The Red Shoe Chronicles : A Fantasy Romance Anthology

by N. R. Larry

  The next time she saw him—if there was a next time—Jenna would tell him immediately that she wasn’t her sister.

  And then I’ll try to get him into bed.

  Angelina said this vacation was all about getting Jenna laid, after all.

  I think I’ve found the one I want.

  Then again, maybe it would better to continue the charade. For all she knew, Angelina was already having sex with this guy on a regular basis. That would certainly make the getting him into bed part easier, even if it might complicate the post-coital confession part. “You just fucked the wrong sister” probably wouldn’t go over as well as she might hope.

  Snickering to herself, Jenna paused on the brick-covered corner of the sidewalk and took another look around her. She didn’t have to go to her sister’s apartment immediately. It wasn’t Jenna’s fault some guy had mistaken her for her sister. In fact, as far as Jenna could tell, that was all Angelina’s fault.

  She checked her text messages again.

  Nothing.

  Fine.

  If Angelina wasn’t going to bother to show up to meet her, Jenna would go ahead and start her vacation without her sister.

  Crowds of people flowed around her as she took her bearings. Pretty much gift shops, bars, and restaurants as far as the eye could see. Pulling up a map app, she peered at her current location.

  So many bars.

  Taking a step back, she put her back to a building under the shade of the roof’s overhang, allowing the people to pass her by as she watched.

  She had a guide book in her car, and it said that Royal Street was the place to go for antique stores.

  She hadn’t planned to come to New Orleans for antiques. This was supposed to be her girls-gone-wild vacation, a way to come out of what had become her increasingly quiet shell. Angelina had promised her the trip of a lifetime.

  But Angelina wasn’t here. That’s what going wild would get you—a great, big, fat nothing.

  Jenna was better off sticking to her usual style.

  She didn’t need her sister to help her find her internal sexy side. She could do that all on her own. And she didn’t need a crazy night, or to get drunk, or to go to bed with a stranger to do it.

  I don’t need any random Mr. Gorgeous to help me find myself.

  After a moment’s reflection, glancing back and forth between the street and her map, she turned left on the cross-street and made her way toward the river.

  Toward Royal Street and its staid antiques.

  Toward her normal style.

  A display of ceramic Mardi Gras masks in the window of a long, narrow gift shop caught her eye as she passed, and she slowed to stare at them through the glass for a moment. Their blank eyes stared back at her.

  Before she left Dallas, Jenna had done some research on Mardi Gras and its traditions. There had been several interesting ones, but the one that had stood out to her was the crowning of the Lord of Misrule in several countries’ Carnival traditions.

  Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday. A feasting day before the privations of Lent.

  New Orleans’ wild street parties were just the latest version of people letting themselves go crazy for a short time before reining it all in for the rest of the year—and historically, they wore masks to hide their misdeeds from others.

  Historically, she told herself firmly. Not now.

  Anyway, she didn’t have a mask.

  But I do have a disguise. A built-in one.

  And someone she’d like to play her Lord of Misrule.

  Or something like it, anyway.

  This was a seriously bad idea. She should not, under any circumstances, go to Angelina’s apartment and seduce a man who thought she was her twin sister. That simply was not the sort of thing Jenna did.

  What if Angelina and this guy had something serious going on? She could step right in the middle of that and ruin it for Angelina. Not to mention destroying her relationship with her sister.

  Mr. Gorgeous had said he was going to go back to Angelina’s place—but that she needed to leave the bar before someone named…Solis? Salas? Anyway, before someone Angelina apparently knew about showed up.

  Speaking of showing up, Angelina hadn’t shown up where she said she would.

  Wouldn’t it be Jenna’s sisterly duty to go to Angelina’s apartment, make sure she was okay?

  Right. This has nothing to do with Mr. Gorgeous.

  Nothing to do with the idea of seeing him again, talking to him again.

  I am a terrible sister. Hell, I’m a terrible person.

  Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to flirt, right?

  No. Do not, under any circumstances, go to Angelina’s. Don’t pretend to be her. Do not see if I can get him to touch me again.

  Of course, if Jenna did try to snag Mr. Gorgeous, it wasn’t like she would be starting a fight. More like continuing one. The one Angelina had started when they were fourteen, and she had stolen Bradley Green from Jenna. Or when they were sixteen, and Angelina left the prom with Jenna’s date.

  Not that any of that would excuse Jenna’s behavior if, now that they were adults, she tried to seduce someone Angelina cared about.

  Assuming Angelina had any interest in this guy at all.

  The right thing to do is go shopping. Enjoy the antiques. Hang out inside nicely air-conditioned shops full of elegant furniture.

  Jenna leaned in toward the window, watching her reflection in the window staring back at her.

  At the thought of doing what she really knew she should, her own eyes looked as blank and hollow as the masks’ eyes did.

  Ah, hell. I’m not going to do the right thing.

  Okay, then.

  Angelina’s apartment it was.

  As she spun on her heel and turned toward the garage, Jenna caught a final glimpse of herself in the window.

  Her wide, mischievous grin perfectly matched the glint in her eyes.

  I only hope the Lord of Misrule wants to play King of the Castle with me tonight.

  If he didn’t start paying attention to what he drank, Corvin was going to end up drunk as a lord before this day was over.

  Better tell Edwin to quietly switch me out to plain soda.

  Thank goodness he had spent the last year cultivating the bartender’s friendship.

  As Luis met his own boss at the door and led him in, Corvin aimed a nod at Gregor Salas, but he didn’t stand up. He needed to walk the tightrope of respect, carefully balanced between showing too much power and showing too much fear.

  Either one could get him killed.

  So could too much distraction, but he kept finding his thoughts drifting back to the reporter he’d escorted out of the bar.

  Shit. He could not have picked a worse time to start obsessing about a woman—or a worse woman to obsess over.

  I’m a fucking idiot.

  But that idiot was Corvin LaValle, undercover police officer.

  In here, he was Corvin Lejeune, small-time dealer with a crazy ex who wanted to hook back up with him. Lejeune wouldn’t be distracted by a woman. Hell, Lejeune would hardly care if that woman died. He could almost hear the ugly laughs, the comments Lejeune and these men would make about it. One less psycho-bitch to deal with, right?

  As much as most of him hated it, that’s who he had to be.

  Corvin could feel the way his body language changed as he slipped into character. Slouching back a little in his chair, he leaned on one armrest. His eyes stayed wary and watchful as Luis made the introductions, though. Lejeune might be a low-level player, but he wasn’t stupid. He was meeting the big boss today, and that boss had deigned to come to him—primarily to keep Corvin from learning too much about their operation too soon.

  No, Lejeune would be eased into the higher levels of the business. Corvin would do what he could to accelerate that timeline, of course, but he couldn’t push too hard. Not if he wanted to take down the whole organization.

  Time to be Lejeune.

  Raising a hand, he wa
ved at Edwin behind the bar to get his attention, then turned back to Salas as the well-dressed, heavy-set man settled into a chair across from him. “What’ll you have, sir?”

  Corvin could figure out what to do about the reporter later.

  After he saw her again.

  And he was definitely going to be sober for that.

  The streets in New Orleans were seriously screwed up, Jenna decided, making her third—or maybe fourth—wrong turn in the last twenty minutes. She could have walked to her sister’s apartment in that time.

  According to the email messages she had traded with Angelina the week before, the apartment was in an area called The Marigny, not far from the French Quarter.

  “Part of the French Quarter, more like it,” Jenna mumbled to herself. She couldn’t see any real difference between the section of the city she had just left and the part she had apparently just entered—except that where she was now seemed slightly more residential, the narrow streets lined with tiny row houses interspersed with bars rather than tiny storefronts interspersed with bars.

