In the Dark

by Judith Arnold

  Wherever they’d come from, she discovered she had plenty more. She slumped against the wall and let the sobs overtake her.

  Julie wasn’t a weeper. The last time she’d cried was when her beloved Bella had died. When her classmates had teased her, they’d only toughened her. When she’d found out about Glenn Perry’s criminal behavior, she’d reported him. When her life as a model had ended, she’d created a new life for herself.

  Girls like Andrea Crowley cried. Not Julie.

  She supposed crying was allowed for someone who had come as close to being killed as she had. Tears were forgivable for a crime victim. But this meltdown wasn’t just over what Andrea had done to her tonight. It came from deep inside her, a wrenching understanding that her life had somehow changed.

  She’d always been her own person. When she’d decided to report Glenn to the police, Marcie had cautioned her against it. “Just quit his agency,” her sensible older sister had said.

  “But he’s taking advantage of young girls,” Julie had argued. “Someone has to stop him.”

  “That someone doesn’t have to be you,” Marcie had argued. “If you report him, you’re going to bring a whole lot of grief down on yourself.”

  Marcie had been right—but Julie had been right, too. Reporting him had saved naive young girls from being exploited. She had never expected that Andrea would resent being saved.

  She’d done the right thing then—by herself. She’d gone off to college in Canada by herself, and she’d moved to New Orleans by herself. She was used to her autonomy, used to depending on herself alone to get through each day.

  But tonight… Tonight she’d needed Mac. She’d prayed for him to find her, and he had. That was what had changed: for once in her life, she’d wanted someone to help her, to stand by her and protect her, to be her partner. To save her.

  Not just someone. Mac Jensen.

  She washed her face, blew her nose, pulled the remaining pins from her hair and finger combed it. The female officer entered the bathroom with a first-aid kit, and Julie smeared her knee with antiseptic ointment and taped on a bandage. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” the woman asked as she escorted Julie back down the hall to the squad room.

  “No, thanks.” If Julie tried to drink anything right now, she’d probably choke. Or burst into tears again.

  “Boy, I remember when Katrina hit a year and a half ago. We were without power for weeks. A good cup of coffee was so rare, it was like the nectar of the gods.” The officer sighed at the memory. “You don’t realize how dependent you are on something until you have to go without it.”

  How true. Julie hadn’t realized how dependent she’d been on Mac tonight until she’d been taken away from him.

  The officer led Julie to a small interview room, where a policeman in street clothes sat at a table. Julie’s sandals lay on the table next to his folded hands. Her shoes were scuffed and battered, trampled by the armies of people traipsing around the French Quarter in the dark. Mac stood, holding his cell phone. “How are you?” he asked as the policeman rose to his feet.

  “I’m fine.” She’d lost count of how many times she’d spoken those words. Mac probably kept asking her how she was because he didn’t believe she was fine. He was waiting to hear the truth from her.

  Her knee was fine, though. That much wasn’t a lie.

  “Listen, Julie—there’s a problem at the hotel. I’ve got to go back there.”

  “What problem?”

  He smiled half-heartedly. “Tyrell just called. Nothing for you to worry about. I’ll go over, check out the situation and then come back. Okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Julie said automatically. Her eyes met Mac’s, and his smile grew. No doubt he’d also lost count of how many times she’d recited those two false words, but he’d accept them for now.

  “This is Detective Rick Pelletier. He’ll take good care of you until I get back,” Mac promised.

  “Okay.”

  Mac held out a chair for her, and she sat. He brushed his hand against her shoulder, then turned and left the room.

  Detective Pelletier resumed his seat as well, opened a notepad and smiled at Julie. “I think he’s more shaken up than you are,” he said.

  Julie smiled back. “I’m pretty shaken up, too.”

  “Why don’t you tell me everything?”

  Julie sat back in her chair, rubbed her stinging knee and sighed. Then she proceeded to describe her strange night to Detective Pelletier.

