail?” he asked in a deceptively mild voice.