  At least she had finally found the right one-way street, and managed to get turned around and headed the correct direction.

  She hoped her difficulty finding the place wasn’t a sign that her plans to meet Angelina’s maybe-boyfriend for a quickie were doomed.

  Snickering to herself, she amended the thought. Okay, maybe not a quickie. Maybe a just a flirty.

  Damn. She needed to pay better attention so she didn’t drive right past the place and have to figure out how to turn around again in this warren of tiny streets. Even the thought of Mr. Gorgeous was some serious kind of distracting, though.

  Pay attention to driving, Jenna.

  Now if only I could find any address numbers.

  There.

  The right address, and the house even had a tiny driveway, with a reserved spot for Angelina’s apartment number.

  Things were definitely looking up for Jenna’s imaginary tryst.

  When Mr. Gorgeous showed up (and it was definitely when—Jenna refused to believe that her new pretend-lover wasn’t going to keep his promise to come by), she would use some subtle turn of conversation to find out if he was, in fact, involved with Angelina.

  And if he is?

  She shoved that annoyingly conscientious voice down, even as she acknowledged that one way or another, she would have to tell him who she really was.

  Anyway, wouldn’t anyone seriously involved with Angelina know that she had an identical twin sister?

  Snagging her purse from the floorboard, she pulled up the message with the key-code for the side gate that led to Angelina’s apartment entrance. From the front, the house had looked like a tiny two-story home, built up high off the ground. Behind the gate, though, the building stretched out much longer than it seemed like it should. The original two-story shotgun house had been carved into apartments—more of them than Jenna would have expected.

  A path wound through a pretty little garden full of tropical looking flowers, punctuated by circular metal staircases winding around center poles up to small balconies that were themselves surrounded by wrought-iron railing. From their correspondence, Jenna knew that the first staircase led to the door to Angelina’s apartment.

  Halfway up the stairs, Jenna began to feel antsy, although she couldn’t pinpoint any reason for it. It wasn’t unusual for her sister to miss a meeting. And it wasn’t like Jenna wouldn’t be able to amuse herself until Angelina showed up—whether or not Mr. Gorgeous made an appearance.

  But something about all of this felt … off … somehow. Her steps slowed as she ran her hand along the metal railing of the staircase, warm in the New Orleans heat. As her head came level with the balcony, she noticed what she hadn’t been able to see from the ground level: the door to Angelina’s apartment wasn’t pulled completely shut.

  The sight of that open door struck Jenna to her core with icy fear.

  New Orleans could be a dangerous city, and Angelina was trying to make a name as a hard-hitting reporter.

  Quit being melodramatic, she told herself.

  Yet when she reached the balcony, she didn’t call out to her sister. Instead, she pushed open the door slowly, standing far enough back to avoid being seen immediately by anyone who might be lurking inside.

  That meant she couldn’t see anything inside, either. After a long, silent moment, she peered around the door, then gasped, her heart thudding in chest so loudly she couldn’t hear anything else for several seconds.

  The apartment had been completely ransacked, clearly by someone who was searching for something. The cushions on the sofa had been shredded, the stuffing inside strewn across the room. Books from the bookshelf lay scattered on the floor, surrounded by broken glass from picture frames tossed down among them.

  Something horrible had happened here.

  Gathering her courage, Jenna called out her sister’s name, her voice shaking. Angelina’s name echoed into the apartment. The lack of response didn’t reassure her.

  That’s when she noticed the puddle of dark red liquid seeping out from the kitchen.

  “Oh, God, no,” she whispered, taking a step into the apartment, even as every instinct she had told her to run.

  A creak from the staircase behind her finally sounded loudly enough to penetrate her haze of dread. Whipping around, she came up against the guy from the bar, his bright green eyes taking a quick survey of the room behind her before his gaze came to rest on her. She froze under that stare, like a rabbit under the spell of a snake.

  He was still muscular, still enormous, still, technically, gorgeous.

