[Bayou Gavotte 00.0] Back to Bite You (3 page)

It’s a good thing he’s a freak
, she told herself. His need for control might save his life. He was attracted to her, but he didn’t want to want her, so he would leave and stay away. Stay safe. “Arthur said you were in Mongolia building yurts. I guess you’re back here to take over the club.”

“I’m here to sell it,” Gerry said. “As soon as possible.”

That figured. “You don’t like the Pie Club?” She giggled in spite of herself. “It’s a great place. I love it there.”

“Too bad my grandfather didn’t leave you the club instead of this catastrophe of a house.” He sounded grim.

In this case, rightly so. “It
is
a mess, isn’t it? All his money and energy went into the club, except for those last few weeks. I told him it was awful to let such a lovely old house fall apart, and that seemed to get him going. We started with the kitchen roof, because a house needs a usable kitchen. He almost fell off the roof the first day.”

“Did he really?” He sounded more sarcastic than appalled, but then, he’d known his grandfather well, known how energetic and determined Arthur had been despite his age.

“Yeah, he was a stubborn old man and such a sweetie. He didn’t want to accept that his sense of balance wasn’t so great anymore. Fortunately, Ophelia was there to catch him.”

His brows drew together. “Who?”

“The landscaper. She works on the yard in her spare time for the cost of the plants and supplies, in exchange for doing what she likes. Her customers always want the same old stuff, and she gets bored.”

“She
caught
Grandpa Arthur?”

“It was something, I tell you,” Mirabel said. “He was on the roof of the lean-to, on his way up to the kitchen roof with a pack of shingles. He insisted on bringing them up himself, when he knew perfectly well I was strong enough to carry them.” She rolled her
eyes. “Anyway, that old roof was slick as all get out. He slipped, but he couldn’t grab onto anything, and he slid over the edge. If Ophelia hadn’t been potting plants on the back porch . . .” Mirabel shut her eyes at the memory. “She caught his ankles and held him still until I could get down to the lean-to roof and pull him back up.”

“You must be strong,” Gerry said as if he didn’t really believe it. “And so must the landscaper. Arthur was a big guy.”

Duh. Vampires are always strong
. But obviously Gerry didn’t realize what she was, unlike Arthur, who had known right away. Clearly there’d been a vampire in Arthur’s past, although he’d avoided Mirabel’s every attempt to find out more. “Maybe she’s my grandma or something,” she had coaxed, but to no avail.

Gerry might not even know hereditary vampires existed. Generally speaking, guys with sticks up their behinds either didn’t know or didn’t want to know. So far, vampires had kept the gene that gave them fangs and made them irresistible—not to mention the enhanced strength and other perks—more or less a secret.

“We’re strong, all right,” Mirabel said. “But if he’d fallen off the roof I was doing today, nobody could have caught him. He would have been a goner for sure.”

“As it happens,” Gerry said dryly, “he’s a goner anyway.”

“True,” Mirabel sighed. “But he knew his time was short. He was ready to go, and he died happy.”

Gerry Kingsley’s face darkened alarmingly. For a horrifying second he looked as if he wished Mirabel were dead, too. “How do you know?” he snarled.

* * *

Mirabel paled. She gaped up at him with wide, uneasy eyes.

Gerry didn’t make a practice of frightening women. He knew he had frightened this one, and he didn’t care.

“Because—” She faltered and paled even more.

He didn’t feel an instant of remorse.

“Because he told me so,” she said, sad and sweet and devastatingly sincere. A tear trembled at the corner of one eye.

Oh, hell
. Now he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her.

And then rip off her wet clothes and fuck her. What the hell was wrong with him? She was a murderer.

Probably.

She wiped the tear away. A tremulous smile hovered on her mouth, and desire pooled in his loins. As if that wasn’t bad enough,
love
tugged at his heart.

He couldn’t take it anymore. “I have to go find someplace to stay,” he said, turning away, heading for the door.

She followed. “You’re not returning to New Orleans tonight?”

He didn’t look back, just stomped out the door into the pouring rain. “No, I have club business to take care of.”
And a murder to investigate, damn it all
.

Maybe. He really didn’t want to believe it. And there was no proof, only suspicion, but . . .