  MAC STRUGGLED through the crazy traffic, trying to get back to the police station as quickly as possible. The dark, the erratic drivers, the giddy pedestrians—everything about this godawful night was getting to him. He hadn’t wanted to be dealing with a crisis at the hotel. His real job was to be Julie’s bodyguard. He’d nearly failed at that. Self-recrimination ate at his gut like battery acid.

  But a body had been found in one of the guest rooms back at the hotel. “I don’t know if it’s foul play,” Tyrell had reported, “but you’d better get over here.”

  Lucky he’d been at the police station. He’d arranged for Joe, the night desk sergeant, to radio for a patrol car to meet him over at the hotel. A body, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the death, was police business.

  The party at the hotel had still been raging when Mac had arrived. Fortunately, Tyrell had kept the discovery of the body quiet, and the guests in the courtyard were having a grand old time, dancing to the unamplified band’s music and stuffing their faces with food the restaurant was cooking on its gas-powered grills.

  Mac didn’t belong there. He belonged with Julie.

  It was well past 2:00 a.m. by the time he got back to the police station. He wondered if Julie would still be there. Ricky Pelletier might have driven her home by now.

  It would serve Mac right if she’d already left. Why should she wait for him? He was useless, the world’s worst bodyguard. He ought to return Marcie’s money. He’d been busy chasing down e-mails and targeting Glenn Perry, and meanwhile a skinny psycho woman had nearly stolen Julie away from him.

  He parked, locked up the car and entered the station. Joe waved him over to the front desk, then motioned toward a bench where Julie was sleeping. “We offered to take her home, but she insisted on waiting for you,” Joe told him. “She said she was sure you were coming back.”

  Mac’s heart constricted. She looked so vulnerable asleep, lying on her side with her knees bent—one of them bandaged—and hair spilling over her shoulders. Her lips were parted and her thick, dark eyelashes shaped delicate crescents against her cheeks. Maybe she was vulnerable now, but trekking through a blacked-out French Quarter with a gun digging into her back, she had been strong and courageous.

  She’d saved her own life. Mac felt guilty for not having been able to protect her, but his admiration for her—her brains and her guts and her stubborn will—soared.

  And she’d waited for him.

  He tiptoed over to the bench, hunkered down and touched her arm. Her eyes immediately fluttered open, and she smiled.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Give me a better answer than ‘I’m fine.’”

  “Take me home,” she said.

  That answer would do.

  She sat up, pushed her hair back from her face, gathered her sandals and yawned. Mac took her hand and eased her to her feet, then slid his arm around her and led her down the corridor to the door and out to his car. She moved slowly, whether from fatigue or her banged-up knee, he couldn’t say. “What was going on at the hotel?” she asked.

  No need to alarm her. “There was a problem in one of the guest rooms,” he said vaguely as he helped her onto the passenger seat. Tomorrow—or the next day, whenever she felt up to returning to work—she could learn about the mysterious body found in the first-floor room of Matt Anderson, one of the hotel’s guests. “Did Ricky Pelletier take good care of you?”

  She nodded. “I hope Andrea pleads to some charge.
I don’t want to have to testify in court. I’ve done that once, and it didn’t work out so well.”

  “It’s history now,” Mac assured her, hoping he was correct. Damn it, if he wasn’t, if she was still at risk, he’d protect her for the rest of her life. He’d failed her once; he vowed never to fail her again.

  Some stretches of the city were still without power, but now, in the space between very late night and very early morning, the streets were relatively quiet, only a few cars and die-hard rowdies out and about. Julie let her head sink against the leather headrest and sighed. Mac suffered a sharp pang deep in his soul. It went beyond anger at having misread the threat to her, beyond guilt that he hadn’t protected her. It was a feeling that if he hadn’t found her, if that lunatic had actually used her gun on Julie, he would not have been able to go on.

  “Why her?” he asked, trying to drag his thoughts away from the scary place they’d wandered. “She was…what? A fellow model, right?”