  But this time, the lines of his face were harsh, his expression fierce and deadly.

  He didn’t look like someone she should have a tryst with.

  He looked dangerous, like the sort of man who might have hurt Jenna’s sister and trashed her apartment.

  If this man really was, as she had imagined him, a sort of Lord of Misrule, he wasn’t the fat, drunken, smiling King of the Mardi Gras parade, tossing out plastic beads and cups and trinkets to observers.

  No. This was the face of the original Lord of Misrule, hard and cold and severe, the one represented in the parades by giant, glittering, winged dragons.

  This man could pass for Satan himself.

  And he terrified her.

  Chapter 3

  The expression Angelina turned up to Corvin was like nothing he had ever seen on her before—pale, wide-eyed, and frightened.

  This wasn’t the hard-nosed reporter he had come to know—at least a little bit—over the last few weeks. He had never once felt protective of her before this moment. Yet now he wanted to wrap her up in his arms and take her someplace safe, then come back and beat the ever-living shit out of whatever it was that had put that look of horror in her eyes.

  Instead, he reached down into his motorcycle boot and pulled his Glock 43 out of its holster. As he raised the gun, Angelina’s eyes widened, and she took a step away from him.

  She thinks I would go after her? What the hell?

  Angelina Riggs might not know for sure that he was a cop, but the last time he talked to her, she had let him know she didn’t believe his cover as a low-level, low-life drug dealer, either.

  At any rate, he didn’t have time to worry about that now. With one hand, he swept her behind him.

  “Wait here,” he mouthed as he made a corresponding motion to tell her to stay where she was, even though he didn’t have much hope that she would follow his instructions.

  Reporters rarely did.

  When he entered the apartment, he could feel her behind him. Everything about the space felt empty, but he knew better than to trust that instinct.

  At least the woman behind him let him clear the room before she waved at him to get his attention and pointed to the puddle of dark red liquid in the doorway between the kitchen and living room.

  He held his hand up to keep Angelina from following him. He didn’t think there was
a dead body in her kitchen—for one thing, it didn’t smell of death in here—but if he was wrong, he wanted to be able to move her back outside quickly.

  And keep her from seeing it.

  Once again, the impulse surprised him. Honestly, as a detective, Corvin was as likely to think that a suspect’s reaction to the dead body in her kitchen could reveal important information as he was to want to shield the suspect.

  Angelina isn’t a suspect.

  Oh, hell. He needed to check that attitude, and fast.

  A quick glance around the wall into the small kitchen let him know it was empty, and a check of the few cabinets big enough to possibly hold a human confirmed that impression. He held up the broken wine bottle that was the source of the merlot spill on the floor and showed it to Angelina, who visibly slumped in relief.

  Red wine. Not blood.

  Who had she expected it to be? A friend? Maybe a lover?

  Unexpected jealousy stabbed through him at that thought, and he had to stop to regain his bearings.

  What is wrong with me today?

  He was completely off his game. If he was thinking clearly, he wouldn’t even be here. He would have dragged Angelina away from the building and urged her to call the police, not gone barging in to investigate.

  There wasn’t much more of the apartment to check. The curtain was open around the shower and tub combo in the bathroom, and there weren’t many spots in the bedroom for someone to hide. Corvin rummaged through the closet briefly and made certain no one hid under the bed.

  As he stood up, his eyes caught on the rumpled sheets and an image slammed into him of Angelina—this Angelina, the soft, beautiful one—spread out on the bed, naked beneath him.

  Instantly, his cock jumped to attention again, throbbing at the thought of touching her. Corvin could feel her presence behind him, could almost smell her, floral and sweet and tempting.

  He wanted more than anything to make that vision a reality—almost as much as he wanted to keep her as far away from the Salas operation as he possibly could.

  That thought should have tamed his raging hard-on, but it didn’t.

  He was going to have to turn around and talk to her, look at her, see her lush lips, and not imagine those lips wrapped around him.