“Your tools,” Mirabel said.

He wheeled around, and without looking at her took the compressor in one hand and the nail gun in the other and headed for his truck. “Thanks.”

“Good luck finding a hotel,” she said. “They’re all booked to the eaves because of the first game of the season.”

He hadn’t thought of that. The rivalry between Hellebore University and LSU drew fans from all over. He dumped the equipment in the back and slammed the door shut. “What a damned nuisance.”

Her voice pursued him. “If you can’t find a hotel, you’re welcome to stay here.”

So she could seduce him into giving her the club? She must think him even more of a fool than Grandpa. He ripped open the door of the truck.

“Arthur would have insisted,” she said. “He loved you very much.”

How dare she?

“Yes, he did,” Gerry said through clenched teeth. “I owe him a lot.”
Including justice
.

He steeled himself to turn. Mirabel stood halfway down the walk, her face uplifted to the rain. She was blissfully alive, while Arthur was dead.

By her connivance.

Or not.

“Thanks for the offer.” Gerry got into the truck and turned the key. He closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts.

Realistically, there was no better place to get to know Mirabel Lane than right here. She’d given him the perfect excuse.

Or an invitation any red-blooded man would find it impossible to resist.

Except that she wasn’t flirting for another month, probably because she didn’t want people to think she was a gold digger. It made no sense at all.
She
made no sense.

He had to talk to the lawyer and the club manager. He needed a clear picture of how Grandpa Arthur’s heart attack had come about. Maybe what he learned would make it plain that Mirabel hadn’t done anything wrong.

And if it didn’t . . . He would return with his passion for justice fully aroused, and his libido definitely not.

“I may just take you up on that,” he said and drove away.

* * *

“Isn’t she a lovely girl?” Gerry’s old friend Stan, a lawyer who could be pretty hard-nosed at times, gazed dreamily at nothing, or more likely at some vision of Mirabel inside his head. Fat lot of use he was turning out to be.

Gerry strove for a tone somewhere between irritable and indifferent. “She seems nice enough. Grandpa did her no favor when he left her that house. It’s falling to bits.”

“You’re damn lucky she came along when she did, given the terms of the old will,” Stan said.

“What terms?”

“Arthur bequeathed the house to your aunts, but he left the contents to you and Hellebore University. All his Mardi Gras keepsakes were to go to the university museum, and the rest was yours. He stipulated that you personally had to go through the house and dispose of the contents before the old ladies were allowed to cross the threshold, much less take possession. Otherwise, you were stuck with the house, too.”

“Jeez.” Gerry rubbed his face with his hands. “I know he didn’t trust them, but that was going way overboard. They didn’t know about that stipulation, did they?”

“Nope. It would have been hell dealing with them. As it is, Mirabel got the whole thing—lock, stock, and barrel.”

“That’s pretty weird, seeing how obsessive he was about the collection.” Grandpa had spent all his spare time organizing and cataloguing it during Gerry’s childhood.

“He trusted Mirabel,” Stan said. “She helped him go through most of his possessions. He donated a bunch of stuff to the university just before he died. She’ll make sure everything else gets there before she sells the place and goes back to New Orleans.” He heaved a lovelorn sigh. “I don’t blame old Arthur for going overboard for her, and if your aunts sent you to tell me she seduced him into giving her the house, they’re wrong. For one thing, I doubt if he was up to it, and for another, she was shocked to find out he’d left her the place. She cried when I told her.”

Because she’d expected to get the club instead?

“She was broken up when he died,” Stan said. “One moment they were having a good time at the club, and the next he was lying dead in the alley.”

“In the
alley
?”

“They’d just left the club to walk home when he collapsed. She called 911 on her cell, but it was too late.”

The alley, dark and usually deserted. “No one else was there when he had the attack?”

“Why would anyone else be in an alley? They only went that way because it was quicker.” Stan pursed his lips and shook his head. “Mirabel worried that old Arthur was overdoing it. She wanted to call a cab, but he insisted on walking, so she made him take
the shortest route. They’d walked home fine other nights, but I guess all that activity became too much for him.”

Either that . . . or she tripped him, he fell, and had the heart attack.