  Julie nodded, her eyes focused straight ahead into the black night on the other side of the windshield. “She was one of the younger girls at the agency. She came from some small Midwest town, and she had big ideas about fame and fortune. She hadn’t even finished high school. Someone told her she had what it took to be a model, so she came to New York.”

  “She had guts. It takes guts to stalk a woman and kidnap her.”

  Julie shrugged. “Back then, Andrea was kind of timid and insecure. But Glenn Perry took her under his wing. He promised to take care of her. And man, did he ever. She was one of the girls he got hooked on amphetamines to keep her weight down. And then he started sleeping with her. She was convinced he loved her.”

  Mac made a face. “Somehow, this starry-eyed romantic picture isn’t fitting with the gun-toting bitch I dragged into the police station.”

  “She changed,” Julie said, her bland tone emphasizing what an understatement that was. “Apparently, she carried a torch for Glenn the whole time he was in jail. When he got paroled, she went to New York to be with him. He showed her the door. He wanted nothing to do with her.”

  “And she blamed you,” Mac guessed.

  Julie nodded wearily. “It was my fault. If I hadn’t gone to the police, Glenn would have still been running his modeling agency.”

  “And that woman would have still been washed up, drug addicted and dumped,” Mac said. “All you did was save her a few years of wear and tear and heartbreak.”

  “Maybe I was wrong,” Julie said quietly. “I was so self-righteous, Mac. I thought Glenn was ruining people’s lives, so I called him on it. Maybe I should have just kept my head down and my mouth shut.”

  “And let the guy continue breaking the law and screwing girls young enough to be his daughters? No, Julie. You weren’t wrong.”

  “I’m always so sure of myself,” she muttered. “I was sure of myself when I turned Glenn in. I was sure I was saving these girls and making the world a better place and all that.” She paused, cast a soft, melancholy gaze his way, then said, “I was so sure that a woman should fend for herself, that she should never trust a man who claims he’s going to take care of her. Because too often, he takes care of himself at her expense. So she’s got to watch out for herself, be dependent only on herself.”

  “That’s not the worst way to get through life,” Mac said.

  “But when Andrea was dragging me at gunpoint around the French Quarter…” Julie sighed again. “I wanted you to save me. I kept leaving feathers for you to follow, because I wanted you to save me.”

  “I wanted to save you, Julie.” His voice broke slightly, and he swallowed. “It kills me that I wasn’t able to.”

  She looked at him again, startled. “You did save me.”

  “Not until after she took a shot at you.” He swallowed again, reliving that ghastly moment when he’d heard the pop of a gun firing. How could Julie think he’d saved her? By the time he’d made the scene, Andrea was already on the run.

  Julie believed he’d saved her because she wanted to. He could argue or let her believe what she wanted. Right now the last thing he wanted was to argue with her.

  Julie’s neighborhood in the Garden District was as dark as the French Quarter had been. Mac pulled up the driveway and parked in the paved area near the door. He shut off the engine and turned to her.

  “What happened to the city?” she asked. “Where did all the electricity go?”

  “I’m sure they’ll figure it out sooner or later. Probably a breakdown in a regional center.”

  “Do you think we’ll be without power a long time?”

  He brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek and smiled. “You’ll never be without power, Julie. You’re the most powerful woman I’ve ever known.”

  “A regular Wonder Woman,” she said dryly. She glanced toward the shadowed front porch of the seedy old mansion. “How will I get inside? I don’t have my keys.”

  Mac reached into his jacket pocket and produced the key ring he’d pulled from her car. “Yes, you do,” he said, then shoved his door open, got out and circled the car to help her out.

  Her sandals in one hand, she swung her legs to the brick front walk. Standing, she winced.

  Mac didn’t bother to ask how she was. She’d only say she was fine, and clearly she wasn’t. He lifted her into his arms, surprised at how light she was, given her statuesque height.

  “Mac, put me down,” she complained even as she clung to his neck. “I’m not a cripple.”

  “Not crippled, just a little wounded.” He carried her up to the porch, lowered her gently to her feet and unlocked the front door for her, groping only briefly before he found the keyhole.