Don’t be ridiculous
. That was no surefire way of killing anybody, even a ninety-year-old man.

Gerry finished with the lawyer and headed for the club. Compared to the rest of the fetish clubs for which Bayou Gavotte was famous, the Pie Club was pretty innocent, but Gerry wasn’t a fetish sort of guy. And if he wanted a fetish, he wouldn’t pick a messy one like food fighting.

“Hey, Gerry!” Janie Jo, the manager, grinned at him and cracked her gum. “If you sell this place, I’ll kill you.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Gerry said, meaning it. She was fortyish, lively, and efficient, and she’d started working for Arthur in her college days, when Gerry was just a kid spending summers in Bayou Gavotte.

“Unless you sell it to Mirabel Lane.”

Damn and blast it all to hell
. “Does she want to buy it?”

“Not that I know of.” Janie Jo grimaced. “She lives in New Orleans, and she’s going back home before long. But she’d be perfect. She
understands
this business. Have you met her yet?”

“Briefly,” Gerry said. Janie Jo led him past the cream and custard pits into the office. Down the corridor, workers—
his
workers now, damn it all—were hosing down the floor and tacking plastic sheeting in the food fight rooms. Jugs of chocolate syrup and
molasses—customers got off on pouring them all over one another—lined the shelves. From the kitchen came the aroma of baked beans.

Once, long ago, Gerry had liked baked beans, but not anymore. Grandpa had dragged him here far too often, trying to interest him in the club. Not content with licking and eating food off one another in private, some customers got their jollies by doing it in the public rooms, and Gerry had seen too many beans plastered on too many fronts and backsides to want to eat them ever again. Grandpa Arthur had always had an “it takes all sorts” attitude, but Gerry could do very well without those sorts.

At least Janie Jo ordered the pies from someplace else. Gerry liked pie. He intended to keep it that way.

“Isn’t Mirabel wonderful?”

Damn it, Janie Jo didn’t even have the excuse of being male.

“She’s great with the customers. Something about her makes people lose their inhibitions much more easily, and not only that, she taught the cook to make the most amazing banana cream pies. Fresh custard and real whipped cream. Customers are paying premium prices for quality pies.”

Gerry blew out a breath. “What a waste of good food.”

“It’s not wasted. We don’t use the good stuff in the pits.” Janie Jo blew a bubble and popped it. “You should watch what happens when the customers buy those pies.”

No, I shouldn’t
.

“After they have their food fight, they crawl all over one another, gobbling it up until every last crumb is gone.” She rolled her eyes. “Arthur was right. You really do need to loosen up. What happened to the fun-loving kid I once knew?”

“I’m plenty loose and fun-loving.” Gerry followed her into the office. “I just don’t see the point of playing with food.”

Janie Jo wrinkled her nose. “Maybe Mirabel will come tonight. She could convert even you.”

He tried to look neutral or even mildly amused, but judging by Janie Jo’s response, it didn’t work. “You really
are
going to sell the club, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” he said.

Janie Jo burst into tears. For the next half hour she sobbed out her fears that a new owner would turn the Pie Club into a sex club. “This is one of the few clubs in town that don’t emphasize sex,” she sniffled. “We have clean play. If customers get turned on here and go home and have sex afterward, that’s cool, but it’s not what we’re about. We even have a rule about no sex in the private rooms, although we don’t actually enforce it. That wouldn’t go over well in Bayou Gavotte.”

And you don’t think Mirabel would change the rule? She’s sex personified! And
, he told himself,
that’s all that crazy attraction was: ordinary garden-variety lust
.
Nothing to do with love
.

Maybe Janie Jo, being female, was oblivious to Mirabel’s incredible sex appeal, although she must have noticed how besotted Arthur was. “Did Arthur meet Mirabel here at the club?”

Janie Jo blew her nose. “No, she was auditing a Mardi Gras history course at the summer session at Hellebore U. Arthur gave a guest lecture on paraphernalia, and they hit it off right away.”

Which seemed a mighty roundabout way to approach the old man if Mirabel was after him just for the club. Or the house, for that matter. Arthur had retired from the university eons ago, and most people didn’t even know about his longtime hobby and valuable collection of Mardi Gras keepsakes.