  “Mac,” she murmured. Her hands had slid from around his neck to his chest when he’d released her, and his lungs filled with her sweet gardenia scent. Her hair brushed against his chin, soft as mink. And she was so close to him, so damn close, and her hands rested on him, and her eyes were so large and pleading.

  He’d almost lost her tonight. But he hadn’t. She was here.

  His brain shut down and his heart took over. Bowing, he took her mouth with his.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HER KNEE HURT. Her toe hurt. But neither of them hurt the way her body did, a sweet, womanly ache that only Mac could ease. His hand was closed around hers as she climbed the stairs to her apartment, her free hand on the railing and Mac’s tracing the wall so they could feel their way safely up to the second floor.

  The upstairs hall was so dark she couldn’t see Mac. She could feel him, sense his warmth, smell his alluring aura. He pressed her keys into her hand, and she fumbled for a few seconds until she finally got her apartment door unlocked. The entry was as dark as the hall outside and unnervingly silent.

  “The aquarium pump,” she said, naming the noise that was missing. Her poor fish! Would their water get too cold with the heating filter pump out of commission?

  “Have you got a flashlight?” Mac asked, halting her before she could charge through the darkness to the tank.

  He was right. She wouldn’t even see her fish without a light.

  “Wait here,” she said. In the dark she’d have enough difficulty walking to the kitchen, where she kept a flashlight as well as candles, and she knew the apartment. Mac had never been inside it before.

  Fortunately, she reached the tiny kitchen without stubbing any toes or tripping on anything. The flashlight was on the shelf in her broom closet, and once she had its light to guide her, she gathered a few candles to fit the candlesticks she owned. After wedging two tapers into holders and locating a box of safety matches, she returned to the living room, carefully aiming the flashlight at Mac’s chest so she wouldn’t blind him.

  The circle of white light struck his loosened tie and unfastened collar. Julie eyed the skin at the base of his throat and shivered—not from the lack of heat. Mac is in my apartment, she thought, lifting her gaze to his face. Enough of the flashlight’s beam bled upward to define the edges of his c
hin and nose, the contours of his cheeks and brows. Another shiver gripped her—and she definitely wasn’t cold.

  So much hadn’t made sense tonight: the unexpected appearance of Andrea Crowley using the name Maggie Jones, the blackout, the abduction. The hours at the police station. The fear, the stubborn determination to survive, the sheer joy of being found by Mac in the midst of the bedlam in Jackson Square. The only thing that made any sense at all was having Mac here with her now.

  “Let’s check your fish,” he said.

  The flashlight guided them across the living room to the silent tank. She set the candles on her coffee table and dipped her pinkie into the water. It was still warm. Her fish glided back and forth from glass wall to glass wall until the flashlight attracted their attention. They flurried over to the tank wall, their unblinking eyes fixed on Mac. This is what a man looks like, guys, Julie wanted to say. Other than Creighton, these fish rarely saw men in her apartment.

  “I think the water’s warm enough for now,” she said. “I should wrap the tank with some towels to insulate it, just in case this blackout lasts a long time.”

  The flashlight got her safely to her linen closet and back. Mac helped her swaddle the base of the tank with thick towels. She didn’t know if that layer of terry cloth would make any difference, but she hated the thought of her fish suffering in this dark, noiseless world.

  Mac must have sensed her worry. “They’ll be okay,” he said, bringing his arms around her.

  She rested her head against his shoulder, grateful that he’d taken her concern seriously rather than scoffing that she was making a ridiculous fuss over a half-dozen fish worth only a few dollars. They were her pets, her companions, and he respected that.

  She felt his lips brush the crown of her head and lifted her face to him. His mouth covered hers, gentle and restrained, but she sensed the hunger in him. He didn’t have to be restrained with her. She was a little wounded, as he’d said, but she felt whole, solid, strong, and she wanted to be kissed with everything Mac had to give. She wanted him to light her dark world with his kiss.